My dad and I don't agree on anything. I'm gay, he's straight; I'm a Democrat, he's a Republican. I served in the Navy, he served in the Air Force.
But I admire him. From a distance, of course, but still. He's decent. Kind, likeable, thoughtful. Worshiped my mom. He was a good provider.
Dad was also a cold warrior. He served on the front lines, in Northern Alaska, South Florida and West Germany, not to mention Korea and Japan. We lived on the sides of mountains, on tropical islands, in tiny towns you've never heard of – often “remote” (read: where other people would rather not live). His job was super secret: we were never quite sure what he did, but it involved disappearing for weeks or months at a time (once, for an entire year). My mom's constant crying and chain smoking during his absences was pretty much our idea of ordinary family life. Once, during an extended period of 'not normal' we got to see Santa Claus on the screen at Dad's work – a map of the Northern Hemisphere, a giant field of black and green that appeared to cover the entire inside of a bright white bubble on a naval air station near Key West.
Dad liked to scare us by dropping little hints about his line of work. One time he told me that, if WWIII happened, we'd never see it coming because the base we lived on would be the first hit. Another time, he told us that, if the Russians invaded West Germany, he'd be the first to die. Then he'd go back to spinning tall tales about the Rothschilds and the Trilateral Commission (it got better – in 1980 he voted for Anderson). We knew his work had something to do with radios and communications. I now know that he was among the first to work with technologies we now take for granted every day of our lives.
He helped people. When a river flooded near our home, his command helped out; he disappeared once for a couple of days, and when he came home, we found out he'd been involved in deescalating a hijacking situation that had been national news.
My Dad served his country until illness forced him to retire. I served until my sexual orientation became a secret I couldn't hide anymore. My mom served too: pulling up stakes and moving across continents, overseas, into sometimes primitive apartments and houses, can't have been easy. As the wife of a senior NCO, we were housed with the officers' families; the officers' wives reminded her of her own 'inferior' status every single day. New friends, new enemies every few years; my mom didn't settle into a house of her own until I was in high school. If the kids ever had friends or enemies, our only confidence was in the fact that we'd leave them behind sooner or later.
Donald Trump mocks my father's service, and my family's sacrifices, every time he opens his mouth to speak about our service members. One day he breezily accepts a Purple Heart from a wounded veteran, saying 'I always wanted to get the real Purple Heart. This was much easier' – as if his comment isn't astonishingly stupid and cruel, given the five deferments he used to get out of risking his own hide in Vietnam. The next moment he and his most ardent fans and followers attempt to slander and shame the family of a Bronze Star honoree who threw his own body in front of a bomb to protect his team. Early in his campaign, he drew glib, ghastly comparisons between the sacrifices, knowledge and training of our service members and military leadership and his experience in an elite military boarding school.
Donald Trump is a traitor to his country. He has openly questioned honoring our commitments to our allies – particularly NATO, an alliance that after two horrific world wars, has prevented and discouraged open warfare in Europe for decades. And his has openly encouraged our adversaries to meddle in our political campaigns. He betrays a perverse willingness to sacrifice our strategic objectives to adversaries like former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who takes comfort in knowing that Donald Trump is happily, publicly willing to concede Russia's control of the Crimean Peninsula, among other gestures that will make our allies in Europe less secure.
Donald Trump lies, constantly and stupidly, about his own admiration for our service members. From telling reporters that the Purple Heart he was given was 'real' – an easily verifiable whopper – to lying about his draft lottery number (a bizarre and, again, easily disprovable fabrication) Trump has such a thin familiarity with the truth that, like Mary McCarthy, one is left questioning even the 'and' and 'the.'
This morning, it emerged that Donald Trump has no understanding of the purpose or utility of the nuclear weapon deterrent that the USA has maintained for decades. In the 80s, my friends and I protested the deployment of US nuclear weapons in England and Germany, and marched for a nuclear free world, precisely out of fear that, in the hands of a nutjob like Donald Trump, nukes would cease to be a deterrent and would instead be used to settle scores and lash out at perceived enemies.
I understood, however, that the idea of deterrence is that the nukes are never used. Donald Trump doesn’t understand the simplest and most fundamental concepts behind the deployment and maintenance of our nuclear arsenal. His willingness to deploy nukes in current situations, on a first-strike basis, betrays a contempt for human life that is far beneath our own norms. His simple willingness to talk about using nukes so casually makes our world more dangerous. I always thought it would be some developing world dictator kook like Gaddhafi who would get us into nuclear trouble. I never imagined it would be a home-grown kook.
My dad kept our country safe. My family made the kinds of sacrifices that Donald, Melania and their brood would never tolerate in their own lives, in service to our country. Dad deployed with our NATO allies in Europe to monitor and understand the communications and activities of our adversaries so that we'd have advance warning if the unthinkable happened. Donald Trump is a traitor who makes the unthinkable, probable.