Samantha Tucker
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read
My brother, the hero.

When Trump mentions Arlington I turn off the TV.

My brother’s company commander is buried in Arlington. The company commander’s wife moved, children, pets, grief, all, to Virginia, in closest possible proximity to her hero. I don’t doubt she’d have moved in closer if she could’ve.

My mother could not bear the distance, could not move. My mother buried my brother in Colorado Springs, five minutes from her house, his marker beneath the shadow of Pikes Peak. My brother waits there beside several other soldiers and a tree we planted, finally in bloom.

I have been to Arlington once. It was 2009, a year and a half since my brother, Iraq. Michelle Obama invited my husband and me to the White House. The previous sentence sounds very adult. I did not feel adult. I felt 25 and scared and angry and so fucking bewildered. I graduated high school in 2002, less than year after the towers fell, less than a year after our dad died of a drug overdose. I graduated college in 2006, right in time for the economic crisis, in time for raging under and unemployment. I thought things could only get easier. I thought —

Arlington. It is beautiful in a way you can only feel in the pit of your stomach. Rain and mist and rolling green, horse-drawn carriages and flags and perfect uniform rows of marbled white. Men and women from every American-fought war are interned in land taken from Robert E. Lee. There are no statues of him there, but you can find the graves of thousands of slaves who tilled the land, farmed and grew before and after the man, who led and lost the south, failed to keep them in chains.

Do you understand? Do you understand who Trump unearths when he calls upon Arlington?

America is built, maintained, upheld, by the poor and oppressed. It is the poor, the disenfranchised, it is people of color and immigrants like my grandmothers, who fight the wars and work the shit jobs and toil and toil and toil for America.

My grandparents all settled close to Fountain, Colorado. Fort Carson is there, and my enlisted grandpas, my dad, my uncles, my brother, my sister, all served. I went to school with kids who inherited the uniform, wore/wear it proudly. As a community we look like a United (Camouflaged) Colors of Benetton advertisement. We are black and Korean and Mexican and German and Japanese and Puerto Rican and poor and differently-abled and trans and LGBTQ and middle-class and hetero-norm and white, and you keep sending us to bullshit wars that kill innocents only to make the rich white men richer, God Bless America.

That phrase was coined by Nixon, exactly thirty-five years before my brother’s, his commander’s, deaths in Iraq. April 30, 1973, Nixon addressed the nation about Watergate, finished with God Bless America. April 30, 2008, my brother drives his MRAP over a roadside bomb, God Bless America.

History repeats itself when power doesn’t exchange hands. Or when power exchanges hands and all the hands look the same and all the same-looking hands are in the rest of our pockets.

This smug draft-dodging motherfucker dares invoke Arlington?

Fifty percent of you voted for this. Many of you probably serve yourselves. I mean, you serve in the military. You’ve convinced yourself 45 cared, maybe because he’s white like you, or he is vulgar like you. Maybe because of her emails, haha. Maybe because you hate women and you just don’t know it yet. Again, maybe because you’re white. Because you’ve convinced yourself the American Dream is a reality, because it gives you a sense of control, because if you just work hard enough, if you just reach and reach and reach...

It is not unlike Arlington in my stomach, the way I feel when I see his orange visage. It is something like, What have we done? How could we? It is despair, bleak and gnawing. I feel it when I see the faces of the black men and women in Ferguson, in Charlottesville, in Columbus, Ohio, in America, where white supremacy is infinite in its reach and destruction. It is my grandmother, who will never make it back to South Korea, bowing at my grandfather’s headstone and scrubbing it with Pledge, chanting, “Thank you, Husband. You work so hard. You were a good father. You serve. I love you.” It is my mother’s face, caving and crumbling, waking up to remember her son is gone forever.

This feeling, this helplessness, this sinking cold in my gut, is the endless realization that my brother — Specialist Ronald Tucker, Ronnie, 21 at his death, blue-eyed and silly, kind and loving and reckless and funny —he died needlessly, in a mistaken war, as they all are, really. He died. We are done. He is dead.

And you don’t get any of that, Donald Trump. You don’t get my brother’s death, or any other soldier’s. You don’t get Arlington.

You don’t get it.

)

Samantha Tucker

Written by

www.theamericandreamstartshere.com

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