Stories, tenacity, and rage
Alternative realities angry veterans won't let go
See update for August 10, 2024 at end of post.
I don’t know. To me, Dan Hollaway’s grievance that Tim Walz “abandoned” his unit to run for Congress[1] seems like a stretch. This was George W. Bush’s “Global War On Terror,” with two utterly misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which the U.S. lost on neoconservative hubris.
When I was working on my Master’s degree, I conducted a few interviews of veterans. I don’t remember if it made it into the paper I wrote for a classroom assignment, but I came away from that experience with the realization that veterans’ war stories are their stories, not unlike how—now—my Ph.D. is my story. My story is what I’m proud of. Their stories are what they’re proud of. Our self-worth, and veterans’ claims to valor and heroism, are all bound up in these stories which are often, in many ways, the only stories we’ve got.
We see it with Vietnam veterans. Their war was lost on anti-communist hubris (neoconservatism hadn’t arisen yet) and just as misbegotten. Many complain that the U.S. could have won that war if it had only fought to win. They insist that this was a heroic war and that they were “betrayed.” And they mourn mythical comrades “left behind”—soldiers who never even existed[2]—with the black POW-MIA flags to be seen around nearly every local government building I’ve seen since arriving in Pittsburgh.
Which is something to think about when we speak today of alternative realities on the right—it’s really nothing new, and one reason I speak of conservatism as ideological.[3] But the stories have real consequences: The antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s were one factor producing the reaction we now know as neoconservatism,[4] the bipartisan “Washington Consensus” that keeps getting us into stupid wars.
The anger that propels these folks, Hollaway included, doesn’t seem to get them very far. But it’s tied up with their stories. And they aren’t letting go.
Update, August 10, 2024: The Washington Post includes an explanation of what the fuss is about: “The attacks have focused on the timing of [Tim] Walz’s retirement, his eventual rank, and subsequent statements that could be construed to suggest he served in Afghanistan or in combat. Walz deployed to Italy in support of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and retired after 24 years in the National Guard to run for Congress in 2005, at a time when his unit was widely expected to deploy to Iraq but before it received official orders. He reached the rank of command sergeant major but retired at one level down because he did not complete required coursework before his retirement.
“A Harris-Walz campaign spokesman acknowledged for the first time Friday that Walz “misspoke” in 2018 when he explained his support for gun regulations by saying, “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.” That phrase led [J. D.] Vance and other Republicans this week to accuse Walz of falsely suggesting that he fought in combat.”[5]
A man serves for 24 years and Republicans attack him for 1) not serving a year longer, and 2) for a bit of hyperbole.
[1] Dan Hollaway, “To Combat Veterans Like Me, Tim Walz's Abandonment of His Unit Is Unforgivable,” Newsweek, August 6, 2024, https://apple.news/AKpv9g5ODSiqWH-No2qpuXQ
[2] Rick Perlstein, Invisible Bridge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
[3] David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).
[4] George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006).
[5] Isaac Arnsdorf and Tyler Pager, “Democrats move to avoid ‘Swift boat’ redux in attacks on Walz service,” Washington Post, August 9, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/09/tim-walz-military-national-guard/