Many Americans complain about things Donald Trump has said or done as he pushes for a return to the White House.
My objection here to his loose mouth is, however, more personal than political. I respond to some of his ill words on behalf of both my late Dad and my own namesake, a soldier from Slope County, N.D., who was killed in battle and buried in Belgium in World War II.
Trump’s behind-the-scenes (sometimes public) derision of U.S. military officers and soldiers disabled or killed in action has surfaced repeatedly. But his labeling of our officers killed in Worl War II in Europe as “losers” and “suckers” angers me especially.
Witnesses as credible as Gen. John Kelly, the former president’s own chief of staff, have confirmed his backroom insults of our fallen and injured heros, and such Trump comments have been reported broadly by the Military Times, CNN, The Hill and elsewhere.
My Dad was a mechanic for Lockheed’s P-38 fighter aircraft in California and then for the Army Air Force in New Mexico in World War II. Meanwhile, his best friend, Staff Sgt. Edward F. Buzalsky, was serving in the Army’s 3rd Armored Division when shot by an enemy sniper in Belgium in late 1944. The war ended soon after, and my parents named their next child after Dad’s friend. Thus, I was christened Edward.
I didn’t get to meet Eddie Buzalsky; neither did most of America. So let me slip in just a snapshot from my Dad’s recollections.
Before their Army service, he and Eddie worked together in the North Dakota Badlands for the Civilian Conservation Corps building bridges, restoring grazing land and the like. One day, Eddie took a stone boat (sled) and draft horses out to clear rocks off the soil surface. To focus his horses’ attention on pulling, he grabbed two prairie rattlesnakes behind their heads so they couldn’t bite him and let the snakes rattle from his post at the front of the sled on the way back to base. Horses will run from the sound of a rattler’s rattle, and Eddie had them pulling that load of rocks and headed home at full-tilt. Like me, I think, a lot of Americans would’ve liked to have met this guy.
Guess what? My dad, now long gone, wouldn’t have appreciated the president of the United States calling Eddie a loser. Nor do I.
Links embedded or helpful to this blog:
https://www.veterans.nd.gov/heroes/edward-f-buzalsky
ABMC War Dead Certificate https://www.abmc.gov/print/certificate/325760
