I don't understand I have been to Washington, D.C., as often as I did when I was younger. When I do, I stop to visit my father. Sometimes I bring a beer with me and sit and talk to him about things. I tell him about his grandson and namesake, my latest adventures, the current state of the republic. The next trip will be the hardest. I have to tell him that my mother and his beloved wife died in January. It is a one-sided conversation because it takes place in Grave 99, Section 3, at Arlington National Cemetery. Commander Peter Roderick was lost in a plane crash off the USS Kitty Hawk in 1979.
On my twenty or so visits, I sat and talked with him and watched the burials. Sometimes there would be a horse-drawn coffin carrying the flag-draped casket of a teenage boy or girl killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Then there would be the sharp, staccato sounds of soldiers firing a 21-gun salute as an officer handed a flag from a grateful nation to a mother or father, a wife, a son or daughter who would never know peace again. I know this was true of my mother.
One thing I’ve always noticed about Arlington is the silence — even the little kids who are dragged there on summer vacation seem to understand the majesty of the place. The exception is Donald Trump. I was already angry when I watched Trump on Monday turn a ceremony to commemorate the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 soldiers at Abbey Gate during the horrific evacuation of Afghanistan into a cheap stunt. Trump was scoring cheap political points against the Biden-Harris administration for its chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, a withdrawal that Trump himself initiated, wanting to claim credit for ending the two-decade war without doing the hard work of saving tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers and allies.
I couldn’t have expected better from Trump, who called John McCain a “loser” for being captured when his plane was shot down while flying over Vietnam. He avoided visiting a French cemetery honoring American World War I dead in 2020 because his hair might get tangled, and besides, he said, “Why would I go to that cemetery? It’s full of losers.” And we’ll never forget the time he mocked the mother of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed in a car bomb in Iraq, for standing by her husband, Khizr Khan, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention while he criticized Trump for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, but he didn’t speak himself. Khizr Khan said his wife, Ghazala, didn’t speak because she was afraid of breaking down. “Trump is devoid of the pain of a mother who sacrificed her son,” Khizr Khan said.
So I wasn’t surprised on Monday when Trump appeared, grinning and giving a thumbs-up at the grave of a fallen soldier. He looked like a tourist visiting Jerry Lewis’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was completely inappropriate and completely true to his character. I wondered if this violated Arlington’s policy of not politicizing America’s holiest ground. It turned out I was right. The next day, NPR reported that Arlington officials and Trump campaign staffers had argued and argued over the Trump campaign’s prohibited photography of grave sites.
It was not the fact that this disaster happened that surprised me. It was the details that surprised me. I lay in bed last night thinking about how a former American president could have gotten a place like Arlington so wrong. Let’s face it, there are thousands of people buried there who died in wars that were unjust and in the best interests of the American people. (My father was killed in a training accident as his brigade prepared for a possible raid on Tehran after the hostage crisis in Iran, a direct result of U.S. support for the Shah, a cruel and corrupt monarch.)
But that’s not the point. Soldiers and sailors had no choice; they all died for their country in service to a cause their leaders told them was crucial to the future of the United States. The fact that this often turns out not to be true makes their deaths all the more tragic.
Donald Trump didn’t have to go to Arlington to shoot offensive propaganda footage. He could have laid a wreath in memory of the 13 dead. He could have left his camera crew in the parking lot. You see, Donald Trump had a choice. My father and the tens of thousands of dead buried here in their stone gardens did not have that luxury.
No American should be surprised by Trump's poor choice.
