On Memorial Day 2024, I spent some time thinking about young soldiers from my hometown and surrounding small towns in upstate New York who went to Vietnam, particularly the ones who never came home.
One such soldier was the only son of one of my favorite high school teachers. He died in 1969.
Years later, in 1993, my teacher was asked if she believed it was true that “time heals all wounds” — she said, “I’m still waiting.”
Vietnam was my generation’s war — had I been male instead of female I would have gone, just as my father and all my uncles responded to the call after Pearl Harbor. These thoughts about war and its costs led me to wonder whether Donald Trump might have become a different kind of man if he had gone to war instead of using bone spurs as an excuse not to serve. His grandfather before him left Germany to avoid fulfilling his military service obligation,
so perhaps it was an inherited trait.
What I cannot understand is why anyone would support a politician who calls dead soldiers “losers,” who disrespects Gold Star families, and who thinks the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, at his urging, are “patriots.” Obviously, we have very different ideas about what constitutes patriotism.
Flying a flag and raising a Bible over your head are meaningless gestures when there is no genuine feeling behind them.
Please consider carefully the character of the next occupant of the Oval Office before you vote in November.
— Connie Root Nuss
Wasilla
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