A Captain's Morning Note to Morning Joe

Topic: Perspective

Dear “Morning Joe” Scarborough,

I do not write on behalf of all veterans or current military personnel, but I am confident that the vast majority of them would vouch for what I am communicating to you in this writing as the unbridled truth.  Here, I speak for myself.  Consider this message to you a repudiation of your reckless commentary from Tuesday night, when the right side of the political Uniparty lost its last hope to ensuring our enduring bureaucracy has bothmainstream presidential candidates under control this November.  Now you’re going to have to steal it – again – if you can.

In case you’re drawing a blank, here is the dialogue between you and your wife Tuesday night:

Scarborough: Trashing the economy, insulting small business owners that wake up early in the morning, go to bed late at night, trying to make their businesses work, trashing entrepreneurs, trashing the people that make our economy the strongest in the world. Trashing, Mika, and I know this is personal for you. I, just, for security reasons, I won’t say who it is, but trashing people like one of your relatives who could have done anything, could have gotten a job on Wall Street if he wanted to. Could have gotten the job on Main Street if he wanted to, but decided to go into the United States Marine Corps. Decided to give everything he had to be a Marine. And we won’t say where he is right now, but it ain’t Miami Beach in spring break, and it’s going to be a long, tough haul for him. He did it voluntarily.

Brzezinski: Many Americans do this.

Scarborough: That story is recounted every day by thousands and thousands of young men and women. Some coming from immigrant families, just like a lot of immigrants. Whether you’re talking about World War Two or whether you’re talking about the Korea War or Vietnam, a lot of immigrants coming in and deciding that they wanted to be a bigger part of this country. And Donald Trump insults our men and women in uniform every day — every single day! And I will say again, we know him.

But who in the audience continues to cheer as this man trashes our men and women in uniform? While you sit and watch cable news, these young men and women in uniform go through basic training. They kill themselves. They sacrifice their lives. They get assigned to go somewhere across the globe for three years. For three years. Committed to one thing: protecting and defending you, protecting and defending your rights. Protecting and defending the United States of America. And you trash them and you vote for a man who trashes them? That is just shameless.

-

The 2024 Primary marks the fourth time I have voted for President Trump; I backed him in the 2016 General Election, both the 2020 Primary and General Election, and this fall, I will make it a solid five times.  My lone moment of weakness was in the 2016 Texas Primary, when I got my arm twisted into backing someone I struggle to support today, Ted Cruz, although I always loved how Trump cleared the field of people… well, people like you.  Yes, I know you were a “Republican” when you were in Congress all those years ago, playing a phony role in days before the Internet readily revealed who made the biggest contributions and therefore controlled your political energies and proclivities.

This isn’t intended to get into baseline political corruption, such as the clear fact that politicians supposedly making just $174,000 annually while living in one of the most expensive markets in America fight, claw, scratch, and scream to maintain that job – almost as if they are making millions more than advertised on back-end deals.  The purpose is to address the utter bullshit you spewed about military families and by extension, veterans, in the aftermath of Trump’s emphatic wins on Tuesday night.  Usually, I only use profanity for emphasis, and I use it sparingly – but since that was your method of operation and has been for some time, you can deal with it.

The military industrial complex has preyed upon the minds of patriotic men and women for more than a century to boost enlistment numbers, whether a draft was in place or not.  I am of the opinion that our nation has not fought a war of necessity since World War II, when we were sandwiched between two great powers who were marching their separate ways to victory and an inevitable collusion against our country on our own soil.  Since then, because we’ve grown so rich, fat, happy, and unfortunately, corrupt – we fight wars of choice like the Roman Empire did as our country decays from within.  Most post-9/11 veterans, the ones who were targeted with propaganda so strong we once thought it was our God-directed duty to try and control stone-age warlords in far-flung shitholes for years at a time, see the truth after two decades in constant strife.  I had very little interaction with death as a young man outside of accidents involving classmates once in a while, or deaths of elderly family members.  Since I put on a uniform, I’ve lost countless peers and friends to suicide – a permanent solution to temporary problems largely brought on by the waste of life investment spent fighting wars we could never win.

Military marriages have a 70% likelihood of divorce.  Those who come back physically intact are often not mentally intact.  I worked on battalion staff when I was in Afghanistan and the worst enemy contact I experienced personally was periodic mortar or rocket dodging, and I have to dig deep to unwind myself in my own everyday life – a consequence of dealing with high stakes, pursuit of the enemy, and constant stress and expectations brought about by being away from loved ones and a support network for up to a year at a time.  I am one of the lucky ones.  Some of my closest friends are heavily medicated and have fought off depression that nearly claimed their lives at the end of a shotgun.  My own family, one with a rich tradition of Army officership dating back to November 6, 1963, in an unbroken streak, came to understand PTSD well by dealing with a Vietnam veteran father who served heroically as an Infantry officer for three tours in another war that could not be won.  We never knew if we would get smacked or praised, or if he would be home at 5 p.m., or 5 a.m.  It took a year in a combat zone for me to fully understand him and the damage in his life that caused him to take his pain out on people he truly loved.  When I read his letters he sent at the end of his life, I know how he really felt about me, but his trauma prevented that from being what was normal in my world while he was alive.

I do support the military, just as I support law enforcement, under one condition – when they abide by the oath, the rule of law, and the defense of the Constitution.  We do not support the use of our military as world police; those of us, unlike you, who have heard shots fired in anger or popped a squat in the woods in a pair of combat boots, now understand why the Afghans have gone unconquered for a thousand years in their ancient pile of rocks the size of Texas.  The Taliban is fond of saying – you have the watches, we have the time.  The British and the Russians learned these lessons long ago – that they will wait us out.  Politicians and your ilk saw an opportunity to cash in on the big business of war, saw a gold mine after 9/11, and sent us there, and then to Iraq, to do their bidding, knowing no meaningful victory would ever come from it.

Now the consequences are clear.  Just as my father’s post-Vietnam military sat in drug-addicted ruins, today’s military is full of quislings and wimps in the highest levels of leadership who are hellbent on ridding the ranks of Billy Bob from the hills of North Georgia and Joe Ray from the thorny woods of East Texas – those good old boys who stormed the beaches, climbed the mountains, and braved winter in the Ardennes with little more than a rifle in hand.  I smelled this weakness coming upon the military as a junior Captain in 2013 – over a decade ago.  Looking at what has happened to our military today with its relaxed fitness and grooming standards and forced social experimentation, we seemed like a group of Spartan warriors back then.  The goal of the military is to fight and win the nation’s wars – by virtue of that, it has no choice but to discriminate and position itself for nothing short of victory.  The institution does not exist to validate immigrants, empower women, or provide people a space to feel good about who they think they are.  It is, in fact, the very first task of drill sergeants in basic training to break individuals and reconstruct them as fighting machines capable of functioning in the shittiest and most austere conditions the world has to offer.

Most of us who are on the sane side of military service, meaning out of it, would not consider ourselves pacifists.  I support justified use of the military in that it is used explicitly to defend the homeland.  The Taliban does not have the ability to project military power across the oceans and ransack our homeland – they, and other like-minded terror fronts, have found a way to pose a threat to the homeland by taking advantage of the non-existent southern border and otherwise loose immigration laws that fail to scrutinize which new arrivals actually have values that would fit in a society that does not stone women for learning how to read, like they do over there.  We support President Trump, as do a majority of current service members, because he wasn’t looking for the first opportunity to involve our soldiers in more trillion-dollar conflicts that satisfy defense contractors at the cost of American lives, minds, limbs, and families.

I am thankful I served because I developed real-life leadership skills and learned how to deal with people I couldn’t stand or didn’t respect in a way to keep the mission moving forward.  I, and others like me, raised my right hand voluntarily, and even though I was bright-eyed and naïve, I did it because I thought military service equaled a love of country.  Love of country also requires us to stand up to the government of our country when it is wrong, and time tells the true tale.  It has been wrong on foreign policy and war longer than anyone reading this letter has been alive.  You do not understand the hearts and minds of soldiers, and you are far removed from anyone outside of your bubble who would sit down and explain the senseless deaths, both over there and back here at home, that have stemmed from committing countless hundreds of thousands of veterans to defending lands that will never know peace because the cause of Jihad demands constant turmoil against the infidel. 

By now, you should understand why veterans and most rank-and-file military members support President Trump and his vision for peace in the world.  We have seen enough of the ugliness of the world and, by virtue of having to survive in such horrible conditions, have grown wise to the ways of those who would never have the courage to live up to one of the most time-honored leadership rules of the military service – never order someone to do a task you would not be willing to do yourself.

President Trump is right about the military.  It is being led straight to hell by a feckless leadership appointed for its political allegiance and controlled by the promise of pension.  Those who fail to recognize it only enable it, and those who served this nation and recognize it will speak the truth about our evil, reckless foreign policy and the direct sabotage of the United States military by those who swore an oath to place the interests of the nation above all others.

Sincerely,

Seth Keshel

Former Army Captain and OEF Veteran

Author’s Note: I aim to provide readers of this journal with the perspective needed to understand a changing world. This post came straight from the heart and is not a product of research or analysis, but rather experience and lessons learned. I appreciate your readership and would be grateful for your subscription as a paying subscriber to this journal. Thank you!