When I was a kid, I had a friend, Lenny, who was younger than me. He was my neighbor. He was the youngest and had three sisters. His mother would ask me to take him to the barber to get his hair cut. When the barber asked him how he wanted his (very straight) hair cut, he would point at me and answer, “I want it cut in curls like his”. In effect, I was his “big brother”.
In 1967, my brother and I were both in Vietnam. He was in the Marine Corps and I was in the Army (Infantry). At the time, I didn’t know it, but Lenny was in Vietnam, too. He was killed about fifty miles away from me.
When I returned home, Lenny’s mother showed me a letter he had written. It told of a night when their outpost was under a massive attack. The fire was coming in so thick that they couldn’t get their heads up to defend themselves. There were explosions from RPGs, and claymores. The area was lit by the strange red light of tracers and the flares drifting overhead. For some reason someone in the center of the compound turned on lights that illuminated the American flag. Lenny looked out the rear of his bunker and saw the flag all lit up. He told his mother that the words of the National Anthem came back to him, “… the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…”. He said he had never fully understood the words until that night.
Then, something strange happened, the attacking Viet Cong stopped shooting at the Marines and raised their fire on the flag. That gave them the chance to come up, lay down some fire, and break the attack. No Marine died there that night because their flag took the fire.
Later that year, Lenny was killed. The Marine Corps asked my brother to escort him home and to stay with Lenny’s family until a few days after his funeral.
Lenny was my friend, my little brother… to Donald Trump he is just another loser. All you Republicans who falsely wrap yourselves in that flag like the one that covered Lenny… all you pretend soldiers who strut around with assault rifles to make up for your smallness… all you petty politicians who grunt around like hogs at the trough of government grift… all you who claim to be patriots while plotting murder… ALL OF YOU! All of you are not worthy of the kid who wanted his hair cut in curls like mine.
His name was Leonard Ray Saint Clair. If you’re at the Wall sometime, look him up.