The Cult of Military Service: Tim Walz as Soldier-Teacher

Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, attacks on his military record began. The media quickly drew comparisons to Democratic candidate John Kerry’s “Swiftboating” in 2004. To be frank, debating the specifics of Walz’s military record misses the larger point being made here: that the cult of military “service” in the United States is widespread and dangerous.

Responding to attacks from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, Walz told a campaign rally — packed with cheering hospitality workers — in Las Vegas:

I was born in a small town in Nebraska where community was a way of life. There’s Nebraskans in the house. You think I’m kidding. You think I’m kidding. 400 people, 25 kids in my class, 12 were cousins. It’s a small town. It’s a small town. But you know what?

My parents and community taught me to be generous to others and to work for the greater good. My father was a chain-smoking Korean War veteran who, two days after my 17th birthday, took me to enlist in the National Guard. I was proud to wear the uniform of this country for the next 24 years.

Thank you to each and every one of you who wore that uniform. And I have to tell you, like my father before me and millions of others, the GI Bill gave me a chance at a higher education. And just like Tilly (sic), My father was a teacher.

My older brother was a teacher. My sister was a teacher. My younger brother was a teacher. And we married teachers. The privilege of my life was to spend two decades teaching in public schools. And you may have heard that I coached a football team to a state championship.

Walz has all the makings of a Democratic presidential campaign: small-town Americana, family tradition, military service, teaching, and football. He was introduced by Tillie Torres, a Las Vegas schoolteacher. The message was clear enough: military service was the natural and honorable step in a person’s life, from being a nobody to becoming someone of consequence in the greater American community. Equating military service with teaching is also a sinister idea, given that the nation’s high schools are one of the main recruiting grounds for the U.S. military.

Soldier-Teacher Role Model

I was quite shocked to see that one of the first widely circulated photos of Walz was a stern version of himself, aged seventeen, in 1981 combat gear, holding an M-16. For a candidate who gained media attention by calling Republicans “weird,” a seventeen-year-old holding a machine gun is not. Walz was, by many accounts, a beloved teacher to his students and well-liked by his colleagues. But the soldier-teacher model is not a good one, especially for young men.

I don’t know if he directly encouraged his students to join the military or what happened to them after they joined. But young people, especially high school-aged boys, can easily be impressed by the glamour of the uniform and combat through movies, television, and video games. This was especially true in the 1980s and 1990s, when political leaders and their friends in Hollywood spent a lot of time rehabilitating the military after the American defeat in Vietnam, while demonizing the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Walz joined the National Guard in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency that saw the beginning of a massive military buildup and a resurgence of anti-communism and American imperialism. It was not until the end of the decade that the United States was again able to send large numbers of ground troops to fight in remote parts of the globe. Panama, the first Gulf War, and after 9/11, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter two dubbed the “forever wars.” The disastrous results for the countries the United States invaded and the many American soldiers suffering from debilitating physical and mental health problems are still being felt today.

Walz was deployed overseas only once, to Italy during the Forever Wars, and saw no combat. He spent seven months overseas before returning home. Others from Minnesota were not so lucky. More than eight thousand Minnesota National Guard soldiers and airmen deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2011. Sixteen Minnesota National Guard members died in Iraq, and seventy-nine others received Purple Hearts for their combat wounds. Nearly a hundred soldiers with a Minnesota connection were killed in combat during the Forever Wars.

Walz retired from the National Guard in May 2005 and was elected to Congress in the Democratic victory of 2006. Reason magazine summed up his years in Congress in view of the forever wars:

Despite his strong beliefs about war powers, Walz has also shown a tendency to avoid tough political fights on the issue. During the surge debate, Walz voted to force the U.S. military out of Iraq within 90 days. Yet less than five months later, he voted to continue funding the war. A position that put him at odds with a majority of his fellow Democrats.

A similar pattern has played out throughout Walz’s congressional career. According to voting records compiled by Peace Action, an antiwar advocacy group, Walz has often voted to repeal War on Terror-era authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), while also voting against restrictions or cuts to military funding.

Walz has proven to be a reliable vote for Democratic leadership during his years in Congress.

“Internal unrest”

Another aspect of the cult of military service is never discussing what the military actually does beyond the blandishments of “serving” or “protecting” our nation. Walz spent his entire military career in the Minnesota National Guard. A quick look at his history reveals a story that sounds like many others, but it’s not a good story, from suppressing the Dakota uprising in 1862 to failing to crush the Minnesota truckers’ strikes in 1934 to fighting the Hormel strike in 1986 to defending the 2008 Republican convention from protesters.

This isn’t just a Minnesota story. The National Guard has deep roots in U.S. history, dating back to the earliest days of English colonization of North America in the early 1600s, when settlers organized militias to defend themselves against Native attacks and destroy Native resistance to their expansion. According to the NAACP, slave patrols in the Old South were replaced by “militia-like groups that had the power to police and deny equal rights to freed slaves. They relentlessly and systematically enforced the Black Codes, strict state and local laws that regulated and limited former slaves’ access to work, wages, voting rights, and general freedoms.”

The National Guards or state militias that followed the railroad workers’ revolt of 1877—the closest thing to a labor revolution in the United States—had to be reorganized in many states after becoming too sympathetic to strikers across the country. The legacy of that era is hiding in plain sight. “Cities across the United States still bear the physical scars of the railroad strike of 1877,” according to the Transportation Logistics Center, “industry backed Eno. To quell labor unrest, many states and cities—with financial backing from wealthy business owners—built armories resembling medieval castles to house National Guard units and suppress labor movements.”

When Walz was governor of Minnesota, he deployed National Guard troops to Minneapolis during the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd, a move that was praised by then-President Donald Trump. This was not an aberration in its long history. Minnesota is very proud of the National Guard’s role in combating “domestic unrest.” The Minnesota Military Museum boasts:

“Since its inception in 1956, the Minnesota National Guard has been called to support the state of Minnesota on 91 occasions in response to various civil unrest. Minnesota has experienced a wide range of racial, labor and other social conflicts since its inception and these upheavals have received varied responses from state governments, including the deployment of the National Guard.”

In many states, the National Guard recruits its soldiers by emphasizing the heroic role they play during natural disasters, as this video shows. National Guard members are billed as “citizen soldiers” who rarely, if ever, see combat. But the reorganization of the U.S. military after the Cold War has made it more integrated into U.S. military operations overseas, in stark contrast to the Vietnam War era. Since ending the draft in 1973, the U.S. military has had to resort to a variety of means to recruit its soldiers.

The cult of military service was born in the age of the volunteer military, and while it means professional politicians like Tim Walz can ascend to the White House with Kamala Harris, it’s a path to the graveyard for many others.