Dear Editor,
Marine Four-Star General John Kelly served as President Trump’s Chief of Staff for 17 months. This was one of the most important positions in the U.S. government.
At that time, he got to know Donald Trump personally. It is important to know when reading this op-ed, that General Kelly’s son Robert, while leading his patrol in Afghanistan in 2010, was killed instantly after stepping on a landmine.
For a year and a half, he heard Trump call veterans who were shot down or wounded in combat “suckers” because there was “nothing in it for them.” Trump is a person who, on several occasions, said he did not want to be seen in the presence of amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.”
On TV, during the 2016 presidential campaign, he complained that he would not visit a cemetery in France because the men buried there were “losers.” In 2017, Trump was with Kelly when the general went to visit his son’s grave and said, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”
You are at a cemetery for our fallen, and that’s what he asks.
On a visit to France in 2018, he canceled a scheduled visit to a cemetery for Marines who died in World War I and called those interred there “suckers.”
There have been times when he was complimentary to the military in general, but we have to keep in mind that Trump referred to Sen. John McCain as not being any kind of war hero because he had been a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
Trump himself was not in any branch of the armed forces during that war because he had bone spurs on one foot.
Bill Scholly, Buckhead