The empty shell of Trump’s and Hegseth’s fake military machismo

Three words I never heard even once growing up in an Army family or in my four years at West Point are “warrior culture” and “lethality.” As cadets, we were in the Army, and we were taught the skills to fight a war. We took tactics and strategy, and a great course called “Military Art and History.” During the summers, we engaged in field training and learned “fire and maneuver” as part of squad and platoon tactics. We ran obstacle courses. We did 20 mile marches in full combat gear. We learned survival swimming in combat uniform and boots carrying a nine pound rifle and ammunition.

I was taught to fire the M-14 and M-16 rifles, the .45 caliber pistol, the M72 LAW Light Anti-Tank Weapon, the M-60 machine gun. We went out on firing ranges and learned to shoot the 60 mm mortar, the 81 mm mortar, the 105 mm Howitzer, the 155 mm Howitzer, and the M40 Recoilless Rifle. We learned to drive and shoot the main gun of the M-48 tank as well as the .30 caliber coaxial machine gun and the turret mounted .50 caliber machine gun.

Later, during my junior summer Army Orientation Training at Fort Knox, I was XO of an AIT tank training company and taught soldiers to command and drive the M-48 tank and fire its main gun.

Not once did I hear anything about the “lethality” of any of the weapons I was trained to fire, or trained others to fire. Not once was what we were being trained to do or training others to do referred to as the “warrior culture.” We were in the Army. We were training to be soldiers.

I bring up these utterly empty words because they are used all the time by Pete Hegseth to justify the crap he is doing at the Department of Defense. He has said that so-called DEI programs threaten the “warrior culture” and the “lethality” of the U.S. military. He has used those words and that rationale to justify the wholesale discharge of transexual soldiers from all the services, without producing even a shred of evidence that a transexual soldier firing a .50 caliber machine gun or crewing a 155 mm Howitzer is somehow less “lethal” than any other soldier. Hegseth has produced no evidence of how a transexual soldier damages what he calls the “warrior culture” in the U.S. military.

Hegseth’s words are empty because they stand for empty, macho concepts that have nothing to do with being in the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines and serving one’s country.

Now Hegseth has announced that the Pentagon will be renaming the Naval vessel named after Harvey Milk, the first out gay elected official in California history who was murdered by a homophobic maniac simply because he was gay. Harvey Milk was a Navy veteran. Hegseth also wants to rename the ship named in honor of Medgar Evers, the famed civil rights figure and NAACP leader who was the first Black person to apply to the segregated University of Mississippi Law School. Evers was an Army veteran who unloaded supplies for the D-Day invasion on the Normandy beachhead under fire. The only reason Evers was unloading supplies for D-Day was because Black soldiers were banned from combat during World War II and served instead in support positions such as supply and driving trucks. Hegseth plans to rename other Navy ships that are named after Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Harriet Tubman, and Cesar Chavez.

Hegseth couldn’t carry Harvey Milk’s or Medgar Evers’ boots, much less wear them.

The military has done this before, when the armed services were segregated by race because the presence of Black soldiers serving alongside white soldiers was said to negatively affect discipline, unit cohesion and morale. Trump’s executive order said that being transgender conflicts “with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.”

In testimony before a Senate committee after President Truman integrated the armed services in 1948, Five Star General Omar Bradley said the quiet part out loud when he testified that white mothers and fathers in the Deep South didn’t want their boys sharing showers and toilets with “Negroes.”

Here is how Secretary of Defense Hegseth put it at a recent gathering of Special Operations soldiers: “No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.”

But dudes who sexually assault women and pay them $50,000 in hush money is just fine with the leader of 1.4 million uniformed active-duty service members, 778,000 members of the National Guard and Reserves, and 747,000 civilian Defense Department employees.

“Warrior culture” is made-up macho nonsense. “Lethality” is more of the same. The soldiers serving on active duty, in the National Guard, and Reserves are not engaged in a “lifestyle” as Trump’s executive order so stupidly put it. They are serving their country, no matter who they are under the uniform. To say otherwise is to dishonor the thousands who lie buried in military cemeteries, whether they are Black or white, male or female, gay, or straight, or trans.