Was I a sucker? I sure don’t want to feel like a sap, but the thought that I may be one arises when I watch this endless parade of patriots – including our last conscious president – being prosecuted for their political beliefs and treated differently under a two-tier justice system as the garbage institutions attempt to quash free speech, and as the alleged president, a desiccated, corrupt, old pervert, generally drives our country into the ground. I defended this?
I did 27 years in our military. I proudly swore to defend our Constitution. Now, I only washed trucks – I wasn’t a war hero like Pete Buttigieg or Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, and I certainly wasn’t killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and also (I think) Maui like Joe Biden’s non-coke-addled son was, but I showed up. I dressed like a tree, marched around, went where they sent me, and did my job. Don’t get me wrong – it was not all bad. It was fun some of the time, and I got to do a lot of interesting things other people didn’t get to. I got a little money – very little – and I’ve always been intensely grateful for the chance to be an American soldier. And I took it seriously. That oath I took? It never expires. And now I just need to know if I was a sucker for believing all that Constitution and freedom stuff when I raised my right hand.
I know a lot of fellow vets who are asking the same question.
I ask because this banana republic isn’t the country I was thinking I was signing up to defend when I pinned on my private first class insignia and entered the Army on December 1, 1987, and got handed a ticket out to Lawton, Oklahoma, for basic training at Fort Sill. Especially for a California guy, winter on the prairie was no fun, but I did it because I thought I was doing something more important than merely serving myself. I felt the same way when I did 14 miserable weeks at Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning – and it will be Fort Benning to me forever, despite being renamed after cavalry legend Hal Moore, who I got to see speak to my Infantry Officer Advanced Course class there. And I felt the same way when I went to Germany, then to Desert Storm, then to the Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake, then to Kosovo, and also to Ukraine (four times), to Korea and to Japan, and even to do a rotation at the high-tech armpit that is the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin (feel free to change that name) as a deputy brigade commander.