The Vietnam Wall casts a long shadow.
In a secret place, most men of that generation harbor this doubt: When it really mattered, did I measure up? Did I do the honorable thing?
Donald Trump didn’t. And now — it seems — his conscience bothers him.
Seems, because nothing this preposterously unlikely presidential front-runner says can ever be taken at face value. Seems, because the man has no shame. Or is foolish beyond belief. Or both — your pick.
Trump was of prime military age when Americans were dying in Vietnam combat at the rate of 350 a week, but he never enlisted. No dishonor there; most young men didn’t. Nor was he drafted; “Bone spurs,” he told the author of a forthcoming biography, led to a series of deferments — followed by a high draft-lottery number.
This is more problematic.
Legitimate physical issues generally resulted in outright disqualification from service; serial deferments, more often than not, were exemptions granted the sons of the wealthy and well-placed — of which Donald Trump certainly was one.
So which was it? In his secret place, Trump should know.
But wait: There’s some confusion.
“I always felt that I was in the military,” he told Michael D’Antonio, author of “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” due out later this month.
How so? Well, because in the early ’60s he attended New York Military Academy — a school that was different things to different people back in the day, but which generally was meant to straighten out troubled rich kids by draping them in military trappings.
And so while “I never had to [actually serve], I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people” — presumably “those people” being his fellow cadets and instructors.
Some of those cadets just hated algebra. Some were aspiring juvenile delinquents. Trump says he was there to deal with “behavioral” issues — so it’s not hard to imagine which end of the spectrum he was on.
Students acquired a military veneer — uniforms, marching and mild discipline — but no one would ever confuse the school with Parris Island.
Except maybe Donald Trump. If, again, he is to be taken at face value.
He is, after all, the fellow who all but accused John McCain of committing treason during the senator’s Vietnam captivity — which suggests that, at best, Trump is a stranger to honorable service.
He’s not alone in this, of course.
But while, say, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg played deferment poker and won, they achieved political success without shedding crocodile tears.
That is, without the self-delusion. And without surrendering to the impulse to camouflage themselves in unearned honor.
That Trump on Tuesday urged CNN to donate ad revenues from its upcoming Republican presidential debate to veterans’ charities suggests that he may realize he’s stuck his foot in it again. Coming on top of the McCain slander, this could hurt.
Or not. Nothing else in his risible campaign seems to have damaged him.
For Trump clearly has struck a chord with voters. So, too, has Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
That neither man has a coherent worldview, nor any obvious appreciation of how demanding the first post-Obama presidency is going to be, seems not to matter to their respective base voters.
This doesn’t appear to trouble Sanders, either — though, in the end, he won’t much matter himself. But Trump leads his field, so he needs to be held to a higher standard.
Never mind that the Mideast is in flames, and about to descend into a nuclear-arms race; that the economically fragile European Union is being swamped by refugees, with unknowable consequences; that China’s audacious base-building in the South China Sea is rapidly destabilizing that part of the world.
That is, never mind that the next president will have to bring more than a little national-security credibility to the table.
It’s enough that Donald Trump went to military school during the Vietnam War, and now he thinks he’s GI Joe.
The Wall stands in silent disapproval.
Bob McManus is a Vietnam-era veteran of the US Navy’s submarine service.
