Walz’ Leadership and JD’s Spin: The Ethics of Service
JD Vance yesterday made the substance of his and Tim Walz’ military service an issue yesterday. This was a guy who specialized in spinning the Iraq War, attacking the service of a guy who was promoted into leadership ranks as a Non-Commissioned Officer over the course of 24 years.
At a campaign stop in Michigan, JD accused that, “when Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.”
Thus began the Swiftboating of Tim Walz, led by Chris LaCivita, the mastermind of the original smear campaign against John Kerry.
The substance of the smear campaign that ensued actually pivots on disputed details far less significant than the kinds of lies that JD and his boss tell as easily as they breathe.
The first issue pertains to how to describe Walz’ final rank when he was promoted to Command Sergeant Major, but never finished the relevant training before he retired in 2005, and so was reverted to his prior rank. The second has to do with a single reference to carrying a gun at war, a rhetorical move to support an argument about the proper role for guns. Both of these are arguments about one or two references years ago — the kinds of misstatements that JD and Trump peddle routinely, including JD’s implication that Walz retired solely to get out of deploying to Iraq.
The third issue — the main one — pertains to whether Walz abandoned his men by retiring the year before his unit deployed to Iraq.
By all accounts, however, Walz had retired already before the formal deployment order came in; he retired because he had already committed to run for Congress when the possibility of a deployment came up.
Walz filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission as a candidate for Congress on February 10, 2005. The next month, after the guard announced a possible deployment to Iraq within two years, Walz’s campaign issued a statement saying he intended to stay in the race.
“I do not yet know if my artillery unit will be part of this mobilization and I am unable to comment further on specifics of the deployment,” Walz said in the March 2005 campaign release.
“As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq,” he continued, adding: “I don’t want to speculate on what shape my campaign will take if I am deployed, but I have no plans to drop out of the race. I am fortunate to have a strong group of enthusiastic supporters and a very dedicated and intelligent wife. Both will be a major part of my campaign, whether I am in Minnesota or Iraq.”
Walz retired from the Army National Guard in May 2005, according to the Minnesota National Guard. In a 2009 interview for the Library of Congress, Walz said he left the guard to focus full time on running for Congress, citing concerns about trying to serve at the same time and the Hatch Act, which limits political activities for federal employees.
Once you understand that you’d need a time machine for the literal words of JD’s attack to be true, then it changes the discussion, to one about Walz’ ethical decision about the best way to serve his country.
A story on his retirement from the first time he ran describes that he struggled with the ethics of the decision.
Bonnifield said they also bonded during a deployment to Italy connected to post-Sept. 11 Operation Enduring Freedom. After seven months abroad, the unit returned to Minnesota.
But Walz had already begun thinking about an exit and bounced it off others, including Bonnifield.
“Would the soldier look down on him because he didn’t go with us? Would the common soldier say, ‘Hey, he didn’t go with us, he’s trying to skip out on a deployment?’ And he wasn’t,” Bonnifield said. “He talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy. He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.”
Walz said it was merely time to leave and he saw a chance to make a difference in the public policy arena.
“Once you’re in, it’s hard to retire. Of my 40 years or 41 years, I had been in the military 24 of them. It was just what you did,” he said. “So that transition period was just a challenge.”
Bonnifield and his brother did deploy to Iraq, in different units. And they both dealt with severe mental health issues upon their return. Bonnifield said Walz the congressman worked to connect struggling Guard members with help and sought to cut red tape.
“If you listen to him, he’s got a very loud, strong voice,” Bonnifield said. “But there’s a very caring person inside. And one very good leader, too.”
Walz saw a chance to make a difference in the public policy arena. And when elected to Congress as an anti-war Democrat, he spent the twelve years he was there trying to end the Iraq War, and when that failed, trying to make the lives of service members better, both before and after service.
As a member of Congress, Walz opposed President George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, though he still voted to continue military funding to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was an early advocate for repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring servicemembers from serving if they came out as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Walz joined with Republicans in 2016 to oppose cuts to the Army’s troop levels meant to save money — a trend that continues today. He argued doing so would leave the service without the manpower to meet growing worldwide threats. As a Guard veteran and co-chair of the House National Guard and Reserve caucus, Walz advocated for the part-time force, arguing Pentagon strategies and plans should better integrate the Guard and Reserves to make use of scarce Army resources.
Walz’s likely biggest legislative achievement in Congress, however, was clearing bipartisan veterans’ suicide prevention legislation that became law in 2015.
This included opposition to some of Trump’s efforts to bring grift to Veterans Affairs.
As the top Democrat on the committee, Walz was a chief adversary for the Trump administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs. He battled with then-acting VA Secretary Peter O’Rourke in 2018 during a standoff over O’Rourke’s handling of the inspector general’s office, and pushed for an investigation into the influence of a trio of informal VA advisers who were members of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. An investigation by House Democrats completed after Walz left Congress concluded that the so-called Mar-a-Lago trio “violated the law and sought to exert improper influence over government officials to further their own personal interests.”
Walz also opposed the Mission Act, the bill that expanded veterans’ access to VA-funded care by non-VA doctors that Trump considers one of his signature achievements. Walz said in statements at the time that, while he agreed the program for veterans to seek outside care needed to be fixed, he believed the Mission Act did not have sustainable funding. VA officials in recent years have said community care costs have ballooned following the Mission Act.
That’s where a sound comparison should focus, in my opinion.
JD only got to Congress, of course, after being recruited by Peter Thiel, after selling out his childhood for fame, after becoming a hedgie — which background got him a seat on the Banking Committee, not the Veterans Affairs Committee. But once JD got to the Senate, he has garnered attention as a member of a later generation of veterans, this time deemed not anti-war, but America First, an anti-interventionist stance conducive to far-right politics.
On April 23, just hours after the United States Senate approved $61 billion in new military aid to Ukraine, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance took to the floor of the Senate to offer a sweeping rebuke of his colleagues’ decision. Standing behind his desk, Vance — who has emerged as a leading critic of U.S. policy toward Ukraine — unspooled a laundry list of objections: that American military capability is spread too thin; that Ukraine is outmanned and outgunned regardless of an increased level of U.S. support; that the Biden administration lacks a clear plan for bringing the war to a close.
Partway through his remarks, Vance suddenly got personal and pivoted to a less frequently discussed source of his skepticism: his time serving as a Marine during the Iraq War.
“In 2003, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War, [but] a couple months later, I also enlisted in the United States Marine Corps,” said Vance, who deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a corporal with the public affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Vance’s tenure in the military features prominently in his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he recounted how his time in the Marines helped him overcome his troubled upbringing in post-industrial Ohio to become a disciplined and functional adult. But on the Senate floor, his account of his military service was notably less sanguine.
“I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance recounted, the emotion rising in his voice. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
[snip]
In Ukraine, Vance argued, the U.S. is doing the opposite: By funding Ukraine and “subsidizing the Europeans to do nothing,” the U.S. is setting itself on a path toward greater involvement in the region, not trying to further extricate itself.
Regardless of the accuracy or intellectual consistency of Vance’s argument, the tendency that it reflects — to ground U.S. foreign policy in a narrower definition of U.S. interests — bears the mark of the failures of the previous wars.
“This idea that it’s in our distinct interest to spread democracy all over the world,” Vance said. “I don’t think that holds even a little bit of water.”
Vance’s opposition to support for Ukraine, in support of which the trained propagandist adopts Russian propaganda, is one of the things that made Trump a fan. And it led him to vote against funding for the military — something that the anti-war Walz did not do.
Vance the propagandist has made the military service of both his and Walz, the NCO, a campaign issue.
But the logical place to bring that scrutiny is not to LaCivita’s parsing of words Walz uttered years ago, but to the ethical decisions both made when they came to an anti-war stance, to the notion of service each took away, to their success at fulfilling that ethic of service.
