What did you do in the war, Daddy?
“I was on the front lines, stringing bands of concertina wire along the border.”
Concertina? Were you in the Army band?
“No, no, not a concert. Concertina wire is razor wire, very sharp and painful. It keeps people out. Or in.”
What people?
“Migrants from Central America, thousands of them coming to the U.S.A.”
Why are they coming here, Daddy?
“Because they are fleeing gang wars, hunger, rape and murder back home — they’re desperately poor, mostly women and children, seeking safety by walking hundreds of miles to our Land of the Free.”
So why the Army? Don’t we have a Border Patrol, Customs agents, state and local police, National Guard troops? And couldn’t a few local contractors handle the wire-stringing job, instead of deploying 6,000 active-duty troops and tons of equipment, costing taxpayers about $210 million?
“Stop making sense.”
But it doesn’t make sense.
“It doesn’t have to if you’re President Trump. The congressional elections were coming up and he needed to scare people into voting for his party, so he used the Army as his political prop. We soldiers know this, but it’s not our job to tell the commander in chief how to deploy America’s fighting forces. So we’ve spent the whole holiday season down on the border idly stringing concertina wire. Now, with the election over and no border “crisis” having occurred, we’re being sent out to take down some of the wire.”
But don’t think the commander in chief is unappreciative of our soldiers’ work on his behalf. While he didn’t bother to thank the troops he sent to do concertina duty, he did take a moment during his two-week Thanksgiving getaway at his opulent Mar-a-Lago golf resort to issue best holiday wishes to all the military members deployed around the globe. Afterwards, he told reporters: “Nobody’s done more for the military than me.”
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
