by W.D. Ehrhart
“What’s in a name?” Juliet asks in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” But what the heck did Shakespeare know? “U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Participating In Combat,” read a recent headline. According to this story, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says that gender characteristics, courage, tenacity, dependability, reliability under fire, the warrior spirit, what have you, are all determined by one’s name. And thus, only soldiers with masculine names are fit to serve in combat.
Our Fox TV “presenter” and “personality” never completed Ranger School, Airborne School, or Air Assault School; served only briefly as an infantry platoon commander before being made a battalion S-9 Civil Affairs officer; was never a front-line leader of combat troops under heavy fire; nor ever commanded soldiers in protracted combat or led exhausted soldiers through night patrols and firefights.
That this man should have the gall to tout some sort of warrior ethos or claim that he understands human behavior under sustained combat conditions is not just ludicrous, but fraudulent. He’s about as macho as Macho Duck.*
But in what has become the Trumpian Bizarro World we are now living in—where the Homeland Security Director thinks habeas corpus gives a president the right to deport whoever it strikes his fancy to deport, where the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services denies the value of vaccinations that have kept Americans healthy for decades, where the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation considers January 6th insurrectionists “political prisoners”—the incompetence and unsuitability of Pete Hegseth are simply par for the course.
As reported recently by the Georgetown Security Studies Review, “the inability of the military to meet its recruitment goals is well-documented by the Department of Defense (DoD).” Yet Hegseth has actively created a hostile environment for women in his military, is requiring transgender soldiers to be kicked out of the services, and now will not let anyone with a “sissy” name serve in combat.
Let’s see now. So that would mean Audie Murphy—who was the most decorated U.S. soldier of the 2nd World War, having been awarded the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts, the French Legion of Honor, the French Croix de Guerre, and the Belgian Croix de Guerre—would no longer be allowed to serve in combat in “this man’s army.”
That would mean that Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier—the All-Pro National Football League defensive tackle for the New York Giants and the Los Angeles Rams—would have to make sure no one knew about his nickname if he were to be drafted into “this man’s army,” as he was in 1957, willingly interrupting his football career to serve a country that still discriminated against him.
John “Duke” Wayne, of course, would be able to serve in today’s manly army, though he didn’t serve in anybody’s army back when he could have. Oh, wait, his real name was Marion Morrison. Marion? Oh, the shame of it. So much for Sgt. Stryker and “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”
From my own war in Vietnam, Medal of Honor winners Nicky Bacon, Loren Hagen, Terry Kawamura, and Riley Pitts would never have had the opportunity to die for their country in Hegseth’s modern military.
Go a bit back farther into American history. How will we ever explain to our children the Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, who became an icon for my generation, thanks to Walt Disney and the 1950s TV show “The Swamp Fox”? And what about New Jersey poet Joyce Kilmer of “Trees” fame, who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 and was killed in combat a year later, leaving behind a wife and five children? They’ll have to take his name off the Joyce Kilmer Service Plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike.
We’re just going to have to rewrite our history. Oh, wait, the Trumpasaurians are already doing that. Goodbye Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, any and every famous American of color, male or female. American history is once again officially white and male, slavery was a blessing for benighted Africans, and the only good Indians really were the dead ones. So what’s the big deal about getting rid of a few American icons with pansy names. Who’s gonna miss ‘em?
Meanwhile, our modern military will soon be bristling with real men like convicted war criminals Clint Lorance, Mathew Golsteyn, Edward Gallagher, and Michael Behenna, all of whom were pardoned by our current commander-in-chief. Clint. Mathew. Edward. Michael. Manly men. Men with the right kind of names. The kind of men Secretary Hegseth wants in this man’s army.
Hey, just a minute here. Secretary Hegseth? Secretary? Isn’t that usually a woman’s job?
Astute readers of this paper may have already guessed that this story about a “Girly Names Ban” is just a spoof, fiction, all made up. It was published in the hilariously satirical The Onion, whose masthead reads: “America’s Finest News Source.”
But given what Hegseth has said and done to curtail the role of women in combat, his order to purge from the military ranks transgender soldiers as unfit for service, his sacking of senior female flag officers for no reason other than their gender, his obvious agreement with his boss’s pardons of convicted war criminals, and the truly unbelievable decisions and actions that have become daily occurrences across the government under this administration, what The Onion wrote was all-too-plausible.
In fact, only days ago, Hegseth ordered the U.S. Navy to change the name of the USNS Harvey Milk, a replenishment oiler ship named for gay activist and LGBTQ+ icon Harvey Milk. So The Onion spoof may turn out in the weeks and months ahead to be nonfiction after all.
* According to Disney Wiki, “Macho Duck is the fifth track on the 1979 album Mickey Mouse Disco. It is a parody of the Village People’s song ‘Macho Man’, rewritten to be about Donald Duck.”
–=≈=–
W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.