The recent controversy regarding Donald Trump’s criticism of Liz Cheney as a warhawk who has never faced the dangers of the wars she embraces has synthesized an issue that may be opaque to non-veterans: the extreme resentment many veterans of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) feel toward Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party.

Harris and the Democrats have created a perfect storm of veteran disdain in that they have succeeded in uniting three once-inapposite groups behind Harris: the neocons who started the GWOT, the media and Democrats who undermined the veterans’ GWOT missions, and the generals who failed again and again and again at bringing the GWOT to a successful conclusion.

If you want to understand the prevailing veteran rage against Harris and love for Trump, you need to understand this unholy trinity that so many veterans loathe.

I’ll start with the neocon “chickenhawks.” Maybe it’s not fair to blame Liz Cheney for the GWOT as her father was its prime architect and not Liz herself, but she has come to serve as a symbol of the many advocates for useless, endless wars who never put their own lives (or the lives of their children) on the line, and who now support Kamala Harris. Liz Cheney stands as a symbol in this regard, and she stands for the many establishment Republicans who would rather support a radical Democrat than the only president in decades who did not start new wars. 

These are neocons like Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Bill Kristol, and the infamous 200-plus Republican former staffers for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain who helped design the GWOT. These are the people who put GWOT veterans into the cauldron that left them and so many of their friends dead, maimed, or bearing invisible scars that linger even today.

I served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I was committed to our missions when I was there, and I know we did great good for so many citizens of those two countries. But in the end — given how those wars ended — I have to admit it was all for naught. Defeating al Qaeda and bin Laden in Afghanistan was the one mission that actually mattered, and the rest of what we did in those two wars was, sadly, a waste of time, money, and lives.

To have the architects of those useless, endless wars now turn on the one president who really cared about not squandering our lives feels like an injustice. Many of us stood by those neocons — even defended them in our private lives against slanderous lies — and now they turn on us by opposing the one man who vows that these sorts of wars will end. It is painful and feels like a betrayal.

The second leg of the unholy trinity is the Democrats and their media lackeys who helped us lose those wars — the same people those treacherous neocons have now allied themselves with.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Taliban in Afghanistan both knew they could never defeat us in battle toe-to-toe. Our technology, our forces, our training, and our tactics were unbeatable. Instead, AQI and the Taliban adopted Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam war strategy: bleed the Americans dry so the folks back home would abandon the war effort. They knew that if they could turn the national will against our mission, America would quit.

They were right. Every IED attack was made not against the soldiers or Marines it killed or maimed, but against the folks back home watching CNN. The “death counts” on TV were the ultimate goal of our enemies.

When I returned from Iraq in 2004, I was shocked at how disconnected the news reports were from the reality on the ground, and I was shocked to see those same Democrats who sent us to war now suddenly turning against our mission. The daily march of Democrats with giant Dick Cheney puppet heads on the National Mall and the endless chants of “Bush Lied, People Died” served precisely the purpose AQI and the Taliban intended: to break the national will. To many of us returning vets, it felt that our own countrymen were giving aid and comfort to our enemy, helping them fulfill that enemy’s strategic objective. This too felt like a betrayal.

The last leg of the trinity of veteran betrayal is the generals who could not win those same wars, retired from the military and went deep into the military-industrial complex, and now endorse Harris and demean Trump. These are generals like Stan McChrystal, who gave us such restrictive rules of engagement in Afghanistan that it cost the lives of so many troops. These are generals like John Kelly, whose counterinsurgency tactics solved so little in Al Anbar Province and who now libels the boss who fired him in The Atlantic magazine. These are generals like Michael Hayden, whose tenure at the National Security Agency did nothing to prevent 9/11, yet who found ways to use that tragic day as an excuse to spy on Americans.

These are the generals who led us in wars that they were not competent enough to win. Their leadership failed, no one was held to account, and now these same men stand proudly against the one president who would not tolerate those failures nor repeat them. This too feels like a betrayal.

Three groups, three betrayals. So many veterans feel like I do — not all, but many.

America called on us to go to war. We answered the call because we love our country. We fought bravely. We lost friends. Some gave all, all gave some. Those of us who came home without visible scars bear invisible ones. Some who bear those invisible scars take their own lives even today because those scars are too much to bear.

We knew this was the cost going in. We fought anyway because it’s who we are.

What we did not count on, though, was the politicians who sent us to those two decades of useless, endless war deciding in 2024 that they would rather support more war and not less by endorsing Kamala Harris. We did not count on Harris’ Democrat Party — Americans like us — and their media lackeys facilitating the strategic objectives of our enemies. Lastly, we did not count on the generals, who failed in leading us, selling out President Trump for their own personal gain and allying themselves with those same architects and proponents of defeat. This is the cause of our fury.

Kamala Harris has accomplished something quite remarkable. She has assembled these three disparate groups into an improbable unholy trinity that now personifies the 1935 warning of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler: “War is a Racket.” 

In creating this unholy trinity, Harris has focused and distilled the righteous fury of America’s cohort of GWOT veterans into a unified force against her and in favor of her opponent, Donald Trump: the one man veterans trust not to commit them to that killing racket unnecessarily. 

In a sense, perhaps we should thank Harris for exposing the perfidy of those we once trusted. Instead, we will vote for her opponent and for a U.S. military that is called upon only when national survival is at stake. It’s not that we are afraid to die — it’s that we are no longer willing to die for nothing.