Tag: us army
Now The Trump Gang Is Coming After West Point

Now The Trump Gang Is Coming After West Point

I have always been proud of having graduated from West Point. My family has a long connection to the Academy: my father graduated in 1945; my maternal grandfather, Bartley M. Harloe, graduated in 1918; my sixth great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, founded the Academy in 1802; and most of all, I am proud of having played a role, along with three of my classmates, in ending the 150-year-old regulation which made mandatory for cadets to attend the weekly services of one of the three approved faiths -- Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. No others were permitted.

At that time, failure to attend religious services was punishable by walking back and forth outside for hours with a rifle on your shoulder in the heat and freezing cold and confinement to barracks for months on end. Refusal led to a Superintendent's Board and expulsion from the Academy.

Like many institutions as old as West Point, the Academy has had many flaws, compulsory attendance at church being only one of them. Racism and antisemitism have infected West Point since its founding. During my father's time, Jewish cadets were assigned rooms by themselves, and they were “silenced” by other cadets, including their classmates, refusing to speak to them. Jewish plebes, first year cadets, were sometimes required by upperclassmen to run up and down stairs wearing their winter uniform and overcoat carrying their rifle at what was called “high port” over their heads until they dropped from heat exhaustion.

Racism was similarly rampant at West Point. The Academy did not have a Black graduate until 75 years after its founding in 1877, when Henry O. Flipper became the first African American to graduate. Flipper was silenced by other cadets and forced to live in a room by himself in the barracks and to eat by himself at a table in the mess hall throughout his four years at West Point.

There were only two other black graduates before 1936, when Benjamin O. Davis became the first Black graduate since 1889 and went on to be the first black general in the Air Force. He underwent the same brutal racist treatment that Flipper had endured -- made to eat alone at a table in the mess hall and room by himself in the barracks, silenced by most of the Corps of Cadets.

By the time I graduated, things had improved at West Point, but only marginally. I had eight Black classmates when I graduated in 1969, amounting to one percent of my class. Racism, while no longer officially endorsed by the Academy, nevertheless endured. One of my Black classmates, a star on the football team, was approached by another cadet in his company on the day Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The cadet, who was white and one of our classmates, put his hand on my Black classmate’s shoulder and grinning widely said, “Well, we finally got him.”

By the time that women were first admitted to West Point in 1976, racism, while not a thing of the past, had begun to be dealt with. There were 80 black cadets in the class of 1973, for example. But the entrance of women into the previously all-male bastion of West Point disrupted the place in ways that the Academy is still dealing with. Most if not all the women in the early classes after they were admitted to West Point were sexually assaulted or raped, and sexual assaults continued for years afterward.

Racism and misogyny have persisted at the Academy. Simone Askew, the first black woman to be chosen as the top ranked cadet at West Point in 2017, wrote this about her experience as a cadet:

“It was just two weeks after I had been selected for the role of First Captain of West Point, becoming the first black woman to hold that position. It was late, and I was headed to my room. There waiting for me was a small, white note, inserted underneath my door. I opened the folded page, which bore no signature. Inside was a picture of me holding a rifle, photoshopped with a monkey's face over my own.

Though I was aware of the historical precedence of portraying black people as monkeys, I wondered if the depiction suggested something deeper about my leadership. Racing through my mind were all the presentations and conversations that I had given in the past 14 days as First Captain and whether I had made any mistakes. This self-interrogation fueled in me a paralyzing fear.

I feared if others knew how deeply such an image impacted me that I would be told -- as black cadets and officers are often told -- that this was not the first nor would it be the last time that I would experience racism, so I had better get used to it. Even worse, they would deem me as too emotional, dramatic, self-centered, weak, and ‘always making it about race.’ My strategy, instead, was to perform flawlessly. After receiving a Rhodes Scholarship, I was optimistic that I had finally done enough. My efforts, at last, would prove my humanity to the anonymous artist -- and to the entire Corps of Cadets.

However, more racist caricatures and comments continued to circulate online. One of the popular images even depicted me as Satan himself.

Am I an animal, am I a demon, or am I human?”

The document from which this statement is excerpted is a policy proposal suggesting ways that West Point might deal with the racism that persists even today. It was authored by nine graduates of the classes of 2018 and 2019 including two former cadet First Captains, two valedictorians, two Fulbright Scholars, and a Marshall Scholar, all of whom held positions of senior leadership and responsibility while they were cadets.

The proposal contains numerous suggestions for programs and classes that would, if adopted, put in practice at West Point the right wing’s boogeymen-du-jour: diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think I can safely say that if this laudable document ever came to the attention of Elon Musk and his cronies, heads would explode.

The estimable Judd Legum reported today in his “Popular Information” Substack on how the wholesale attack on DEI in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has led to the “digital and physical destruction of 18 publications on workplace safety practices. Almost all of the publications are not associated with DEIA topics but appear to have been targeted because they include a DEIA-related keyword used in a completely different context.”

In one example cited by Legum, a document entitled OSHA Best Practices for Protecting EMS Responders During Treatment and Transport of Victims of Hazardous Substance Releases, the words “diverse” and “diversity” are used to describe not race or gender but rather certification and training requirements for EMS workers and how their training might keep them safe on the job.

I include this off-topic report as an example of the broad-brush approach being applied to the government-wide attack by the Trump administration on anything that might smack of promoting sane practices to deal with racism and sexism and even discrimination against the disabled in the workplace.

As I have previously reported, the Academy's panic over Trump's obsession with DEI recently led to the closure of several cadet extracurricular clubs for groups of women and minorities including the National Society of Black Engineers Club, the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Vietnamese American Cadet Association. A friend with sources among the Academy's staff and faculty told me today that some of the clubs may be allowed to return because West Point determined that the clubs had nothing to do with the DEI office, programs, or policies. The clubs were of course just groups of cadets with similar backgrounds who wanted to get together and have fun.

The assault by the right wing on West Point and the other service academies is far from over, however. Our newly inaugurated Vice President, JD Vance, who made such a fool of himself on the world stage last week at the Munich Security Conference, when he told NATO member nations that Donald Trump will be taking the side of Russia in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, has questioned why the United States even needs West Point or the Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy or the Coast Guard Academy. Vance and the rest of the Republican right-wing were horrified and outraged when the Supreme Court specifically exempted the service academies from its decision ending affirmative action on college campuses.

Trump and his hand puppet secretary of defense have accused the Pentagon of being filled with so-called “woke” generals and senior civil servants who amount to what they describe as a Marxist underground within the military establishment. They have even accused one of the several secretaries of defense appointed by Trump in his first administration of being a woke radical. That would be Mark Esper, a West Point graduate from the class of 1986, who they apparently believe was subjected to woke ideological pollution because his was among the first classes with female graduates. Oh, the horror that human beings of the opposite sex might take the place of the young men who had traditionally enjoyed the exclusive privilege of a West Point education!

It's hard to put into words how bad things are with Trump using the utterly bogus excuse of DEI to turn back the clock to an earlier time when white men had most of the money and all the power.

So, I'll reach back to a megalomaniac from an earlier time to put today's DEI panic in context. During my senior year when I and three of my classmates were attempting to overturn the requirement that cadets attend church every Sunday, West Point's deputy commandant singled me out as the ringleader and ordered me to get the others to cease and desist. He did this by making me come to his office every afternoon at exactly 5:05 PM for a daily lecture and verbal drubbing.

For several weeks, I would report to his office, and he would try to convince me how wrong we were and why we should withdraw our formal complaints. When I countered with our arguments about the obvious unconstitutionality of the regulation, he would leap out of his chair and come around his desk screaming at me at the top of his lungs.

He labeled me -- see if this doesn't sound familiar -- as a Communist and a Marxist and so radical that I was, in his memorable phrase, “beyond Mao.” Fed up, I replied, “Sir, you mean first is Marx, and then Lenin, and then Mao, and then Truscott?” Red-faced, his body shaking, he sputtered, “D-d-don’t you know what's going on here, you little shit?” Playing dumb and wanting to hear him answer his own question, I told him I had no idea.

“If you succeed at ending mandatory chapel, the next thing that will happen is that we'll have women in here, and then we won't have West Point anymore. All this place will be is a goddamn college.”

The name of the man who made that rather prescient prediction in October of 1968 was Alexander M. Haig, later to become Nixon’s chief of staff, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and secretary of state.

Eight years later, the first class with women was admitted to West Point. The issue of gays in the military wasn’t on the horizon yet, and DEI didn’t even exist, but the dread threat of white men losing their grip on power had breached the sacred ramparts of West Point. Power is what the whole thing has always been about, and those with power have been crazed about holding onto it ever since.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter. Please consider subscribing.

Why Trump's 'Mass Deportation' Threat Is Just Another Bullying Lie

Why Trump's 'Mass Deportation' Threat Is Just Another Bullying Lie

Logistics is the reason Donald Trump will never, ever, even if he wins election and invokes the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, be able to deport the 15 million, or 20 million, or 25 million undocumented immigrants – whatever the number he throws out seemingly according to his mood or state of mental deterioration.

Let’s take 20 million, the number in the middle, double the population of Los Angeles County, which occupies about 4,000 square miles.

Twenty million undocumented people means they are spread out over almost 4 million square miles. Do you know how big the continental U.S. is? It’s about 3,000 miles from Maine to Washington, and 1,700 miles from North Dakota to south Texas. Any way you look at it, the United States of America is big.

We know immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, live in every state, in large cities and small towns both. Most of them who are not children have jobs. They rent apartments and houses. They own cars. Their kids are in schools. Some of them even own businesses through partnerships with citizens or immigrants with documented status. Who knew a town in Ohio called Springfield had more than 100 Haitian immigrants before Trump and Vance began their lie-fest about immigrants kidnapping and eating neighbors’ pets? I sure didn’t.

I don’t know how many immigrants live in Dover, New Jersey, either, although I drove through there recently and discovered the town of 18,500 is a treasure trove of Mexican and Central American restaurants, so Dover must have quite a substantial immigrant population. Dover isn’t far from Morristown, New Jersey. I don’t know the immigrant population there, either, but I spent a night in a big hospital there recently, and just from that experience, I can tell you that the size of the immigrant population of Morristown is considerable.

So, Stephen “I’m chasing ‘em, boss, I’m chasing em’” Miller and his round ‘em up cowboys will be looking for their 20 million undocumented immigrants all over the place. Until now, at least, we haven’t been a “show me your papers” country. Even assuming they try to create a national requirement for some sort of domestic passport, that attempt will face countless legal challenges in federal and state courts, so that won’t be happening anytime soon. Which creates another obvious problem, that of distinguishing U.S. citizens from immigrants, and documented immigrants from undocumented ones.

Let’s assume that in the beginning, they are able to find a relatively large number of undocumented immigrants. What are they going to do with them? Sure, they have talked of building what amounts to concentration camps where they say the government will hold them until they can be deported. They did this before, remember, when they hastily threw up some wire-enclosed camps near the border, grabbed people coming across, and threw them into the camps, even separating parents from children and giving them plastic “space blankets” to sleep under on bare floors. At one point, they even had people fenced in under a freeway, out in the open, except for the shade provided by the overpass.

Their attempts then were haphazard and inhumane, and they might try the same thing again. Last time, however, it was just a few thousand people they captured right at the border and had to move only a few miles to the camps they threw up. This time they’re talking about rounding up 20 million people scattered throughout the whole country. If they were to make some sort of serious attempt, how would they do it? How would they move them? Where would they put the detainees, not only down near the border, but if and when they find large numbers in the center of the country, far from the border?

There is one organization in the United States with experience in moving large numbers of people from one place to another: the U.S. Army.

Let’s discuss what it takes to move, say, a brigade of 15,000 soldiers. The first thing you need to understand is that the organizational structure of this many soldiers is already in place. A brigade is broken down into three or four battalions. Each battalion has four companies of a hundred to two hundred soldiers. One of the companies, the headquarters company, is organized and trained for the purpose of doing things like mass movements.

The companies and battalions all have their own supply systems, including the ability to feed hundreds or thousands of soldiers during a move. They also have the vehicles necessary to move the soldiers and their equipment in trucks and personnel carriers, and they have the capability to house hundreds or even thousands of soldiers overnight or for more extended periods using tents and other temporary structures. The soldiers themselves carry the equipment for sleeping, such as ground pads and sleeping bags. They have the uniforms necessary to keep themselves warm in cold weather as well.

It is very, very difficult to move even 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers. It takes weeks of planning and preparation. All the equipment must be checked. All the vehicles must be in operating order. All the supplies necessary for the move such as gas, water, and food must be made ready. There will be breakdowns of vehicles and other equipment. Soldiers who can make necessary repairs must be present with all the tools and extra parts needed to effect the repairs.

The most important thing to realize about what I’m describing here is that this is about moving the soldiers themselves, and nobody else. If anyone who is not a soldier is included, every extra person takes extra effort and extra supplies and extra equipment. Even one additional person.

So, just to begin, for any immigrants Trump and his gaggle of brownshirts are able to find, starting on day one, they will have to be housed and fed. There will have to be vehicles in which to move them.

Trump and Vance and others have talked about “using the military” in some fashion to accomplish all their plans to round up immigrants. This is a fantasy. The military does not have domestic powers of arrest or imprisonment. Even when National Guard troops have been used along the border, it has been to supplement domestic law enforcement and border patrol agents. Soldiers are not empowered to arrest or detain for purposes of customs and immigration.

Trump has made noises of invoking the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the law that was used to place Japanese, Italian, and German immigrants in internment camps during World War II. That act, which has been widely condemned for its misuse during the 1940’s, creates a condition that this nation must be at war with enemy nations in order to be used. It also specifies that any “alien” must be served with an “order” to depart the country and given a time frame for this to happen, and only then can the “alien” be detained by a “marshal” reporting to the Secretary of State (!). If the “alien” is found to have violated the order, “upon conviction thereof” the “alien” can be imprisoned for a term not to exceed three years and then deported with no possibility of returning and seeking citizenship again.

No mention is made in the text of this terrible law of using the U.S. military as a police force to imprison and deport anyone who is not a citizen. And oddly, the Alien and Sedition Act appears to confer upon “aliens” many of the same rights immigrants have under our current immigration laws.

While Trump was in office, he was not able to use active duty, reserve, or National Guard soldiers as immigration cops on the border, and there is little reason to think that courts would allow the military to be used domestically for this purpose now.

But…let’s take a nightmare scenario…and assume that Trump somehow orders the military to be used in the “round up” and deportation scheme. Neither the active-duty army, reserves, or National Guard have the supplies and equipment necessary to do anything more than move themselves from one place to another.

Buses would need to be used to move undocumented immigrants. At 40 persons per bus, that would mean some 500,000 buses would be necessary to move 20 million people. There are about 500,000 school buses in this country that move school children to and from school every day. School buses amount to the largest transportation fleet in this country, but they are in use every day, and if Trump tried to commandeer them, chaos would result. I realize that “chaos” is Trump’s middle name, but not even Donald Trump is ready for what would happen if schools were shut down because school buses were somehow nationalized to move undocumented immigrants.

And who would drive them? A commercial license is necessary in most states to drive a bus. If Trump were to conscript school bus drivers to drive the school buses full of immigrants from, say, Nebraska to Texas or Arizona, they would have to be paid…and housed…and fed…and so on, and so on, and so on.

Do you see what we’re looking at here? Rounding up and deporting 20 million undocumented immigrants, even using the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, would entail a logistical capability that not even the U.S. military has. It would entail, under that unthinkable law itself, the issuance of formal “orders” that under the language of the law would involve the Department of State, and then arrests of those not complying with the “order,” and then trial and conviction of violating the “order,” and then imprisonment, and then deportation.

We don’t have enough immigration courts and judges to handle the thousands of applications for asylum in the system right now. The backlog is at least part of the reason we have so many immigrants in this country with undocumented status waiting for hearings, appeals, hell, just waiting for paperwork. Congress has been asked repeatedly to increase the budget for more immigration courts and judges, and it hasn’t happened.

The words pipe and dream come to mind if you step back even a half-foot and consider Trump’s rhetoric about deporting undocumented immigrants. It may be red meat for the MAGA masses, but it’s as untethered from reality as his talk about Hannibal Lecter.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Leaker Behind Grave Breach Of Security Identified As Young 'Gun Enthusiast' ​​

Leaker Behind Grave Breach Of Security Identified As Young 'Gun Enthusiast' ​​

(Reuters) - The person who leaked U.S. classified documents prompting a national security investigation is a gun enthusiast in his 20s who worked on a military base, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing fellow members of an online chat group.

The person shared classified information to a group on the instant messaging platform Discord of about two dozen men and young boys who shared a "mutual love of guns, military gear and God," the Post said.

The Post based its report, which did not name the person, on interviews with two members of the Discord chat group.

Reuters was unable to verify details of the report.

Discord said in a statement earlier on Wednesday that it was cooperating with law enforcement.

The Department of Defense and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The Department of Justice opened a formal criminal probe last week after the matter was referred by the Pentagon, which is assessing the damage done by what may be the most damaging release of classified U.S. information in years.

The person went by the handle OG, slang for Original Gangster, or an old school traditionalist. The person was described by one of the Post's sources as being in his early to mid-20s, and was looked up to by members of the group.

"He's fit. He's strong. He's armed. He's trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie," said one member of the chat group, who was under 18 and spoke on the condition of anonymity with the permission of his mother, the Post reported.

In what appears to be the gravest leak of U.S. secrets in years, pictures of sensitive documents were posed on Discord and other platforms including the online messaging board 4Chan, the encrypted Telegram global messaging app, and Twitter.

U.S. national security agencies and the Justice Department are investigating the release to assess the damage to national security and relations with allies and other countries, including Ukraine.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

For more columns like this one, and to support my work writing about politics, war, and the culture, you can buy a subscription right here. It will be much appreciated.

Writing about the madness of war reminded me of my first months as a second lieutenant in the Army. I was stationed at Fort Benning, the “Home of the Infantry,” to attend the Infantry School, a beginner course for lieutenants destined for platoon commands.

If you drove onto the post, located on the edge of Columbus, Georgia, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. The first thing you saw was a gigantic wooden thermometer with its red indicator almost to the top, indicating 99 percent participation in the United Way fund drive on the post. Then came immaculately groomed grass along the sides of the road and sidewalks lined with white painted rocks and headquarters buildings with American flags flapping atop white flagpoles and platoons of trainees in fatigues and spit-shined combat boots marching in formation along the roadsides.

Looking at Fort Benning’s obsessive neatness and the discipline of the troops and the neatly lined-up vehicles in the motor pools, you would be forgiven if you forgot that the war in Vietnam was raging thousands of miles away across half a continent and the Pacific Ocean.

Beneath the placid surface of things at Fort Benning and outside its gates, however, things were coming apart. In June, Life magazine had published its ground-breaking cover story, “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside were 10 pages of the photographs and names of 242 American soldiers who had been killed in a single week in Vietnam. Local papers around the country had been publishing photos of the boys from the small towns who had been killed as the deaths were announced, but this was the first time photographs of the war dead had been collected in a single place, and it was stunning.

It was as if the editors at Time-Life in New York City had finally decided to take a stand against the war. The dead were 19 years old, or 25, a few were in their 30’s, but their faces looked impossibly young. In the coming months and years, the Life cover with the faces of the dead would mark a turning point in support for the war. Richard Nixon, who had run for president saying he had a “secret plan” to end the war, had been in office only a few months, but even by then it was obvious there was no plan. We were losing the war in Vietnam, and more people were realizing that nearly every day.

On the post at Fort Benning, life went on as normal. At the Infantry School, we marched to and from classrooms and training areas with student platoon leaders marching alongside their platoons calling out the defiant cadence of the young and the doomed:

If I die in a combat zone

Box me up and ship me home

Tell my girl I done my best!

Lay my medals across my chest

Lay my body six foot down

Until you hear it touch the ground!

We rode in deuce-and-a-half trucks to the firing range; we spent rainy nights soaked to the skin on training maneuvers; we studied how to formulate mission statements and ops orders in classrooms in old World War II-era wooden buildings; we ate C-rations in the field and cold sandwiches and Cokes from food trucks on the post. Nobody talked about Vietnam. Nobody had orders yet; soldiers would be sent to brief stateside assignments, and then they’d get orders. It was far away in the future, the war, months away at least.

We read in the papers that in May, a great victory had been won at Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. A battalion from the 101st Airborne Division had driven a large unit of the North Vietnamese Army from a hilltop in the A Sau Valley near the border with Laos. The battle was part of the famed, or infamous, “search and destroy” tactics in the war, where U.S. army units basically went out into the boonies until they encountered the enemy and fought them. The battle of Hamburger Hill was supposed to interdict North Vietnamese supply routes into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Back home, there were hints, rumblings that all was not well. Just before we graduated West Point in June, the Academy administration did something it had never done before. They brought a group of young officers back from the war, straight to West Point, and put on a panel in an auditorium to talk to my entire class about what it was like to be a young officer in combat.

During questions after their presentation, which could charitably be described as dispirited, someone I was sitting near asked about stories in the paper about drug use among soldiers over there. One of the older officers, I think he was a captain or a major, said the stories were false, liberal propaganda against the war. When the panel was over, one of the second lieutenants came down the steps from the stage straight over to where the questioner was sitting. A bunch of us gathered around as he said they had been ordered to deny stories of drug use, but it was a lie. Drug use was rampant in Vietnam he told us, sotto voce. Believe the papers, not the army.

One day at Fort Benning, I ran into a classmate at the PX and we stopped to talk. He told me something strange had happened recently. He was sharing an apartment off-post with another lieutenant he had found advertising for a roommate on a bulletin board somewhere. A few days before as he and his roommate were getting ready to drive onto the post, his roommate had been arrested by the MP’s and taken away. He didn’t know what for, and he hadn’t seen his roommate since. I asked him what the guy's name was. “Rusty Calley,” he answered. I forgot about it, writing it off as some goof who was probably picked up for coming on to a colonel’s wife at a bar and run out of the army.

It wouldn’t be until November that Seymour Hersh’s stories about the massacre at My Lai hit the press. We were gone from Fort Benning by then.

There were rumblings in my student company at the Infantry School as well. A few weeks into the course, they started putting pressure on us to contribute to the United Fund drive. The battalion commander was demanding 100 percent participation. Just for the hell of it, a friend and I drove down to the United Fund offices after getting off that afternoon. We asked to see something that told us how the United Fund money was being used in the Columbus community. They gave us a list of organizations – Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, a small community theater group, that sort of thing.

We checked the United Fund documents we were given and saw that four Boy Scout troops were getting funds, a thousand dollars or something like that. We found the number for the local Boy Scouts office and learned that there were eight scout troops in the town. We went back to the United Fund and asked why four Boy Scout troops were getting United Fund money, but four weren’t. Unabashed, they told us those were the Black scout troops. We looked a little further into what the United Fund supported and what it didn’t and found that no Black organizations in Columbus received United Fund support.

The next day, we got our student company commander, who was Black, to announce to the whole company at morning formation that no money from the United Fund was going to Black organizations in Columbus. The United Fund was nakedly racist. He said he wasn’t contributing to the United Fund. We spread the word that we weren’t either. A few days later, the battalion commander came down and said only one guy in the company had contributed to the United Fund. Our lunch hour was canceled and we were marched over to an old World War II-era movie theater.

We were all seated when a major walked out on the stage and announced that Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the hero of Hamburger Hill, would be addressing us on why we should contribute to the United Fund. He was on some kind of tour giving speeches around the country to counter the bad reviews the battle of Hamburger Hill was getting in the press. With that, Honeycutt, a rather squat figure with a crewcut and thick neck in starched fatigues, strode across the stage into the spotlight. He made some short remarks about the big win at Hamburger Hill and then launched into a speech about discipline and morale and good order and how an army wasn’t an army unless everyone was on the same page, and on he went with boilerplate we had all heard a dozen times at West Point. And then he ended by banging on the podium and telling us that we wouldn’t be able to be good combat commanders unless we followed orders and gave to the United Fund!

The place erupted in applause. Honeycutt took it as applause for him and his speech, but the major who had introduced him got it that we were applauding for another reason. He signaled to Honeycutt from the wings to cut it short, but Honeycutt ignored the major and growled, “Questions, gentlemen?” There was a long silence, and then the guy sitting next to me, Strosher, got to his feet.

Strosher was a former sergeant who had been given a battlefield commission to first lieutenant two months previously in Vietnam because he had been the only guy in the 25th Infantry Division to blow an ambush in a year. Yes, that means exactly what you think it does. Soldiers had basically stopped fighting the war by the summer of 1969, and when they were sent out on night ambush patrols, they would just sit there. They wanted to stay alive more than they wanted to fight the VC.

Strosher said the ambush he commanded had been blown when one of his soldiers fell asleep and his head accidentally fell onto the trigger for a Claymore mine and set it off. A VC patrol happened to be walking past their position, and the rest of the patrol started firing and blowing their claymores and they killed a dozen enemy, and Strosher was a hero. He didn’t want to be promoted. He was happy as a sergeant, he told me, but the division commander insisted he take the commission, and he was sent back to the states to attend the Infantry School.

Strosher, who despite the silver bar on his collar, still looked and sounded like a sergeant and had the cocky attitude of a guy with 10 years in the service and two tours in Vietnam under his belt, knew the answer to the question he would ask Honeycutt before he asked it. He paused a moment and then introduced himself. “Sir, First Lieutenant Strosher. Can I ask where you were during the battle of Hamburger Hill?” He remained standing.

Honeycutt looked confused, as if he hadn’t been asked that question before. “Uh, I was in my C&C ship at my assigned altitude.” Honeycutt was referring to his command and control helicopter. Thinking to himself, doing a mental calculation, Honeycutt continued: “Uh, 2,500 feet as I recall.”

Strosher lifted a hand in a little wave and said, “Thank you, sir. That’s all I needed to know.” The place erupted in laughter. Honeycutt had done what we would today call saying the quiet part out loud. While 72 of his men were killed 2,500 feet below him, and 372 were wounded, he was circling the battlefield in a helicopter wearing a headset and microphone giving orders.

Wars aren’t lost on the battlefield alone. They’re lost in the countries that wage them with politics and posturing and lies and sending out puffed-up buffoons like Honeycutt to transform tragedy into heroism, loss into victory. Wars are lost by exercising racist policies and permitting, even rewarding, racist behavior and expecting no one to notice. Wars are lost by mistaking technology for genius, tactics for strategy, means for ends. If we take this hill and that town and kill that number of enemy soldiers and blow-up apartments and destroy hospitals and explode power stations and burn villages and kill civilians and damage and poison crops and call it a victory, then it will be, or so they think.

One year after I was at Fort Benning, I went back there to cover the trial of Lieutenant William Laws “Rusty” Calley for The Village Voice. He was charged with the premeditated murder of 109 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai in 1968. Calley put up the classic defense that he was just following orders. I was in the courtroom on the day that he testified. As I sat there, I heard whole paragraphs of the Infantry Manual come out of his mouth as he described the “standing assault” he and his platoon conducted that day.

Lieutenant Calley was a product of his times. He had been drafted into the army during Project 100,000, a program instituted by Robert McNamara to induct substandard men into the service at a time when they weren’t getting enough recruits and too many young men were dodging the draft. They lowered the IQ level necessary to serve, did away with the requirement for a high school diploma, and gave anyone serving less than two years in jail for minor offenses the opportunity to get out early if they would sign up for the army. Calley, who had dropped out of junior college, was one of the more stellar recruits and was sent to Officer Training School and became a second lieutenant in the Infantry.

This is what Calley told the jury in answer to a question from his own attorney on the day I was in the courtroom: “Well, I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so, sir.”

This is what losing looks like. This is Hamburger Hill. This is My Lai. This is Bucha. This is Mariupol. This is Kyiv. This is Odessa. This is Lviv.

This is the United States of America. This is the Russian Federation. This is war. There are no winners. Only the dead, and memory, if you can keep it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World