On Memorial Day, Our Fallen Deserve Better
Sometimes a few musical notes can trigger a swarm of unconscious emotions. I was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s stunning live show from Cork, Ireland on Nugs. During “Last Man Standing,” his tribute to the late Castiles bandmate George Theiss, Springsteen reenacts his years on the Jersey Shore circuit during the Vietnam War with its line, “You count the names of the missing as you count off time.”
The elegiac sound of a trumpet Springsteen used onstage in “Last Man Standing” is borrowed from his own “The Wall,” the song he wrote in tribute to Bart Haynes, the Castiles drummer and Walter Cichon, the singer of the bar band the Motifs. Cichon went MIA in 1968 and was never found. They were just 19 when they died.
This Memorial Day as we commemorate those who died in service, the sanctity of the dead and their selfless sacrifices —from World War 1 to the greatest generation that fought in World War 2, those who perished in Korea and Vietnam and closer to present day in Iraq and Afghanistan—have always been sacred,
When Springsteen saw their names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, he was in town for the Kennedy Center Honors. Springsteen wrote the solemn “The Wall” after attending a dinner where the former Secretary of Defense and architect of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara was in attendance.
Were he still alive this Memorial Day, Mr. McNamara who expressed late-life regrets, would have no place at the Wall. Nor would one of the front runners for the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump. Wherever he plans to be campaigning this Memorial Day, Trump has no standing on this solemn day.
In this election year, it’s instructive to go back to a piece from September 2020 by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. The headline is Trump: Americans Who Died In War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’ It threads the narrative of Trump’s disdain for those who died in military service and his denigrating comments while he was president.
“The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.”
The article details Trump’s refusal to attend the Belleau Wood cemetery in Germany where Marines and our Allies stopped the German advance in Paris in World War 1.
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump is quoted as saying and responsible for putting out the story that a helicopter wasn’t working that day..
Trump also famously disparaged the late John McCain as a “loser” for being captured in North Vietnam where he was held captive for five years. When he visited the grave of Robert Kelly, the son of then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Trump turned to Kelly and asked: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” The article goes on to make the larger point: “Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible.”
This past week I walked by the old New York Times building on 43rd Street in Manhattan. The paper has long since moved to a flashier building but it was here in this now ghostly empty building that historic decisions were made to publish The Pentagon Papers, the then secret history of the Vietnam War. The building was recreated in Steven Spielberg’s movie The Post about the decision of the Washington Post to join the Times and publish The Pentagon Papers.
McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, was friends with Washington Post publisher Kay Graham. In the film’s turning point, her character played by Meryl Streep asks, “Bob, how could you send so many of our boys to die if you knew we would lose?”
Those boys included Cichon and Haynes and the more than 50,000 others whose names are ingrained on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. The list is even longer with the many forgotten like my next door neighbor Billy who perished at home by exposure to Agent Orange. They were never the same.
“Both Bart and Walter were killed in action in Vietnam when they were very, very young,” Springsteen said before introducing “The Wall” as a short prayer for his country at Charlotte, North Carolina’s Time Warner Cable Arena on April 19th, 2014. “They were 19, at best. It was a tremendous, tremendous loss to our neighborhood, to our town, to that thing inside of you that feels somehow that the best should get their shot.”
I have no doubt that Trump could no more identify the Central Highlands mud where Chicon was lost in action any more than he could pick out the capital of Ukraine on a map. While many would agree with his proclamations to avoid “senseless” overseas wars like we experienced in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear Trump has no historical context for how the peace of the world was created after World War II. Before he tried to overthrow the country on January 6, he tried to break-up NATO that has ensured the stability we’ve benefitted from for over 70 years. He has ceded intelligence to our adversaries and were he elected, the possibility exists that he could force Ukraine to surrender to Russia, the same country that would like no better than to end the West.
The fallen who ensured the freedoms he, and we as a country, take for granted today, should be safe from indifference and disdain. They deserve better.