We finally have a general who is a hero: Mark Milley

We owe him a debt of gratitude. He prevented Trump from sending armed troops against Black Lives Matter protesters, and he probably saved us from a war with China.

General Mark Milley as he testified this week.

I would have hated to have been one of the Republican pipsqueaks on the Senate and House Armed Services committees facing that implacable wall of generals who testified this week.  It was evident that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley, Secretary of Defense and former 4-star general Lloyd J. Austin III and Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. had done more than just compare notes before their testimony.  McKenzie, commander of Central Command, was the most reticent of them, but all three were unified and did not allow the niggling little questions and disrespectful comments from Republicans budge them from their message that while they may have disagreed with President Joe Biden’s decision to pull all our troops out of Afghanistan on August 31, they obeyed his orders without question and were proud of the way they had run the airlift out of Kabul at the end of August. 

Senate and House Republicans did everything they could to drive a wedge between the military leaders. They failed.  What goofballs like Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee didn’t understand was that by the time you get 4 stars on your shoulders, you’ve carried out more wrongheaded orders you disagreed with than you can count.  It is quite literally what civilian control of the military means.  Time will tell if Biden’s decision to pull all our troops out of Afghanistan this summer may turn out to be the right one or the wrong one.  But it’s the job of the generals to carry out their orders unless those orders are illegal on their face, and that’s what the three men who testified this week did.

If you’ve been reading me for any length of time at all, you know that there has been no love lost between me and certain generals over the years.  I had what might be called a rather contentious relationship with Alexander M. Haig when I was a cadet at West Point.  I thought the puff-up martinets like William “Body Count” Westmoreland should have been run out of the Army on a rail.  More recently, I have been singularly unimpressed by the generation of generals, David Petraeus most prominent among them, who did just enough in Iraq and Afghanistan to get more stars pinned on their shoulders, burnish their reputations in the media, and while keeping us in both wars for two decades.

I have been observing general officers nearly my entire life, ever since I was a boy growing up on Army posts here in the U.S. and overseas.  I spent the first 18 years of my life spending summers with my grandfather and namesake, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr.  But I have never seen a general officer in an official capacity or a public forum as tight-lipped with rage as Milley was testifying this week. 

One thing I can tell you about general officers who reach the rank and position Milley has achieved is that they never tell everything they know.  Milley didn’t tell the Senate or House Armed Services committees everything he knew about Trump’s state of mind before and after the election of 2020.  He didn’t tell Bob Woodward and Robert Costa everything he witnessed in the presence of Trump did before and after the election last year or after the assault on the Capitol on January 6.  He has never told us how he was mousetrapped by Trump into accompanying him, wearing combat fatigues, on his infamous stroll through Lafayette Park for Trump’s so-called bible photo op in front of St. John’s Church in June of 2020.

You want to know how we know this?  By how Milley looked as he testified this week before the House and Senate committees. He was fairly boiling over with anger.  On several occasions, he said he could answer a question from one of the Republican nit-wits in executive session, and the way he said it sounded more like a threat than an offer to expand on his answer.  Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t taken up on his offer.

Republicans went particularly hard at Milley because he was quoted in “Peril,” the new book on the end of the Trump administration by Washington Post reporters Woodward and Costa, in an attempt to flesh out Republican charges that Milley was disloyal, had gone “rogue,” even that he had “committed treason” in his calls to his counterpart in China, General Li Zoucheng. 

Milley fired right back, repeatedly making the point that both of his calls to had been made with the full knowledge of both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in October, and Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.  He went so far as to give the number of senior defense officials who were present in the room as he spoke to General Li: “I made a call to General Li on 30 October. Eight people sat in that call with me, and I read out the call within 30 minutes of the call ending,” Milley said.  “Eleven people attended [the second call to Li] with me, and readouts of this call were distributed to the interagency that same day. Shortly after my call ended with General Li, I personally informed both Secretary of State Pompeo and White House Chief of Staff Meadows about the call, among other topics. Soon after that, I attended a meeting with Acting Secretary Miller where I briefed him on the call.”

I watched the faces of some of the Republicans on the Senate and House committees as Milley said this, and they were not pleased with how easily Milley had swatted them aside.  Even goofballs like Tom Cotton know you don’t commit treason in a roomful of Pentagon officials and then report what you have done to your superiors.

Milley’s calls to the Chinese general in October of 2020 and January of this year were to assure Li that things in the United States were “stable” and that we had no intention to attack China.  “I know, I am certain that President Trump did not intend to attack the Chinese,” Milley testified yesterday. “And it is my directed responsibility-- and it was my direct responsibility by the secretary to convey that intent to the Chinese. My task at that time was to de-escalate. My message, again, was consistent-- stay calm, steady, and de-escalate. We are not going to attack you.”

Milley’s public recounting of his top-secret call with the Chinese was extraordinarily personal and loaded with innuendo.  “It was my direct responsibility…” “My task at that time…” “My message, again, was…”  He seemed to be making the point that he was speaking to his Chinese counterpart not only as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but as a man who knew more than he could say and was bent on doing every last thing he could to avoid this country heading into a disaster at the hands of an out-of-control president. 

By personally telling the Chinese “all is well” and “we’re not going to attack,” Milley was sending them an unmistakable signal that all wasn’t well, and that Trump was at least thinking about starting a war to save his political career.  Milley was not trying to cover his ass and protect himself from future charges of “treason” by informing Esper, Miller, Meadows, and Pompeo about the calls to the Chinese general.  He knew they would report his calls directly to the president and when Trump found out that the Chinese had been informed, it would take the wind out of his sails of war.  Milley stepped between China and Trump, and he meant to.  It was an incredible act of courage.

Milley had been witness to Trump’s erratic actions as president for four years.  He had been in the room early in Trump’s term when he met with Pentagon officials including then Secretary of State Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis and at least one of them called Trump a “fucking moron” afterwards.  (Milley was at the time Chief of Staff of the Army.)  He was there for it all – Trump’s petulant threats to pull out of NATO, his capitulation to Putin in Helsinki, to Trump calling soldiers who had lost their lives in Europe in World War I “losers” and “suckers” during his visit to Paris in 2018.  He knew exactly how dangerously uninformed and arrogant Trump was. 

Milley felt compelled to apologize for his appearance in uniform with Trump at his political photo-op in Lafayette Park in June of 2020. In a videotaped speech 10 days later, Milley said, “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”  And he went further, addressing the subject of the protest in front of the White House, decrying the “senseless, brutal killing” of George Floyd: “His death amplified the pain, the frustration, the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. The protests that have ensued speak not only to his killing, but to the centuries of injustice toward African Americans."

Sounding like he was speaking from a chapter in a Critical Race Theory textbook, Milley clearly sided with Black Lives Matter and slapped Trump upside the head with a focused endorsement of the protests happening in the streets everywhere that summer.  I think Milley knew his statement of defiance bordered on insubordination, but Trump’s threats were so dangerous he made it anyway.

The book “Frankly, we did win this election:  the inside story of how Trump lost” by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, tells the story of how Milley was often the lone voice in the Oval Office trying to reign in Trump as he called for more law enforcement violence against Black Lives Matter. “Beat the fuck out of the protestors,” Trump said in one meeting.  “Crack their skulls.”

Milley was said to be so concerned that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and put armed active-duty troops on the streets, he made “a concerted effort to stay in Washington” to keep an eye on the president during the final months of Trump’s time in office.

General James Mattis issued a statement to the Atlantic Magazine two days after the Lafayette Park incident criticizing Trump’s attempts to draw the military into his political campaign:  "Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society, and diminishes the trust and constitutional relationship between the armed services and the civilian population they support.”  He went on to criticize Trump as "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”

It was an extraordinary statement for a retired general to make about the president under whom he had served.  It's hard for me to believe that Milley and Mattis, who had known each other and served side by side for years, were not in touch during that delicate time when Trump was threatening to put armed American soldiers on the streets to suppress Black Lives Matter protests.  It should be recalled that Secretary of Defense Esper, a former Army officer and West Pointer, also issued a statement on June 3 in opposition to using the Insurrection Act.  "The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations." He added that the unrest nationwide had not reached that point.

What my instinct tells me is that Milley’s quotes in the books about Trump’s behavior during the Black Lives Matter protests and in final days in office don’t tell the full story of what he saw and heard. It was much, much worse.  Milley’s first call to General Li in China happened four days before the election last year.  His second call happened two days after the insurrection at the Capitol, when Trump led what an obvious attempt at a coup to overturn the results of the election he lost.

I think Milley knows how much worse it was. I think he knows how close we came to not only a constitutional crisis, but a war in the streets.  I think that’s why his face bore a look of barely concealed contempt as the Republicans from the House and Senate, apologists all for their hero Trump, pecked at him like ducks. 

Milley knows we dodged a bullet with Trump.  Milley himself was prepared to take that bullet to stop him.  He went beyond the call of duty and very likely saved us from a war in the streets in the summer of 2020, and a war that Trump may have tried to start with China in a last-ditch attempt to save his foundering campaign for re-election.  That’s why we owe him.  We finally have a general who is an American hero.

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