Pep Rally

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame

His orders come from far away no more

They come from here and there and you and me

And brothers, can't you see?

This is not the way we put the end to war

-Donovan

This morning in the Atlantic I ran across an essay about the unhinged messaging at the most recent Trump rally, reminding us that he's coming to deliver "judgment day" for "vermin" like me. His followers eat this up, howling for revenge against the elites who've let them down.

But that's not what set me off. Rather, it was the detail that they've stopped playing the Star Spangled Banner at his rallies, and replaced it with "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood.

Don't know the song? Lucky you. It's roughly four decades old, and filled with every mawkish bit of patriotic hucksterism one could cram into three minutes. I'm pretty sure Greenwood has a dinner theater in Branson now, which tells you what you need to know.

I've hated that song ever since a very specific event, on February 4, 1991. I was sitting alert in Dhahran, passing the time as we did those nights, watching TV while tensed and waiting for the phone to ring and summon us out into the pitch black to fill a gap in the defensive wall of fighters along the Iraqi border. The war had gone on by then for about three weeks. I'd flown over twenty combat mission in that space, the initial terror giving way to exhaustion and resignation as to how it all might end.

That night on the Armed Forces Network we were greeted with a patriotic special honoring our troops, direct from Walt Disney World in Orlando. It was a pep rally, a f*cking pep rally, cheering us on in those days just before the ground war started. The climax of this spectacle came when Lee Greenwood stepped out and started singing "God Bless the USA". Soon he was joined by Barbara Mandrell and Mickey Mouse in a tri-cornered hat, the three of them marching shoulder to shoulder in front of the fake castle.

I can't tell you why that image set me off that night, and still does. I sort of exploded in a sea of expletives, the theme of which was that we were fighting and dying in the desert, and those a**holes back home think it's a game. I remember saying something along the lines of "come ride in my backseat tonight, jerk, and see if it feels like a game after you s**t your pants."

Salty this morning.

While I was running around the block a couple hours ago it struck me why I have always taken it as a point of pride that I never got anything in exchange for that experience after returning home, thirty-three years ago next week. No disability, despite seven screws in my neck that keep me from turning my head. No pension. I can't even walk into a BX. I used to attribute this feeling to a sense of honor and duty, Cincinnatus returning to his plow after serving his nation in a moment of national peril.

But that's not it, not at all. There was no national peril then, and there hasn't been since my grandfather bombed the Nazis into the Stone Age eighty years ago. We were sent to fight to prevent a dictator from seizing billions of dollars in assets in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, owned by American oil companies. That was it. That's pretty much always been it, from the Marines repossessing Haiti a century ago when they defaulted on debts owed to U.S. investors to putting down the Philippine insurrection, we protect capital.

Fun side note: right after the war we had a "hot wash" just before we flew home, filling our main briefing room and telling stories about what we'd just experienced. The talk was moderated by the general who wrote the operational plan for the beginning of the war, a brilliant guy and definitely one of us, a real fighter pilot. As he talked about the planning phase and their expectations for the first couple weeks of combat, he revealed that they expected up to half of us to be killed or captured in the exercise. Half. The Russian Army isn't even experiencing those sorts of losses these days.

So, at twenty-six I climbed the ladder on what the higher-ups thought might be a suicide mission. Nice to know.

And that's why, I guess, I don't try to get the local chain restaurant to take ten percent off my bill after eating a plate of popcorn shrimp. This country shouldn't be thanking us for our service; it should be apologizing to us for electing people who send soldiers into harm's way for no good reason at all. Taking that discount is like a kid accepting a trip to Baskin Robbins after the molesting.

Then again, I volunteered for that ride. No one made me sign up; no one made me go. And although I seem to harbor a little bitterness about the whole thing, particularly when I'm around veterans who never saw the elephant and have been suckling on the teat since they were teenagers and taking those discounts on their popcorn shrimp, I'm grateful that I know things I never would've understood without the experience. Plus I learned to fly. Which is nice.

Today's an office day, and Peg has folks coming for supper. And so it goes.