Image by Israel Palacio.
Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the attacks on his military record began, with media outlets quickly drawing comparisons to Democratic candidate John Kerry’s “swiftboating” in 2004. To put it bluntly, when we discuss the intricacies of Walz’s military record, we miss the larger point being made here: that the cult of military service is widespread and dangerous in the United States.
Responding to attacks by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Walz said at a campaign rally in Las Vegas attended by many enthusiastic hospitality workers:
I was born in a small town in Nebraska where community was a way of life. There are some Nebraskans in the house. They think I’m kidding. They think I’m kidding. 400 people, 25 kids in my class, 12 were cousins. That’s a small town. That’s a small town. But you know what?
My parents and my community taught me to be generous to those around me and to work for the common good. My father was a Korean War-era chain smoker who took me to enlist in the National Guard two days after my 17th birthday. For the next 24 years, I was proud to wear the uniform of this country.
Thank you to each and every one of you who has worn this uniform. And I must tell you, like my father before me and millions of others, the GI Bill gave me the opportunity to get a college education. And just like Tilly (sic), my father was a teacher.
My older brother was a teacher. My sister was a teacher. My younger brother was a teacher. And we married teachers. The privilege of my life was to teach in public schools for two decades. And you may have heard that as a coach I made football a state champion.
Walz fits all the criteria for a certain kind of Democratic presidential campaign: small-town America, family tradition, military service, teaching and football. He was introduced by Tillie Torres, a teacher from Las Vegas. The message was pretty clear, that military service is the natural and honorable phase in the life of a person who goes from being a nobody to being a somebody in the greater American community. The connection between military service and teaching is also not insignificant because high schools across the country are some of the most important recruiting grounds for the U.S. military.
Role model soldier-teacher
I was quite shocked that one of the first images of Walz to be widely circulated was of a serious-looking, seventeen-year-old version of himself in combat fatigues from 1981, holding an M-16. For a candidate who caught the attention of the U.S. media by calling Republicans “weird,” isn’t a seventeen-year-old with a machine gun exactly odd? Walz was, by many accounts, a popular teacher with his students and well-liked by his peers. But the soldier-teacher role model is not a good one, especially for young men.
I don’t know if he ever directly encouraged any of his students to join the military, or what happened to them after they enlisted. But young people, especially high school-aged boys, are easily impressed by the glamour of the uniform and combat through movies, television and video games. This was especially true in the 1980s and 1990s, when political leaders and their friends in Hollywood spent a lot of time rehabilitating the military after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, while demonizing the Vietnam antiwar movement.
Walz joined the National Guard in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which marked the beginning of a massive military buildup and a resurgence of anti-communism and U.S. imperialism. It was not until the end of the decade, however, that the U.S. was again able to send large numbers of troops to far-flung corners of the world to fight wars. Panama, the first Gulf War, and, after 9/11, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq—the latter two were called “forever wars.” The disastrous consequences for the countries the U.S. occupied, and the large number of U.S. soldiers who suffered debilitating physical and mental illnesses, are still felt today.
Walz deployed to Italy only once during the Forever Wars and did not see combat. He spent seven months overseas before returning home. Others from Minnesota were not so lucky. More than 8,000 Minnesota National Guard soldiers and airmen deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2011. Sixteen Minnesota National Guard members died in Iraq, and another 79 received Purple Hearts for combat injuries. Nearly 100 soldiers with some connection to Minnesota were killed in combat during the Forever Wars.
Walz retired from the National Guard in May 2005 and was elected to Congress in a Democratic victory in 2006. Reason magazine summed up his years in Congress in terms of the forever wars as follows:
Despite his strong stance on war powers, however, Walz has also shown a tendency to avoid tough political arguments on the issue. During the troop surge debate, Walz voted to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq within 90 days. But less than five months later, he voted to continue funding the war. This position put him at odds with the majority of his Democratic colleagues.
A similar pattern emerged during Walz’s congressional career. According to voting records kept by the antiwar advocacy group Peace Action, Walz often voted to repeal War on Terror-era Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) while simultaneously voting against restrictions or cuts to military funding.
Walz proved himself to be a reliable voice of Democratic leadership during his years in Congress.
“Domestic unrest”
Another aspect of the military cult is that what the military actually does is never discussed, beyond the blandishments of “serving” or “protecting” our country. Walz spent his entire military career in the Minnesota National Guard. A cursory glance at their history reveals parallels to many others, but it is not a good history, from the suppression of the Dakota Uprising in 1862 to the failed attempt to crush the Minnesota Teamsters strikes in 1934 to the Hormel strikebreaking in 1986 to the defense of the 2008 Republican National Convention against protesters.
This is not just a Minnesota story. The National Guard has deep roots in United States history, dating back to the earliest days of English colonization of North America in the early 17th century, when colonists organized militias to defend against Native attacks and break Native resistance to their expansion. Slave patrols in the Old South were replaced by “militia-like groups empowered to control freed slaves and deny them access to equal rights,” according to the NAACP. They relentlessly and systematically enforced Black Codes, strict local and state laws that regulated and restricted access to work, wages, voting rights and general freedoms for former slaves.
The National Guards or state militias following the 1877 railroad revolt – the closest the U.S. ever came to a workers’ revolution – had to be reorganized in many states after showing too much sympathy for strikers across the country. The legacy of this era is evident. “Cities across the U.S. still bear the physical legacy of the 1877 railroad strike,” according to the Logistics Center for Transportation. “Industry supported Eno. To quell social unrest, many states and cities – with financial support from wealthy business owners – built armories resembling medieval castles to house National Guard units and suppress labor movements.”
When Walz was governor of Minnesota, he deployed National Guard troops to Minneapolis during the rebellion following the police killing of George Floyd, which President Donald Trump praised at the time. This has been no exception in its long history. Minnesota is quite proud of the National Guard’s role in preventing “internal unrest.” The Minnesota Military Museum boasts:
“Since its inception in 156, the Minnesota National Guard has been called to assist the state of Minnesota 91 times to respond to a variety of civil unrest. Minnesota has experienced a variety of racial, labor, and other social conflicts since its founding, and these unrests have been responded to differently by state governments, including the deployment of the National Guard.”
The National Guard in many states recruits soldiers by emphasizing the heroic role they play during natural disasters, as this video shows. The National Guard is sold as do-gooders or “citizen soldiers” who rarely if ever see combat duty, but the post-Cold War reorganization of the U.S. military has resulted in the National Guard being more involved in U.S. military operations abroad, a sharp contrast to the Vietnam War era. Since the end of the draft in 1973, the U.S. military has had to resort to a variety of avenues to recruit its soldiers.
The cult of military service was born in the volunteer army era, and while this means that career politicians like Tim Walz can get into the White House along with Kamala Harris on this basis, for many others it means the road to the graveyard.
