Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

One of the great things about the Army, and one to which is given too little thought, is the fact that you don’t get to choose who you serve alongside. No matter the branch of service, you are assigned to the unit you join. You don’t get to pick it. The Army doesn’t care who you are. You are just what used to be called “a warm body,” a number. Second Platoon is down a few soldiers, put him there. The platoon leader for First Platoon got orders for Vietnam, give it to the new lieutenant.

I was that new lieutenant in 1969 at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the Fifth Mechanized Infantry Division. I got Second Platoon. I remember the day I entered the barracks to introduce myself to my new platoon. They were a motley bunch—Black, white, Latino, Southern, Midwestern, urban, from farms and small towns—one was from the northeastern-most town on the coast of Maine. They didn’t request me. I didn’t ask to be assigned to lead them. We were stuck with each other.

You didn’t have to like each other to be assigned to the same bunk in one of the old World War II era barracks we had. You didn’t have to like the guy you were pissing next to in the latrine, the one you stood next to in ranks at Reveille. But you had to do it. You were in the Army, not a college dorm, or a fraternity, or a club. And it was all guys.

I had one guy who was drafted into the Army out of the Hells Angels chapter in Riverside, California. Another came from a farm in Kentucky. One of the Black guys was from the south side of Chicago; another was from Watts in L.A. A couple of guys were drafted during Project 100,000 right out of short sentences in prison. More than one of them tested below the previous low mark for mental aptitude for the military service, in the 30 to 10 percentile range, again because of Project 100,000. One was born in a house in Southern Viginia that didn’t have running water and he didn’t take showers. He smelled so much, one night ten guys ganged up on him and took him in the shower and scrubbed him with a floor brush and soap, turning his skin red and raw, bleeding in some spots. He started showering after that.

Two of the Black guys hated all white people. More than one of the white guys from the South hated Black people. One guy, who would later tell me had been abused as a child, was so depressed, he didn’t talk to anyone, about anything, ever, until one night I had to take him to the emergency room because he had overdosed.

They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them, at least not at first. Whether you liked the guy next to you, or your squad leader, or the platoon sergeant, or the platoon leader, didn’t matter. You weren’t there to like each other. You were there to serve, because Uncle Sam had told you that you had to serve. You couldn’t quit and go home. That would be AWOL at least, desertion if your AWOL lasted long enough. You could end up in the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks, the military’s highest security prison, for walking away from the Army.

It was the same in my grandfather’s Army, and my father’s, and my brother’s. Frank, my brother, was the only guy who could read and write in a Basic Training platoon when he went into the Army in 1966 during the early days of Project 100,000. He wrote letters home for the guys in his platoon bay.

One of the good things about the Army’s practice of throwing everyone together no matter their race, religion, or political beliefs was that many of them learned to get along with each other despite their differences. One of the bad things was that it gave racists and Anti-Semites and others an opportunity to discriminate, sometimes using their rank to do so.

There were several racial murders when I was at Fort Carson, both Black on white and white on Black. It was a bad time in the Army. It was a bad time in America. The Army suffered as the country suffered from the ills of poverty, racism, and the enormously unpopular war thousands of miles away. John Kerry, who would go on to be elected to the Senate, got it right when as a young veteran in 1971, he asked the U.S. Senate, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Memorial Day is the day we have chosen to honor those who died in all our wars, justifiable, honorable, mistaken or otherwise. Many of the soldiers who died in those wars volunteered. Many more were drafted. Some who were killed disagreed with the war they were sent to fight. Some had been at war with the system that sent them to fight before they set a foot on foreign soil. Some, especially Blacks, were victimized by the country that sent them to go overseas and kill people who had done nothing to them.

Many of those who died in our wars didn’t like each other. They were of different faiths, different political parties, different belief systems. Racists commanded Black people they thought were less human than they were. Black people commanded racists of whom they were contemptuous, whom they hated. Anti-Semites commanded Jews. Jews commanded Anti-Semites. Believers served alongside non-believers. Some who fought and died for this country were not even citizens. Gay and lesbian solders who died for this country were not even permitted to serve before “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They hid their sexuality in order to act on their patriotism at a time when the military didn’t even want them, sacrificing more than their lives, because living in the closet, they had also sacrificed their identities.

But they are buried next to each other at Arlington, at Anzio, at Normandy, and in national cemeteries across this country. In the South, those cemeteries are often the only cemeteries in which Blacks are buried with whites. In every military cemetery, there are liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, Communists and John Birchers, men and women, gays and straights, even citizens of foreign countries who volunteered their service to this one.

We honor them—all of them—for their service and for having sacrificed their lives for this country in its good wars and bad. We didn’t ask their political beliefs when they volunteered or were drafted to serve in the wars that claimed their lives.

Nor should we today. Which is why it is so wrong for this administration to openly profess a policy to rid the military of so-called “woke” generals and senior officers and enlisted soldiers alike. To discharge transgender soldiers is equally wrong. There are transgender soldiers who have given their lives for this country, whose caskets were covered by American flags, whose families accepted tri-folded flags from military honor guards when their bodies were buried in the ground.

All of those who gave their lives, no matter their skin color or religion or political party or sexuality, deserve the same honor we bestow upon all our fallen. We honor everyone equally on this Memorial Day. We should welcome their service with the same spirit. To do otherwise dishonors the dead and the democracy they fought and died for.