Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Allow me to introduce you to the shit detail, an ancient military custom that dates back to Alexander’s time: It is a task, usually mundane in nature, that no one wants to be assigned to. In my day in the army, when my platoon was housed in a wood-frame clapboard sided World War II temporary barracks that was still in use 30 years after it had been built, one of the worst shit details was to be put on what was called “fire watch.” The barracks were heated with coal burning furnaces in the basement providing passive radiant heat that rose through large metal grates built into the particle board floors.

Fire watch duty consisted of staying awake for a 12-hour shift and constantly shoveling coal into the furnace to keep the fire going and the heat rising. It was a perfect shit detail: tedious, dirty, hot, and terminally boring. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to be put on fire watch duty, and yet with two platoons assigned to each two-story barracks building, soldiers could expect to be on the fire watch shit detail at least once a month when the unit was in barracks and more often when some soldiers were assigned to field duty or deployed on temporary assignments and there were fewer soldiers present for duty.

I bring up the subject of shit details as an example of the somebody’s-got-to-do-it nature of so much there is in military life. Somebody also had to pull KP duty, helping the cooks in the mess hall with stuff like peeling potatoes, scrubbing pots and pans, swabbing out the kitchen and mess hall floors with a mop, and doing many other routine tasks involved in keeping an infantry company fed.

One of the shit details that had to be pulled every day was emptying out and refilling with water the red painted #10 tin cans that sat on little shelves along the wall and were mounted on the square wooden columns that ran in two rows down the middle of the barracks. The water had to be changed every day, because guys would use them to put out cigarettes and as trash cans. At the time, the tin cans were the army’s idea for fire extinguishers because real ones were too expensive.

Army barracks aren’t heated by coal burning furnaces anymore, nor does the army use #10 tin cans full of water to put out fires, and they did away with company mess halls staffed by soldiers serving as cooks and doing KP duty decades ago. But I know as well as I know my own name that the army still has plenty of reasons for soldiers to pull shit details of one kind or another, in addition to whatever their real assignments are, such as infantryman, serving on a howitzer or HIMARS rocket battery, assignment to an engineer company that it erects temporary bridges or builds and reinforces bunkers and berms and other defensive battlements.

Right now the Pentagon is making plans to deploy several brigades of soldiers to the border with Mexico in the states of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. They’re going to need soldiers to put up temporary shelters like tents, to lay barbed wire along sections of the border where Trump’s famous wall was promised but never built, and for dozens of other jobs that will support soldiers when they are on temporary assignment away from the post to which they are regularly assigned.

At a time when the military is running 10 to 15 percent behind in its recruiting goals, the Pentagon is going to need every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine they can get to pull both regular duty and the shit details that keep the military running. Which raises an obvious question: what the hell does Secretary of Defense Hegseth, acting on the orders of the president, think he’s doing issuing orders to discharge any and all trans people currently serving as active duty, reserve, and National Guard in the military? There are estimates that as many as 15,000 transgender people are currently on active duty or in the reserves, but it could be more.

Nobody knows the total number for sure, a fact that became painfully obvious in a federal courtroom in Washington D.C. last Wednesday when Judge Ana Reyes, hearing a lawsuit filed to challenge Trump’s transgender ban, asked the lawyer appearing for the Department of Justice a series of questions which he could not answer, including the question about how many transgender people may be affected by the order, how the Pentagon intends to identify them, and how they define “symptoms of gender dysphoria” cited in the order banning transgender soldiers.

The judge had other questions for the DOJ attorney that he could not answer: why is the military so concerned with soldiers who take hormone therapy for gender reasons? Are they also concerned with soldiers who take hormone therapy for other medical conditions such as thyroid problems? If the military is going to target one hormone-related medical issue, why not other conditions such as diabetes, infertility, or depression and anxiety?

The judge wanted to know how the Secretary of Defense could allege that the “lethality, readiness and war-fighting capability of our Force” was negatively affected by transgender service members when the Pentagon had no idea how many of them are serving. Hegseth’s order referred to three studies done by the Department of Defense to support why transgender service members should be discharged, but when questioned about the reports,

it turned out that the DOJ attorney had not read them. Judge Reyes had to adjourn the hearing for 30 minutes so the DOJ lawyer could find a place to sit down and read the reports that he was relying on in court. When he had read them and the judge asked him to compare them to the quotes Hegseth had pulled from the reports, it turned out that Hegseth’s quotes were inaccurate or incomplete or contradicted by the actual findings of the DOD reports. Hegseth had also misquoted the reports in public statements and posts on X. The judge gave the DOJ lawyer until Monday to come back with a retraction by Hegseth of his inaccurate and misleading statements and quotes from DOD studies of transgender soldiers in the military.

It didn’t stop there. The lawyer for the Department of Justice said that $5.2 million was spent annually by the Pentagon on treatments for gender dysphoria. The judge asked him how much the Pentagon spent annually on Viagra. When the lawyer said he didn’t know, Judge Reyes informed him that the Pentagon had spent $42 million on Viagra during 2024 alone. “It’s not even a rounding error, right?” the judge asked. “If it’s a cost per service member, it does matter,” the DOJ lawyer answered meekly.

Hegseth’s order banning transgender service members states that if brought up for discharge, they can apply for a waiver. The so-called “waiver” requires the transgender service member to agree to serve “in their sex assigned at birth without clinical distress or impairment of functioning, that they have never pursued medical transition, and that they are willing to adhere to the standards for their sex.”

When the judge asked the DOJ lawyer to defend the “waiver” policy, he couldn’t, and she told him that it amounted to a rebirth of the military’s disgraced and discontinued “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, because receiving a waiver essentially made someone hide their gender identity.

In all, during a hearing that lasted more than five hours, the plaintiffs’ attorneys spoke for five minutes, with the DOJ attorney answering questions, or failing to answer them, and hemming and hawing for the entirety of the rest of the hearing.

It turns out that the Department of Justice has at least one similarity with the U.S. military: The DOJ has shit details too, and this lawyer pulled down one of them: defending a blatantly discriminatory, idiotic policy that will gut our military and deprive patriotic people of their right to honorably serve their country.