By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
When I was young, I thought my father had two belly buttons.
One was where they’re usually supposed to be, but he had a second indentation a couple of inches to the left and a bit lower down. When I’d ask him about the mark, he’d say, “That’s just my second belly button.”
It wasn’t until I was a bit older when he told me where that mark actually came from. It was a gunshot wound — one of a few he received from fighting in the Korean War as an infantryman in the U.S. Army.
He was too young for World War II; but, when the conflict began in Korea, he was quick to enlist. By the time the hostilities ended, he’d received two Purple Hearts: one for taking a sniper shot in the neck, and another for his “second belly button,” after being gut-shot.
As a result, he carried that scar — and a recurring case of malaria — all of his life.
He never shared combat stories with me as a kid; but, before he died in 2007, I managed to get him to open up about what it was like fighting in a war. My father — a big, tall Swede who wasn’t afraid of anything — often had to pause while recounting a particularly troublesome story of combat. It was clear he didn’t like talking about it. After several uncomfortable silences, I stopped asking.
I took the idea from the stories that he did share with me that I didn’t want anything to do with the military. I’d yet to see a conflict or political situation in my lifetime that warranted bloodshed, and I’d be damned before contributing more to the growing military-industrial complex with my flesh and blood.
But, as the son of a combat veteran, I grew up with a huge amount of respect for those who fought for our country. Even though I’ve gravitated toward nonviolence since I was a kid, I was fascinated by the mechanisms of war; what brought man to deliver such evil onto one another.
My dad was a staunch conservative — a Reagan man through and through. We often disagreed about politics, but we usually met on a DMZ of sorts between our ideologies that allowed for intelligent discussion and debate.
I often wonder how Dad would’ve reacted to someone like Donald Trump. On the surface, I’d say he’d have been a Trump voter in 2016, but probably strayed from him and written in another candidate in the 2020 and the 2024 elections. My dad couldn’t stomach when people bad-mouthed veterans. He didn’t like con artists or grifters, and he showed a particular disdain for any leader promoting authoritarian tendencies.
Like every other conservative until about three months ago, he didn’t like Russia and considered that country one of the greatest threats to our own. His opinion wasn’t formed solely from Fox News; but, rather, from the years he spent with boots on the ground, fighting against a communist threat that most Western nations agreed was a danger to our democratic freedoms. He lived most of his adult life during the Cold War and didn’t forget that.
Now, well… it’s a big, jumbled mess. President Trump is seemingly all-in on Russia. He has reinvented history regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, claiming that it was somehow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s fault for Russia’s invasion. This is the old, “Your face ran into my fist” argument. After the disastrous Oval Office meeting on Feb. 28, Trump and Vice President JD Vance threw him out of the White House and later announced the U.S. would halt all military aid to Ukraine. Zelenskyy has since offered an olive branch, saying he’d consider the deal giving the U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals. As usual, it’s all about money.
If America became a world superpower on Sept. 2, 1945 when World War II officially ended, it’s clear that Feb. 28, 2025 is the day America turned its back on the rest of the world. After 80 years of fighting fascism, communism and attempting to live up to the lofty words written in our founding documents, we abdicated and gave up, leaving a vacuum for another nation to occupy. What especially bothers me is the legion of sycophants cheering Trump on as he dismantles the ideal my father and so many others fought to protect.
Trump won’t always be president — despite his attempts otherwise — but the shame he has brought to this nation will forever reverberate around the world. We have lost our honor, America.
That should concern all of us.
It breaks my heart that it doesn’t.
