Brothers in Arms

And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms

–Mark Knopfler, “Brothers In Arms”

Yesterday I had a call from a fellow NCO in the unit I served in, far and away back in the day but so much more recently than when I was a young soldier. He called to tell me of his disappointment, not with leadership but with me.

I had stepped afoul by criticizing white male supremacy.

I always take calls from fellow vets. Whether or not we paint our war canoes the same, they’re paddling the same river I am and I keep the life rings handy. Veterans Day is a good reminder that sometimes the people I feel closest to aren’t family (sorry) or even dear old friends, but the people I got thrown in the popper with and exploded into fluffed up kernels of military grain.

Even when they’re hard to talk to.

We all share certain things that maybe you don’t. We all submitted to a system based on honor that forced us to push ourselves through hazing, physical exhaustion, austere conditions, and a mindset that we might die for our (often teenaged) decision. Some of us went to war, and all of us faced the prospect. There’s an internet joke about how universities sucker teenagers into signing up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt for programs they can’t possibly be prepared for.

That’s cute. You should definitely whine about the interest on your college debt to an amputee with a Purple Heart pinned to her stump.

So I pick up the phone. If a vet needs to yell at somebody, I can be that guy. If brother wants to tell me I’m an idiot for the way I think, that’s his business and yesterday I had some patience to spend on it… right up until my former comrade started an earnest campaign to convince me I couldn’t disagree with him unless I were clinically insane.

We were PSYOP soldiers together. The problem with PSYOP training is that it convinces certain of its trainees that they’re the cream of the intellectual crop. Some of them go on to believe that the term “psychological” in Psychological Operations means that they’re now clinicians — after all, they’ve heard certain terms like “DSM IV” and “ethnocentrism” and “target audience.”

Do not be fooled, even if we were. PSYOP is marketing. That’s where it got its chops. There is zero clinical training.

So my friend seemingly forgot that, or forgot that I knew it. He also forgot that “22 a day” isn’t some random number. It’s a great idea to call up old comrades, especially around Veterans Day, but it might be a less inspired notion to call up and tell them that they’re unsalvageably insane.

That has not always gone well for gun-owning veterans like myself. Fortunately for him I’m not suicidal, and haven’t been for a very long time. Had I been yesterday, that would have been the worst imaginable buddy check. How would he live with that, I wonder?

My friend, he of the DEI revulsion, also forgot that I’m older than he is.

My lead drill sergeant was a 173rd Airborne Vietnam veteran from Guam, shorter than my Jewish wife even in his round brown and tougher than a new pair of jump boots (which, as many old soldiers tunefully recall, can’t be beat). My assistant drill was a young black woman who could crank out situps from breakfast until they bugled retreat. The black lead instructor I had in AIT, who taught us lessons about soldiering that transcended the course material, later became my platoon sergeant in Korea, then (field artillery being a small world of big weapons) my first sergeant in Georgia.

There were zero performance standards those soldiers couldn’t meet, which is another way of saying there was no pressing requirement to replace them with strapping white men. I’ve been a white man my whole adult life, doing my best like most of us, but it isn’t an automatic performance advantage.

It shouldn’t be an advancement advantage.

Let me put a finer point on that. Craggy old wreck that I’ve become, you might not realize that, in physical terms, I once was Donald J. Trump’s poster boy. Tallish, vaguely Nordic in appearance (and this was before Norway was designated “a shithole country;” in fact, Donny was still using it as the counter-example), pretty well-muscled once I got after it, and wearing a hero’s chin to distract you from my zits. I was fast, strong, blue-eyed, blonde, smart, and committed.

I was straight out of central casting.

And my 5’2″ Guamaniac of a drill sergeant, with his Purple Heart from getting shot up in the jungle, could outrun my 19 year-old ass for speed and distance. My 5’5″ woman of an assistant drill couldn’t outsprint me, but she could grind me up for distance (and those situps… phew!).

The thing about EO is that the military got serious about it well before the civilian sector. Secretary of Defense (that’s his title, by law) Pete Hegseth either forgot that or never knew it. Probably, he just sees what he wants to see.

Making space for minorities and women isn’t some recent, progressive distortion of military tradition. Blacks, Native Americans, Filipinos, and ethnic Japanese fought courageously for us during WWII.

Molly Pitcher didn’t just bring water to Continental troops. She took over a field piece when her artillery husband fell in the fight. Women were making U.S. military history before the U.S.A. was a complete idea.

Hundreds of women picked up rifles for both sides of the Civil War by disguising themselves as men. Women managed hospitals and large nursing staffs, delivered supplies and provided battle relief aid. Clara Barton went on to leverage her arduous Civil War experience to found the American Red Cross.

In a predecessor to the commissioned nursing corps, hundreds of women deployed during the Spanish American War, including 80 Black nurses. Many of the soldiers they tended were Buffalo Soldiers, black troops from the 9th and 10th Cavalry who made Teddy Roosevelt’s famous charge possible, and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments.

The breakout of WWI in 1918 marked the first time women served in the U.S. military in widespread capacities. Female U.S. troops nursed combat casualties across Europe (where hundreds of women died). They comprised Gen. Pershing’s switchboard corps. They also saddled up for thousands of Stateside backfill roles. The “Yeomanettes” drove truck. ran radios, shuffled paper, and repaired equipment from coast to coast while men fought in the trenches of Europe.

Now hear this: trans soldiers have also served since the beginning. Deborah Sampson, AKA Robert Shurtleff (various spellings) served in the Revolutionary War but didn’t merely serve. At 5’8″ and far from wispy, Private Shurtleff was bigger and stronger than most male peers, and was recruited to the 4th Massachusetts Regiment Light Infantry Company — elite soldiers who were more or less the army Rangers of their day. When shot in the leg, Shurtleff dug out the lead with a pocketknife before self-stitching a forehead wound incurred from a saber slash.

And became a farm wife and the mother of four after mustering out, because life is complicated and subtle.

Sampson/Shurtleff would surely have failed Sec. Hegseth’s testosterone test, courtesy of his manosphere-fueled Bright Idea Fairy, but fails no test of courage in any context. Of the Buffalo Soldiers sent to the least glamorous combat roles of our “splendid little war” in Cuba, five earned the Congressional Medal of Honor — as did one black sailor. In all, 97 African American service members have received our highest award for valor, along with four Filipinos and 21 Japanese, despite endemic prejudice that we see once again slithering into our national politics and poisoning our military. Only one woman, Civil War doctor Mary Walker, was awarded the MoH. It was then rescinded and not restored until the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Now we’ve got a Secretary of Defense, slammed into second puberty by booze and internet SARMs, ravaging our readiness in his hellbound quest to rid the military of any tinge of non-white, non-“alpha male” presence. This despite servicemembers like Army LTC Marilyn Wils, a black staff officer who helped fellow DoD workers out of the blazing Pentagon on 9/11 when Pete Hegseth was just an ROTC cadet; and trans Air Force cryptologist Master Sergeant Alexandria Holder, who retired with more combat deployments than Sec. Hegseth (or I) will ever see.

Here on Remembrance Day, leaving our comrades behind is despicable. Let’s never do that. Let’s never tolerate it in others.

But hey… it’s Veterans Day. If you need to call, call. I’ll be here, even if you mainly want to justify white grievance (like other catechisms, I mostly remember the dialect). If you’d rather jaw about old times, well that’s my favorite. Feel free to make shit up. We all know how much we were badass mofos (I mean, in the WHITE way) back in the day.

But if you really want to make my Veterans Day, contact your Congressional reps and senators. Implore them to impeach the Sec. of Defense, who’s so intoxicated on hair gel and “hard power” and whiskey that’s too good for his burned out palate that he forgot what soldiering is really about: the man and woman and… well, the soldier fighting next to you.

If he ever knew.

Now the sun’s gone to Hell
And the moon’s riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it’s written in the starlight
And every line in your palm
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms

–ibid