“The loudest and the most unqualified person in the room.” That’s how one general described Pete Hegseth on NPR.

Spot on, I applaud the General’s observation. We have all been around that person, the loudmouth who goes around making uninformed and frankly outright stupid proclamations because what they lack in experience and education they make up for in self-aggrandizement.

Nobody is more aware of how utterly unqualified he is for the job than Pete Hegseth. That’s why he’s intent on firing all the qualified people who are far superior to him in every way.

And Republicans in Congress, who are equally as unqualified as Hegseth, let him do it.

I cannot express how gutted I am when I think about my father’s death and our family’s lifelong sacrifices only to end up with a draft-dodger as president and an ignorant racist rapist as Secretary of Defense, on in Hegseth’s case a warmonger.

Now we throw into that toxic mixture the world’s biggest grifter – Elon Musk.

What could possibly go wrong?

I try never to despair, and I resolutely refuse to now.

Still, I received a phone call from an active duty soldier last week that did give me pause. This fella has done tours in war zones. He grew up in a time and place where he was groomed for patriotic duty. He was fed all the patriarchal tropes about “real men.”

“The first movie I remember watching was a James Bond film with my uncle,” he said.

He began rethinking everything he’d been enculturated to after a few tours in war zones. It’s one thing to play soldiers as young boys. It’s quite another thing to be talking your buddy off a suicide attempt once you’ve returned to the homefront.

As we spoke he told me the story of one of the soldiers he served with, how everyone in the field thought this fella was truly fearless. How they would ask him, how many kills he’d gotten that day. How he would often reply with the biggest kill number in the company, and how everyone would regard him as the company’s true badass.

A real wartime hero. The sort of fellow that Hegseth brags about.

This is the same fellow that numbs the memory of those kills with a bottle of Maker’s Mark and when the whiskey fails to work on those memories any more, he thinks about ending his own life.

Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder. PTSD. I wrote about such soldier’s guilt in my Appalachian series of Mother of Rain, Burdy & Christian Bend. I’m sure Hegseth, the loudest most unqualified person in the room, mocks the soldiers who suffer from PTSD.

Not me.

I’ve sat with soldiers suffering from PTSD. I’ve listened to their tales of war regrets. I’ve looked into their eyes as they admit to how they’ve been used up by politicians like Hegseth, and exploited by the rich men like Elon. Men who mock them, call them weak for having a conscience, for caring about humanity.

My friend, the soldier, told me about how he was assigned to a duty in DC for awhile and how he was paraded around by Congressmen for the requisite “Support the Troops” photo op. He told me about how he witnessed Dan Crenshaw and Nancy Pelosi hugging in the halls of Congress and how he realized then that the clips shown by CNN or FOXNews of them at each other’s throats was all for show. All a game to manipulate the public and exploit the soldier.

He told me of his frustrations in trying to get another soldier help for their PTSD and how the system is set up to wear veterans down.

Of course, I knew most of this already.

I’ve been writing about all of this for well on three decades now. Ever since I reached my 40s and realized how the military had lied to our family about how my father was killed. How they continued to lie even as I enlisted the help of my then Congressional leaders to find the truth. How even my father’s commanding officer lied to cover his own incompetence, young and inexperienced as he was.

All the men who served with my father are dead now, save for the doctor who tried his best to save Dad’s life. He, too, suffers from the PTSD, the result of my own father’s death.

But all my years of writing about the guilt & trauma these men and women come home with seems never to matter because I am just an old Gold Star daughter now, trying to be heard in a country full of men like Hegseth – the loudest and most unqualified person in the military.

I wish all those generals would take their job seriously and realize that the greatest threat to the country they took an oath to protect is coming from inside the Pentagon. If they really were to honor their oath of office, they would slap handcuffs on Hegseth and Trump both.

I pray that Congress would quit paying lip service to the fallen and to our active duty soldiers and actually arrest the president.

That would truly be some heroic shit worth writing history books about.