Mr. Potato Head

We’re encouraged, often, to look the other way, out of politeness, a concern for privacy, or concealment, or avoidance. Put yourself in their shoes, we say, choosing to be silent, afraid of being indecorous. And the kid next door who pulls the wings off flies, and you wouldn’t trust alone with a puppy, never gets noticed until forty years later, when the cops start digging up his back yard. You realize that you don’t have to sympathize with your abuser, sometimes you just have to get out of the God damn house.

Photo Credit: MSgt. Alexander Burnett, 82nd Airborne

Pete Hegseth is a passed-over Reserve major, forced out of the Army – in his telling – because they got too woke, a bunch of pussies more worried about a hostile workplace environment than warfighting. In truth, I don’t care what the root causes of Hegseth’s insecurities are. As with Trump himself, it doesn’t really matter what the problem is – was his toilet-training too aggressive? – you want it to go away. I know we should be looking for the cure, a polio vaccine for our moral infantile paralysis, but in the meantime, can’t we just get rid of these clowns? It’s so tiresome, fighting the inertia, when all you want to do is pull the covers up over your head, and sleep ‘til noon. It saps your strength.

Hegseth is purging senior leaders of the American military. The first hit was immediately after he was named SecDef, and he relieved the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. C.Q. Brown, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, CNO. They were followed by Coast Guard commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, and DIRNSA, Gen. Timothy Haugh. Earlier this year, Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army. The latest to go is Gen. Chris Donahue, commander, U.S. Army Europe and Africa. Some of these forced resignations were apparently because the officers were suspected of not entirely enthusiastic support for Trump – the kiss of death is any association with former CJCS Gen. Mark Milley – and some of them signaled Hegseth’s rejection of so-called DEI policies. Some of them, too, were collateral damage in the Pentagon turf war between Hegseth and his Army secretary, Dan Driscoll. (I wrote about this in a column, 04-07-2026: https://gatesd.substack.com/p/the-warrior-enema)

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There’s a real problem, here. Like his boss, Hegseth is a phony, and they’re both consumed by resentments. You may recall Hegseth’s vanity production at Quantico, last September, when he had some 800 senior officers and enlisted show up to be lectured about the “warrior ethos.” (I’m guessing that most of those present have willed it into oblivion.) The point is that Hegseth, who dead-ended his own military career, got to smirk and strut in front of the U.S. command structure, and play toy soldier.

The dismissal of Gen. Donahue seems to have a struck a nerve, although like so many of the deeply stupid things these people have done, I doubt if stays front and center. Our attention span is too short, and their catalogue of trespasses too long. Donahue is from the Spec Ops community, Delta, 82^nd Airborne, jump badge, Ranger tab. He has eighteen deployments, at every rank he’s held from captain to major general, and he was, famously, the last American GI to leave Kabul. There was talk he might have been in line for Army chief of staff, but that’s all it is, now, talk. He’s put in for his retirement.

The obvious question is, How do we lose an officer like this? And how does a no-account goldbrick like Hegseth end the guy’s career?

I saw another new word the other day, or rather, a familiar word used in an unfamiliar context. Legibility. I know what it means, in the classic sense, but in this usage, it stood in for authenticity, or clarity. It has a certain stickiness - also used in a slightly novel way. Legibility is the quality of being immediately readable, without interference or mediation. There’s a famous photograph of Elvis getting the polio shot, just before he went on the Ed Sullivan show. That’s a legible image.

There’s a picture, reproduced at the beginning of this column. It’s a thermal image of Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue stepping onto the ramp of a C-17, just before it lifts off from Afghanistan. This, too, is legible. It doesn’t require explanation, or an apology, or an alibi. It’s what duty looks like.

What aggravates me about this is Pete Hegseth leaving his handwriting all over it, to appropriate the authenticity of somebody who’s taken seriously, as a soldier and a field commander. Hegseth never will be. He’ll always be the guy who abused his authority, and boasted it was manhood.