Trump’s choice of Hegseth will be corrosive to the U.S. military’s honor

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In September 2016 I went to a televised forum with the two leading presidential candidates and asked Donald Trump about military policy in Iraq, where I served with the Marine Corps several years earlier. He told me America should “take the oil.” Then he said it again: “Take the oil.”

A dumb answer, but a clear one. If we’re going to put American lives at risk, let’s get something out of it. Something concrete, something valuable. You can’t touch an ideal, but you can shove your grasping hands deep into a black pool of liquid gold. A few years later, explaining our military presence in Syria, Trump said he was keeping troops there “only for the oil.” What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.

When it comes to articulating a vision of American warfare, Trump is the least hypocritical president of my adult life. He does not promise to spread democracy or human rights or a liberal, international rules-based order. He does not claim we’re a shining city on a hill. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he has said instead. “What? You think our country’s so innocent?” He has stated smaller, less idealistic goals: our borders, secure; our economy, soaring; our wars, ended. These are most presidents’ goals, of course, but Trump expresses them plainly, even crassly.

Given this, it seems unlikely that Trump will start a disastrous war in a faraway country to “free its people and defend the world,” as George W. Bush did, or make appeals to international law in Ukraine while ignoring it in Gaza, like President Biden. And if and when Trump does kill people overseas, he’s more likely to claim they “died like a dog” than perform hand-wringing the way Barack Obama did about how he wanted to save them but “the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.” After so much presidential windbaggery, Trump’s bracing cynicism is almost refreshing.

But this sort of amoral pragmatism, especially in matters of war, has its limits and dangers. It will inevitably run up against a core belief in America’s identity as a nation, the belief in the moral obligation to strive to conduct and fight wars honorably. It’s a belief I still hold and that millions of Americans do, too.

When I started Marine training, our instructors constantly harangued us candidates about the core military virtues and told story after story of past heroes who had lived them. For men and women to trust their lives to one another in combat, you need a shared set of values and commitments, which is why all great militaries teach their recruits something closer to religious devotion than business calculation.

Is it all a sham? JD Vance, our vice president-elect and an Iraq war veteran, seemed to have come to an answer about his service when he said, simply, “I was lied to.” And what do you call a man who puts his life at risk because he fell for lies? Apparently, you call him a sucker. Or a “loser.” That’s what a former Trump chief of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, claimed that Trump had called the Americans who died fighting in World War I — troops who had been told they were fighting to make the world safe for democracy: losers. After all, if we measure virtue in profit and loss, then American troops who lost their lives in war really are losers.

So the incoming Trump administration isn’t offering our military a moral purpose. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Vance claimed at the Republican National Convention; they’ll fight only to defend their homeland. It’s a smaller vision, fitting for a country that has lost faith in itself.

How a second-term President Trump will lead the military is an open question. His inconstancy and lack of ideological commitment make it impossible to know. But his proposed cabinet appointments give us at least some idea of what he hopes the future will be. And more than any other pick, it is Pete Hegseth, whom Trump has chosen to be the next secretary of defense, who troubles me.

There’s a swirl of controversies and concerns around Hegseth that make it difficult to focus on what’s important. But most notable to me, because it strikes at the core of the honor of the American military, is his signature achievement as a political advocate: helping persuade Trump to intervene in the cases of three men accused or convicted of war crimes. Afterward, Trump publicly heralded the men as “great warriors” and later invited two of them, including Clint Lorance, onstage at a private fund-raiser.

Here’s how Lorance earned that invitation.

In 2012 he was sent as a new commander without combat experience to lead a platoon of young soldiers deployed to Afghanistan with the largely hopeless mission of defeating the local Taliban and winning over the area’s population. One day he threatened to kill a farmer and his son, a 3- or 4-year-old boy, and a day later ordered his men to shoot within inches of unarmed villagers, including near children. “It’s funny watching” the villagers “dance,” he said. Lorance’s men, combat veterans, eventually balked at his orders and refused his instructions to make a false report about taking fire from the village. The next day he ordered fire on unarmed Afghans over a hundred yards from the platoon, killing them, and radioed a false report claiming the bodies couldn’t be searched.

And here the difference between an idealistic and an amoral vision of America becomes concrete. Because those soldiers, who’d seen combat and watched their friends suffer terrible wounds, turned in Lorance that evening, 14 of them eventually offering testimony against him in the court-martial that found him guilty of second-degree murder.

That testimony meant nothing to the elite media personalities like Sean Hannity and Hegseth who took up Lorance’s cause, though. Trump’s pardon of their former leader was a final betrayal for the troops who served in that platoon.

One of them said that he attempted to kill himself when Lorance became a cause célèbre in right-wing media. Even beforehand, the killings haunted them. “It tainted our entire service,” another explained. Soldiers from other units called them the “murder platoon.” “I thought of the Army as this altruistic thing,” yet another veteran of the unit reflected. “The Lorance stuff just broke my faith.”

Anyone who knows the history of America’s wars knows that such faith has often been betrayed, but that’s not the same as saying that it should be or that it always will be. I choose to believe in an America that might honor that faith, despite the worst my country has done and despite what it might do over the next four years. How else to respond to an age of cynicism than to point out, steadily, without undue histrionics, that Americans have proved capable of more in the past and they can prove capable of more in the future? That our notion of our homeland has always been tied up with grand moral principles.

And this faith I have, despite it all, is tied up in my experience in the Iraq war, the same war that left Vance so embittered. Because, by and large, the men and women I served with really did want to make the world a better, safer and more democratic place. Sure, they wanted college money and adventure, too, but they were less like Lorance than the men of his platoon, decent people who wanted to do something good and be a part of something larger than themselves. Peculiar and crass and funny and filthy and heroic, they expended monumental efforts that reaped little reward, but that’s hardly their fault. And though their aspirations, shared by so many Americans, are an untapped resource in politics, that doesn’t mean they’re not still there, waiting.

Right now, I’d like to speak up for the suckers and the losers. After all, I am one. I was a 21-year-old dupe, taking the oath of office. Twenty years later, I’m still convinced that America can be a force for good in the world and that soldiering is an honorable profession. I still haven’t learned my lesson, nor have I lost my admiration for those who, even when poorly led by men without honesty or honor, tried to serve their country well.

There may be benefits to Trump’s skepticism about major military commitments abroad. But a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.

Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war, is the author, most recently, of the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.