TRUMP: Gutless Coward, Shameless Liar, POS, and ENEMY OF VETERANS.

 

From openDemocracy

"Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam."—Donald Trump

May I tell you a personal story? 

Please bear with me. It’s kind of long.

In high school I had a wonderful buddy named Ed. (I’m still friends with him.) Our group of friends had a lot of laughs with each other (along with the typical ridiculous arguments about sports, music, and other stuff that teenage boys care so much about). Ed’s older brother (who shall remain nameless here) had been drafted into the Army in late ‘68 (I think) and had been sent to Vietnam. We learned later that he had become a member of an elite unit (which will also remain unnamed). We had no cause to think that anything was amiss until the older brother was released from the service in early 1970. (My buddy has filled me in on all this.) When his parents came to greet him at the airport, the older brother rushed to his father’s arms and said, weeping,  “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” We learned later that the brother had been accused by the Army of having committed a gruesome murder, an act which he denied having done.

But there is so much more. 

The older brother was utterly shattered mentally. His behavior was wildly out of control.

But I befriended him. I felt compelled to do so. I seem to be drawn to broken spirits, I don’t know why. He was really witty, he laughed readily (if maniacally at times) and he seemed to respond to me. We hit it off really well for some reason, we really did.

He rode a motorcycle at top speed from northern Illinois to Mexico, tripping on acid the whole time, blowing through traffic signals and ignoring speed limits. (He told me this personally.) He would say anything to anyone, even if it started a fight. He had violent mood swings. It got so bad his father was forced to commit him to a VA mental institution. His Dad broke down into helpless tears after he did so. (I can barely keep my composure as I write this sentence, ok?) The older brother was PHYSICALLY ABUSED in the VA hospital. After he got out, he vowed that if he ever ran into any of the attendants who abused him, he would kill them, and I believe it. He wasn’t bullshitting. He would have ended their lives without hesitation.

After knowing each other for a while, the older brother and I began to talk about what he had experienced in Vietnam. Sometimes it would be in conversations late at night, and sometimes we would talk while drinking and driving through rural Wisconsin. (I drove, and he drank.) The more rapidly the beer bottles flew out of the passenger side window, the more...interesting the older brother’s stories got. Here are a few:

The first Viet Cong he killed had jumped out and surprised him. He fired his weapon, on full automatic, reflexively. The VC was cut in half from his crotch to the top of his skull. One half of the VC’s body fell forward, the other half fell backward. Quite an introduction to combat.

In a vicious fire fight, the head of one of the older brother’s buddies literally exploded all over the brother. He wept instantly. Then, seeing the man who had killed his friend, and having an M-60 machine gun as his weapon, “I put a hundred rounds into his fucking face.”

He saw the bodies of GIs that had been so savagely tortured by their VC captors that it filled him with homicidal rage.

He once had to slaughter dozens of VC with his M-60 during a wave attack on his camp.

He saw every form of horrible death. He saw a close friend killed by a Soviet-made RPG (rocket propelled grenade). The friend was completely torn to bloody shreds. (The brother dreamt of this incident, always in black and white, for many years afterward. He simply called it the RPG dream.)

The GIs, living in a waking nightmare in which they saw potential enemies everywhere, often treated the civilians brutally. (I once mentioned My Lai to the brother. He said, casually, “Oh that happened a lot.”) Drugs among the GIs were rampant, and many went into battle high as hell. The brother saw every form of obscene suffering and terrible violence a human can see. Broken by the horrors he had experienced, addicted to drugs, and then having been accused of dismembering a fellow soldier (which had actually been done by GIs who were insane on speed), he fell apart and was discharged.

It was quite an education for a young, green, wet-behind-the-ears kid like me.

There was more than one stretch in VA psych wards. There were the anti-psychotic drugs that he was forced to take every day of his life (and still does, as far as I know). There were the incidents of insane behavior. (He once gathered up the TV remotes in his home, jumped in his car, and forced the Wisconsin state police to chase him across the entire state. I know this because he called me from jail.) He was rescued by a great woman, not the kind of sexy beauty the brother had so often banged and forgotten, but an angel in human form, a woman who understood him, who loved him without reservation, and who understood that you condemn the war, not the warrior. The brother’s brave family stood by him like a rock, the strongest people I’ve ever known. And there were thin little reeds like me, doing what I could by just being his friend and listening to him. 

He never, ever, got well. I lost touch with him some years ago, but he’s still around.

Still around, with the memories he will never shake. 

So you can imagine how I react to this. This is from an interview with Howard Stern:

STERN: Now getting back to dating, and when you got to say to a woman, you gotta go to my personal doctor and I’m gonna have you checked out, is that a tough thing to say to a woman?

TRUMP: It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world.  It is a dangerous world out there.  It’s like Vietnam, sort of.

STERN: Hey it’s your personal Vietnam isn’t it?

TRUMP: It is my personal Vietnam.  I feel like a great and very brave soldier! [My emphasis]

STERN: A lot of guys who went through Vietnam came out unscathed.  A lot of guys going through the 80’s having sex with different women came out with AIDS and all kinds of things.

TRUMP: This is better than Vietnam, but it’s uh… it’s more fun.

STERN: A little better, but every v****a is a landmine, haven’t we both said that in private?

TRUMP: [intense laughter] I think it is a potential landmine.  There’s some real danger there.

STERN: When you go to a bar, do you ever go with a fleet of doctors and have them check all the women, and then party with the uninfected?

TRUMP: [laughter] The few!  You mean the few uninfected!

Every time I see this, the hatred, the rage, and the contempt just boil up inside me.

NOT GETTING AN STD IS LIKE SERVING IN FUCKING VIETNAM?!? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?

 This is real fuckin’ personal to me folks. Real fuckin’ personal.