(THREAD)

I’m not Jim Gaffigan and I have approximately 3 fans and I’m too old to get a Netflix special, so maybe this isn’t as brave. That being said, like many of you I heard the news of the president disparaging the US military and I need to make a confession.

Having traveled, across the country and the world, to entertain American armed forces over the years, I need to come clean here. At the beginning, it was all very selfish. I did it because I wanted to see cool things: fighter jets, tanks, machine guns.

Yes, I did get to see all those things and many more amazing weapons, facilities and vehicles. But something happened along the way of seeing “things.” I met *people*. And these were amazing people doing the difficult tasks we asked them to do in the most impossible situations.

Men and women stationed at a distant Command Outpost in Afghanistan, where they were shelled by enemy mortars every day at 3pm, like clockwork.

People stationed on a remote 1 mi² island under the threat of dying from the chemical weapons they were destroying to keep *us* safe.

A young woman from Boston, toiling in the 120º heat of the Middle East to pay for college.

A young man, his body broken and burnt from an IED that killed his friends, lying in a hospital in Germany, but strong enough to comfort me through my tearful thank you’s and apologies.

When World War 2 hit home in this country and racism yet again reared its ugly visage, many Japanese Americans were demonized, incarcerated, their homes destroyed and businesses stolen without due process or regard for their rights as Americans.

But a group of such men stood up to prove their love for a country which had forsaken and vilified them, serving in a segregated unit. The 442nd RCT took heavy casualties in impossible missions, becoming the most decorated unit, for its size, in American military history.

Japanese American soldiers freed Jewish prisoners from German concentration camps, even as they themselves had family in concentration camps back home.

My uncle served in the 442nd, and was killed in action in Europe. He is buried at an American military cemetery in France.

Is my uncle a loser and a sucker? Are any of these men and women, of whom we ask so much, losers and suckers? Are the POWs, the KIAs, the MIAs all losers and suckers?

I suppose they would be, to a coward who cheated his way out of such service.

When a comedian says, “Let’s give it up for the troops,” it’s a cheap pop, an empty and pandering gesture to garner applause.

I hope this thread does not come across as that, though some may dismiss it as such.

But this isn’t that.

This is, “Let’s give him up for the troops.”

Though I never served, I am grateful for the opportunity to have met our troops and see their struggles and sacrifices.

Turns out there *are* suckers and losers in America, but they are the people that enable and applaud this shameful grifter of a president.

Vote. Him. Out.