Maybe it’s a small thing, but it’s been nagging at me.
I listened to part of Trump’s Veterans’ Day speech. He mentioned, in order, the “Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps.”
Civilians don’t understand this, but the military is, well, obsessed with rank. Each officer has a date of rank when he/she was promoted to their current grade (rank). You put three captains on a desert island and within about five pico-seconds, they will have hammered out who is senior, mid, and junior, by their dates of rank. It’s a thing, but it’s necessary. Someone has to be in charge.
The same applies to the Services, but mostly in a ceremonial way. The dates of each service’s formation are:
Army: 14 June 1775
Navy: 13 October 1775
Marine Corps: 10 November 1775
Coast Guard: 4 August 1790 (The USCG, I believe, now falls under Homeland Security and not DoD. Before 9/11, it was kind of co-owned by Dept of Transportation and DoD. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.)
Air Force: 18 September 1947
Now that might not mean a lot to most of you, but to the military, it does. Especially to the Marine Corps, it means a whole hell of a lot. The Marine Corps has always been the red-headed stepchild when budgets are apportioned, and they’re pretty sensitive about their place in the scheme of things. As an example, on the Army’s anniversary every year, maybe someone notices and puts an announcement on the bulletin board. The Marines treat their “birthday” as a damned international holiday. A galactic holiday. Every Marine has two birthdays: when the Marine Corps was born, and when the Marine was born.
So Trump, ignorantly, dissed the Navy and the Marine Corps by not recognizing their seniority. That doesn’t surprise me. Trump’s a draft dodger. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.
But what it tells me is that no one on his staff that wrote and vetted that speech has a clue, either. It tells me that the speech was not staffed through DoD, because I guarantee you they would have fixed it. Whoever wrote the speech, vetted the speech, and read the speech off the teleprompter didn’t care enough to even figure out the seniority of the services. It was just words without meaning.
Navy members who heard it might have just shrugged. Marines who heard it are, and should be, pissed off.
(As an aside and a measure of my respect for Marines, I remember many years when any Marine who heard the name Oliver North, spit. Oliver North violated his oath as an officer, lied under oath, and worse. Marines hated Oliver North because he embarrassed the Corps. That was before the Republicans made him a super-patriot. Of course, his true colors shown again when he ripped off the NRA. A crook’s a crook.)