Are MAGA-besotted veterans losing sight of first principles?
Jul 30, 2026
Whenever I’m in Washington, I visit the Vietnam Memorial to pay homage to the men and women who paid the ultimate price and helped me survive my own time in the war zone. During the Trump years the melancholy I carry on these pilgrimages comes tinctured with rage, because the man who occupies the Oval Office a few blocks away treats the uniform with something close to contempt.
For five and a half years I served in Vietnam as a CIA officer analyzing enemy intentions. It was a civilian assignment, but I relied on brave American and Vietnamese troops to protect me while I did my work. I felt my debt to them every waking moment and became obsessive in my search for intelligence that I hoped might save their lives.
Too often I failed. My visits to the Wall are, in their way, a penance I keep paying.
Now, all these years later, given Trump’s truly sociopathic abuse of those in uniform, I can’t fathom how any Vietnam vet or any active-duty warrior can stand behind him.
The other day I ran into an ex-Marine with Vietnam credentials who tested my patience to the limit.
He sees Trump as a welcome wrecking ball aimed at the institutions and alliances that he blames for delivering us into Vietnam in the first place. There is a kind of grim satisfaction in that for him. He is a man shaped by grievance, and Trump has become his instrument of payback.
But for me this guy’s love affair with MAGA fails the stress test on one critical point: Trump’s incessant denigration of the very people who have fought and died defending this country.
I know the record well enough to have hammered my new buddy with it on the spot. My reverence for his Vietnam service stopped me. I told him I would write it down instead.
Dear (name),
Everything you said to me in Trump’s defense deserves pushback. But talking it all out would cost us both the kind of emotional energy it usually takes to explain Vietnam to people who weren’t there. It is always a soul-numbing ordeal. I am writing to you anyway because I cannot let your comments go unanswered and because I still view you as an honored comrade.
Thanks be to all that you survived Vietnam intact and without falling into enemy hands. But both of us remember all too many who weren’t so lucky.
What if Trump had said of a POW buddy of yours what he said of John McCain? “He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.”
McCain, as we both know, spent more than five years as a prisoner in North Vietnam, refusing early release out of loyalty to the men held with him. Trump, on the other hand, avoided Vietnam altogether on four student deferments and a diagnosis of bone spurs, then joked decades later that dodging sexually transmitted diseases in the 1970s had been his own “personal Vietnam.”
Mull over that phrase for a second and think of how it would register on any American who, while serving honorably in any war, had been seized and tortured by the enemy and is still staggering from the wounds and the trauma.
And what of someone cripplingly disabled? What if you had been badly shot up in I Corps and were now consigned to crutches or a wheelchair? Here’s one thing for sure: President Trump would not include you in any parade he organized, because as he once put it, nobody wants to see that.
And what if you were a Gold Star father like Khizr Khan, who dared to grieve out loud at a GOP convention. Trump’s answer to him was a direct political attack.
These are not hypotheticals I am inventing as gotchas. Trump did rule out showcasing disabled veterans at a parade event, according to The Atlantic, and the press widely reported the slight on the Gold Star father.
There’s more, and it only deepens the wounds. Former officials told The Atlantic that Trump has referred to Americans killed in war as losers and suckers, and that he has wondered aloud why anyone would bother to volunteer.
Trump has denied the story, but parts of it have been confirmed by officials who claim first-hand knowledge.
And what if you had a grandfather, a one-time Marine, who lies buried at Belleau Wood, or your dad rests in the hallowed cemetery above Normandy? Based on news reports, this sitting president has questioned aloud whether visiting such graves is worth the trouble.
Trump has disputed that story too. But ask yourself why so many separate accounts, from separate sources, keep landing on the same portrait of this man.
And when Trump told an audience two years ago that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is better than the Medal of Honor because recipients of the latter are usually dead or in very bad shape, I thought of every decorated soldier I had ever briefed who returned home missing pieces of himself.
What if it had been your best buddy, a crippled survivor of Khe Sanh or one of the KIAs, that Trump was talking about?
Any second thoughts, my friend?
Then there is Trump’s casual despoiling of the most sacred ritual of all. At the recent dignified transfer for the four soldiers killed in Jordan and Iraq, he assured reporters that every one of them had publicly applauded his decision not to let Iran have a nuclear weapon — as if each had been an adoring constituent and their parents’ grief was his to spend on the next headline.
What if it had been your family standing on that tarmac, and before the caskets had even come off the plane, Trump had made your own lost loved one an alibi for his mistakes?
“Sick” barely scratches the surface of that kind of desecration.
And then there are the purges: the administration’s decimation of the military’s leadership class, waged in the name of a war on diversity and in service of purposes even more sinister than that. Since returning to office, Trump, backed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has carried out the most extensive turnover of senior military leadership in decades.
More than two dozen generals and admirals have been dismissed, forced into early retirement, or sidelined. Several Judge Advocates General, the military’s own top lawyers, have been removed after Hegseth complained they stood in the way of presidential decisions. Promotion lists have reportedly been rewritten to weed out officers judged too diverse or insufficiently loyal. The Army fired its own Chief of Staff, General Randy George, before he finished his term. Hegseth reportedly struck two Black officers and two women from a single promotion list and called the result merit.
I call it raw discrimination.
What if your own promotion, earned in blood and years, had vanished from a list because someone above you decided your face didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell?
Like many of us, I suspect you revere the memory of General Colin Powell. He proved himself heroically in Vietnam and became a model Secretary of State, not least because he had the humility to admit his own mistake about Iraq’s nuclear weapons. As part of Trump’s anti-DEI crackdown, Hegseth has stripped Powell’s name from the National Cemetery web pages that once honored him among the nation’s notable Black service members.
Surely you have it in you to condemn that.
Trump and Hegseth defend their radical housecleaning as an effort to restore merit and the warrior ethos, as if either was missing. They also insist they are finally holding people accountable for Afghanistan, and that appears to be part of their justification for removing General Christopher Donahue, one of the Army’s most accomplished battlefield commanders, the man who oversaw the final evacuation of Kabul.
Your own experience must tell you something is terribly wrong with this.
General Donahue didn’t design the Afghanistan withdrawal. He executed it, and he executed it well enough that his peers trusted him with the last flight out.
Forcing out an officer of that caliber teaches the rest of the officer corps one lesson: your career depends on politics, not performance.
That is a dangerous lesson for any army to teach its own.
Remember how just such a mindset figured in the execrable My Lai coverup, one of the ugliest moments of the Vietnam war, a ghastly corollary to the slaughter itself. The Army’s own postmortem on the cover-up found that a whole generation of officers who served in Vietnam had learned to lie about the truth simply to protect their next promotion.
My takeaway: never again. Not the massacre. Not the cover-up. Not the shame.
You know as well as I do that officers swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a president, and that they’re expected to give civilian leaders their honest judgment even when nobody wants to hear it.
George Marshall wasn’t valued for agreeing with his president. Neither was Eisenhower. Neither was Ridgway. They earned their place in history by telling the truth, and that is precisely the habit a purge like this one trains out of the next generation.
When promotion starts to look like a loyalty test, the whole institution suffers, perhaps irrevocably.
There’s one part of this shakeup I first mistook for a joke, something lifted from the pages of The Onion. Then the mainstream press caught up with it, and I stopped laughing.
Hegseth has decreed that every service member over thirty, the very field officers and NCOs whose judgment carries a unit through a hard tour, must now submit to mandatory testosterone screening, sold to the country as combat readiness.
What if you had come home from Vietnam only to be told the officers who kept you alive now had to prove their hormone levels before the Pentagon trusted them to lead men again?
No joke in that, right?
The worst part isn’t the screening itself. It’s what the screening is really meant to do: devalue and disqualify women and anyone who identifies as transgender. Bravery in combat, heroism under fire, and love of country come in every shape there is. The moment we make the right to wear a uniform dependent on the paranoia and bigotry of the draft evader who now sits in the White House, we are on the downslide as a nation, any way you look at it.
During Trump’s first term, as you’ll recall, men like James Mattis, Mark Milley, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper served as guardrails against the president’s worst instincts. According to reliable news stories, they blocked or slowed proposals to send active-duty troops against American protesters, resisted military action in Mexico and Venezuela, and worked to keep the armed forces inside their traditional constitutional lane.
Those men are gone now, and so is the resistance they represented. With independent judgment now a career-ending liability at the Pentagon and the JAG Corps too gutted to hold the line, the President’s worst instincts are giving way to terrifying mission creep.
He has sent U.S. special forces to remove and seize the president of a sovereign country, who he alleges was involved in drug trafficking. He has ordered missiles and drones fired at boats on the high seas, killing more than two hundred people whom he calls narco-traffickers, without an indictment, a trial, or a shred of due process for any single one of them.
His legal rationale is that the cartels responsible for the illicit drug flow amount to narco-terrorist armies at war with the United States, which lets him act under his own Article II authority as Commander-in-Chief rather than treating the men on those boats as criminal defendants. If you accept this argument, it means the targets are enemy combatants, not alleged lawbreakers, and therefore don’t get a courtroom.
Is your head spinning? You’ve doubtless pored over many “legal” or political justifications for Vietnam that were nothing more than official double talk for what was really going on. Read this variation on a similar theme and tell me honestly whether it holds up.
It doesn’t hold up for members of Congress from both parties, or for most constitutional scholars who’ve looked at it. The underlying reasoning simply hands the presidency a kind of unilateral power the Constitution was written to prevent.
That power was never going to stay overseas. Consider what Trump and his Pentagon flunkey have begun rehearsing for the country itself.
At Quantico last September, with Hegseth at his side, Trump told a room of senior officers that American cities could serve as training grounds for the troops and spoke of the nation fighting a war from within, while Hegseth declared an end to what he calls “woke” culture in the ranks.
As if that weren’t warning enough, the administration has already deployed active-duty Marines and thousands of National Guard troops in support of federal immigration operations, despite criticism that such missions blur the traditional line between military and civilian law enforcement. Though challenged repeatedly, Trump has declined to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act, saying federal troops would be used wherever he believed necessary to maintain “law and order” and even suggesting military action could be justified in situations “less than” an actual insurrection.
That’s got to freak you out. It does me. Federal troops can be used on American soil only under very narrow conditions, chiefly the Insurrection Act, and nothing resembling an insurrection was underway back then, or is now.
There’s also another object lesson that bears special poignancy for the two of us. After the fall of Vietnam, every fair-minded American reacted in horror as Hanoi’s security forces descended on every village and hamlet in the south, killing or penning up untold numbers of our defeated allies while burning books, destroying libraries, and muzzling what was left of the press.
How can anybody condemn that and still indulge Trump in his ruminations, however conjectural, about using the U.S. military for domestic police duties?
Forgive me for getting preachy again, but the Constitution recognizes that every citizen, liberal, moderate, and conservative alike, has the right to protest peacefully. To treat liberal or moderate demonstrators as though they were committing sedition, or even to intimate casually that they warrant suppression by the U.S. military, is a mockery of every sacrifice memorialized at Arlington.
Even the special days set aside for mourning our fallen heroes haven’t been spared. Trump’s Memorial Day and Arlington remarks have increasingly skewed more political than solemn, turning a graveside into a campaign backdrop. And though he would defend his staffing cuts at the VA as Musk-approved efficiency measures, I see them as proof of standalone contempt, because you and I both learned long ago that a nation’s regard for its living veterans and its dead ones travels in the same direction, or it travels nowhere at all.
Here is where the pattern gets truly current, and where I think it should trouble you most. This month the Pentagon’s casualty count for the Iran war dropped overnight from eighteen dead to fourteen. Officials told reporters that four of those deaths, three in Jordan and one in Iraq, were re-categorized because they came after Trump’s declared ceasefire, as though a soldier’s family grieves less because Washington drew an administrative line after the fact. The Pentagon’s own spokesman called it a technical glitch.
You served. You know which explanation smells more like the truth.
Trump has also published statistics showing that the revised casualty figures for the Iran conflict are pleasingly dwarfish compared to those for Vietnam and other recent wars. The heartlessness and moral myopia on display here are staggering.
And I keep thinking of Hegseth, sweating under Senator Jon Ossoff’s questions in the recent appropriations hearing, standing by his springtime boasts that Iran’s military had been destroyed even as he was asking Congress for tens of billions more to keep fighting it. I was preparing to join the CIA when Lyndon Johnson’s Pentagon insisted the Vietnam war was being won while the body count told a different story. Watching Hegseth do the same dance with the same stakes, American lives, was like watching old film run backward.
Then there is the deepest wound. Trump has put servicemen in harm’s way in Iran without ever asking Congress for the authorization that would rally the whole country behind protecting them. You and your comrades were sent to Vietnam under the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Congress barely debated, and we witnessed what that absence of real consent did to the men and women who wound up on the front lines.
Trump has learned nothing from that, or he has learned exactly the wrong lesson.
I don’t write any of this to score points against you. I write it because I still see the man in you who once trusted the people beside him with his life, and I cannot understand how this same man extends his trust to someone who speaks ill of patriots in uniform, and dismantles the institution that trained them, the way Trump and Hegseth do.
I am not asking you to abandon everything you believe about the elites and the institutions that may, or may not, have failed us. I am asking you to look at what Trump does with the uniform once he has finished using it, and to ask yourself whether that is really the Commander-In-Chief, or the Pentagon, you signed up to follow.
With more sorrow than anger, and with the old respect intact,
Frank