What about the other 2,446 who died?

A struggling Donald Trump attempted to crash himself into the news cycle this morning with a visit to Arlington Cemetery allegedly to honor the 13 American soldiers who were killed in a suicide bombing on this day in 2021 during the pull-out of American forces from Afghanistan.  Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania (!), joined some of the family members of the dead soldiers, some of whom appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention earlier this month in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The appearance of the dead soldiers’ families with Trump at the convention was part of his campaign for the presidency, and Trump’s appearance with the families at Arlington was another stab at using the honor and sacrifice of soldiers to bolster his fading chances in the campaign as it closes in on election day in November.

That Trump would use the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as a backdrop for his failing campaign for president is disgusting.  It was at Arlington Cemetery in 2017 on Memorial Day that Trump turned to his chief of staff, John Kelly, a former general in the Marines and himself the father of a fallen soldier, and said of the graves in neat rows running up the hillside, “I don’t get it.  What’s in it for them?”  In a recent interview, Kelly confirmed again Trump’s statement in 2017, as well as Trump’s having called fallen soldiers in Europe “suckers and losers” during a visit by Trump to France as president.

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump would try to use the honor of soldiers killed in a war to advance himself politically.  He would do anything at this point, anything, to keep himself from losing an election he has reportedly already confided to campaign aides that he is afraid he will lose.

But this isn’t about Trump and whether he will win or lose.  The stories about Trump’s visit to Arlington all say it’s about the 13 soldiers killed three years ago by a suicide bomber, but what about the 2,446 other soldiers who lost their lives during that 20 year misbegotten war?  Aren’t their lives worth honoring?  Pentagon records say that 1,992 American service members died due to “hostile action,” with 534 dead due to non-hostile causes, which might include accidents, disease, or soldier-on-soldier violence.  However it happened, every one of the soldiers who died in Afghanistan gave their lives because they had been sent over there to serve what they were told was their country’s interests.  That our nation’s “interests” turned out to have had a start date in 2001 and an end date in August of 2021 in no way diminishes their sacrifice for this country.

We appear to be in the midst of another one of America’s reevaluations of its overseas adventures.  Back in 1965, soldiers on their way to Vietnam were being told they were saving the world from the spread of communism through something called the “domino theory,” which held that if Vietnam were allowed to “fall” to communism, who knew how far the poison would spread?  In 2001, young Americans signed up in droves after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to fight “terrorism” that would spread everywhere, presumably, if it wasn’t stopped. 

So, off went our soldiers and sailors and Marines in the never-ending quest to stop yet another “ism” that was said to threaten our democracy and the lives of Americans.  They went to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then most of them came back from Iraq, and over the years, there were a lot of them in Afghanistan during so-called “surges,” and then fewer of them, as four administrations found new reasons to keep them there. 

I was in Afghanistan in 2004 in the early days of that war, and I had not spent even two or three days on the ground in Kabul before it became evident that we were there, as we had been in Vietnam, to save Afghanistan from itself.  Kabul was a bustling metropolis with electricity and cars and cell phones and restaurants and government offices and lots and lots of NGO’s doing all manner of good things, but if you drove ten miles outside of that city, you were in the 5^th Century, with boys in pale blue shirts carrying Korans walking along the roadsides to and from madrassas, and no sign of women at all, because they were all behind the walls of mud brick and stone houses doing things like having babies and cooking and serving the men. 

The Taliban had been in control of Afghanistan until we drove them out in 2001, and just this week there were reports from Afghanistan that the Taliban made new rules that women’s voices were not to be heard and their faces were not to be seen in public.  That is the way it was in rural Afghanistan in 2004.  I saw a total of one woman in the rural areas of eastern Afghanistan north of Jalalabad along the Kunar River.  She was wearing a burka and walking behind her husband along the main street of one of the little villages on the road from Jalalabad to Asadabad along the Kunar River, all of it Taliban-controlled territory according to the locals.  The U.S. military considered that the same road and the same villages were controlled by U.S. troops, but those troops traveled along that road only in heavily armed convoys of five to ten vehicles or more with helicopter support overhead.  What did that tell me?  With women not in evidence except wearing burkas and opium poppies being the only cash crop in the whole region, the U.S. military “controlled” that area of Afghanistan about as well as the U.S. military “controlled” the areas outside of base camps in Vietnam.

Taliban are running things again in Afghanistan, which essentially means that they now control Kabul as well as the rest of the country which they controlled when we were there.  In Vietnam, the Vietnamese are in control of the country, which means in the south that they control Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, as well as the rural parts of the country, which they controlled when we had troops there.

58,220 Americans died during the ten years or so we were in Vietnam, so that “control” of Vietnam could return to the Vietnamese whose country it was before American soldiers ever set foot on their soil.  2,459 Americans died in Afghanistan so that “control” of that country would return to the same Taliban leaders who ran things before we got there in 2001.

Both of those wars were misbegotten in the sense that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing in either country while we had soldiers stationed there on heavily-armed base camps, from which they ventured only in heavily-armed convoys or in helicopters, which were also heavily-armed.  But does that fact lessen the honor of those who served and gave their lives in service of a mistake?  No, it does not.  Therefore, we honor the dead from the war in Vietnam with the Vietnam Memorial wall on the Mall in Washington, and we honor the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and our other foreign wars on Memorial Day every year, and we remember them as having served their country honorably in all the wars.

Donald Trump, with his history of disdain and dishonor for American soldiers who died in service to their country, should not be allowed on the soil of Arlington Cemetery or any other National Cemetery around the country where soldiers are buried.  His footsteps there are a desecration and dishonor.  His footsteps belong on golf courses and Mar a Lago ballrooms where billionaire donors like Miriam Adelson, who give him money, are honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for having served not their country, but Donald Trump.

You don’t have to hear the lonesome tones of Taps played by a bugle to sense the whispers of the dead in Arlington:  Save us from this dishonorable creature.  May he never return as president or citizen.  We don’t want him, and neither should you.