Not Nearly Long Enough

Sometimes a single sentence tells you more about the character of a person than a whole book could. On Friday, August 14, standing on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, President Trump gave us such a sentence.

A reporter told him that the families of sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln were worried about the conditions their loved ones were enduring — reports of moldy showers, food shortages, a mental health crisis serious enough that sailors have gone overboard. "No, they're not," the President said, dismissing the families' fear outright. Then came the second question: had the deployment, by now past 260 days and a modern record for consecutive time at sea, gone on too long?

"No, no, no," he said, leaning toward the press corps as if to make sure the words landed. "Not nearly long enough."

Then he turned and walked away.

I have thought of little else since I read those words.

I could not help but think of my father.

My father was a gunner on a B-29 in the South Pacific during the Second World War — a position, those who know that war will tell you, of terrible vulnerability. When he shipped out, my mother had just given birth to my sister, Melinda. She was left to raise an infant largely alone, though she had family and friends who helped her through it, as families did in those years. Every so often my uncles, trying in their rough way to prepare her for the worst, would say to her: "You know, he's probably not coming back."

She waited on his letters. He wrote to her weekly, sometimes more, counting down the days until he would be home. I have imagined, more than once, what it must have been like for a young mother to hold an infant in one arm and a letter in the other, doing the arithmetic of survival with every page.

I cannot imagine Franklin Roosevelt looking at a woman like my mother and telling her that her husband's time in that turret, over that ocean, in that danger, had not gone on nearly long enough. I cannot imagine any American president saying it — until Friday, when one did.

It would have broken her.

And here is where the sentence becomes, for me, unbearable in a particular way: it was spoken by a man who has never worn his country's uniform for a single day. Whatever one makes of the deferments that kept Donald Trump out of Vietnam, the fact remains that he has never known what it is to wait for a letter, or to write one home from someplace his family feared he might not leave. He has never asked a mother to entrust a husband to the sea. And yet he stood before the families of men and women who have spent nine months on a warship, in combat, cut off from their own children by a record-setting expanse of ocean and time — and told them it was not enough.

Where does such a sentiment come from?

I do not ask that rhetorically. I ask it as a question of moral formation, because it is the question a priest is trained to ask. A man does not arrive at "not nearly long enough" by accident. That sentence is the residue of a lifetime spent never having to count the cost that other people pay. It is what contempt sounds like when it has stopped bothering to disguise itself as concern. Sacrifice, for such a man, is not something felt in the body or grieved in the heart; it is a resource, infinitely available, belonging to other people.

My mother did not have the luxury of that distance. Neither did my uncles, who loved my father enough to prepare her, however clumsily, for the possibility of losing him. Neither did the thousands of families this week who are watching the news for word of the Lincoln, wondering whether the ship that has kept their sailor away for nearly nine months might, God willing, finally come home — only to hear their commander in chief suggest that nine months was insufficient.

I think, too, of the young men and women themselves — the sailors and Marines who did not choose the length of this deployment, who have gone more than 260 days without so much as a port call, who are, by every account reaching us now, exhausted, frightened, and far too much alone. They did not ask to become a talking point on a tarmac. They asked only to serve their country and to come home to the people who are waiting for their letters, the way my mother waited for hers.

My heart goes out to them. They have left the comforts of home and given something of themselves that most of us will never be asked to give. Whatever else is said about this war, about this deployment, about the politics surrounding it, that much ought never to be in dispute: their sacrifice deserves gratitude, not a sneer.

My father came home, in the end. Not every gunner did. My mother spent the rest of her life, I believe, quietly grateful for every day past the one my uncles warned her about. I wonder whether the families of the Lincoln's crew will be granted that same grace — and I wonder, too, whether the man who told them their wait was not nearly long enough will ever understand what he asked of them when he said it.

Msgr. Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.