“All gave some and some gave all” is an often-repeated phrase in America during Memorial Day, a quote attributed to Korean War veteran and purple heart recipient Howard William Osterkamp, who served in the US Army from 1951 to 1953.
US President Donald Trump, who avoided military conscription a reported five times during the Vietnam War, and whose former lawyer has said made up his deformities to do so, managed instead to give a speech on Memorial Day that lashed out at his political adversaries on a day meant to honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
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After being helped to lay a wreath at Arlington Memorial Cemetery near Washington D.C., which contains the graves of countless American soldiers killed in action, Trump took the opportunity to once again degrade former Commanders-in-Chief on matters completely unrelated to soldiers’ sacrifices.
[“The President shall be Commander in Chief,” is established in Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution. – Ed.]
He used the time to talk about his own domestic policy, complaining that former administrations did not crack down hard enough on immigration across the US-Mexico border.
“Who would let that happen?” Trump said at the revered burial ground. “People pouring through our borders unchecked. People doing things that are indescribable and not for today to discuss.”
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It was a veiled reference to his predecessor Joe Biden, whose son Beau served with the US military in Iraq and Kosovo before dying of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. None of Trump’s children has served in the military.
In a Truth Social post that same day Trump wrote, “Including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds, who allowed 21,000,000 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane, through an open border that only an incompetent president would approve.”
After paying some lip service to the armed forces at the sacred burial ground, what Trump did not discuss was his own sidestepping of military service, nor his own degrading comments about fallen US soldiers, once describing them as “suckers” and “losers”.
In 2023, former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, himself a former US Marine Corps general, described Trump as “a person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.”
He continued that Trump was someone who “did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
A Gold Star family is one who lost a family member in active duty.
While Veterans Day in the United States, in November, is meant to honor all US servicemen and servicewoman (of which there are several on the staff of Kyiv Post), Memorial Day in America is reserved for those who died serving their country.
The first Memorial Day in the US was observed on May 30, 1868, after a proclamation by then-Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic to honor Union soldiers (those fighting for the North) who had died in the American Civil War. It has since been observed to honor all soldiers who died serving in all of America’s conflicts.
An estimated 620,000 soldiers from both the Union and Confederacy died in the Civil War.
In the American Revolutionary War, an estimated 6,800 patriots died in battle.
In World War II, an estimated 417,000 US servicemen sacrificed their lives.
In Vietnam, an estimated 60,000 US soldiers gave their lives, about the same number as the average estimate for Ukrainian soldiers killed defending their own country against the full-scale Russian invasion that started in February 2022.
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