Tim Walz Isn't Being "Swiftboated"

anti-discourse discourse forms another roadblock

I regard the claims about the allegedly dishonorable ending to Tim Walz’s military service to be plausible but not fully proved, and I’m waiting for more evidence. But this kind of framing…

…is nonsense. Similarly, the military news website Task & Purpose suggests that questions about Walz’s service amount to “swiftboating,” politicized and dishonest attacks on honorable military service. As much as I hesitate to declare my own judgment about the things Walz is alleged to have done — knowingly abandoning his battalion on the verge of a combat deployment, claiming combat experience without having been in combat, losing a rank at his sudden retirement because he abandoned the training he promised to complete — the framing about these discussions is mostly insipid and grating.

The idea that military service is beyond criticism — that questions about Tim Walz’s service constitute “an attack on ALL of us who have served” — misses a great big fat hanging softball of a historical reality. Soldiers don’t respect all soldiers, and often have mixed feelings about other soldiers, and frequently say so with the greatest possible clarity.

The countless examples are almost too obvious to bother with, but start with The Long Gray Line. Rick Atkinson’s culturally important book is about the Class of 1966 at West Point, and about the legacies of the Vietnam War. Men graduating from the United States Military Academy in 1966 were given the chance, at the end of their fourth year, to choose their branch — a choice they made in front of their peers, out loud, one at a time. They could also volunteer for Vietnam, or choose not to.

Most — not all — stood up and chose combat arms branches, with the infantry leading the count. “Ninety-eight men volunteered for Vietnam.” But many others thought the war was strategically foolish, poorly run, and not worth the personal danger. Young warriors, completing an academy designed to prepare men to provide leadership in combat, they chose to avoid the war that was waiting for them as they became army officers.

Atkinson’s book is about the years of rage and resentment that followed those decisions, as men from the Class of 1966 judged other men from the Class of 1966 over their wartime choices. I’m not going to go in details, because the depth of that story shouldn’t be reduced, but I hope you’ll read the book if you haven’t. Soldiers and officers, men struggled for years to just stand in the same room with some of their classmates. They graded one another for moral wisdom, and didn’t hide their conclusions.

The pejoratives that soldiers apply to other soldiers — ring-knockers, blue falcons — reflect the persistence of those judgments. Ditto the many characters in depictions of war that are foolish or shameful, like the TV version of Captain Sobel (who may or may not have been a completely faithful depiction of the real man).

The book that every combat arms officer was expected to read, back in the Pleistocene when I tracked these things from a spot on an army post, was about a lifelong conflict between a sleazy, scheming West Point dirtbag and a virtuous young infantry sergeant who becomes an officer when he earns a battlefield commission: Courtney Massengale and Sam “The Night Clerk” Damon. I read Once an Eagle at Fort Benning, sometime around 1999, and random officers stopped in hallways to rant at me about it like a fan club when they saw me carrying the book. (The current generation of officers is apparently much less enthused by the thing, but they still read it and know it.) So:

1. The book is about a career-long struggle with an army officer who’s a giant piece of shit, rising to four-star rank on the basis of his repulsive and amoral careerist scheming;

2. Generations of army officers have loved it.

So we’ll see about the Tim Walz thing, but it’s not at all the case that soldiers will be angry to see Walz criticized if the allegations — any of the allegations — can be clearly proved. See also, from a retired colonel:

On my life, this view is not an outlier. This is Soldier 101.