Happy Birthday, Mr. President

The sun was blazing hot and orange like Minute Maid when I first heard the distant sounds of Chinooks filling the air. In perfect unison, I and thousands of fellow Americans snapped our necks towards the Washington Monument where we spotted the hulking copters, their melodic “chop-chop-chop” punctuated by speakers blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”—or maybe it was AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” or perhaps “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters?

It can be easy to forget a track list amid the fog of war. What mattered were the helicopters, those iconic troop transporters first introduced in Vietnam. A previously somber crowd became instantly captivated by the machines: one man in front of me, donned in red-white-and-blue garb with an American flag tied around his neck, ecstatically stretched his arms to the sky, as if in prayer. For those few fleeting seconds, a military invasion—albeit of the capital of said military’s country—had never looked so good.

The Chinooks were cutting through air made thick from New Jersey wildfires. While also doing a number on my lungs, the smoke conjured a bombed-out haze, the perfect complement to President Donald Trump’s big birthday party for himself (79 years old) and the U.S. Army (250). Further contributing to the battlefield atmosphere were the numerous attendees who suffered heat exhaustion and had to be medevacked.

Those of us who showed up to the celebration were penned like sheep into the National Mall by miles of anti-scale fencing. We were also totally surrounded: choppers in the air, tanks in the streets, and snipers on the roofs. As in war, the crowd was hot, sweaty, and stimulated, collectively caffeinated by Phorm Energy, a nootropic drink concocted by UFC CEO Dana White and Anheuser-Busch. Handed out for free in large quantities, the Phorm fueled periodic bursts of energy among the crowd in what was a generally subdued affair, one owing to the weather, yes, but also the dispiriting truth that the Army hasn’t won in a while.

I had begun my day at the top of Capitol Hill, with lunch at the nouveau-right French bistro Butterworth’s, where Steve Bannon is a regular. Then, at around 2:00 p.m., I walked past the dome and down the hill toward the White House, loosely tracing the path of January 6-ers, but in reverse.

As I approached the National Mall, I spotted Brandon Fellows, a pardoned insurrectionist donning an ICE field jacket. He told the Washington Post that he’d returned to the scene of his crime to enjoy the celebration. He said he hadn’t spotted any of the jurors in his case, then added ominously, “I know where they live, though.”

Hours earlier, a Minnesota man named Vance Boelter had visited the homes of state Democratic lawmakers, killing one and wounding another. Days before that, Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to suppress protests, over the objections of local leaders. FBI agents had also roughed up and handcuffed California Senator Alex Padilla as he attempted to confront Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about her draconian deportation policies at a press conference.

Trump had paired his recent ramping up of domestic military might with a clear charm offensive. In recent weeks, he visited Arlington National Cemetery and gave a set of unusual remarks at West Point and Fort Bragg. First, he fluffed up graduating cadets as a “bunch of male models,” then selected a pack of Army loyalists at Bragg to populate the stage behind him and vocally express their allegiance to his political cause. The parade served the perfect coda to this work, producing a factory line of sorts in which representatives from all the major Army divisions marched past Trump and saluted him.

But overall, the pageant felt far less disconcerting than what Trump had hoped for. This is owed in part to the crowd, which included the MAGA faithful but also many soldiers and civilians clearly there to celebrate the Army’s birthday, not Trump’s. While the commander-in-chief is developing bands of radical loyalists in the ranks, there are also many who don’t like him. One mid-level officer called the entire event “repulsive” to Military.com, an expression of a significant segment within the armed forces eager to resist Trump’s rococo style.

America’s last major military parade commemorated our victory in Desert Storm. Hundreds of thousands of excited spectators filled the streets. President George H.W. Bush had previously declared that the short skirmish had finally “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” referring to the public’s deep aversion to military entanglements in the years that followed our botched withdrawal from Saigon.

America’s Vietnam syndrome may have gone into remission, but the nation, and the military, still seem sick. Dotting the National Mall was a sea of small Americans flags, part of a lobbying gambit by an interest group called “The Headache Alliance.” While I’d initially assumed the flags were a visual remembrance of fallen troops, they were, on closer inspection, a symbolic tally of the “veterans and military personnel living with headache disorders.”

The production of the parade had caused a major migraine for the Army, with the brass hurriedly hustling to expand what had been originally permitted as a small event—three hundred troops, four cannons—into a major spectacle featuring seven thousand soldiers, plus dozens of copters, planes, tanks, and horses. The event’s estimated price tag is in the ballpark of $45 million, or roughly half the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet.

The Pentagon’s ever-proliferating budget has provided countless more guns, bullets, and mercenaries, plus many pencil-pushing bureaucrats needed to process the invoices. As I waited in line on the mall to enter the perimeter, a young boy walked up excitedly to a major general behind me and asked if he would post with him for a picture. The general happily obliged. I didn’t have the heart to tell the boy that the man he lionized was not some badass war hero but Mark. S. Bennett, the Army’s budget director. A few minutes earlier, he’d assured a man in line that the Pentagon would pass an audit soon. “We’re getting there,” he said, “but it’s going to take time.” (Hooah to that!)

Inside the perimeter was a festival featuring tents and booths run by Army units and weapons contractors. They had a captive audience to shill lethality and, hopefully, find new recruits. In service of this mission, Northrop Grumman handed out baseball caps, GE Aerospace gave away grab bags, and soldiers showed off static tanks and weapons. One troop handed a Carl-Gustaf recoilless rifle to a six-year-old boy, according to the New York Times. I hung around a pack of cyber dogs and their trainers, jacked men in black T-shirts that read DEVCOM, shorthand for the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command. When I asked one of the DEVCOM guys if the dogs had lethal capabilities, he explained that, while the pups can’t kill, the Army is developing a “Terminator-style robot” via another technology initiative called Project Origin. As they bowed and picked up balls, the robots were treated by some onlookers like a litter of schnauzers. “So cute,” someone cooed. “Look at that frisky thing,” said another.

Unlike under most authoritarian regimes, the U.S. soldiers didn’t march in lockstep—a phenomenon that felt at once felt reassuring and worrisome. It signaled, perhaps, that the military wasn’t particularly motivated to impress Trump, or that the chain of command couldn’t easily snap troops into perfect conformity. But when the soldier marching stoically at the beginning of the procession had his face completely covered by a flag, rendering him blind, I began to worry that, were we to ever actually need our troops, maybe they’ve lost a step. Then an Abrams tank creaked the down the street and I snapped back to the horror of seeing heavy military hardware roll down an American avenue for purely propagandizing purposes.

The pageant also demonstrated how the impending takeover of the military via tech firm is going to make it harder to gin up jingoism. The event itself was sponsored by Amazon, Oracle, and Palantir, all emergent contractors in the military industrial complex. New software and hardware won’t ever command the respect like the old stuff does. The viscerally creepy robot dogs, or the soldier dressed as World War I doughboy riding on a Lime scooter, or the troop walking down Constitution Avenue holding what looked like a commercially available drone defiantly above his head—all evidence that lethality and looking cool aren’t necessarily related.

I couldn’t ignore the fact, too, that the size and scope of the Army parade was dwarfed by the millions of people who’d showed up to protest Trump across the country, including a pack of belligerent anti-fascists at the exit who verbally dressed down departing soldiers. Their protest happened about an hour after the Chinook affair, and again I felt something thrilling, authentic, and familiar: a momentary flareup of Vietnam syndrome.