What Was In It For Them?

On Arlington, John McCain, a Gold Star family, and a man who apparently can’t work out why anyone would die for something that doesn’t pay

I grew up in a service family, which means I grew up in a world where the names on memorials were never quite abstract. Remembrance wasn’t a poppy you remembered to buy on the way to the shops; it was part of the furniture of the year, and later, when I spent my own working life in the RAF Police, it became part of the furniture of my job. So you’ll forgive me if I bristle slightly when I watch politics doing what it does best these days, which is turning human beings into ammunition. The dead become statistics, the wounded become talking points, grieving families become handy props for whichever argument is fashionable that week, and somewhere in all the shouting we lose sight of the rather inconvenient fact that these people were real. They had parents, wives, husbands, children and mates down the pub, and their ordinary lives were interrupted because they put on a uniform and went where their country told them to go.

Which brings me, with a weary sigh, to Donald Trump and General John Kelly.

Kelly is not some disgruntled intern with a grudge and a book deal. He’s a retired four-star Marine general who served as Secretary of Homeland Security before becoming Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff. His son, First Lieutenant Robert Kelly, was a Marine killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I’m not mentioning that to suggest Kelly should be believed simply because he lost a child, because grief doesn’t come with a truth guarantee. I mention it because it explains why the conversations he later described were never matters of abstract military policy to him. The American war dead included his own boy.

In 2020, The Atlantic published an account of Trump’s attitude towards military service that landed like a mortar round. It claimed Trump had described American soldiers killed in the First World War as “losers” and “suckers”, had questioned the point of military service, and had been reluctant to visit an American war cemetery during a 2018 trip to France (the White House blamed the weather). It also reported that while standing with Kelly at Arlington in 2017, Trump had asked, of the soldiers buried there, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” The original reporting leaned heavily on unnamed sources, and Trump and his people denied the lot.

Now, I spent long enough in an investigative trade to be deeply suspicious of anonymous sources, particularly when the allegations are politically explosive and conveniently timed. A claim doesn’t become a fact because it appears in a magazine, and anyone who cares about the truth ought to resist that temptation, whether the allegation concerns Trump, Biden, Boris Johnson or the chap who runs the bar down the road from my cave and has somehow convinced himself that his neighbour is running a cryptocurrency empire from a goat shed.

But the story didn’t end in 2020. In 2023, John Kelly went on the record. Speaking to CNN, he confirmed for the first time, with his own name attached, several of the incidents that had previously come from background sources, including the Arlington episode. He described a man who regarded those who defend their country in uniform, those wounded in combat and those who spent years as prisoners of war as “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them”. He also confirmed that Trump didn’t want to be seen alongside military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.”

Read that last line again, slowly, because it does rather a lot of work. It isn’t an anonymous whisper anymore. It’s a four-star general, a Gold Star father, telling the world what he heard from the man he served. That doesn’t magically turn every allegation in the original article into gospel, and it doesn’t stop Trump denying it, but it does change the evidential picture considerably. “An anonymous journalist made it up” is one proposition. “The former chief of staff, who was standing there, says it happened” is quite another.

Kelly also confirmed the account of Trump’s much-desired military parade. Trump had watched the Bastille Day procession in Paris, fallen in love with the idea, and wanted one of his own. The snag, according to Kelly, was that Trump didn’t want wounded veterans taking part, because their presence wouldn’t “look good for me”. So here we have a man who wanted tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, but didn’t want the people who’d paid for that hardware with their arms and legs cluttering up the photographs. Kelly’s reply, by his own account, was that these were the heroes, and that the greater heroes were the ones lying in Arlington. I suspect that conversation didn’t make the official highlights reel.

Trump continues to deny all of this, and that denial belongs in the story. A fact-check that quietly removes the inconvenient counter-evidence isn’t a fact-check at all; it’s propaganda wearing spectacles. Trump has argued that Kelly was bitter and hostile, and he attacked Kelly publicly after the 2023 disclosures, which, if you’ve been following his career for more than about fifteen minutes, will not come as a shock.

So we can’t produce a laboratory test proving what was said in a private conversation years ago. Fair enough. What we can do is ask whether any of the wider story stands up without leaning on anonymous sources at all, and this is where things get uncomfortable for the defence, because quite a lot of it does.

Take John McCain. In 2015, campaigning for the Republican nomination, Trump was challenged by the interviewer Frank Luntz over his criticism of McCain, a former Navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, enduring torture that left him with injuries he carried for the rest of his life. When Luntz pointed out that McCain was a war hero, Trump replied that McCain was only a hero because he’d been captured, adding, “I like people that weren’t captured.” No anonymous source required. He said it into a microphone, in front of an audience, and the transcript is a matter of public record.

His defenders will say he was attacking McCain the politician rather than McCain the serviceman, and that’s a distinction worth making. But every serviceman and woman I ever worked with understood something Trump apparently didn’t, which is that capture is not a failure of courage. It’s very often the price of it. McCain was captured because he flew the mission. He didn’t get to choose whether his aircraft came down, but he did get to choose, during those years in captivity, whether to break, and he didn’t. You can think McCain was a dreadful senator, and plenty did, without turning the most brutal chapter of his life into a punchline. It’s also worth noting, purely for the record, that the man delivering the punchline avoided Vietnam with five draft deferments, the last of them for bone spurs. I make no comment. The record does that all by itself.

Then there’s Khizr Khan, father of Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American Army officer killed in Iraq in 2004. At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Khan asked whether Trump had ever sacrificed anything comparable to what military families had lost. Trump’s response was to turn his attention to Khan’s wife, Ghazala, who had stood silently beside her husband, and suggest that perhaps she hadn’t been allowed to speak. Ghazala Khan later explained that she had stayed silent because she had been overwhelmed, standing in front of an enormous photograph of her dead son. Again, all public, all recorded. Confronted by a grieving father, Trump chose to go after the grieving mother. We don’t need to psychoanalyse his motives to establish what happened, and people are perfectly capable of drawing their own conclusions.

That, increasingly, is where I think political discussion ought to start. Not with “Trump is evil” or “Trump is a genius”, not with “the media lies” or “the media is the last bastion of truth”, but with the deeply unglamorous business of establishing what someone actually said and did before we start brawling over what it means. It’s not a method that’s going to trend on X, I’ll grant you.

The bigger thread running through all of this is Trump’s language around loyalty and worth. His political career has always been intensely personal. Loyalty to Trump himself is treated as the cardinal virtue, and anyone who stops supplying it can very quickly find themselves recast as a traitor, a fool or a loser. His critics call this transactional; his supporters call it refusing to play the Washington game. People can interpret it how they like, but they don’t get to edit the record to make their interpretation more comfortable.

And military service is precisely where the transactional worldview falls flat on its face, because service is the one human arrangement that makes absolutely no sense on a balance sheet. Nobody goes into combat because someone has promised them a return large enough to justify being shot at. People serve for all sorts of reasons, and I won’t pretend they’re all noble… careers, a trade, an escape from a dead-end town, family tradition, belonging, adventure, the simple need for a bit of structure. I’ve seen every one of them. But when somebody dies in uniform, the ledger closes rather decisively. There’s nothing left to collect. The dead make terrible customers.

That’s why the question Kelly says he heard at Arlington stops me cold. “What was in it for them?” It sounds almost childishly simple, but asked in a cemetery full of American war dead, beside a father standing near his own son’s grave, it reveals something about the person asking. The honest answer is that there was nothing in it for them, and that’s rather the point. That’s why we build the cemeteries, carve the names and stand in the cold every November. Not because every soldier was a saint or every war was wise, because neither is true and history is a lot messier than the brochures suggest, but because they accepted a risk they couldn’t control for something they believed was bigger than themselves. If you genuinely can’t understand why anyone would do that, I’m not sure the uniform is the thing that’s lacking.

Perhaps Kelly’s account is unfair. Perhaps, as Trump’s defenders argue, it’s coloured by animosity. We can’t climb inside Trump’s head, and we shouldn’t pretend we can. What we can do is lay his public record alongside the testimony of people who worked closely with him and decide how much weight each piece deserves.

None of that requires hating Trump. If anything, it requires less hatred, because hatred makes people sloppy. Once you’ve decided someone is uniquely monstrous, every rumour becomes useful, and every accusation becomes another brick in the wall, and that’s not truth-seeking; it’s stockpiling ammunition. The same applies, with equal force, to the faithful. If you’ve decided Trump is incapable of doing anything wrong, no amount of evidence will ever be enough. A recording is “out of context”, a transcript is “fake”, a former chief of staff is “bitter”, and a Gold Star family is “political”. At that point, the standard of proof has been raised so high that the verdict was reached before the evidence walked through the door. That’s where loyalty becomes genuinely dangerous… not because loyalty is a bad thing, but because it quietly rewrites the rules by which we judge reality.

So put it all on the table. The original Atlantic story relied on anonymous sources. Trump disputes the allegations. Kelly, who was there, later put his name to the substance of them, and journalists independently corroborated other parts. And sitting alongside all of that, needing no corroboration whatsoever, are Trump’s own public words about John McCain and his own public treatment of the Khan family. Then ask the question that journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens should ask far more often: which explanation best fits the evidence? It’s an awkward question, because evidence has no interest in our tribal loyalties. It doesn’t care whether you watch CNN or Fox, whether you wear a red cap or a “Never Trump” badge, or what some bloke with a blue tick is shouting about at two in the morning. It just sits there, annoyingly, waiting for somebody to take it seriously.

What bothers me most is that we seem to have reached a point where the only acceptable response to criticism of your chosen politician is to destroy the person doing the criticising. Trump has turned this into something of an art form. Attack the critic, unleash the following, and watch the original question vanish into the fog. Everything becomes a fight about personalities, and the conduct itself quietly slips out the back door.

The dead at Arlington don’t have a campaign to run. They have no network defending them, no social media army explaining what they really meant. They have their names cut into stone, which is about as permanent as any of us get, and Robert Kelly’s name is among them. That ought to buy a little humility before we turn the whole thing into another partisan punch-up. His death doesn’t make his father’s every recollection true, but neither should our feelings about Kelly, Trump or anyone else make us indifferent to what he has told us.

Out here, the evenings are quiet enough to hear yourself think, which isn’t always the blessing people imagine. And the thought I keep circling back to isn’t really whether Donald Trump is a hero or a villain. Those are words for rallies and television panels. It’s what we expect from a Commander-in-Chief when he stands among the people who paid the full price for decisions made by presidents. Respect? Gratitude? Some basic grasp of why they did it? Or have we drifted, without quite noticing, towards a world where sacrifice is just another line on the balance sheet, valued according to what it produces and how it looks in the photographs?

If it’s the latter, then this was never really an argument about one man. It’s an argument about what we think service means and what we believe the dead were worth, and that question won’t be settled by the next election, or the one after that. I’m not sure it gets settled at all. I just know which answer the rows of white headstones seem to be waiting for, and I’m not convinced we’ve given it yet.

Until Next Time