Clarence Page

By CLARENCE PAGE

Syndicated columnist

Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lead us to war against Iran reminds me, as war stories often do, of a scene in one of my favorite war movies.

I’m talking about the unforgettable Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, brilliantly played by Robert Duvall, in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War classic, “Apocalypse Now.”

The strutting, bare-chested Kilgore delivers one of the most memorable lines in cinematic history, as artillery explodes around him and others take cover in foxholes: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning…. Smells like … victory.”

Having just returned a few years earlier from two years of fortunately combat-free service as an Army draftee, I was obsessed like many other veterans with seeing movies that I hoped would help me to make sense of that traumatizing period. My biggest surprise, as a longtime critic of the war that made napalm infamous, was to realize how much I found myself actually liking Kilgore.

The scene conjures the insanity and moral nullity of the Vietnam War, and without justifying or even making sense of America’s role in it, Kilgore in a strange way offers a glint of humanity.

As the narrator Capt. Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, explains, despite Kilgore’s peculiar passion for surfing under fire, you could trust him to protect his own men. He “loved his boys, and he felt safe with ’em,” Willard observes. Kilgore made them believe he would get them through the battle alive.

Vietnam, like other wars, had real heroes. One of these was Milton Lee Olive III, a Chicagoan who received the Congressional Medal of Honor, in April 1966, for falling on a grenade during a patrol in Vietnam’s Phu Cuong province the previous October, saving four of his comrades.

Kilgore is no hero. He is totally committed to the war, moral qualms and other niceties be damned, although he is also willing to sacrifice for his men.

It’s easy to be seduced by Kilgore’s aura, amid the horror and madness of war. And when he cryptically observes, “Someday this war’s gonna end,” we understand that the horror and madness will go on.

All of these thoughts are hard to put out of my mind as I try to make sense of what President Donald Trump calls our current “excursion” in Iran, a war that some observers are comparing to Vietnam, not so much for its duration or casualties as for the rebuke it has delivered to pretensions of American military omnipotence.

Since becoming defense secretary, Hegseth has diligently worked to instill an evangelical bellicosity in the Pentagon.

He hosts monthly Christian worship services for employees. His department’s promotional videos have displayed Bible verses alongside military footage. He prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

It is troubling enough that the Trump administration has ignited a war without such constitutional niceties such as congressional approval. Now the defense secretary’s propensity for using Christian rhetoric to justify the war calls into question the core civic value of the separation of church and state.

In speeches and interviews, Hegseth often argues the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, an ahistorical claim that certainly finds no support in the Constitution. So much for the military’s secular mission and hard-won pluralism.

Sadly, the self-described “Secretary of War” has also been dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within the Pentagon and attacked the feel-good phrase “our diversity is our strength” as the “dumbest phrase in military history.” In the name of “unity” and “warrior ethos,” he has targeted female and minority officers for demotion or removal to restore what he sees as a more traditional force structure.

Critics accuse him of trying to resegregate the military, which sounds about right to me. But his supporters argue he is prioritizing merit and unity over identity-based initiatives, which reveals an unfortunate ignorance on his part of recruiting shortfalls and other problems to which a lack of diversity led in past eras.

It would be easier to overlook these appeals to God if our president hadn’t threatened Iran with genocide last week.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote Tuesday morning on Truth Social.

Just pause to reflect on what it means for an American president to make such a threat. If stated with sound mind, this rises to the seriousness of a war crime. It’s certainly beyond any acceptable moral boundary, as the pope himself pointed out in response.

This is clearly a war few Americans want or ever intended to authorize. As combat veteran and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said after Trump announced a “ceasefire” with Iran, “While I hope a ceasefire is realized, the American people are utterly baffled by how we got here.” Indeed.

She called on the Republican leadership to call the Senate back in session to vote on a War Powers Resolution that would “rein this president in.”

Our careless president and our strutting secretary of defense, talking tough and pretending for all the world to have a warrior’s aura, have stumbled into a catastrophic war whose aims, to the extent that we can discern them, have been dashed by Iranian adversaries whom they never rated.

Again I am reminded of the Vietnam era. It’s time for us, as it says in the Book of Isaiah, to “beat our swords into plowshares.”

E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.