Bone Spurs Bonaparte

I don’t care, do you?

Bone Spurs Bonaparte

I don’t care, do you?

As I’ve been reflecting on the debacle aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the exhaustion, the deteriorating conditions, the families pleading for someone in authority to acknowledge what is happening to their loved ones, I’ve found myself thinking about my father. My dad served in the United States Navy during the 1950s, aboard two ships: the USS Oriskany and the USS Haven, a hospital ship. Between deployments during the Korean War, he met my mother, Suzette, at the USO in San Pedro, California, where she played piano for servicemen on leave. Music, as it so often does, created the opening. What followed was a wartime courtship that somehow succeeded despite the uncertainty, the deployments and the enormous distances involved. They married in 1957, and the following year Michael Joseph Jochum the fourth, that would be me, arrived to complicate their lives immeasurably.

I have tried to imagine what my mother would have endured if my father had disappeared over the horizon for eight and a half months with little or no meaningful contact. No FaceTime. No reassuring text message before bed. No photograph arriving instantly from the other side of the world. Just silence, interrupted occasionally by a letter written weeks earlier by a man whose circumstances might have changed completely by the time she held it in her hands. She would have gone to sleep not knowing whether he was safe, injured, frightened, unbearably lonely or dead. That was part of the price military families paid in my parents’ generation. It was understood as sacrifice, but it was never supposed to be treated as inconsequential. The uniform did not make the person inside it less human, and the oath did not absolve civilian leaders of their responsibility to bring that person home.

That is what makes the current treatment of the sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln so revolting. The ship has been deployed for more than 260 days in support of a war with Iran that never should have happened, spending a record-setting stretch at sea while the people aboard it endure exhaustion, severe mental strain and deteriorating living conditions. Families have described food and hygiene shortages, broken toilets, moldy showers, contaminated water and mail failures that prevent care packages from reaching the ship. More than 200 family members reportedly confronted Navy leadership at a tense meeting in San Diego. There have been reports of sailors attempting to go overboard; one such incident in early August was confirmed by a U.S. official and remains under investigation. These are not the complaints of pampered vacationers whose cruise buffet ran out of shrimp. These are warning flares being fired by human beings pushed dangerously close to the breaking point. Reuters⁠ and the Associated Press⁠ have documented the deployment and the growing concern, while ABC News⁠ confirmed the overboard incident.

And how did the commander in chief respond when a reporter told him military families were concerned? “No, they’re not.” There it is: the entire Trump presidency reduced to three contemptuous words. Reality presents itself, and Donald Trump simply waves it away. Families say they are frightened; Trump announces that they aren’t. Sailors are exhausted; apparently, they aren’t either. Toilets are broken, showers are moldy and people are reportedly reaching a level of despair where the open sea begins to look like an escape, but pay no attention to any of that unpleasantness because the emperor has issued a correction to reality. When asked whether eight and a half months was too long, he said, “Not nearly long enough.” What a magnificently courageous declaration from a man making it within walking distance of his private aircraft, surrounded by security, with a clean bathroom, fresh food and a comfortable bed waiting at the other end. Bone Spurs Bonaparte is always remarkably generous with other people’s blood, other people’s sanity and other people’s children.

Pete Hegseth, naturally, strutted onto the stage to declare that reports about conditions aboard the ship had been “completely misrepresented.” Hegseth postures and preens as though callousness were a qualification for leadership, falling back on the usual chest-thumping implication that this is what service members signed up for. No, it fucking isn’t. They signed up to defend the Constitution and serve their country. They did not sign up to become disposable props in an illegal, immoral and strategically incoherent war manufactured by politicians who will never personally endure its consequences. They did not volunteer to live indefinitely with failing sanitation, diminishing supplies and crushing psychological strain so a president could pretend that prolonging suffering is proof of strength. They certainly did not sign away the right of their husbands, wives, parents and children to worry about them. The administration now says the USS George Washington is moving in to relieve the Lincoln, as if replacing one exhausted crew with another ship somehow absolves the architects of the disaster. Moving the burden is not the same as ending it.

These men and women are stranded in a literal sea of discontent, carrying out orders while the people who issued those orders minimize their suffering from thousands of miles away. Behind every sailor is a mother like mine once was, waiting and worrying. There is a spouse lying awake, a child counting days, a father jumping every time the telephone rings. Military sacrifice is never confined to a battlefield or the steel hull of a ship. It reaches into kitchens, bedrooms and family conversations. It occupies every empty chair at the dinner table. My father’s service eventually led him home to Suzette, to marriage and, a year later, to me. That history makes this personal. I cannot look at the Lincoln as a floating symbol of American power. I see thousands of individual lives and thousands more tethered to them by love.

The real measure of a nation is not how loudly it praises its military during campaign rallies or how many flags its leaders arrange behind a podium. It is how carefully that nation treats the people it sends into danger. Trump’s “not nearly long enough” was not merely another stupid, impulsive remark. It was an admission of moral bankruptcy. To him, service members are scenery, families are inconvenient and suffering becomes unreal the moment it complicates his preferred narrative. These sailors and Marines deserve rest, competent leadership, proper care and the embrace of the people who have spent more than eight months wondering whether they will come home whole. They deserve to be more than expendable pieces in a war that never should have begun. Most of all, they deserve a commander in chief capable of recognizing that sacrifice is sacred precisely because it carries a terrible human price, not because powerful men find it so easy to demand more of it.

Michael Jochum — Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Music, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition