Knock Walz for His Politics, Not His Military Service – Kevin D. Williamson

Tim Walz has exactly the kind of dopey, smug left-wing politics you’d expect from a Minnesota public school teacher. Republicans’ trying to knock his military service instead may be the dumbest thing I have heard in a long, dumb political season. 

Walz and his Republican opposite number, J.D. Vance, have something in common: Both men are veterans who never did any fighting per se. Vance is a Marine who served in a public-affairs role in Iraq, while Walz served for a quarter-century in the National Guard, including deployments to Italy, a mission that was—somehow, in our stupid times, this phrase has become controversial—“in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.” Neither man was spending a lot of time rappelling out of helicopters in combat zones or kicking down doors in Fallujah. Which is to say: Both men had military careers that were a lot like most military careers. 

People who want to sneer at that kind of service should do themselves—and the rest of us!—a favor and read a book. Maybe even two. Because you do not have to be a veteran, only a literate person, to know what military commanders from Julius Caesar to Napoleon to Dwight Eisenhower understood: Soldiers may perform deeds of great heroism and courage in battle, but wars are won by the support staff, by the logistics teams, by the boring pencil pushers, truck drivers, and back-end workers who make sure that the troops and the bullets and the food and the bandages are where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. Eisenhower never fired a shot at an enemy in the course of his long military career, where his most important talents were administrative and organizational. He did not kill one enemy in combat, but he did organize D-Day—160,000 troops, 7,000 ships and boats, 12,000 aircraft, etc.—and that must count for something. 

Walz’s unit mostly served as guards at military bases—not exactly what Chris Kyle spent his days doing, but there’s a reason they give those guys rifles. Vance’s role as a self-described “public-affairs Marine” (he was a combat correspondent) was part of a larger effort to try to ensure that that combat he was writing about produced the desired effect. Armies and navies are big, unwieldy things with many different roles, none of them unimportant. One of the most admirable military careers with which I am familiar has been mostly communications-oriented. 

These are important jobs. But, at the same time, Walz was a middle-aged high-school educator when he retired from the National Guard to run for Congress. And please be assured that I write the following words with the appropriate degree of self-awareness: He wasn’t exactly a lean, mean, fighting machine in middle age, and he didn’t need to be: It’s not like he was about to be sent out into the field to chase the bad guys around in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

There is real sacrifice involved in the kind of service in which Walz was engaged. (I love Italy,…