The ugly Americans

A destroyed Russian tank abandoned in a field in eastern Ukraine. (c. Martin Kuz)

The TV news clip playing on Andriy Konovart’s phone showed him smiling and shirtless on a warm summer day in a past life. Outside Lviv’s regal opera house, he appeared with several of his teammates from the Dynamo water polo club to promote the sport’s national tournament taking place in the city. Wearing swim briefs and caps, the young men, lean and loose-limbed, tossed banter and a water polo ball back and forth. As a crowd gathered, the players chatted with onlookers and posed for photos, their affable manner as natural as the blue skies above.

The segment from 2015 ended after a minute, bringing Andriy back to the present, a cold, ash-gray afternoon in March 2022. So much more than the passage of seven years divided then from now. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine less than two weeks earlier.

The next day, Andriy volunteered for Lviv’s territorial defense force, joining hundreds of thousands of men and women across the country who wanted to protect the homeland. “I didn’t ever think we could be so united,” he told me. “I don’t think Putin did, either.”

Clad in a hooded jacket, knit cap and jeans, Andriy, 27, stood ankle-deep in mud as he guarded the opening to an underground trench near the city’s closed airport. His gloved hands cradled an automatic rifle against his chest, and he wore a small blue and yellow Ukrainian flag patch on his shoulder. His new “teammates” consisted of fellow citizen soldiers with whom he patrolled the surrounding area, where a recent Russian missile strike had destroyed an aircraft repair plant.

Andriy retired from water polo in 2021. The Lviv native played for the Ukrainian national team during his career, and he saw little distinction between competing and fighting for his country. He brought the same unassuming patriotism to both tasks. “I represented Ukraine in sport,” he said. He smiled as he had on TV when the skies and circumstances were brighter. “Now I represent it in war.”

Andriy Konovart, who played for Ukraine’s water polo team before retiring, stood outside an underground trench in the western city of Lviv during the second week of Russia’s war against Ukraine in March 2022. (c. Martin Kuz)

I recalled Andriy’s modesty — and his flag patch — as I watched highlights of last week’s championship game of the World Baseball Classic. Down 2-0 to Venezuela in the 8th inning, Team USA, stacked with All-Stars and their XXL egos, tied the score on a Bryce Harper home run. After rounding third base, the two-time MVP offered a military salute and repeatedly jabbed his American flag shoulder patch before braying as if about to birth a foal.

And so there it was yet again on the international stage: the crass, sneering, preening, half-witted face of America in the age of Trump, the face of a MAGAified nation that the world recognizes as nativist and imperialist, joyless and soulless, boorish and belligerent.

Fortunately, on this occasion, hubris delivered comeuppance when Venezuela scored a run in the 9th inning to win. A victory in an event as meaningless as a baseball tournament could not avenge the abduction of the country’s president and the violation of its sovereignty by U.S. troops in January. Still, for a night, Venezuelans drank deeply from the chalice of schadenfreude.

Their underdog team had vanquished the self-satisfied and heavily favored Americans, several of whom pulled off their silver medals almost as soon as they received them. Denied the mantle of insufferable winners, they trudged off the field as sullen losers, heads down as they scanned the ground for golden binkies.

Harper’s home run antics made clear that he believed he accomplished something heroic, something befitting a warrior in the artificial American concept of the term. It’s the sort of skewed self-perception that arises from living inside the contradiction of a nation steeped in militarism while less than 1 percent of the population serves in its armed forces. His salute-and-scream typifies a country where people remain so removed from war that most never consider that, in a global context, such a life is one of luxury — an unearned, invisible privilege that fits hand in glove with their unthinking veneration of the armed forces.

Oblivious to the rigors of military service, untouched by the ravages that missiles and drones inflict, far too many Americans — athletes included — conflate sports fields with battlefields. If they ever experienced a day of combat or a night of falling bombs, they would grasp that likening athletic competition to warfare is at once naïve and obscene.

Harper’s juvenile display marked only one example of Team USA’s perverse military fetishism at a time when America and Israel are killing thousands of civilians in an illegal war against Iran and Lebanon. For a locker room speech to the players, manager Mark DeRosa recruited MAGA booster Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who claims he killed Osama bin Laden. Catcher Cal Raleigh wore a T-shirt with the words “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY,” an instructional phrase imprinted on Claymore antipersonnel mines. Developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s, the weapons have killed thousands upon thousands of troops and civilians around the world.

Then there was pitcher Paul Skenes, who played for and “studied” at the Air Force Academy for two years before transferring to another college prior to turning pro. His toe-dip in military culture has endowed him with the kind of performative courage most often associated with a child navigating the big slide at the playground. After pitching the team to victory in the semifinals against the Dominican Republic, Skenes said, “You know, this is what we do in America. We fight and we win.” Hell yeah, son!

Players representing other countries danced, sang and drank shots of espresso to celebrate big moments during games. They smiled and laughed. Their U.S. counterparts chose to flex and snarl. Maybe the Americans imagined that they looked like soldiers, or even that they were soldiers — or warfighters, in the inane, “Call of Duty” lingo of Pete Hegseth.

Whatever the case, their decision to swaddle the team’s collective identity in military idolatry came off as a pitiful attempt to appear bravery-adjacent, revealing a very American cluelessness about war’s realities — and their own complicity in supporting the deaths of innocents. To a man, they lack Andriy Konovart’s quiet valor and moral integrity. Which is to say, if another country invades and occupies the United States in Harper’s lifetime, don’t expect him to stand guard in a trench near the closed airport of his hometown. Who would be there to watch him jab his flag patch?

A destroyed apartment building stands vacant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. (c. Martin Kuz)

After Donald Trump himself, nobody embodies the crass, sneering, preening, half-witted attitude of MAGAified America more than Hegseth. The self-styled “secretary of war” would have made a fitting mascot for Team USA given the aggressive ignorance he conveys with his appearance and rhetoric alike. Beyond his crusades to murder fishermen “narco-terrorists” at sea, purge women and minorities from the military and infect the ranks with a virulent strain of Christian fascism, he possesses an undisguised bloodlust for killing Muslims in general and Iranians in particular.

Hegseth has talked about Iran for years in a manner that lays bare a pathological hatred for the country of 92 million people. (A recent Guardian piece traced the history of his Tehran Derangement Syndrome.) The former Fox News propagandist once tarred the nation as “America’s mortal enemy,” and judging from his comments since the U.S. and Israeli militaries began attacking Iran and Lebanon, he asks ChatGPT to write his speeches in the popular Biblical War Crimes font.

“We negotiate with bombs,” he said on Tuesday. At a press briefing earlier this month, he gloated, “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” At another: “We will keep pushing, keep advancing — no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Hegseth’s frat-boy malice and mouth-breather IQ have inspired Pentagon staffers to nickname him Dumb McNamara. More seriously, military and legal experts point out that his vow of “no quarter” could constitute a war crime under U.S. and international law. In a published analysis, Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group, explained the reasons for the ban on denying mercy to enemy personnel.

“The rule serves humanitarian purposes by prohibiting the murder of those no longer engaged in hostilities,” he wrote. “And it serves a practical military purpose insofar as an enemy who believes surrender will not be accepted has nothing to lose by fighting to the death.” Military leaders risk individual liability for failing to show mercy, Finucane added, noting that German officers tried for war crimes at Nuremberg after World War II faced charges of “refusal of quarter.”

In other words, within two weeks of America and Israel launching a war of choice, Hegseth earned comparisons to Nazis even as he bears an uncanny resemblance to Carl Spackler, the gopher-obsessed groundskeeper in “Caddyshack.” His military of warfighters, meanwhile, demonstrated its warrior ethos — another of his WWE-tinged pet phrases — by committing a probable war crime in the conflict’s first hours on Feb. 28. A missile strike on an elementary school for girls in southern Iran killed 168 people, including more than 100 children ages 7 to 12.

Two days after the attack, the “secretary of war” all but hyperventilated as he crowed about “no stupid rules of engagement” for U.S. troops. Or to paraphrase Skenes, “You know, this is what we do in America. We fight and we win and we murder scores of little girls in faraway places.” Hell yeah, son!

Trump signed an executive order last September to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Hegseth agitated for the switch — no doubt because he thinks “secretary of war” looks way cooler on his Tinder profile — and boasted during the Oval Office announcement that the Pentagon now symbolizes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

For the military that Team USA so slavishly worshipped, “maximum lethality” has meant killing — in lockstep with Israeli forces — nearly 2,000 civilians in Iran and more than 1,100 in Lebanon.1 The war has further displaced 4.2 million people in the two countries. Or to paraphrase Skenes, “You know, this is what we do in America. We fight and we win and we terrorize the masses.” Hell yeah, son!

Hegseth deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. He has channeled his bitterness over America’s “forever wars” into his warrior ethos, codifying a revanchist, post-9/11 mindset that treats all brown people as targets and all Muslims as vectors of evil. In the guise of a Christian avenger, and in a twisted effort to compensate for chronic character deficiencies, he pushes a military doctrine that rejects the laws of war, the strictures of morality and the sanctity of human life.

Like the players on Team USA, he is a small man, convinced that the truest expression of love of country and American greatness is the oppression of others. There’s a word to describe that cruel and poisonous brand of patriotism: Russian.

Etc.

— The Trump regime has already lifted sanctions on Russian oil, reviving the country’s flagging economy and refilling Putin’s war chest while he supplies drones to Iran. Now there’s talk that the Pentagon will divert weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East.

— As part of a parallel war on the press, Hegseth wants to restrict and reshape the editorial mission of the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes. I covered the war in Afghanistan for the paper and later served as a national correspondent based in its Washington office. In my 30-plus years in journalism, I have never worked for a publication — and there have been many — with a more attentive, appreciative readership. What I heard again and again from service members is that they trusted Stripes to tune out the brass and provide the unvarnished truth about conditions on the ground. The troops and their families expect as much from the paper and deserve as much from Dumb McNamara.

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