The Muskrat Mess: Paul Rieckhoff Isn't Having It

This is not about tax cuts. This is about power. This is about seizing the levers of power. That's what they're doing right now. They're not concerned about the midterms. They're not concerned about re-election. They're concerned about grabbing the levers of power so they can force forward full transformation of the culture and the government. 

Paul Rieckhoff, Independent Veterans of America, on MSNBC’s “The 11^th Hour,”  February 19, 2025

The sweep and remorselessness of the Musk/Trump takeover of our very democracy has all but disarmed the sort of pushback we may have hoped for. The usurpation of the entire federal system--with even sadder, global impacts on starving children and AIDS victims condemned to death as their medication is cut off--brought all but the doughtiest few Republicans into its surge. (They’re afraid of MAGA-stoked political and even physical violence, only too realistically.) And the loyal Democratic opposition, save for a few hard chargers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chris Murphy, seems reduced to praying for the judiciary to come to the rescue.

We mustn’t mistake Trump’s self-important gibberish and Musk’s feverishly self-amused antics for ineffectuality as they carpet-bomb once-sacred government functions. The main lesson Musk has absorbed from Trump is that the clown show’s blundering mismanagement and destructive policies  will not undercut their base—quite the contrary is in fact true, as the brain dead yet successful cabinet  appointments have proven. This is even as Trump’s polling shows slippage.  When you’ve been looking for hope from moral featherweight Mitch McConnell, who voted to install RFK Jr. before pulling back into his battered shell after a shameful, seemingly endless span of years of public life, you hope in vain.

I had gone most of this dispiriting month half-ducking newscasts and “Breaking News,” feeling some feeble assent at the commentaries from AOC, Murphy, Eric Swalwell, Adam Kinzinger and a few others, as Elon’s swarm of juvenile vandals the victimized government workers have dubbed “muskrats” did their remorrseless work. 

But when Stephanie Ruhle chose to end what could have been a despairing update of Musk's just-announced assault on Pentagon staffing by throwing to Paul Rieckhoff, I finally saw someone with eyes ablaze, or as one would say if he boasted more of it, his hair on fire, as he continued:

…And I'm not putting in faith in the Democrats or the Republicans, but I do have faith in the American people, and [the Musk.administration is] about to hit that guard rail by laying off millions of Americans in communities around the country... 30% of them are veterans, and they are going to speak up. And if somebody is going to say this, right now it’s not the Democrats or the Republicans, it's the American people.”

As this blog tries to tramp forward covering entertainment news that for the moment feels deeply trivial (thanks to my sometime colleague Kurt Loder for that two-word phrase) it feels necessary to strike however glancing a blow by addressing the closure of the representational government in which I was raised and given the chance to flourish.  

The rising oligarchs have little use for any appeasement, and we ordinary citizens and commentators now encounter what they’re really deploying—the fear of a promised “retribution”. 

 It’s beyond laughable and shades into tragedy how impotent and pathetic the Republican congresspeople have been in their lack of reasoned response. (Rieckhoff cites what has become a drumbeat that’s hopefully prophetic—they may pay in the voting for midterms.)

Such studious silence is not Rieckhoff’s way, ever since he grew alienated during --and since– a door-kicking tour of duty commanding a platoon of 38 soldiers through multiple combat scenarios, in Iraq. The tactical and political errors demanded by “smiling pogue generals,” the return home and aftermath laced with insincere thanks for his and his men’s service, made him an eloquent—he’s an Amherst grad--and angry activist. (He has addressed the tragedy of veteran's suicides repeatedly and with impact.) In 2004 he founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), and the next two decades of unrelenting visibility on stages and news broadcasts, built him a constituency. In 2024, weaponizing is media savvy (by contrast to the more time-honored avenue of  street and stadium protests) he founded the organizations American Veterans for Ukraine and Independent Veterans of America, both designed to gather the influence and useful anger veterans can own.

His path to his ongoing maverick status arises with a fundamental contradiction. Though dubious about the Iraq war from the beginning, nonetheless, as he writes in “Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier’s Perspective," "I volunteered to go fight in it." The chapters are generally introduced by an apt quote from sources as varied as William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” the pithy jabs of Mark Twain, and a stark one from legendary WWII combatant and later chief executive Dwight D. Eisenhower: “The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on a battlefield.”

 Rieckhoff talks about finding his activist voice as he sought to re-enter mainstream American life after his return in 2004 from 10 months in the blood and tumult of the desert war sandbox. Walking the streets of New York, struggling through near-psychosis to rebuild relations with his girlfriend, he found little in common with the city folk around him: “Solipsistic fashionistas and silk-suited businessmen strutting down the street made me cringe, they were self-appointed Masters of the Universe who care more about the labels on their clothes than the policies of their country.”

Journeys to Las Vegas and Los Angeles didn’t improve his civilian re-indoctrination: “The opulence, the glamor, the detachment from reality disturbed and angered me…”  He was incensed that those who critiqued George W. Bush’s WMD rationale for invading Iraq, notably former ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, were targeted to the extent that “the message was clear: those who challenge the White House on the war in any way will be crushed.”

Sounds achingly familiar as regards the present crisis, no?

He would come to find a possible kindred spirit in Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, himself soon to be ‘swift-boated’ out of contention by political tricksters, even as Rieckhoff himself entered into the rough and tumble of going against America’s global defense polices.  In critiquing his war experience as a visible symbol he came to resemble the contrarian soldier and ad-hoc diplomat, John Paul Vann, the complex antihero of Neil Sheehan’s 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “A Bright Shining Lie”. 

The life paths diverge—Vann stayed in the fight, sometimes sidelined and disenabled by the Pentagon powerbrokers and eventually dying in a chopper crash in the midst of battle he could less bravely have commanded from a distance. Similarly, however, Rieckhoff could not make the higher-ups see reason: “I was certain about my assessment of the war. I knew it was the wrong battle, fought at the wrong time,  for the wrong reasons.”

A curious aspect of Rieckhoff’s story of what he saw and learned in Iraq overlaps in several particulars with the life accounts of two key contemporaries who are his political and ideological adversaries. Rieckhoff, in part spurred by the horrors of 9/11 (he volunteered as a first responder to the site), would don his National Guardsman’s camo gear in earnest to become a boots-on-the ground infantry leader in 2003 while Iraq was still fully aboil. As the American invasion transformed into an almost equally onerous occupation, he would serve his ten months and bring everyone in his platoon back. He had barely returned home when J.D. Vance (who signed up in 2003) arrived in the country in 2005 as a Marine public affairs aide, having served, ironically in light of cockamamie internment camp plans Trump has floated, as an officer overseeing a detachment of activated National Guard jailkeepers at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

Newly installed defense head Pete Hegseth--now recently back from joining Vance in a gob-smackingly misguided, “America first” ill-will tour that stunned  the world—had checked a box by  earning his Combat Infantryman Badge and even adding a pair of  Bronze stars (which were all but routinely doled out for officers in country, though those with an added “V” standing for valor in combat were harder-won).   A further irony marking this mismatched bro-pack is that each of the three did a stretch on Wall Street in investment firms; two now stand to support their venture-capital/tech bro’s cohort as the new administration lowers aristocrats’ taxes and slaps food out of disadvantaged commoners’ hands. Vance continues to cosplay as tough-minded flag-pin patriot—by contrast with Reickhoff, who saw active combat (and even Hegseth, who has blamed his taste for multiple drinks on being in a vehicle struck by a dud, rocket propelled grenade). Vance wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “I was lucky to escape any real fighting.” (No doubt the same benevolent deity who guided a round past Trump's head also had Pete in his master-plan playbook.)

The more vigorous Rieckhoff’s pushback becomes, the more his book, which is entertaining and articulate even as it illumines a singular American life, should find a wider audience. 

It may come to join the ranks of an epoch-summarizing work like Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie,” the story—at an epic length and reach of 800-plus pages—of one fiercely dedicated solider. Army officer John Paul Vann lived the Vietnam war from early days  almost until the fall of Saigon,  stirring awakenings and controversy with the top brass. His landmark epiphany arrived in 1963 with his  “rage and despair”  over Pentagon insiders to canceling his planned briefing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’d felt the top brass to be dangerously misled by more optimistic predictions from various Pentagon staff officers—the “bright shining lie” of the title.

In his certitude Rieckhoff is reminiscent of Vann’s dislike of the office-bound cake eaters. He began railing at the Iraq war’s mismanagement in his last active-duty days. He now has a new fight, which he’ll pursue mostly by abjuring the conventional tactics for swaying the country’s wisdom—and actions. In starting his first veterans’ movement  Rieckhoff and his building cohort “made the strategic decision that we would not be joining any antiwar protesters marching around with signs…public demonstrations and rallies were outmoded, Vietnam-era tactics that failed to move either the public or the policy makers. “

The words he wrote some years ago might equally apply to the present constitutional and leadership crisis. We can only hope, and ideally help insure, that they still do: “So my new band of brothers and I focused our eyes on the ball. We would fix what the most powerful people in the world had broken.”

Instead of moaning about it all, doesn’t it make sense to lend them a hand?