Chicago           Waiting for a plane, I happened to sit next to someone who liked my hat.  It turned out he was a 16-year Marine veteran with the Corps symbol on one arm and a sleeve from wrist to shoulder on the other.  He had been a combat photographer, but was now in the public relations department for the Marines.

I asked his take on the Trump meeting with all of the brass at Quantico.  He smiled and rolled his eyes.  He asked if I had noticed that silence and stern faces in the crowd.  I said, “yeah, I saw the picture in the paper.”  He then said, “What have we learned from 9/11 and more?  Bringing everyone in from everywhere and doing so publicly with advance notice.  How risky was that?”  He just shook his head.

Hegseth’s military is a scary, secret thing.

Reporters will lose their access if they publish reports without permission from the military itself.  No more My Lai exposes.  No more Afghanistan withdrawal videos.  No more news that’s that certified, sealed, and approved from above.  Is that how a military in a democracy works?

Another report says that lie detector tests and investigations are being launched to make sure that civilian employees and soldiers are toeing the line for the administration.  Access to channels for whistleblowers, those being bullied, or those wanting to report discrimination in the military are being closed.

The Marine told me his group had just finished a bunch of redesigns on social media to bring them up to date for recruiting and publicity.  All of it has been shut down.  Instructions have come down on what they can say, to whom and how they can respond, and other limitations.  Social media has virtually been banned.  He wasn’t sure how they were supposed to communicate either internally or externally within the new instructions.

None of this even includes that Trump and Secretary of State / National Security Advisor and former Senator Rubio seem to be going to war near Venezuela.  Rather than stopping boats to see if they are carrying drugs or engaged in drug smuggling, and then putting them in jail and going to trail, he’s having the military shoot boats out of the water and summarily execute the people on the boat.  The last time any of us saw this level of extra juridical killings was by Philippines strongman Duterte who is now in hiding from the International Criminal Court.  He also claimed he was killing drug dealers.

All of this is also being done simultaneously with a series of stories in the New York Times about Green Berets gone wild in Afghanistan in what also might normally be classified in some instances as war crimes.

If this is where they are pushing the military, kicking and dragging from the look on some of the faces of the brass at the Trump-Hegseth captive audience meeting, then how can this be America?  Who are we now?