Aug. 8, 2024, 10:25 PM UTC
By Chris Hayes
This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 7 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Every year, about 2 million Americans serve in the armed forces, either full time or one weekend a month. These people come from all walks of life and serve in different ways.
Many serve as Sen. JD Vance of Ohio did. After high school, Vance signed up for a four-year enlistment in the Marines including six months in Iraq doing public affairs. Then he was honorably discharged.
That’s a bit of a rarity among politicians. Most served as officers after college, which means better pay and benefits. But there is an even rarer experience: Among the tiny fraction of Americans who enlist, a much smaller share make a career of it — serving 20 years or more, with multiple deployments. And only a small fraction of those stay in the service after being disabled on the job.
Walz continued to serve for the next 24 years under four commanders in chief.
One of them is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, an enlisted soldier in the National Guard for nearly a quarter of a century. A journey that began on a Nebraska farm as soon as he was eligible to join.
“My father served during the Korean War. And the day after I turned 17, he took me down to an Army National Guard recruiter and I raised my hand and signed up,” Walz said of his enlistment.
That was in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was president. Walz continued to serve for the next 24 years under four commanders in chief.
He spent most of that time as an artillery soldier, which took a toll on his hearing. In 2002, after Walz had already done 20 years and qualified for retirement, a medical board considered discharging him because of his hearing loss. Instead, he convinced them to let him complete his final enlistment, which began after 9/11.
Walz achieved theh highest enlisted rank in the Army, command sergeant major. But rather than stay in and complete the schooling for that rank, he retired in 2005 at the rank of master sergeant.
In part, he says, because he wanted to speak freely about political injustices, including the Iraq War. The following year, he was one of more than 60 anti-war veterans running for Congress as the “Fighting Dems,” a group that included Sen. Tammy Duckworth, now former Sen. Jim Webb and now former Rep. Patrick Murphy.
Following his surprise victory in a traditionally conservative district, Walz became the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress. There he worked to help end the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
After Donald Trump was elected president, Walz became the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, where he fought the White House over privatizing veterans’ health care. He also used his own experiences with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to help other veterans get their benefits.
Walz’s experience in the armed forces is an atypical one for most Americans, and particularly for politicians. There’s literally no one like him.
Walz’s experience in the armed forces is an atypical one for most Americans, and particularly for politicians. There’s literally no one like him.
But now that Walz is running with Vice President Kamala Harris against Trump and Vance, Republicans are trying to “Swift-boat” him — denigrating his service the way they did with Vietnam veteran John Kerry 20 years ago.
They claim Walz stole valor and left the Army to avoid going to Iraq. It’s a playbook Republicans also used against Walz when he ran for governor of Minnesota.
And it failed then. As it turns out, when voters hear about the quarter century Walz spent as a citizen soldier and the time he has spent since, fighting for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to get the benefits they deserve, they don’t see what Republicans do.
Instead, they see a rare kind of veteran in politics who can cut through the self-serving B.S., rather than adding to it.
Join Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and many others on Saturday, Sept. 7, in Brooklyn, New York, for “MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024,” a first-of-its-kind live event. You’ll get to see your favorite hosts in person and hear thought-provoking conversations about what matters most in the final weeks of an unprecedented election cycle. Buy tickets here.
Chris Hayes
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday on MSNBC. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “A Colony in a Nation” (W. W. Norton).
Allison Detzel
contributed
