On the reprehensible desecration of Arlington National Cemetery

Today, we leave the hot jungles of  the Vietnam of my youth where, in the late 60s and early 70s hundreds of thousands of soldiers from opposing sides tried to kill each other and where more than 50,000 Americans died, making the ultimate sacrifice.

We arrive 50 some odd years later in the charming and hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington DC, where so many of the dead from Vietnam have found their final resting place, joining other fallen from our wars.

On 26 August, the cemetery and all its dead were pulled into the political knife fight that is the 2024 presidential election. Once again, as he always seems to do, morally corrupt and remorseless Donald Trump, empty of mercy, pity, empathy, conscience, and guilt, decided that what was in his interest was ever so much more important than any moral considerations for the dead and their loved ones.

As NPR originally reported, on that day Trump visited Arlington Cemetery at the invitation of some Gold Star families whose loved ones were killed at the Abbey Gate of Kabul International Airport while U.S. forces were evacuating Afghan allies three years ago. Thirteen service members were killed after an Islamic State fighter detonated a bomb that also killed more than 170 Afghan civilians.

Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown. Fine, so far. But that’s not all he and his campaign aides did.

Those service members he was invited to mourn are now buried in Section 60, which is the resting place for those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Armed Forces considers Section 60 sacred ground, as do the families of the dead who are entombed there.

I’ve been there, and, when I was, I had the feeling of being in church.

On that day, after laying the wreath, Trump and his campaign team cavalierly invaded Section 60, Arlington’s sanctum sanctorum, for a political photo op and video. Members of Trump’s entourage pushed aside an Army employee who was trying to enforce the rules — and federal law — which forbid photos, videos, and anything else that smacks of political campaigning within the gravesites.

Trump got his pictures.

After the incident became public, Trump’s Representative Steven Cheung, said, “This individual was the one who initiated physical contact and verbal harassment that was unwarranted and unnecessary,” As if that wasn’t enough, he added that the employee obviously “had a mental problem.”

The Army said the employee who’d been tossed aside declined to press charges, allegedly because of fear that Trump and his MAGA minions might retaliate against the employee or her family. For the record, the Army said she was only doing her job.

At a campaign rally the next day, Trump blamed the whole thing on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Then he said it didn’t happen. It was a “made up story.” Makes your head spin. But what else would one expect?

Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, wrote to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, asking for the incident report from Arlington, which the Army has not yet made public, as well as a briefing.

With Donald Trump, this stuff is routine transactional business. Incidents like this come fast, so fast they seem like a many-headed-hydra, mythology’s version of whack-a-mole. The result is the nation has become desensitized to their rapid fire and depraved nature. And our mainstream media — I’m talking to you, New York Times — treats them as if they’re nothing more than a little dirty politics, which happens in every campaign, doesn’t it?

An existential crisis for American democracy? Many scholars seem to think so, but you’d never know it from America’s “paper of record.”

Yesterday morning, writing in the Washington Post, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, giving Trump the Voldemort treatment, never saying his name, scathingly rebuked those who had used Arlington National Cemetery for “a political event.”

Admiral Mullen wrote:

But no part of Arlington — or any veterans’ cemetery for that matter — should ever play host to partisan activity. These cemeteries are sacred ground. They represent the final resting places of our best, our brightest, our most unselfish citizens.

Our fallen and departed veterans did not serve, fight or die for party. They fought and died for country, for each other, for their families and for us. They served in a military that defends all Americans — regardless of creed, color, race and, yes, voting habits.

Politics has no place in the ranks. And it absolutely has no place in our national cemeteries.

Spot on.