There’s a meme going around about Barron Trump’s birthday. The joke — if you can call it that — is that someone should send him to the front lines. It’s meant as a dig at his father. A punishment by proxy.
I’m not here to defend Donald Trump. But I know something about being 20 and in uniform, and I think both the people cheering that meme and the people outraged by it are missing the point entirely.
By the time I was 20 I had enlisted, shipped out, and gone to war. I had fought a fire aboard a naval vessel at sea. I had been “Dear Johned” from a thousand miles away with nowhere to put it. I had worked a volcano rescue operation. I had been referred to suicide watch following a mental breakdown. I had been sent to the brig on bread and water for being late. I broke my leg. I survived a hurricane. I was shipwrecked and beached. I worked rescue operations from a piracy related collision at sea. I spent five days dead in the water off the Horn of Africa. I served in Somalia during Restore Hope and watched what that meant up close. And then I lost my grandmother while at sea and could not come home to bury her.
I was 20 and my service period was easier than a lot of people’s.
So no — I don’t want that for Barron Trump. I don’t want it for your son either. Or anyone’s.
That’s not softness. That’s the conclusion of someone who’s been there and had decades to think about what it cost and what it bought.
The answer is: too much, and not enough.
War is a transaction humanity keeps making and keeps losing on. Whatever it once settled, whatever it once built or protected, the ledger has stopped balancing. We are a species with the demonstrated capacity to solve extraordinary problems when we decide to. We have not yet decided to solve this one.
The meme isn’t really about Barron. It’s about how casually we use the idea of sending young people into harm’s way — as a punchline, as a threat, as a political point. Both sides do it. Hawks dress it in glory. The left uses it as a weapon against the powerful while conveniently forgetting that it’s never the powerful who actually go.
It’s always the 20 year olds.
I turned out okay. Well, mostly. But I carry every one of those things I listed, and I will carry them until I don’t carry anything anymore. That’s the actual cost. Not the meme. Not the politics.
Just a kid who was 20, a long way from home, watching the world ask everything of him before he knew what anything meant.
Buckminster Fuller called it livingry — the opposite of weaponry. All the tools, all the resources, all the know-how we already have, turned toward taking care of each other instead of blowing each other up. He said we had everything we needed to do it. He said that decades ago. We still do.
We can do better than this. We just have to decide to.
