I am a U.S. Navy veteran who served as a hospital corpsman during the Vietnam War. At that time, enlisted women were not allowed to serve overseas, so I served in one of the many evacuation centers for war casualties stateside. Helping those young men deal with their injuries — physical and mental — taught me to appreciate the horrors of war. Working the night shift, I spent many hours listening to an endless stream of patients who would come and sit with me and share their nightmares that would not allow them to close their eyes and sleep. I sat and held the hands (or stumps) of kids so maimed by war that they could not leave their beds. I hand-fed soldiers who no longer had hands with which to eat, all the while keeping a brave face, yet inwardly mourning the fate of these guys. We were all so young.
Opinion
There is still no answer to why we were involved in that war, and yet here we are again, entering another war. What is the Iran war about, and when will we know it’s done? The administration has provided no rationale for this war. They have offered at least 10 different reasons in the past week and have not presented any clear goal — rather they have cited multiple goals and seem to choose from among them almost randomly.
On March 1, an Iranian drone hit an operations center in Kuwait, and six American service members lost their lives. Not only was this event a tragedy — it requires an explanation. The drone apparently snuck through American defenses without setting off any alerts and struck a target that seems to be unduly vulnerable to such an attack.
In the wake of this attack, I watched the press conference with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. I was curious to hear his message of condolence to the families of the deceased and to evaluate how his method of expressing grief and remorse at the loss of these American lives measured up against that of previous secretaries when they delivered such news.
I was mortified by the way Hegseth handled this press conference. The defense secretary — the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them — instead whined about the unfairness of it all. As he put it: “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news.” He complained that the press was covering the deaths because the press “only wants to make the president look bad.” Hegseth said this as though it is unreasonable to look any closer at such tragic events. He seems unable to grasp that the deaths of Americans are not merely a public relations problem. When six members of American armed forces are killed by a drone that slipped through U.S. defenses, the deaths of those service people are the story.
Americans should be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth. No one is asking for classified details to be released, but the people of the United States deserve more of an explanation of what’s happening in this war. And they certainly deserve more of an eulogy for their fallen children than “tragic things happen.”