Dan Merwin joined the Army in 2007 and served in Iraq from 2009-2010. Following The Atlantic’s September 3, 2020 “Suckers And Losers” article, he shared the following thoughts. This opinion piece is being shared on National Day of the Deployed, which honors deployed troops and their families for their sacrifices in service to our county.
I always said that I will not criticize Vets for who they vote for because their service has given them standing to vote in a way that should ALWAYS be respected.
Being that The Atlantic’s September 3, 2020 article has been verified as accurate by multiple sources from across the political spectrum, this is different.
It means your service has been cast in a new light. Will Trump lose your vote? Was he just kidding? Did John Kelly or Maddog Mattis simply resign for other unknown reasons? Better to have a Veteran-hating Republican president than a Veteran-respecting Democrat?
Your service is truly on the line now. Pick your uniform or pick Donald Trump. You can’t have both.
Suckers and Losers. Right now, I feel like one.
I feel like a sucker and a loser because, perhaps, these people see us as a tool and not as a guardian.
I feel like a sucker and a loser because, perhaps, these people see us as custodians of their garbage and not custodians of their freedom.
I feel like a sucker and a loser because the country we put uniforms on to defend so that they can “live free” is not a country of ideas and examples, but of identities in a petty ideology war of machoism, hyper man-card carrying, and white pride.
I feel like a sucker and a loser because our service has been taken for granted far too long, only to further be defined as service on behalf of a country where more civilian casualties on the homefront than combat casualties on the warfront has been accepted and excused as the new American normal.
I feel like perhaps three-quarters of the people waving American flags — the ones who say they honor Veterans and honor police officers and honor firefighters — secretly hold us in the same regard as they do janitors or McDonald’s workers: that we are all people that are needed for their daily American convenience to continue; that it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it (and they whisper: “just not me… or my kids… or my grandkids…”).
I feel like a sucker and a loser because a lot of us will now feel more like suckers and losers because the Commander-in-Chief, who enjoys more unconditional love and trust from his own Party despite his behavior, including a great majority of us suckers and losers, will be further and further erased from the acceptance of society as it becomes irrevocably shaped by the now-further confirmed accounts of his statements that we are suckers losers.
Many of us will commit more suicide as a result of this and the number will go from 22 a day, on average, to even higher.
Many of us ARE suckers because we have been sucked into believing that through our service our country can be a place where anyone in the world can live free without fear of death at a moment’s notice. Many of us ARE losers because we have lost more at the hands of what our country has now become in barely the last four years than we ever have before, where we were already losing and losing and losing, while rising and rising and rising as props for some big gun-toting politician’s right-wing candidacy.
I know this really happened, and I know it was unsurprising. I just really was hoping it was actually fake news. I did not feel good when the multiple sources confirmed it, including Fox News. I only felt more hurt, because it was pouring more jagged glass in the wound.
Sincerely,
A sucker and a loser
