“Mr. President, I just buried one of my constituents. He was a big fan of yours. I promised his family I’d tell you. They know we talk. His daughter is six years old.”
The commander in chief is also the consoler in chief. “Tell them I’m doing all I can to end these wars. I’m more anti-war than you are, Matt. I believe what you believe even more than you believe it. Promise me you’ll tell them.” I carried the message to America’s newest Gold Star family, my voice cracking as I relayed our president’s gratitude.
“I don’t want you to do this. You’re hurting my leverage, but I know you feel it in your heart. I’m not going to bust your balls over this.” We’ve never discussed that vote again—at least not directly.
Later the president would tweet, ostensibly to all members of Congress, to “vote your heart.” I’m not the first man to get a love note tweeted by our president—that honor would fall to my fellow millennial Kim Jong-un—but I sure took it that way.
Along with the president, my heart breaks when the blood of America’s bravest patriots is wasted unwisely by men who then turn around and pretend that they did nothing wrong as they cash in.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Joe Biden for president—just as he had the warmongers Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hey, I wonder how the Iraqis feel about him supporting a candidate who called for breaking Iraq into three countries?
Powell warned that if you break it, you bought it. But he and Biden were among the breakers. We are still paying the price, with rising costs in dollars and lives. Real courage isn’t backing a man who Obama’s own secretary of defense, Robert Gates, said was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
CNN breathlessly pretended that Powell’s endorsement was some courageous breaking of political ranks. Powell was the front man for bad intelligence. He should wear that for the rest of his life.
Indeed, the last time I listened intently to Colin Powell, it was eighteen years ago, and he was saying something ominous about WMDs in Iraq. Unfortunately, others were listening, too. Not so much with Donald J. Trump, who called bullshit and later called George W. Bush a war criminal to a standing ovation in South Carolina—one of our most pro-military states. That was the moment that I knew everything would be different. Because everything about it was true. Finally.
Courage requires truth-telling. Powell couldn’t tell the truth to the nation, the world, or even President Bush and Shadow-President Cheney. I doubt he can even tell the truth to himself. I wonder if he even knows it now. We don’t get to use truth serum on network news, though everyone would tune in. I told Trump the truth about my vote when we disagreed. I wouldn’t authorize a blank check for another generation of neocon desert adventures at the expense of America’s finest and bravest.
This is not a policy debate. The victims of bad military decisions are my neighbors. We play cornhole at KC’s Sandbar & Grille in my hometown of Fort Walton Beach. I know what they signed up for because they tell me why they signed up for it. I know they’d die for America as often as God would allow. For some, it is a family endeavor—parents hand off the family commitment to daughters and sons. For others, it is a private, almost spiritual commitment to the country they love.
They will never run from a fight, but we have a responsibility to make sure it is winnable and worth winning. Fake leaders have no license to spend their lives frivolously, as Powell, Biden, and Cheney have. Capt. Nathan Hale regretted that he had but one life to give for his country. My people give their all—their arms and legs, their backs, and scrambled minds. They give their youth, their marriages, their everything. They carry that service with them in the boardroom and in their kids’ bedrooms as they tell the stories, but they never leave it behind. Those who don’t come home alive—and we never leave them behind even when they are not breathing—hang around in the minds of their moms, dads, and kids, who soldier on without their soldiers long after the medals are doled out and the obits are written. Great Americans always carry on. Military families inspire the best within us because they are the best among us. They’ll go to any land we ask, even to space, because we ask.
My baseball coaches wore pilot bags. My scout leaders were air commandos. My Baptist deacon maintains the flight line. My amazing Chief of Staff Jillian Lane-Wyant is a marine spouse. During Florida’s legislative session, a bomb technician fed my cat.
I will never send America’s troops, our neighbors, into a fair fight. Rather, I intend on providing the funding, equipment, infrastructure, and arms to achieve decisive victory every single time. We build the best weapons ever because we, and we alone, never hope to fire them. We trust our best.
A well-funded force need not be so well worn. Today our military is overstretched, over-deployed, and overexerted. Growing up where I have, I’ve seen my whole life what endless deployments and unfocused wars truly mean for our best people: tearful airport goodbyes. Bargaining with God for the safe return of loved ones. Parenting disrupted. Marriages destroyed. Extra psychiatrists at our schools. Drug abuse. Domestic violence. Veteran suicide. Shattered limbs, broken hearts, and grieving families at Walter Reed Hospital. Caskets draped in flags. Gold Star families in mourning. Roads, parks, and schools named in permanent reverence for the fallen.
The “fog of war” is no fog to me, nor to any of the seven hundred thousand people I serve. It is weird to talk about service when so many of my constituents serve me and indeed all of us. I
