Trump is unable to do his job and fails to do his duty
Unlike American service men and women, Trump does his job without a sense of duty
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
10.21.2017•8:00 AM
There’s a big difference between a job and a duty, especially in the military. In the Army, serving as lieutenant as I was, you can have the job of platoon leader, the officer who supervises the lives and training of up to about 40 enlisted soldiers — privates and corporals mainly, a few sergeants. I was 22 year old when I had about 25 soldiers under my command. I was also the weapons officer and mess officer. That was my job.
My duty was to care for the men in my platoon, to treat them fairly and insure they were treated the same way by the rest of the command structure in the division, to make sure their families were okay, even to check to see that they were able to pay their car loans and insurance and rent on time. It was my duty to insure that there was no discrimination by race in assignments or promotions, and to make sure that the Army’s laws and regulations were enforced fairly and equally for each of them. It was my duty, finally, to exercise the authority I had over these men fairly and equitably, and to insure that the orders I gave were reasonable and legal. There were a lot of what we called “shit details” in the Army — jobs nobody wanted to do. It was my duty to insure that the overall shit detail of serving in the Army was shared equally by us all, including myself.
I learned about duty from my grandfather when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I remember the summers I spent with my grandmother and grandfather in Washington, D.C. back in the early 1960s. My brother Frank and I would be out in the garden with our grandfather, or maybe we’d be in the kitchen helping him wash the kohlrabi and peppers and tomatoes we had just harvested from his vegetable garden. And grandpa, who had been a general who commanded as many as a million men in combat over three years during World War II, would be standing over the sink in his long-sleeve khakis, sweat-stained from the sun and the heat outside, and without looking at us, maybe holding a big fat kohlrabi under the faucet in his massive hands, he would growl in his gravelly voice: “Boys, one of these days you’re going to be in the Army and you’ll have men under your command, and what you have to remember is this: Your first duty is, you feed ‘em, you make sure they’ve got plenty to eat. Then you put a roof over their heads, then you pay ‘em, and then and only then, can you send them out to die.”
They taught a less harsh version of the same thing at West Point. For four years there, it was pounded into our heads every day that our first duty as leaders in the Army was to “take care of your men.” The unspoken corollary to that admonition was that if you took care of them, they would take care of you. When you ordered them to do something, they would follow your order. And as my grandfather said in his inimitable fashion, if need be they would go into combat and risk their lives and die in carrying out your orders. It goes without saying that “taking care of your men” was entirely different than say, supervising workers in an office in civilian life. In the Army, when you took care of people, you couldn’t guarantee that in following your orders, they wouldn’t lose their lives. The purpose of armies is to fight wars, and that wasn’t the bargain. Wars are fought with real bullets and bombs, and people die. But also unspoken in the contract between leaders and the soldiers who follow them was the promise that if they died, you would take care that they would be treated with dignity and respect in death and make sure that their families would be treated similarly in their grief. The Army afforded a $10,000 “death benefit” paid to the next of kin upon a soldier’s death back then. Today it’s $100,000, and it’s called a “death gratuity” and is intended to help a soldier’s family deal with funeral and other adjustment costs after the death of the soldier.
But any soldier’s family will tell you while it’s nice to have the money, it’s the way they’re treated by the military that really counts. Nobody ever wants their spouse or mom or dad or brother or sister to die on the job. But if you have to die on the job, the job you want to have is soldier, because they know what to do when soldiers die.
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https://www.salon.com/2017/10/21/trump-is-unable-to-do-his-job-and-fails-to-do-his-duty/
