We Should Respect Military Service

Jack Cronin, an old friend from Dorchester who graduated from Boston Latin School and then from West Point, was honored to walk with the West Point Class of 2028 with “full rucksacks, weapons and equipment” from a distant training area to the USMA campus in a march that took most of the night, 50 years after he arrived on campus.? These are young people who are committed to serving their nation and are prepared to go into combat as have young people since the founding of West Point in 1802.

?We should salute these young people given that they heed the call to do “what you can do for your country.”

?Compare this valor to the rhetoric emanating from the former president who pontificated while at his golf course in New Jersey that the Medal of Freedom which he had awarded to the widow of a wealthy Republican contributor was much better than the Medal of Honor “because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers.? They are either in very bad shape because they have been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”? How obscene!? This is a pattern indicative of Trump’s longstanding negative attitudes towards military service perhaps as a result of suffering psychological damage from having been sent by his father to a military academy. ?Perhaps he was not accepted at West Point! We all know about the “bone spurs” that resulted in his avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War. A psychologist could have a field day with respect to Trump’s attitudes towards our military.

?The Veterans of Foreign Wars National Commander said in a statement “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterize the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.”

?In 2015, Trump said the late Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for many years was not a war hero “because he was captured…I like people who weren’t captured…..” He reportedly declined to visit a World War II cemetery in France because it was filled with “losers” who had been killed in action. ?He then barged into Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign video.

?Trump gave the Medal of Freedom to wrestlers, golfers, football coaches, Rush Limbaugh and to rich people, not to true American heroes.

?Should we not honor those who truly serve their nation like those young people at West Point, rather than those who purchase their friendship with the President of the United States?