All served in the army. So far, 18 service members have been killed since the war, a joint operation with Israel, began on Feb. 28.
At the time, President Trump and Hegseth boasted that the war would be over in “four to five weeks,” but the president added that this nation’s military had the “capability to go far longer than that.” With no defined strategy, the president’s war of choice is now in its fifth month with no end in sight.
According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released last week, 68 percent of respondents said that the war against Iran was not “worth fighting.” Yet Trump seems intent on escalating a war that an overwhelming number of Americans do not support.
In addition to soldiers’ deaths, more than 100 troops have been injured since July 7, information that the Pentagon reportedly withheld for almost two weeks. While Trump loves to flex about how the military is hitting Iran “very hard,” he talks far less about the costs of war that go beyond the everyday pain of gas and oil prices that are surging again.
That would be the human toll, the men and women of the US military whose families will never see them again. The longer Trump’s lethal Middle East misadventure persists, more families will join that solemn fraternity of grief and loss now present in four more towns and cities across the nation.
Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois knows well the real cost of war. In 2004, while in the Illinois Army National Guard and serving as a Blackhawk pilot in Iraq, her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. She lost both legs and partial use of her right arm.
During a CNN interview on Tuesday, Duckworth laced into Trump for his mismanagement of this war.
“First and foremost, Trump is the one who started this war. Trump is the one who started this war without any actual plan for how he was going to execute the mission,” Duckworth, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said. “So the blame for those 18 service members’ deaths [lies] at the feet of the president of the United States. It sits on the Resolute Desk in front of him in that gilded Mary Antoinette of an Oval Office that he’s turned it into.”
On Wednesday, Trump was asked by a reporter what he has to say to the families of fallen soldiers who died in a war that “Americans are strongly against.” Citing an unnamed, and probably nonexistent poll, the president falsely claimed that while Americans don’t like higher gasoline prices — the national average is $4 a gallon — “they’re not against the war.”
That’s a lie, and Trump knows it, although it’s also known that his Cabinet and staffers generally opt to make the president feel like the genius that he is not as they tell him what he wants to hear instead of the truth.
With no way out of a quagmire of Trump’s own making, the United States, as of Wednesday, had bombed Iran for 11 straight nights. As long as this escalation continues, more American service members will die.
Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware where the remains of the four service members were returned to American soil on Wednesday. Hours before the ceremony, Trump said that “one of the hardest things to do as a president” is to honor those whose lives were lost in service to their country. But with no plan to get their fellow soldiers out of harm’s way, this dignified transfer for these fallen heroes was marked by the indignity of dying in a misbegotten war that never should have been.
This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. Sign up to get Outtakes in your inbox each Thursday.