No Respect
When weak men disgrace themselves by pretending to be strong ones, plus, a deep dive with Mortuary Affairs
Young Subscriber Giveaway: No, I’m not giving away young subscribers. That would be human trafficking. Don’t get excited, perverts. This is Slack Tide, not a party at Russell Brand’s house. But as I was saying last week, which you would know if you weren’t yet again shut out on the wrong side of the paywall (a status easily rectified by subscribing here), due to a generous endowment by reader Buck Bell (not, apparently, his porn name), I’m giving away a number of free one-year paid subscriptions to high-school or college-age students. Or even non-students of the same age, if they’re into self-enlightenment. The only preconditions being that they can read, and aren’t put off by my occasional potty-mouth. Though I mostly try not to swear, because as my sweet little Sunday school teacher taught me during my wayward youth, “Profanity is a language crutch for lazy s—theads.” (They had to remove her for obvious reasons.) In any case, I have a few slots left. So if you know, are related to, or happen to be a person to whom this applies, send the eligible contestant’s name and email address to askmattlabash@gmail.com, and as long as I still have slots, they will be comp’ed a no-strings paid subscription for one year, which entitles them to all new c….con…..I almost said “content,” before remembering that I’m not a sad tech-dork. It entitles them to all new pieces, plus gives them full archive access to other paywalled pieces. Which they’ll need, when wanting to inflict me on their degenerate, weed-smoking friends who could stand some wising up. And now on to today’s business……….
Whenever I’m conversing with naïve young journalists who like to believe they’ve chosen their vocation wisely, instead of maybe picking a more respectable trade like baby-seal poacher or black-market organ harvester, I like to tell them that if the news doesn’t make you sick, you’re probably just not paying close enough attention to it. Or maybe, like me, you’re paying too-close attention. For if you bang yourself in the head with a hammer every day, eventually, your frontal lobe will lose all sensation/processing power.
It is easy to get desensitized. And so, for instance, when allegations broke last week that the married, family values-extolling South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, thought to be a potential Donald Trump VP-pick, was carrying on a years-long affair with longtime Trumpist tapeworm Corey Lewandowski, himself married to a 9/11 widow (they don’t call him “Ewwwandowski” for no reason)……..I yawned. That ain’t nothin’, if you’ll forgive the double negative. Because the man who Noem still might serve if she doesn’t get run out of office (and maybe even if she does), the man who bragged even after the scandal that she’d given him a “full-throated endorsement” (Trump’s so clever with the naughty wordplay!), is facing 91 criminal felony counts, and nearly got his last vice president hanged. So Noem and Lewandowski are going to have to up the ante a bit to shock me. Maybe Lewandowski could repeatedly try to grope a married Super PAC donor at a Las Vegas Benihana, brag about his penis size, and throw a drink at her when rebuffed. Oh, wait, Lewandowski allegedly did that, too. (Sincere apologies, Ewwwandowski, for doubting your scandal prowess.)
Or take Bob Menendez, but do so quickly, because the feds might take him into custody first. News is just breaking that the longtime Democratic senator from New Jersey, and his wife, are facing bribery charges for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts over the years to protect three corrupt co-conspirators in their home state, as well as the nation of Egypt, perhaps not the best look for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez and his wife allegedly accepted everything from cash to gold to mortgage payments to a luxury vehicle. Sounds awful. And yet, am I truly mad at him? Sure, a little. But I’m also sort of grateful for a corrupt Democrat finally giving the recent rash of corrupt Republicans a well-earned day off.
And then comes word that one out of every five Americans now support the idea of secession. Or maybe they got confused, and support the idea of Succession, the TV show. (According to The Literacy Project, the average American now reads at a seventh-grade level.) Whichever the case, who cares? If my long-ago home-state of Texas, for instance, wants to secede – they’ve been threatening to Texit, off and on, since the state was in short pants – I’m too tired to talk them out of it. You’ll miss us more than we’ll miss you. Just leave your keys, your federal benefits, and a few Whataburger franchises by the door on your way out. (I do love me some Whataburger.)
Yet there was one story that truly lodged in my craw this week. A single anecdote in a larger story, really. It was by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, and came smack in the middle of his exhaustively-reported 13,000 word profile on the departing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and his internal efforts to help safeguard the country from the coup attempt that up until 2021, was a threat that a U.S. president never posed to his own people.
When assuming his new role at his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, “Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers,” Goldberg writes. We’ll let him take it from there:
Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers. It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)
These are hardly the first reports, of course, of the once and likely future nominee of the GOP (current average primary poll lead: 45.2 points) making such comments. There was Trump allegedly denigrating American war dead in a French cemetery as “losers” and “suckers” (which he denied). And there he was openly disparaging - onstage in broad daylight, so he couldn’t deny it - John McCain, who’d spent 5 ½ years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, who insisted other prisoners be released before he was, and who could never raise his arms correctly again. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero who was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” said the man many now call Captain Bonespurs. (Trump received a medical exemption from serving in Vietnam due to alleged spurs in his heels, which don’t apparently bother him when he goes to war on the putting greens of Bedminster.)
This didn’t seem to sit right with Mark Milley, both of whose parents were World War II veterans, while Milley himself is a veteran of numerous combat hitches in Iraq and Afghanistan, and where, as Goldberg tells it, he buried 242 soldiers who’d served under his command.
It didn’t sit right with me, either. I come from a military family – my grandfather having sailed to Normandy in the Navy during WW II. My father was a 30-year career Air Force officer. My military service, by contrast, was pretty much limited to hitting the record stores at the BX’s around all the bases we lived on or near throughout my formative years. My father, having recognized my distaste for waking up early or taking arbitrary orders, correctly advised that journalism might be a more suitable path for me.
But just because I haven’t lived it, doesn’t mean I don’t deeply appreciate those who have done so, by choice or otherwise. And just because I haven’t personally approved of all the recent fights our country’s engaged in, that doesn’t mean I don’t have the deepest reverence for the people we send to those fights, so that more pampered people (be they Captain Bonespurs or keyboard warriors with soft hands who type things for a living) don’t have to go to those fights.
Consequently, I’m going to re-run a piece in its entirety that I did twenty years ago, a hangout with the men and women of Mortuary Affairs during the Iraq War. The ones who see off those willing to pay the ultimate price, when combat goes all wrong (as it inevitably has to - their guys are shooting at our guys, too), and who do so with devotion, affording plenty of the fallen more dignity in death than some of them probably ever saw in life. I’m doing this not because I needed a piece this week. (If you’re still with me, you’ve just read 1,500 words – which qualifies as a long column on any op-ed page in America.) But because I’m sick of lesser men treating our military like a political football or yet another culture-war piñata, pretending that political combat is combat. It’s not. If we’re willing to pretend that weak men are strong ones, we’ll no longer recognize the difference when it smacks us in the face. So consider this piece a smack in the face. This is a piece about strong men and women:
"And so we brought our dead man home. Flew his body back, faxed the obits to the local papers, called the priests, the sexton, the florists and stonecutter. We act out things we cannot put in words." --Thomas Lynch, "The Undertaking"
Camp Wolf, Kuwait
The backstretch of the Kuwait International Airport, like much of the rest of the country, is ugly. It is barren and arid, and the frequent sandstorms that whip through make the entire place look like it's been breaded in a Shake 'N' Bake bag. Yet there is a special pocket in this otherwise nondescript military tent city. It is a place where cause becomes effect, where military service is considered sacrament, where all the editorial-page flapjaw about "sacrifice" becomes haltingly, disturbingly real. It is the Theater Mortuary Evacuation Point.
At a gate on the camp's outskirts, I roll up in an SUV with Army Col. Richard Dillon, who oversees the 377th Theater Support Command, under which fall the Mortuary Affairs personnel from the 54th Quartermaster Company and two reserve units. Though we are comfortably in the rear, where quartermasters like Dillon usually do the unglamorous work of getting infantry types their bullets and beans, Dillon has brought along a sidearm--as mandated by the Army ever since a civilian contractor was murdered by a terrorist not far from here in January. "We took custody of the body to enable us to process his remains with the same dignity and respect of each of our own soldiers," says Dillon. Since that day, the men and women of Mortuary Affairs have grown considerably busier.
Dillon is tall with a thin mustache. He speaks in the plodding, carefully measured cadences of a computer specialist, which is what this reservist is in his civilian life--a life he hasn't known since his deployment in December 2001. "It's been over a year since I've heard a dog bark," he laments (although he re-upped for another stint when his initial year-long assignment expired). His wife and children live back in New Orleans, but he speaks in the geographically indistinguishable accent shared by many military lifers who, moving every two or three years, never get the chance to settle into regionalisms.
At the gate, we come to a crossroads. One road goes to the military side of the airport. The other is traveled only by Mortuary Affairs personnel, who bring along the bodies of deceased soldiers in order to send them home. Dillon made sure his people had access to a separate entrance, he says, because nothing shakes an incoming soldier's morale like seeing one of his fallen comrades returning home in a refrigeration truck.