I don’t get to Washington D.C. as much as I did when I was younger. When I do, I stop in to see my father. Sometimes I bring a beer and sit down and catch him up on things. I tell him about his namesake grandson, my latest misadventures, and the current state of the republic. The next trip is going to be the toughest; I must let him know that my mom and his beloved wife died in January. It’s a one-way conversation because it takes place at Grave 99, Section 3, in Arlington National Cemetery. Cmdr. Peter Rodrick was lost in a plane crash off the USS Kitty Hawk in 1979.
In my 20 or so visits, I’ve sat and talked with him and watched the business of burying the dead. Sometimes, there was a horse-drawn caisson carrying a flag-draped coffin of some teenage boy or girl killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Then the crisp, staccato sounds of soldiers firing off a 21-gun salute as an officer hands a flag from a grateful nation to a mom, a dad, a wife, a son, a daughter who will never feel whole again. I know that was true of my mother.
One thing I’ve always noticed at Arlington is the silence — even little kids dragged there on summer vacations seem to understand the solemnity of the grounds. The exception is Donald Trump. I was already pissed when I watched Trump on Monday turn a ceremony commemorating the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 soldiers at Abbey Gate during the harrowing evacuation of Afghanistan into a tawdry stunt. Trump was scoring cheap political points against the Biden-Harris administration for the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, a withdrawal that had been set in motion by Trump himself, who wanted to take credit for ending the two-decade war without doing the hard work of extricating tens of thousands of soldiers and Afghan allies.
I didn’t expect much better from Trump who has — deep breath — labeled John McCain a “loser” because he got captured when his plane was shot out of the Vietnam sky. He also dodged a 2020 visit to a French cemetery honoring American dead from World War I because his hair might get mussed up and, besides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” And we will never forget the time he mocked the mother of Humayun Khan, an army captain killed by a car bomb in Iraq, for standing alongside her husband Khizr at the 2016 Democratic National Convention while he criticized Trump for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, but not speaking herself. Khizr Khan said his wife, Ghazala, had not spoken because she was afraid she would break down. “Trump is devoid of feeling the pain of a mother who has sacrificed her son,” said Khizr Khan.
So I wasn’t surprised Monday when Trump was shown giving his shit-eating grin and a thumbs-up at the grave of a fallen soldier. He looked like a fucking tourist visiting Jerry Lewis’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was gruesomely inappropriate and totally true to his character. I did wonder if it violated Arlington’s policy of not politicizing America’s most sacred ground. Turns out I was right. The next day, NPR reported that Arlington officials and Trump campaign staff scuffled and argued over the Trump campaign filming grave sites, which is forbidden.
That the fiasco happened did not surprise me, just the specific details. I laid in bed last night and thought how it was possible that a former American president could misunderstand the purpose of a place like Arlington. Let’s face facts, there are thousands buried there who were killed in wars that turned out neither to be just nor in the interests of the American people. (My father was killed in a training accident while his squadron prepared for a possible raid on Tehran after the hostages were taken in Iran, a direct result of the United States propping up the Shah, a cruel and kleptocratic monarch.)
But that’s not the point. Soldiers and sailors don’t have a choice; all of them died for their country serving a cause that their leaders told them was crucial to the future of the United States. The fact that often turned out not to be true only makes their deaths more tragic.
Donald Trump didn’t have to go to Arlington to film b-roll for attack ads. He could have just laid a wreath in memory of the 13 dead. He could have left his own 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 gardens of stone did not have that luxury.
That Trump made the wrong choice should not surprise any American.
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