Thank you for your service

My wife and I are both Air Force veterans. We met and married in Bitburg, Germany, while assigned to the 36th TFW. I made the Air Force a career. My wife, an Air Force nurse, helped save my life, retired, and then raised our two boys.

I volunteered for Vietnam after my assignment to Bitburg. I did so because I had friends, guys like myself in their early twenties, putting their lives on the line to serve their country. News was coming back to us that some were KIA or MIA. I felt a need to serve, as they had, and to honor them in doing so.

As it turned out, the Air Force had other plans for me, and I didn’t end up going to Vietnam. I was assigned to the Pentagon instead. I was lucky. So many of my generation weren’t. They gave the “last full measure of devotion” to their country — those who died, and those who live afterward with the scars of their service forever etched in their psyche.

I had a good friend, 'Dan' (pseudonym), who was shot down and spent 6 years in the “Hanoi Hilton.” When the war was over, he transited Hawaii, where I was stationed at PACAF HQ. He had dinner with us. We had music playing. He asked me to turn it off. He’d been beaten so severely about the head, that what we heard as music was just a cacophony to him.

I haven’t the words to express my emotions when seeing Donald Trump’s disdain for my Brothers in Arms. He will never understand, “What's in it for them,” because for him sacrifice is a sucker’s bet. For Trump, there's always a way to get around an obligation, an oath, and even a law.

Several thousand protesters on the National Mall on Friday, March 14, included veterans, who rallied against the Trump administration's unilateral deep cuts to the federal government, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump's cuts to the VA and rollback of veterans healthcare is further evidence of his disdain for "service," a concept foreign to him.

In case you missed it, March 14 is abbreviated as 3/14, and Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, disqualifies anyone from holding office if they engaged in insurrection. Trump should have been disqualified, but a heavily conservative Supreme Court, even then held in low esteem, quelled at the thought of "disenfranchising voters" (Justice Kavanaugh's words), and on March 4, 2024, ruled that states could not disqualify Donald Trump.

So, here we are a year later, after more than seventy-thousand Americans (just under 50%) voted to install the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, victims to the whims of a man intent on creating a nation in his own image; selfish, mean-spirited, unpredictable, and destructive.

God Bless America.