A Different Kind Of Stolen Valor
Photo by Rocklin Lyons
Here’s a guest post from our very own Perry Gaskins. Perry was kind enough to school me a bit in copyrights, fair use, and protection of original expressions. I really appreciated that, and I try to walk with the angels in my posts. I can count on Perry to smack me if I stray.
It’s no secret the news media has its fair share of hustlers, scoundrels, and fools. Still, only rarely does the press cross over to taking on the military in a personal manner. In a recent piece in Salon the writer Lucian K. Truscott IV comments on the recent resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis with a story titled Good riddance to James Mattis, Trump’s last general:
According to Salon’s own bio, Truscott is a graduate of West Point. Woven into the Mattis hit piece are also minor factoids about how Truscott was also once a platoon leader which is apparently supposed to show Truscott’s bonafides as a member of the warrior clan and resident Salon expert on things military.
But here’s the thing: What the Salon bio doesn’t show is that Lucian K. Truscott IV did indeed graduate from West Point in 1969, and was stationed at Fort Carson for the next 13 months. Then when it apparently became likely that Truscott would be shipped to Viet Nam, our future Salon scribbler resigned his commission and received a discharge “under other than honorable conditions.” Evidently, and without putting too fine a point on it, when Truscott couldn’t be a REMF anymore, he decided to be a coward.
Such a biographical omission, at least it seems to me, makes Truscott’s hypocrisy in the Mattis piece remarkable. What the piece also does is point out that not all stolen valor posers are those wearing a blinged-out biker vest, a do-rag, and hugging an emotional support dog. Sometimes they can hide in plain sight.
And that would probably be more-or-less okay in the overall kharmic scheme of things, except that when the Army kicked Truscott to the curb, he didn’t fade into the background. Instead, he’s spent decades making a living by being a leftist press go-to guy for military issues. First at the Village Voice and now at Salon. Along the way, he’s also written six books. Most of those apparently having a military theme where Truscott is able to cash in on his West Point experience. Because, or so Truscott and Salon would apparently have you believe, being a graduate of West Point is the same as, like James Mattis, spending decades in active service.
My own view is that Lucian K. Truscott IV, on his best day, isn’t qualified to shine James Mattis’ shoes. And the real mystery is why Salon pretends otherwise.
Category: Guest Post, Veterans Issues, West Point
General Lucien K. Truscott, 3D ID CG, VI Corps CG, Fifth Army CG, and one of the great commanders of WWII, turning over in his grave at what his grandson became: A COWARD!!!
I was thinking the same thing.
yeah, about 1400 rpm by now
Ok, that’s why the name sounded familiar to me.. yeah, sad how far from the tree some nuts fall.. just like that asshole SNL clown that attacked the Navy SEAL running for office (sorry, names escape me at the moment).. His hero father that died on 9/11 is probably at the same or similar RPM
He doesn’t deserve the honorable name, “Truscott”.
As Gomer Pyle might say,
“Surprise! surprise! surprise!”
When Lucien K. Truscott IV passes on to the Great Beyond, he and Pat Conroy can share a snivel beer together at the Cowards’ Club…
At least Conroy had the decency to finally confess his cowardice which I wrote about in this American Thinker piece a dozen years ago: Good Enough to Die For I have just read a mea culpa by Vietnam War protestor, novelist and poet, Pat Conroy, who possesses the literary skills to express what I am willing to bet many other older American males, his former brothers at the barricades, also feel, but lack the skills and the honesty to articulate. It is left to men like the politically born again David Horowitz and novelist Conroy to speak for these old troupers of the Left’s long-haired legions, to reveal their long hidden recognition that they were possibly misguided in their protesting but more often than most will ever admit, motivated more by fear of serving in combat than by any sense of moral/political rectitude. For that reason this is an issue that reverberates only within the ranks of male protestors of that era. For the braless, hygiene and make-up challenged young women of the movement, there existed no threat of death or disfigurement in combat, so the purity of their motives is questionable only in the intellectual, not the moral sense. They may have been naïve fools but they weren’t hiding a blushing personal cowardice behind the skirts of world socialism. This then, is an issue of character only for these now old, greying men who, like Conroy, must eventually face the moral consequences of their actions in those turbulent days. As someone who, like most of us, has experienced events in my life where I now wish that I had shown more moral and physical courage, more honesty, and most importantly, more unquestioning love and understanding of family, I know how those failures live with you long after the memories of trying to do so many things right have dimmed. Many of my lapses involved nothing more than minor events where I failed to speak up, or stand up and be counted, or even stand up and be knocked down; but regardless of their minor nature, it is these life… Read more »
I’m reminded of a quote by Shakespeare:
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
The Pat Conroy quote was frpm his book “My Losing Season” There is a bit more context that should be given it so here is a more complete C&P When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth’s house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still. “Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator.” “That’s what I heard, Conroy,” Al said. “I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right.” “Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you,” I said. On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn’t know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears). When Al awoke, he couldn’t move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was well enough to get to… Read more »
I think it might be that self-reflection on one’s own cowardice that fuels some of the valor thieves.
“when it apparently became likely that Truscott would be shipped to Viet Nam, our future Salon scribbler resigned his commission and received a discharge”
Reminds me of two Norwich Acadamy graduates that resigned within 90 days of graduation.
And proud of it.
IMHO Lucian K. Truscott IV isn’t even worth a squirt of a deployed Private’s piss or an MRE fart! The Village Voice and now Salon? If he resigned his Commission that quickly to avoid going to Vietnam, I bet he was likely such a pissy excuse of a Leader that he was heavily worried about getting fragged as well as his own cowardice, IMHO he’s a lower form of life than John “Lurch” Kerry.
“And the real mystery is why Salon pretends otherwise.” You know the answer. It’s so that readers obtain the wrong impression about Truscott and, in doing so, assign undue weight to his views.
There was some additional information that could have been added to this post about Truscott including a gushy New York Times piece from 1979 about how Truscott 4.0 and his ex-wife were like the reincarnation of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. In it, he cheerfully admits to having been a problem troop threatened with assignment to RVN. I didn’t include the link because of the Times’ metered paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/19/archives/successful-writing-couple-become-a-hot-property-an-illustrious.html
The term “fawning” is inadequate…
Believe I read that he wrote an article about heroin addiction which rubbed the brass wrong, and says he was threatened with Vietnam in retaliation, so he resigned. Would love to see that article; would bet money he said something flamingly intemperate. And what West Point grad of the time would NOT expect to go to Vietnam? One suspects he is probably like Che-boy from West Point.
Exactly.
Why should telling someone they might deploy be a “threat”?
If you view a combat deployment as a thing to be avoided…Military service ain’t for you.
Definitely not as an officer.
What a shit this guy is.
Well, well, well. Especially paragraphs 7-9.
https://afflictor.com/tag/lucian-truscott-iv/
Apparently he’s also a descendent of Thomas Jefferson. Pathetic. (Paragraph 3)
https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Lucian_Truscott_IV/
Salon… says it all. TMZ, Salon, Hello Giggles and several others… better content on Yahoo or Huffpo. And that ain’t saying much.
Never went to a salon, I stick to Barber shops that aren’t real clip joints with high prices.
You don’t know what you’re missing.
Isn’t there a minimum service obligation for the free USMA education? Or is that why the OTH discharge?
Seems to me that Uncle Sam should get more than 13 months out of a four year investment during a time of war.
True, I always thought that USMA Graduates were obligated to a minimum of five years of Service after Graduation. To me it’s quite obvious that Lucian K. Truscott IV got his appointment at least partly due to his family lineage and made himself about as worthy of respect as “Hanoi Jane” Fonda by resigning his Commission to avoid going to Vietnam.
He totally gamed the system and the manner in which he did it smacks of pre-planning.
I believe the obligation is five years active and three inactive reserve after graduation from a Service Academy or ROTC. Cutting that short should have consequences. Any O’s on board to confirm?
Not sure about now, but that was the basic obligation during that time frame for the Academies. My background is Navy but I think the same rules applied to Army and Air Force. There were two types of ROTC students then, Regular and Contract. Upon graduation, Regulars were commissioned as USN and had a 4 and 2 obligation (4 yrs. active, 2 yrs. reserve). Contract middies received a USNR commission and had a 3and 3 obligation. Acceptance into some programs requiring additional schooling (e.g. nuclear and aviation) obligated the officer for additional active duty time. Hope this helps.
Thanks!
Minor quibble: I’m pretty sure that when Truscott the Unwilling graduated from West Point that the AD requirement was 5 active/1 reserve if commissioned RA, and 3 active/3 reserve if commissioned USAR (possible, but quite uncommon). The total military obligation when one signed on the proverbial “dotted line” was only 6 years until the latter part of 1980.
There’s also the possibility that Truscott had to repay part of the cost of his education if he was released early UOTHC. Given the success of at least one of his novels, that wouldn’t have been much of a problem financially.
So this snotnosed mistake on his mother’s part didn’t want to go to Viet of the Nam?
Gee whiz, according to Wardogs:
7,484 women (6,250 or 83.5% were nurses) served in Vietnam.
Seems to me that these WOMEN had more guts than Lucian K. Truscott IV. In fact, I think it’s plausible that WOMEN serving in the military in general, and in war zones NOW have more intestinal fortitude – including my Army nurse niece at Baghdad – than this asswipe.
He is not fit to tie their shoes, never mind even look at them.
He should resign his position as a member of his family and stop puffing himself off as an expert on anything other than being a stank ass slacker metrosexual slug.
What a waste of time he is for the effort his father made in cranking out sperm.
What a waste of time he is for the effort his father made in cranking out sperm.
I’m thinking that line will find its way to the log of insults maintained on this site.
4.0 is a member of the Monticello Association and a great-great-great-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson. Truscott apparently inherited some of TJ’s literary skills but none of his patriotism.
When I realized Truscott went to IOBC at Ft Benning, Ga in the summer of 1969, I emailed him. I started 1 Feb 1970 and we discussed some of the events there.
He said he lived off post, and got beaten up one night using a pay phone. He also mentioned at West Point he would fall asleep at the chalk board. After graduation and before IOBC, he also covered the Stone Wall riots in NYC as a freelance, June 28, 1969.
Also I think he mentioned drug use contributed to his ultimate discharge as a Platoon Leader at Ft Carson, Co. My two cents.
Lucien is just another gutless REMF (stateside, no less) who couldn’t man up and do combat arms soldiering like he was trained to do. Anyone doubt he was given his West Point appointment because of who his grandpa was? I served with and under some West Point officers, but none were as big a pussy as Lucien. And yes, Lars, I am entitled to criticize him because I received my RA commission only about a year before he received his; and I went to the Viet of the Nam and did all the infantry stuff he was apparently unwilling and afraid to do, in violation of his oath. So, I am likely better qualified to judge General Mattis, than he is. But after all, it is Salon and their proggy readers who value his worthless opinion.
I concur, circle and initial.
By the Law of Averages you’d think that the commies could find at least one bona fide warrior to help them with their world view.
Even if the bastard was fighting for t’other side…
Where do cowards go for their reunions? Harvard?
I wonder if his great grandfather Lucian Truscott of WW2 is rolling over in his grave at the antics of his progeny?
The original Lucian King Truscott was known as the man without fear when he commanded troops in the European Theater of operations..
Damn. Quite a read.
Arlington Cemetery Link