Trump doesn't understand importance of Arlington
By: Mike Kelly
Columnist
USA Today Network
..... To walk across Arlington National Cemetery is to walk amid memories. You need to tread lightly.
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I know My mother and father are buried at Arlington.
..... But what does Donald Trump understand about America's most famous and most hallowed graveyard? amerce should wonder.
..... Section 11 - the site of my parents' graves - sits on a leafy hill, about a half-mile from Section 60, where many service members who died in Iraq or Afghanistan have been laid to rest. Trump visited Section 60, reportedly at the invitation of relatives of U.S. Marine laid to laid there after they were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan during the Pentagon's mistake-filled pullout form that war zone in 2021.
..... Cemetery officials rebuked Trump for breaking the rules and turning his visit into a campaign photo-op, posing thumbs-up and smiling if he were at one of his rallies. Trump, of course, claims he did nothing wrong. But to understand the enormity of how Trump disgraced Arlington and those buried there, you need to go there.
..... What you see are not just the rows of identical tombstones that are, in themselves, so haunting. Each tombstone can tell a story. But Arlington is not some sort of hall of fame. Nor is it a make-believe theme park. It's the final resting place of thousands of people who sacrificed in some way for their country. In other words, they offered themselves for something other than their own self-interest. That's the essence of they story Trump seems to miss.
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Each grave tells us the rank and service of the person buried there. Some tombstones add that the deceased served during a war. Some make note of medals that were awarded.
..... My father's tombstone tells us that he served in three wars World War II, Korea and Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, rising from an 18-year-old private to retiring as a major in his 50s - and that his many medals included a Silver Star for gallantry and a Purple Heart for being wounded. In my mother's case, you can decipher that she enlisted as a 19-eyar-old in the then-brand-new women's component of the U.S. Marines. Her tombstone says she served during World War II and Korea as a U.S. Marine, retiring as a sergeant.
..... Such basic information is just a starting point, however. From such rudimentary tombstone facts, there is often a far deeper story of service and courage.
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My father's tombstone does not tell you that he was awarded a Silver Star for leading an attack on a Japaneses-held pillbox on a forgotten Pacific island on Christmas Day1943. He received a Purple Heart after shivving an explosion in an attack in Saigon in 1966.
..... My mother's tombstone does not say she was a member of the first class of women Marines to endure the Corps' famous (infamous?) boot camp. she later worked in what was then a new government building called the Pentagon. After World War II, she was one of 100 women Marines asked to stay on in the service as an experiment on how the Marines might incorporate women. She left, amid the Koren conflict, when she married my father and became pregnant with me. In her later years, she campaigned for the rights of women to remain in the service when they became pregnant. One of those women - a retired Marine lieutenant colonel - became one of her best friends in her elder years and was at Arlington when my mother was buried two years ago.
..... That is shut a hint of the kinds of stories you find at Arlington. here is another:
..... A few feet from my parents' graves is the resting place of a 20-somethiing U.S. Army air Corps lieutenant, killed in France in 1943. What that brief description tells you is that this young man was either a pilot or a crew member of a fighter or bomber flying over Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
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But then, when you notice the Star of David on the tombstone and the man's Jewish surname, you can't help but sense the deep courage that he surely possessed, in volunteering as a Jew to fly over a terrain where he would have likely been tortured and executed by the Nazis if he had been shot down and captured. In another sense, consider the stories associated with the memorial to the Kennedy family. There is the much-visited hillside protico that is home to the "eternal flame: that burns over the grave of President John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jacqueline, and their tow infants who died. Nearby, on lush grass, sit simply white crosses - one for Kennedy's assassinated brother, Robert, another for his brother Edward.
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A few steps beyond those graves, however, is another white cross that is easy to overlook. This one is for Kennedy's older brother, Joseph, a U.S. Navy pilot. But this cross tells you that the site is only a memorial. No remains are buried there. Joseph was shot down in 1943 while piloting a B-24 bomber on a secret mission over the English Channel. His body was never recovered.
..... T Hat kind of memorial is not unusual in Arlington. In fact, on just about any hillside - especially in spots unsuitable for graves - you can find memorials to soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from a battlefield.
..... Or you can find other graves that tell a different sort of tragedy. For instance, on a hill not far from the Tomb of the unknown Soldier is the grave of Charles Burlingame, a U.S. Navy pilot who flew missions in Vietnam and during the first Persian Gulf War and later became a commercial airline pilot. Burlingame was killed by al-Qaida terrorist on September 11, 2001, just before they took control of his jetliner. American Airlines Flight 77, and crashed it into the Pentagon. Just a short walk southward from Burlingame's gave is a bowl-like meadow that is home to the graves of dozens of women - most of them nurses - killed in war zones. To the north sits a memorial to Pan Am flight 103, the jetliner blown out of the sky over Lockerbei, Scotland, when a bomb planted by Libyan terrorists exploded just before Christmas 1988, keeling 270 people.
..... Elsewhere, you can find a mass gave for the 250 Coast Guard sailors, Army solders and medical personnel who were killed when a ship blew up in the Solomon Islands during World War II. The bodies were so mangled that they were place in just 52 coffins - a reminder of the brutality of war.
Does Donald Trump actually care about our military?
..... Did Trump know any of this history when he tamped through Arlington National Cemetery two weeks ago with his campaign film crew? dis his staff have any clue about the site's history as they pushed aside a cemetery worker who tried to tell them that campaign events were prohibited?
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Did Trump even think to apologize? To accept some measure of responsibility for what he did?
..... I have wondered for nearly a decade why Trump's followers, while sometimes criticizing his habit of criticizing anyone he reprieves as a rival, nonetheless give him a pass when he insults the military. Here, Trump's record is shameful. In 2015, he attacked senator John McCain, who survived five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, as "not a war hero,: Said Trump: "I like people who weren't captured."
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Months later, he criticized the parents of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq, who happened to be Muslin, because they spoke at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Hilary Clinton. As president , he told his chief of staff that he did not want wounded veterans at a ceremony because it doesn't "look good for me." Later , he told the widow of a U.S. soldier, killed on a mission in Africa, that he "knew what he signed up for." And just before losing the presidency in 2020, he surmised that veterans and their families vising the White House might have infected him with COVID-19.
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Also as president, he reportedly canceled a visit to U.S. military cemetery in France because he did not want to mess up his hair and referred to the cemetery as "filled with losers."
..... Only weeks ago,, in one of Trump's more inexplicable and indecipherable statements, he described the civilian Medal of Freedom as "actually much better' than the military's medal of Honor. Said Trump: :Everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that's soldiers, they;re either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead."
..... What kind of person, who has spent even a few minutes around soldiers, as a president should, or who bothers to read even a paragraph or two of history, speaks like that? Such are just a few of the stories Trump - the man who traipsed through Arlington National Cemetery in recent weeks with a campaign film crew.
..... Yes, he offered the excuse that he had been invited by families of U.S. Marines and other killed by a suicide bomb in Afghanistan. And yes, he made a point of unfairly and gratuitously blaming President Joe Biden for the botched evacuation of the U.S. military from Afghanistan.
..... But Trump missed something very basic.
..... He missed the ground he steeped on.