Trump, the alibied bone-spurred coward has made a fetish of mocking a fabled Vietnam hero, demeaning Gold Star families, denigrating our military alliances, libeling our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, betraying secrets that injure friends and comfort enemies, bargaining away national security interests for political and personal profit, playing lickspittle to Putin, and tainting this country with an aura of callousness and self-dealing that can only dissuade anyone from ever trusting us again.
And yet, where are Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, military icons all, the last of whom fervently chastised the generals of the Johnson era for not speaking truth to power about Vietnam?
Have these stalwart military men all traded away the service ethic of “Honor, Duty, Country” to a Trump-like obsession with private profit now that they have finished covering for him as members of his administration?
Mattis, who resigned on principle, now tells us he has a “duty to silence” where Trump is concerned – the Good Soldier Schweik still marching in lockstep with The Great Leader — though this “duty” seems to dovetail all too conveniently with Mattis’ own interest in protecting the government contracts of General Dynamics where he again sits on the board.
Such self-serving expediency and calculated discretion threaten to make revered military officers and ex-officers, our uniformed role models, complicit in the denigration of everything they profess to stand for.
And those veterans and armchair patriots who have kept their counsel about Trump and his obscenities for the sake of tax breaks, Supreme Court slots, and an expanding military budget and its spillover for military contractors should review the history of Hitler’s rise to power and who collaborated in it for reasons all too analogous.
But the curtain is ripped away now, any room for a weaselly abrogation of moral responsibilities is gone. Every Kurd who dies because Trump invited Erdogan to commit genocide against them in northern Syria is blood on the hands of everyone who stays mum and lets it happen.
Duty to silence? It’s the same soul-rotting silence that led U.S. Army officer corps to cover up My Lai. Only now the casualties and the stain on our national honor could be far beyond anything Trumpian-style lies and those who abet them can ever whitewash away.