What “boots on the ground” really means

It’s not boots. It’s human beings. In the case of Trump administration rhetoric, those human beings are soldiers.

Boots are inanimate objects until they are laced onto the feet of soldiers. Then they become warm with the 98.6 temperature of the soldier, because blood is flowing through the veins of the soldier’s legs and ankles and feet.

Blood is the word left out of the easy phrase that is thrown around by Trump’s gabblers such as Secretary of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The latter made an appearance this morning on Meet the Press with Kristen Welker and talked of American forces turning Kharg Island, the main Iranian oil shipping port, into what he called “a U.S. asset.” When Welker pressed him on whether Trump was willing to commit ground troops to accomplish the insane goal that Bessent tossed off like it was something you chat about during a Sunday game of golf, Bessent told her “all options are on the table.”

Let me tell you what one of those options is: It’s turning U.S. Marines and U.S. Army soldiers who are right now walking around and checking messages on their phones and having a burger at the PX and talking to their girlfriends and wives and husbands on WhatsApp into dead bodies. Before the Marines and Army soldiers risk getting killed as they are delivered to Kharg Island on helicopters or landing craft, they will be miserable and more frightened than they have ever been in their lives.

The Iranian military forces still on Kharg Island after the missile attack launched under Trump’s orders last week will be shooting at the Marines and Army soldiers with Kalashnikov rifles and RPG-7 rocket propelled grenades and RPL-20 belt-fed light machineguns and mortars. Overhead, Iran will rain down ballistic missiles and Shahed drones carrying 135-pound explosive warheads. If any of the Iranian missiles strike the oil tanks and oil shipment facilities, Kharg Island will be consumed by explosions and oil fires and deadly smoke.

If that happens, being on foot on Kharg Island will not be survivable. This means soldiers and Marines will die from bullets, from shrapnel, from blast-injuries, and from smoke inhalation. If the oil facilities go up in explosions, it will not be possible to land helicopters on the island to evacuate wounded. If the oil tanks are hit by missiles and drones, which seems likely, they will leak oil into the water surrounding the island, and the Persian Gulf itself will be on fire. That will make it impossible to evacuate American Marines and Army soldiers by boat.

This is how people from the Trump administration are talking about the possibility of such a terrible conflagration: “We’ve always had boots on the ground in conflicts under every president, including Trump. I know this is a fixation in the media, and I get the politics, but the president is going to do what’s right,” one “senior official” told Axios on Friday. Another “administration official” said, “He wants Hormuz open. If he has to take Kharg Island to make it happen, that’s going to happen. If he decides to have a coastal invasion, that’s going to happen. But that decision hasn’t been made.”

They’re actually using the incredibly casual “boots on the ground” phrase. One of them said “take Kharg Island” like he’s talking about picking up a bag of chips from a convenience store. “Coastal invasion” is mentioned as if the horrors and slaughter of D-Day and Iwo Jima never happened.

Here is what I can assure you: The families of the soldiers who were killed when they “took” Baghdad in Iraq in 2003 did not talk of the deaths of their loved ones so indifferently when they buried them after their bodies had been returned in flag-draped caskets to Dover Air Force Base on gigantic transport planes. The families of the 13 soldiers who have been killed so far during a war Donald Trump named as if it is a video game, “Operation Epic Fury,” isn’t a game to those families. It’s not a game to the families of people in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait and Israel who have been killed in missile attacks by Iran. It is not a game to the families who lost more than a hundred little children in the U.S. bombing of the school in Iran on the first day of the war.

This war is being talked about by Republican politicians as if it’s a slide in a classified briefing at the Capitol. Senator Tom Cotton said that we don’t have to worry about the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran because Trump “has mountains of plans” to reopen the Strait.

Here is what Donald Trump told the press about Kharg Island on Friday as he prepared to fly to his resort in Palm Beach to play golf this weekend. “We can take out the island anytime we want. I call it the little island that sits there so totally unprotected.”

This is an outrageous lie. Iran has not left the island and port from which it ships 90 percent of its oil unprotected.

And then he said this: “We’ve taken out everything but the pipes. We left the pipes because to rebuild the pipes would take years for them.”

Trump was standing there on the grassy lawn of the White House wearing a suit sounding like he was talking about a construction project, not his war.

The Washington Post is taking things seriously tonight. Here is their headline:

“Trump threats, U.S. troop build-up raise specter of battle for Hormuz.”

It’s not boots on the ground. It’s blood on the ground. At the whim of one man, the blood of thousands has already been spilled. No matter who it belongs to, all blood is precious.

Anyone who speaks casually about the death and destruction and madness of war is a despicable monster.