There are no gold-plated ballrooms where admiring throngs can gather to pat the Commander in Chief on the back while thousands of Americans are stuck on Navy ships, at Air Force bases, and in Army compounds where weekend is mostly just a word and the world is dangerous.
Some of those young people have died and might die and others have been wounded and more will be wounded while their commander in chief plays golf and suggests that nine months of isolation on a boat isn’t long enough.
He putters while miliary families pray; they are Charlie Browns and he is a petty, vindictive, uncaring Lucy with a football.
There is something he can’t feel, has never written, and shows no capacity for: empathy.
I am not, a veteran and I have no family members who are in the active military so my feelings of outrage at the cavalier attitude the President and his Secretary of Defense toady have shown toward our service people in this needless war on Iran must be small compared to the feeling of friends and families of those who prosecute Trump’s game of playing soldiers with the real thing.
Several years ago I was privileged to be a guest for 24 hours on the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and of spending a day on the USS Jefferson City submarine, so I have had a taste of the small and a taste of the huge in our arsenal. A miniscule taste which is far more than their biggest commander has had.
A man whose greatest personal link to the military is his obligatory presence when the coffins come home is incapable of respecting those unfortunate enough to be carrying out his irrational orders.
My experiences left me incredibly impressed with the deep commitment and the high-level of professionalism of the young people who crew these vessels. When we visited the bridge of the Roosevelt about 120 miles out in the Atlantic, we saw a 24-year-old woman driving the ship. Down on the deck, a large number of her generation was efficiently and safely launching and landing F-16 fighter/bombers.
On the submarine we watched young sailors running a boat that was more than 400 feet underwater. We peered through a periscope and lined up possible shot, knowing that someone in their 20s might someday be responsible for programming the torpedoes and determining if the target is an enemy or a friend before a commander far younger than we were makes the firing decision, .
These are people who not only are on duty for weeks at a time; some are underwater for weeks while their commander in chief plays golf, spends his overnights writing insults, and who cannot wait for each weekend so he can get aboard a luxurious jet to take him away from whatever cares he has, has no appreciation for the people who live on highest alert 24 hours a day while he thinks up new ways to honor himself and denigrate others.. Stories that an aircraft carrier is short of everything from food to feminine hygiene products cause him no sleep loss.
And now might be the greatest insult to those on the front lines:
The Navy, cleansed by the administration of Navy loyalists and largely run by Trump amateur appointee-loyalists, reportedly wants to name a new aircraft carrier for Donald Trump. Of course, he who recently posted an AI generated image of himself as a highly decorated Army General despite his personal record of avoiding the draft, and who suggested the Abraham Lincoln had not been on alert in a war zone long enough, has no objections at all to removing the name of a Pearl Harbor hero and replacing it with his own—despite the custom of naming the current class of carriers after dead Presidents.
The racial overtone of this case cannot be overlooked, given President Trump’s track record. The planned name had honored Cook Petty Officer First Class Doris “Dorie” Miller. It was going to be the first carrier named after a black person—who also was the first African-American to be awarded the Navy Cross and to be nominated for a Medal of Honor.
WKTR-TV in Newport News, Virginia talked to Miller’s great-nephew, Thomas Bledsoe, who said he was shocked by the reports. He told the station, “One of the things about Doris Miller’s story is not only about him being the hero that he was on that day at Pearl Harbor but it was also about an individual stepping beyond the means of what they were assigned to do and going above and beyond. That ‘why not me’ moment was very significant, not only for the African American community but for Americans overall.”
The Navy says the suggested change has not been made official.
Miller helped wounded crew members to safety during the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and even operated a machine gun—although he had no training—and shot down two of the attacking airplanes. In 1943, Miller was assigned to the escort carrier Liscombe Bay that was torpedoed in November and sank within 23 minutes, taking Miller with it.
Some have suggested his name would be better applied to a destroyer or to a cruiser. A frigate was christened with his name in 1973.
The keel of the new carrier is to be laide later this year. At the 2023 ceremony announcing the naming of the carrier, President Trump lamented that he hasn’t had a ship named for him.
As for the Abraham Lincoln, 
It finally is headed to port. Ship spotters on Saturday saw it passing through the Singapore Strait apparently headed to a port in Thailand where at last the crew can step onto dry land and have some time to unwind—-
—while their well-fed commander in chief lines up his next putt on the soft green grass of a Florida golf course, having taken time away from his stressful thinking about invading Greenland, Cuba and maybe the Falkland Islands, making Canada the 51st state among other adventures both foreign and domestic, and what the next memorial to himself should be.
(Photo Credit: Miller—WTKR; Lincoln—U. S. Navy)