This Memorial Day, New Respect for the Military » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Watching the Trump Administration honor the American military this Memorial Day Weekend, I felt a wave of relief as well as pride. Relief that the four-year nightmare of disdain and blind risk for our soldiers and sailors under the previous regime was over. Plus, real old-fashioned pride, not the artificial Pride that had been forced on them by fools and fanatics to elevate unworthy, unqualified servicemembers and reject the best of them. My relief extended to my family, specifically someone I didn’t want to be lamenting on a future Memorial Day.

Two years ago, my nephew, Lucas, then 22, told me he was considering joining the Marines, and asked what I thought of the idea. There was a time I would have blurted, “Simper fi!”. However, here I had to pause to reflect.

Lucas was a good kid, smart and athletic, though rather lost. His two attempts at college had gone poorly, and the movie work provided by my Second-Unit Director brother ended with George’s early retirement. Traditionally, the Marines were a perfect fit for a young man in his place. But this was an anti-traditional period.

I reviewed my devoured history of the branch as referenced in The Marine Corps Hymn, which kids of my generation once actually memorized. “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli,/We fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea./First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean,/We are proud to claim the title of United States Marine.” For visual help, I mentally replayed scenes from great films associated with the song.

I drew a blank on the Halls of Montezuma, which referred to the heroic Battle of Chapultepec in the now politically incorrect Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Very few people today even Remember the Alamo. But in September 1847, U.S. Marines stormed Chapultepec Castle to take Mexico City and win the war. The heavy casualties they suffered — some 130 killed, 700 wounded out of 7,000 men – inspired the red “blood stripe” on Marine officers’ dress blue trousers.

I did much better on the Shores of Tripoli, recalling an incredible sequence from John Milius’ brilliant The Wind and the Lion. Fictionally relocated to Tangier, the sequence thrillingly depicts a disciplined band of Marines marching to and seizing the royal palace. Even nine years before his provocative Red Dawn, leftists screeched about Milius’ jingoism.

Then followed a more vivid image from August 2021, unfortunately not from a movie. Eleven Marines blasted to bits in a suicide bombing at Kabul Airport during President Biden’s historically inept troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. A disaster Biden called “an extraordinary success” in a speech five days later.

A final picture flashed in my mind before I could reply to Lucas. Of Dover Air Force Base, and Biden checking his watch beside the caskets of all 13 service members killed in the Kabul blast. I gave Lucas my answer to his joining the Marines.  “Absolutely not,” I said.

In 2023, I wasn’t the only man having second thoughts about the Biden military. The Armed Forces were enduring the worst recruitment crisis since the all-volunteer force began in 1973. According to Grok, the Army failed its goal of 65,000 new soldiers by a staggering 10,000. The Navy fell short of the 37,700 sailors wanted by 6,000. And the Air Force missed the 24,100 target by 2,800, its first shortfall since 1999. Oddly, not enough people wanted to experience another “extraordinary success” a la Kabul.

For some strange reason, the necessary few good men were turned off by the woke recruitment ads of the day. Like the Disneyesque cartoon about the girl raised by two moms who joined the Army to find herself. “Although I had a fairly typical childhood (albeit with two moms),” she narrates, “took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality (in a typical childhood way).” Boy, sign me up for that Army.

Tough guys already in uniform were discharged for refusing to take the COVID vaccine, among them 8,400 Navy Seals. The recruitment crisis really frustrated the Biden people, who wanted to focus the military on their real enemy — not Russia, China, or Iran — the American people critical of his presidency. “If you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons,” Biden said in a speech.

President Donald Trump put an end to Biden’s woke, worthless military with a whole new, or old, approach, cherishing the warrior spirit of those dead and alive. This Memorial Day Weekend, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spent Saturday with his family helping to clean up the Korean War Memorial. “We will never forget those who paid the ultimate price for our freedoms,” Hegseth said.

Also on Saturday, in Annapolis, Vice-President J. D. Vance shook the hand of every single Navy graduate, all 1,049 of them. And President Trump was similarly uplifting at West Point while addressing its graduating class. “The job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun,” Trump said. “The military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America anywhere, anytime, in any place.”

Trump can count on my nephew, and so can I. Lucas reports to basic training at an Army base in North Carolina this week.

READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:

The Left’s Collapsing House of Cards

Winning the War on Beauty