Stars stripped

Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoon in WWII Stars and Stripes

The big story that’s all over the place this afternoon is the firing of the editor of Stars and Stripes, the quasi-governmental semi-independent newspaper that is provided for free to service members around the world. The paper’s publisher, who had recently announced his retirement at the end of September, was fired yesterday. The editor in chief, Erik Slavin, told the Associated Press that he was fired “for insubordination” after giving an interview to CBS in which he stated that “censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” A reporter for the paper who covers the Middle East, Lara Korte, was also fired after she told CBS that she works “for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker.”

Stars and Stripes, which has a daily circulation online and in print of about one million readers, is distributed to members of the military all over the world. In many, far-distant locations, it is the only English language paper servicemembers have access to.

Secretary “I can read good if I try real hard” Pete Hegseth was not the first Defense Secretary to go after Stars and Stripes. In 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced that the Pentagon’s budget for the paper, $15 million a year, amounting to about half the paper’s budget, would be cut to zero. Esper ordered the Stars and Stripes to vacate government-owned office space at all facilities around the world, and then he ordered the paper to close down completely. There was an uproar in Congress over the shuttering of the Stars and Stripes, and Trump did something he rarely does: he reversed Esper’s order, and the paper was kept open.

In January of this year, the Washington Post reported that new employees of the paper were being asked to answer questions about their political leanings and loyalty to the Trump administration.

Stars and Stripes reporters have always occupied a middle zone between purely civilian newsgatherers and military spokespeople. Some reporters for Stars and Stripes are civilian, and some are senior enlisted soldiers. Reporters for the Stars and Stripes are trusted by soldiers, and the paper has often beat civilian newspapers to stories about bogus decisions made by commanders and conditions down in the ranks in the services. Stars and Stripes was among the first to report on unsanitary conditions on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, and the paper covered the strain on families of sailors who had been deployed for more than 250 days. Hegseth criticized the coverage and called the reports “dishonest.” Reporters for Stars and Stripes shared their notes with me after a military command press conference I missed in Afghanistan and helped me out when I was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. Stars and Stripes reporters were hardworking and often shared insights they had into what was going on with the troops that other reporters lacked.

Today Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, told reporters that the Stars and Stripes would henceforth be directed “away from woke distractions that syphon morale.” The first thing Hegseth did was cancel the paper’s publishing of comic strips, a long tradition that goes back at least to World War II, when cartoonist Bill Mauldin published his famous “Willie and Joe” cartoons in the paper.

Mauldin’s cartoons poked fun at officers and celebrated enlisted soldiers, depicting Willie and Joe as unshaven and unkempt, while officers in the middle of a war zone were perfectly uniformed and groomed. General George Patton accused Mauldin of insubordination and ordered him removed from his command. (The cartoon above is one that got Mauldin in trouble with Patton.) Mauldin found a home in the Fifth Army, commanded in Italy by my grandfather, and continued to publish his cartoons in the Stars and Stripes. Grandpa loved Mauldin. They stayed in touch after the war, and Mauldin gave him a copy of his book, “Bill Mauldin’s Army,” with a hand-drawn cartoon of Willie and Joe dedicating the book to him inside the cover. He remained a family friend of the Truscotts until his death in 2003. I visited him with my son Lucian V in his nursing home in California the day before he died.

Hegseth’s hand-puppet Parnell went on X in January and posted this, which perfectly sums up the attitude and philosophy of Trump, Hegseth, and every other shithead in the administration: “Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters. It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”

Just this week, Hegseth ordered the disbandment of the Army’s only unit focused on drone warfare, the Unmanned Assault Battalion. Part of the 173^rd Airborne Brigade, the battalion was involved in learning from Ukraine’s experience with drone warfare and was focused on wars of the future. In the future, the battalion will focus “on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion assigned to a Mobile Brigade Combat Team (Airborne),” a spokesman for the Pentagon said.

Lots of hollow image-conscious “warfighting.” No cartoons. No “woke” stories in the Stars and Stripes from those counterculture hippies at the Associated Press.

Stars and Stripes is probably not long for this world under the Trump administration, which has a long record of attacking the First Amendment, suing news organizations, and going after writers and entertainers they don’t like. If he were still around, Bill Mauldin would have had a field day with the recent video of Hegseth spit-shining his pompadour.

Long live Stars and Stripes and the honorable service the paper has provided for decades to soldiers and to the nation.