Tim Walz has exactly the kind of dopey, smug left-wing politics you’d expect from a Minnesota public school teacher. Republicans’ trying to knock his military service instead may be the dumbest thing I have heard in a long, dumb political season.
Walz and his Republican opposite number, J.D. Vance, have something in common: Both men are veterans who never did any fighting per se. Vance is a Marine who served in a public-affairs role in Iraq, while Walz served for a quarter-century in the National Guard, including deployments to Italy, a mission that was—somehow, in our stupid times, this phrase has become controversial—“in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.” Neither man was spending a lot of time rappelling out of helicopters in combat zones or kicking down doors in Fallujah. Which is to say: Both men had military careers that were a lot like most military careers.
People who want to sneer at that kind of service should do themselves—and the rest of us!—a favor and read a book. Maybe even two. Because you do not have to be a veteran, only a literate person, to know what military commanders from Julius Caesar to Napoleon to Dwight Eisenhower understood: Soldiers may perform deeds of great heroism and courage in battle, but wars are won by the support staff, by the logistics teams, by the boring pencil pushers, truck drivers, and back-end workers who make sure that the troops and the bullets and the food and the bandages are where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. Eisenhower never fired a shot at an enemy in the course of his long military career, where his most important talents were administrative and organizational. He did not kill one enemy in combat, but he did organize D-Day—160,000 troops, 7,000 ships and boats, 12,000 aircraft, etc.—and that must count for something.
Walz’s unit mostly served as guards at military bases—not exactly what Chris Kyle spent his days doing, but there’s a reason they give those guys rifles. Vance’s role as a self-described “public-affairs Marine” (he was a combat correspondent) was part of a larger effort to try to ensure that that combat he was writing about produced the desired effect. Armies and navies are big, unwieldy things with many different roles, none of them unimportant. One of the most admirable military careers with which I am familiar has been mostly communications-oriented.
These are important jobs. But, at the same time, Walz was a middle-aged high-school educator when he retired from the National Guard to run for Congress. And please be assured that I write the following words with the appropriate degree of self-awareness: He wasn’t exactly a lean, mean, fighting machine in middle age, and he didn’t need to be: It’s not like he was about to be sent out into the field to chase the bad guys around in Iraq or Afghanistan.
There is real sacrifice involved in the kind of service in which Walz was engaged. (I love Italy, but Walz wasn’t exactly stationed at Villa d’Este.) But it is of a different kind from charging up Bunker Hill: inconvenience, separation from family and community, the dreariness of rote military work, interruption of career and personal plans, etc. Walz gave 24 years of his life to that kind of unglamorous service. Nobody is ever going to make a movie about his exciting military career. I am sure that much of it was dead boring. That doesn’t make it any less essential. He did his bit and then some before he left to run for the House.
The worst I have seen of Walz’s supposed exaggeration of his military career is his saying that the AR-style rifle is something he “carried in war” in the course of making some predictably dumb and banal remarks about gun control. That is a pretty thin reed to hang him on. For one thing, there is the fact that his statement was true: He was at war, in a needful role. The truth of that is not changed by the fact that his role was a modest and obscure one—and, to his credit, he has never pretended that it was anything else. You can’t tell soldiers “Thank you for your service” on Mondays and then sneer at the actual service that most soldiers do on Tuesdays—that isn’t how gratitude works. It isn’t how armies work, either.
By all means, savage Tim Walz for his dumb politics. And he deserves to be criticized in the serious matter—the seriously character-illuminating matter—of his willful, shameful personal dishonesty toward J.D. Vance, to whom he owes an apology. Vance, for his part, is going to have a hard time convincing anybody that Walz’s military career was anything less than honorable from his current undignified position on his knees in front of Subcommandante Bonespurs, a draft-dodging coward who has spent years mocking the service and courage of better men. That Vance’s position also makes it difficult for him to complain about dishonesty in the service of derision doesn’t make Walz’s dishonesty any less dishonest. It just means that American politics offers voters an opportunity to choose from a colorful and diverse bouquet of a–holes.
So, Tim Walz: Thank you for your service. And thanks but no thanks on the dumb politics.
Is that so hard?
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