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Eric Gay/AP Photo

U.S. Army personnel load and secure military tanks for transport to Washington, D.C., May 22, 2025, at Fort Cavazos near Killeen, Texas.

Memorial Day has been somewhat upstaged this year, both by the Army (understandably) and Donald Trump (narcissistically). That's because three weeks later, on June 14, the Army will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its establishment by the Continental Congress in 1775, in order to fend off the British. And it's also because June 14 will be Trump's birthday, so he's ordered the festivities expanded to include a tank-and-armored-vehicle parade down Constitution Avenue to celebrate his power.

Initially, before Trump's re-election, the festivities were to be chiefly confined to the National Mall. There were to be -- are still to be, in fact -- soldiers dressed in the garb and carrying the weapons used in all of the nation's wars, beginning with the Revolution and concluding with I'm not sure what. (Afghanistan? Syria? Yemen? Will there be someone carrying a drone?) Some of those wars were clearly what we call "good wars" -- the Civil War and World War II most particularly. (Of course, Pete Hegseth or somebody like him might decide that we need to celebrate the traitors of the Confederacy, too.)

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As to our other wars, there's the War of 1812, where Trumpians avant la lettre tried unsuccessfully to take over Canada; the Mexican War, of which one young officer who fought in it (Ulysses S. Grant) later wrote, "I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation"; the various 18th- and 19th-century wars to dispossess the native tribes of their land and sovereignty; the Spanish-American war of conquest over Cuba and the Philippines, the latter being followed by the Army's bloody suppression of the Philippine independence movement -- wars opposed by such anti-imperialists as Mark Twain and Samuel Gompers; World War I, which was accompanied by the domestic suppression of critical publications and arrests of the critics; the Korean War, under the nominal aegis of the United Nations, through which the spread of the totalitarian Kim regime was halted; the Vietnam War against communist and nationalist forces, which killed not just more than 55,000 American soldiers but also between two and three million Vietnamese; its Nixon-Kissinger expansion into Cambodia, which led to the Khmer Rouge's extermination campaigns; the Gulf War; the intended-to-be-brief-but-ended-up-nearly-eternal Afghanistan war; and the pointless Iraq War, a neocon miscalculation of catastrophic consequences, which made Iran into a major Middle Eastern power and gave rise to ISIS.

Does that mean that the passing troops should be applauded or booed depending on which war they're dressed to recreate? Of course not, since none of the troops doing the recreating, and, for that matter, none of the long-departed troops who really fought those wars had any say in the decisions to start them, much less any say in how they were conducted. I will note that in most of those wars, we had allies: As the troops recreating the Revolution pass by, the presence of a French schooner in the Potomac could signal that we might well have lost absent the French navy. I'll note, too, that the two singers who've been announced so far are both country music stars, which may reflect the preferences of many of today's soldiers, but who can't really cover the songs that attended each of our wars (e.g., "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" during the run-up to World War I, or Irving Berlin's "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" once we got in; or Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" for Vietnam, which includes these cheery lines:

And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for?

Don't ask me I don't give a damn

Next stop is Vietnam.

Which actually echoes the sentiments of "Strike Up the Band," a George and Ira Gershwin song about a fictional war, which they wrote in the gloomy afterglow of World War I:

We fought in 1917

Rum-ta-ta-tum-tum-tum

We drove the tyrant from the scene

Rum-ta-ta-tum-tum-tum

--

We're in a bigger, better war

For your patriotic pastime.

We don't know what we're fighting for,

But we didn't know the last time.

Songs, in other words, that are a pretty good measure of what Americans have thought of their various wars.

But I certainly don't think booing the passing soldiers is a good idea, and if some groups that have said they'll turn out to protest Trump and the parade descend to verbally abusing the marchers, that would be both unfair to the soldiers and strategically idiotic.

One of the main reasons it took forever for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam, even though the American people clearly had turned against the war by 1969-1970, was that as much as they hated the war, they hated the anti-war demonstrators even more -- a hatred that then-President Nixon and his aides stoked to win support, particularly among the working class, that they might not have been otherwise able to claim.

It was young working-class men, of course, who were doing the fighting and dying in Vietnam. Young college students like me had student deferments that kept us far from the conflict. And when a small but vociferous minority of war protesters did things like wave North Vietnamese flags at anti-war demonstrations, aligning themselves with the very army that was shooting at those working-class Americans who'd been drafted into the war, that so outraged their parents and other working-class Americans who could envision themselves as parents of such soldiers that it became more important to them to suppress those internal enemies than it was to secure a speedy end to a senseless and unwinnable conflict. Anti-war protesters who publicly aligned themselves with the Vietnamese communists, and who denigrated the overwhelmingly working-class soldiers who'd been condemned to fight them, likely managed to lengthen the war by a good two or three years.

I've rehashed this sad saga because there's a chance that some anti-Trump, anti-current U.S. foreign and military policy demonstrators may also verbally abuse the soldiers out for parade on the 14th. A niche sect that calls itself the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is helping coordinate a demonstration for that day. According to the application for a permit that the coalition submitted to the National Park Service, "A military parade celebrating Trump and the Army is an outrageous insult to the American people. What really makes America great is its working people."

This requires parsing. The Army's initial plan was not for a parade at all. Trump's plan in his first term for a procession of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles chugging down Constitution Avenue was nixed because the damage such heavy vehicles would do to the road surface would have cost perhaps $90 million. But this time, a parade there will be, due to Trump's infatuation with such displays, his hostility to D.C. (which apparently extends to its roads), and his thinking it a grand way to reflect and celebrate not so much our power but his. The soldiers doing the marching, however, will be drawn from the very same "working people" whom the protest coalition celebrates. And even if our military, particularly under Trump, may be sent to dubious battles, the soldiers will have no say in that. Besides, this is not only a display of our current prowess but a commemoration of our past deployments, which, as I noted above, have ranged from the heroic (World War II and the Civil War) to the disgraceful (Mexico, the tribes, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). But in none of these conflicts, both the good and the evil, were the soldiers the ones who decided they should be there.

So any counterdemonstration on June 14 needs to target very carefully, as whatever they do will reflect on the broad American left. I'd suggest focusing on Trump's potential to start god-awful conflicts. He's already squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in drones and fighter jets in a senseless slap fight with the Houthis in Yemen. For that matter, he's resurrected the domestic suppression we saw during World War I without there even being a war on which to hang it (hence, his malign misclassification of Venezuelan refugees and immigrants as an "invasion"). I'd suggest focusing not just on the president but also on the Fox network stooge he placed atop our military. And while there always are generals and admirals whose political beliefs descend straight from Attila's, the fact is that most of our top officers tried to keep Trump from running amok during his first term, and some of them have yet to be purged today.

So how about: Army, sí; Trump, no! The Army can go either way; with Trump, there is no trajectory but down.