Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving menu: salad, chauteaubriand, chauteau potatoes, sautéed Brussels sprouts. Our friend Mary Anne is bringing an appetizer platter, and later today Donna’s going shopping for a fancy prepared desert. I’ll be in charge of the deux châteaux; Donna the Brussels sprouts.
Which, in their natural state, look positively prehistoric, and bring to mind Peter Graves’ immortal line from Airplane!
Reminding service members they swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any particular president and commander-in-chief, and that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders, can get a little tricky. This’ll come across elitist as hell, but when those six senators and congresspersons went public with a video addressed to military members in general, they could rightly be accused of stirring up troops to oppose the commander-in-chief, their ultimate civilian master. It’s officers, senior officers in particular, who are most responsible for considering whether orders from on high are legitimate or not. In our classless, democratic society, it’s impolite to draw this kind of distinction between troops and their leaders, but it’s nevertheless there, and the military could not function without chiefs, warriors, and the implicit understanding that orders will be obeyed.
About ten years ago, while on a flight safety teaching trip to USAF bases in South Korea, I turned on Armed Forces Radio Network and heard Rush Limbaugh ranting that Barack Obama wasn’t a legitimate president and that any orders from him should be questioned, literally fomenting disrespect and resistance toward the commander-in-chief. In my view, broadcasting Limbaugh’s show to overseas troops made AFRN complicit in undermining good order and discipline in the military. I was so enraged that on my return I wrote letters to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the USAF chief of staff, and my senators and representatives, demanding Limbaugh be taken off AFRN. My then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (wife of the same Senator Mark Kelly who participated in the recent illegal orders video), wrote similar letters to military authorities on my behalf, and I’ll be her number one fan to the day I die. We didn’t win our case, but that’s another story. In any case, what I accused Rush Limbaugh of doing back in 2015 is not that different from what these six Democratic senators and representatives are accused of today.
Not that they’re wrong, mind you!
As for Senator Kelly’s medals, I have no idea if they’re correctly arranged or not. There’s an eager army of military decorations experts out there, spring-loaded to pounce on errors, but I will say this: once you have more than than three or four ribbons or medals, you quit trying to arrange them yourself and hire someone to do them for you, normally a third-party vendor, who’ll mount them on a backing and guarantee they’re arranged in the correct order. Everyone I knew in the military did this — it’s not worth the hassle of trying to get individual decorations straight and neat, or the strong possibility you’ll screw up the order of precedence. These are my ribbons and medals, by the way, and you can damn well bet I paid a vendor to arrange and mount them — as I’m sure Mark Kelly did his:
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A couple of things to know about ribbons and medals for non-military readers: ribbons are worn on regular uniforms; medals on formal, fancy-dress uniforms. Many decorations consist of just a ribbon; the more significant and meritorious ones consist of both a ribbon and a medal. As for order of precedence, the most important ribbon or medal is the one on top and closest to the heart, the lesser ones are toward the bottom, The little pins and whatnot attached to them are called devices, to indicate the number of times you’ve won a particular decoration or if there’s an act of valor associated with it, etc. If you want to know more, you can find an expert on almost any street corner.
As for Secretary of Whatever Pete Hegseth and his threat to put Senator Kelly back on active duty and then court-martial him … bring it on, you drunken pipsqueak. You may well be going after the next president of the United States.