Was I a sucker? I sure don’t want to feel like a sap, but the thought that I may be one arises when I watch this endless parade of patriots – including our last conscious president – being prosecuted for their political beliefs and treated differently under a two-tier justice system as the garbage institutions attempt to quash free speech, and as the alleged president, a desiccated, corrupt, old pervert, generally drives our country into the ground. I defended this?
I did 27 years in our military. I proudly swore to defend our Constitution. Now, I only washed trucks – I wasn’t a war hero like Pete Buttigieg or Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, and I certainly wasn’t killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and also (I think) Maui like Joe Biden’s non-coke-addled son was, but I showed up. I dressed like a tree, marched around, went where they sent me, and did my job. Don’t get me wrong – it was not all bad. It was fun some of the time, and I got to do a lot of interesting things other people didn’t get to. I got a little money – very little – and I’ve always been intensely grateful for the chance to be an American soldier. And I took it seriously. That oath I took? It never expires. And now I just need to know if I was a sucker for believing all that Constitution and freedom stuff when I raised my right hand.
I know a lot of fellow vets who are asking the same question.
I ask because this banana republic isn’t the country I was thinking I was signing up to defend when I pinned on my private first class insignia and entered the Army on December 1, 1987, and got handed a ticket out to Lawton, Oklahoma, for basic training at Fort Sill. Especially for a California guy, winter on the prairie was no fun, but I did it because I thought I was doing something more important than merely serving myself. I felt the same way when I did 14 miserable weeks at Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning – and it will be Fort Benning to me forever, despite being renamed after cavalry legend Hal Moore, who I got to see speak to my Infantry Officer Advanced Course class there. And I felt the same way when I went to Germany, then to Desert Storm, then to the Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake, then to Kosovo, and also to Ukraine (four times), to Korea and to Japan, and even to do a rotation at the high-tech armpit that is the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin (feel free to change that name) as a deputy brigade commander.
Most other vets feel the same way. We know what we were fighting for, or in my case, lathering up 5-tons and Bradleys for.
But if some sergeant first class pushed that piece of paper and a pen across the desk to me today, I don’t think I would sign it like I did back in 1987. I don’t think I’ve changed. I think I still love the America I grew up in. Hey, if you are a young guy or gal who signs on the line that is dotted now, awesome. I got your back. But if you don’t, I’m not going to try to talk you into it. The sad fact is that the America I grew up in is, if not dead, in a coma.
And most other vets feel the same way. Not all of them. There are some blue falcons out there who think the current woke military is just great, with its political witch-hunts, bizarre diversity fetishes, and track record of total failure in unequivocally winning a major war in the last three decades. If you ask me, “What’s wrong with the military today?” I can sum it up by asking you a question in response: “What is the name of the general or admiral fired because of the fiasco in Afghanistan two years ago?”
There hasn’t been one.
But I’m sure all the generals and admirals think that’s just great. Accountability sucks when you suck, and they really, really, really feel that accountability sucks. They are currently scandalized because Senator Tommy Tuberville refuses to allow the Senate to mass promote them until the Pentagon stops its illegal expenditure of tax money to facilitate abortions. They should be scandalized about ships running into each other, by troops punching out the second their enlistments are up, and about the potential for getting sent to fight someone else’s war in Ukraine. They talk a big game about strategy, but in Ukraine we seem to have no strategic objective other than enriching the corporations that had the likes of Nikki Haley and Lloyd Austin serving on their boards. And I don’t believe any of the pronoun brass has the stones to rip the stars off their epaulets and toss them on our Commander-in-Crusty’s desk rather than obey an order to send American troops into that meat grinder.
Why fight for an elite that hates you? Here at home, we see normal, traditional Americans dragged through the dirt by a garbage ruling class that wants to castrate our kids, seize our weapons, and lock us out of political participation. When we protest, we’re terrorists – little did we know that it was an assault on Our Democracy for those of us who served and our families to presume to participate in it.
Our service means nothing to them. We are expendable and ignorable, unless we get uppity, and then we get their flunkies’ full attention. We just saw a guy with two Purple Hearts get nearly two decades in prison for a rowdy ruckus on Capitol Hill, a minor scuffle (except for when the government killed an unarmed protester) that was dwarfed in intensity and violence by the Los Angeles riots I helped suppress while in uniform. But our ruling class approved of scumbags like the Los Angeles rioters just like it approves of the BLM and Antifa scumbags who ran rampant across the country in 2020 and killed dozens of people. One of them burned a guy alive, and the Department of Justice, the same one that wants to steal decades of life from veterans for the crime of having dissident political views, actually went to bat for the killer and explained that this arsonist was merely upset by systematic racism or some other garbage. He got just 10 years.
I’m not sure how you’re supposed to convince normal Americans to go serve when a guy who fries another human being as part of a leftist riot gets a slap on the wrist and the book gets thrown at the guy who served his country and basically shook a fence. And they aren’t convincing people. The recruiting numbers are lower than Kamala’s IQ, but what do you expect? The people who defend this country are traditional, normal, and largely conservative citizens from outside the blue cities where our ruling class dwells behind walls and armed guards to keep out the criminals that they coddle. They have made it very clear that our country, at least the version they are currently operating, hates normal people. And surprise, surprise – normal people are unwilling to die for them in yet another misbegotten overseas adventure. They might be more willing to go secure our border at home, but obviously we can’t do that because of reasons and shut up, racists.
So, we return to the original question. Was I a sucker for doing what I did? Did I fall for the okey-doke? Was I the mark? Were all of us veterans fooled?
Absolutely not, because the America I chose to defend, and that millions and millions of veterans chose to defend, was worthy of our service and our sacrifice. The unworthy among us have temporarily taken over. The unworthy have gutted our institutions and, as Twitter legend Iowahawk memorably put it, worn those institutions as a skinsuit demanding respect.
Well, let me tell you commie bastards something. You get nothing. You don’t get respect. You don’t get obedience. You don’t get deference. All you get is us focusing our efforts on peacefully, and permanently, driving your sorry butts out of any position of power.
Us vets will lead the way. We were part of the greatest institution of human freedom in human history, the United States military. Even you leftist jerks, with your corruption and greed and stupidity, are not powerful enough to totally ruin our military, much less our country. We’re going to take our institutions back. We’re going to rebuild our military. We’re going to clean house at our Department of Justice [sic] and ensure that there is one system of laws that applies equally to everybody. We’re going to have free speech, and we’re going to buy all the damn guns we want no matter how hard you sissies cry.
I don’t regret serving my country. It was an honor. Moreover, I’m going to continue to do so, and so are the rest of us patriotic vets. Like I said, that oath we took doesn’t expire.
Let me break it down for you half-stepping pinko punks. We’re going to toss you out like the trash you are. See you at the ballot box. I’ll be the guy proudly wearing the Persian Gulf War veteran baseball cap.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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