I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the people who choose to serve in the military and to run for public office. [1/12]

Senator Daniel Inouye comes to mind. He was the first Japanese American in Congress. He died in 2012, when he was 88 years old. [2/12]

He was only 21 years old when he was very nearly killed leading his platoon against a heavily defended Nazi fortification on the Gothic Line, in Italy, in 1945. Inouye was shot in the stomach and in the leg. His arm was shattered, and later amputated, without anesthesia. [3/12]

Many decades later, Inouye told me about how the hell of war had shaped him. It made him reject the very idea of tribalism. To Senator Inouye, you either had moral courage, or you did not. [4/12]

“I don’t believe in partisanship,” he told me once, describing the unexpected friendships that developed from his stay in a Michigan hospital where he recovered from his war injury. [5/12]

It was there that Inouye met Bob Dole, and they mused about what it’d be like to run for Congress someday: “We were just one mile apart, and one week apart, when we got injured,” Inouye later told me. [6/12]

Inouye always expressed gratitude for the events that shaped his life. He had a tradition of taking his wife to the same restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean every April 21 on the anniversary of his war injury. [7/12]

I once asked him once what his life would have been like if things turned out differently. “It would have been terrible and dull,” he said. [8/12]

I also asked him, in 2011, “Can you believe that Donald Trump is a potential candidate for the Republican party?” [9/12]

He told me then: “I would not push him aside.”
I pressed: “You take him seriously?”
It wasn’t Trump, he warned, but Trumpism: “The message, I take seriously.” [10/12]

So when I learned that President Trump said amputees must stay out of military parades—“Nobody wants to see that,” Trump said—I thought again of those who choose to serve in the military, and to run for public office. And I thought again of Daniel Inouye. [11/12]

Please read every word of this story: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/ [12/12]