At the Capitol on Jan. 6, Veterans Fought on Both Sides of an American Battle

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Jake Tapper
@jaketapper
NYT: At the Capitol on Jan. 6, Veterans Fought on Both Sides of an American Battle
“I would say this was somewhat similar to being in Iraq,” said Sgt. Tyrone Gross, a Washington Metropolitan Police officer who spent a year in Iraq as an Army specialist.
At the Capitol on Jan. 6, Veterans Fought on Both Sides of an American Battle
Military veterans trying to defend the Capitol were taunted by veterans in the pro-Trump mob who were storming it. Both felt they were doing their patriotic duty in a fractured country.
nytimes.com
8:09 AM · Feb 8, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/us/politics/capitol-riot-trump-veterans-cops.html

WASHINGTON — As Samuel Hahn of the Metropolitan Police Department struggled to hold back rioters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, a group of veterans among the protesters repeatedly yelled the same refrain at him: “Remember your oath. You’re breaking your oath.”

Officer Hahn, a Marine before joining the city’s police, listened in astonishment

“The oath that every member of the military takes is the same one as a police officer, which is to uphold the Constitution,” he later recalled. “There was this cognitive dissonance between what I was doing and what the people screaming at me were doing, which is the very thing that is antithetical to that oath.”

Veterans at the Capitol that day stood on both sides of the barricades after serving in every branch of the military and at all ranks. Some had deployed at the same time to the same regions of the world, and some bore the same physical or emotional scars of the era. They were all about the same age, and while their reasons for joining the military varied greatly, they shared a strong sense of patriotism, expressed in diametrically opposite ways.

Officer Hahn joined the military in 2010 to help prime him for an eventual job in law enforcement. Working as a Washington police officer is similar to his Marine service, he said, because “it is something larger than yourself.”

Then there were those like Jere Brower, who spent four years in the Army, but has also had brushes with the law and, according to news reports and law enforcement officials, has associated with white supremacist groups. He was an intense supporter of President Donald J. Trump — and ended up under arrest.

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[Cirque du So-What]

1. Thank you for your service

That phrase may come with qualifications before it gets tossed around casually. For example, did you participate in actions or insurrections against the US government?