Last week Donald Trump and Iran’s president signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding, and the press called it peace.
Maybe it holds. I sincerely hope it does for thousands of reasons, but, mostly for the lives in the crosshairs.
I spent 22 years in the Army. I flew and walked combat missions in Desert Storm and Iraq. I sent men and women into danger and carried the weight of it long after the headlines faded. I have never once rooted for a war to keep going.
But I want to tell you something that gets lost the minute the cameras leave and the politicians start their victory laps.
The cost of service does not end when the shooting does.
It never has.
We have already lost at least thirteen Americans in this war, and hundreds more came home wounded. Those families do not get a ceasefire. Their loss does not get renegotiated in sixty days in Switzerland.
And here is the part nobody puts on a recruiting poster: even when we are not at war, the uniform still takes everything.
I learned that as a young scout pilot. The most dangerous flying I ever did was not always over a target. It was at midnight, dead tired, low on sleep, training for the day we prayed would never come.
Training is not the easy part. Training is exhausting, it is relentless, and it is just as deadly.
Don’t take my word for it. Take the Pentagon’s own words. Noncombat accidents have killed more American service members than enemy fire every single year since 2015. A government watchdog found that Army and Marine vehicle accidents alone, outside of combat, killed 123 troops in a single decade.
Not in a war. In training.
And it is happening right now, in the quiet, while the cameras are pointed at the Strait of Hormuz.
The same week that deal was signed, a B-52 went down on a test flight just after takeoff from Edwards Air Force Base in California. Eight Americans on board. All of them gone. Service members, government civilians, and contractors, the deadliest B-52 crash since 1982. It did not happen in Iran. It happened over the Mojave Desert, on a routine flight, on American soil, while the rest of the country was reading headlines about peace.
It was not the only one. Last month, Sgt. Devin Seibel of Robinson, Texas, twenty-six years old, was killed in a training incident at Erbil Air Base in Iraq. None of them died in the war everyone is arguing about on cable news. They are just as gone. They all left families behind.
That is the cost we ask young Americans to carry in our name. Not just bullets. Long deployments. Missed birthdays. Kids who learn to walk over a video call. Spouses who hold a whole family together alone for a year at a time. The slow, grinding exhaustion of being ready, always ready, for something most people never have to think about.
I carried it. So did every person I served with. We did it gladly. But we did it with one basic, reasonable expectation: that the people who hold the power to send us, and the power to bring us home, would treat that responsibility with the gravity it deserves.
That is the whole ballgame. The burden of leadership at any level SHOULD feel heavy.
Something the Army taught me is that leaders are supposed to feel the weight. When you make a decision that puts thousands of lives on the line, you should feel it on your shoulders. You should lose sleep over it. You should be able to look a mother or widow in the eye and tell her why.
I have done that. I have sat down with the widows of my men knowing my decisions are why they are alone on that couch at night. It weighs on me every day.
So when I watch this Congress, I do not see many people who feel the weight.
I see my opponent, Ann Wagner, who twice abdicated her duty to check the White House and continues to ignore her constituents. Not one hard question. Not one demand for answers. Not one word for the families burying their kids.
She sits on the House Intelligence Committee and is silent while a man completely unqualified, BY LAW, to fill the job is currently dismantling the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
That is not steadiness. That is cowardice dressed up as loyalty.
We do not need more cheerleaders in Washington. We do not need more people who will twist themselves in knots to avoid crossing a president. We need leaders who understand that the cost of service is real on the best day and crushing on the worst, and that it does not vanish the moment a deal gets signed.
Service members do not get to clock out. Their families do not get to look away. The very least we owe them is leaders in Congress who refuse to look away either.
Donate to support my campaign now!
That is the job I am running for. Not to give speeches. To feel the weight, and to govern like it.
The war may be ending. The duty we owe the people who fought it is just beginning.
I am going to Washington D.C. to fight for them. Fight for those soldiers whose names you don’t know.
I am going to to fight for working Missourians.
Fight for the struggling families battling billion dollar companies with no help.
Fight the oozing corruption that is costing every single American as their tax dollars are thrown away or stolen like Monopoly money by billionaires and criminals.
I am going to Congress armed with a lifetime of carrying the burden of leadership and I will never take it off my shoulders.
It’s time we had someone in Washington D.C. representing Missouri who feels that weight. I would be honored to have your help carrying it.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.