Hail to the Chief

by W.D. Ehrhart

During a recent campaign event in New Jersey, Donald Trump proclaimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is the “equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor. They’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. [Miriam Adelson, a major Republican donor to whom Trump gave the Medal of Freedom in 2018] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. They’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and she got it through committees and everything else.”

Really? Everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor? Let’s see. Roughly 2,700,000 Americans served in Vietnam during the American War there, while just 268 Medals of Honor were awarded for service in Vietnam. That would mean that roughly 2,699,732 did not receive the Medal of Honor. I didn’t get one. I know of only one Marine in my battalion who did get one, and that would have been over a period of the nearly six years 1st Battalion, 1st Marines was stationed in Vietnam, so we’re talking six or seven or eight thousand men.

In fact, it’s not even the Congressional Medal of Honor. The award is simply the Medal of Honor. Okay, a lot of people make that mistake, but most people know you don’t just get it for being “hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.” It is the nation’s highest decoration for valor, heroism, and courage on the battlefield.

Let’s see who some of the recipients of the Medal of Freedom are. Doris Day, actress. Julia Child, cook. Lou Holtz, football coach. Phil Donahue, television personality. Tom Brokaw, newscaster. Denzel Washington, actor. Bruce Springsteen, the Boss. Katie Ledecky, maybe the greatest swimmer of all time. Megan Rapinoe, one of my personal heroes. Bill Clinton, serial philanderer. Ted Kennedy, killer of Mary Jo Kopechne. Rush Limbaugh, criminal prescription drug abuser.

Some very colorful people. Some very talented people. Some people who have given great joy and pleasure to millions of other people. And some people who are maybe a bit less than entirely admirable. Even some people who have lived lives of steadfast courage and conviction like Marion Anderson, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez.

But risking life and limb to save one’s comrades under fire or hold off overwhelming enemy forces, acting selflessly and unhesitatingly while facing imminent death? Read the citation for the Medal of Honor awarded posthumously to Sgt. Alfredo Gonzalez for his actions during the battle for Hue City in 1968: https://www.cmohs.org/recipients/alfredo-freddy-gonzalez.

Of course, one needs to consider the source of this comparison between the Medal of Honor and the Medal of Freedom. This is a man who has said that he always wanted a Purple Heart, but when he had the chance to earn one, he instead avoided the Vietnam War by getting a podiatrist renting office space from his father to certify that he was medically unfit for service because he had bone spurs, a highly dubious claim to say the very least.

This is a man who has called dead American service personnel “suckers” and “losers,” and wondered aloud at Arlington Cemetery, “What was in it for them?” (Trump denies this, but Marine Corps General and Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly says it’s true, and I’m inclined to believe a Marine over a man who has lied so often, so flagrantly, and so demonstrably over the course of his entire political career.)

This is a man who mocked Navy torpedo bomber pilot George H. W. Bush for being shot down by the Japanese during World War II, said of Navy veteran Senator John McCain, “I like people who weren’t captured,” and belittled Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Gold Star parents whose U.S. Army captain son was killed in combat in Iraq.

But then, the man who claims that the Medal of Freedom is the equivalent of—and even superior to—the Medal of Honor has also claimed that he “served in the military” because he spent a few years at a private military academy during high school.

What truly amazes me—indeed, takes my breath away, leaves me shaking my head in utter wonder—is why anyone who ever served this nation honorably in any branch of the U.S. Military would ever—ever—vote to allow this man to be the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces.

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W. D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.

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