When a soldier is killed in action his/her survivor receives condolence letters from people who never remember that death again. It is no sweat off the brow of Petey Hegseth or that of Donald J. Trump, who thunk up this war for the sake of their own vainglory.

And that is what this war in Iran is all about – Trump and Hegseth’s Vainglory.

vain·glo·ry

noun

literary

1. inordinate pride in oneself or one’s achievements; excessive vanity: His vainglory put the Republic at risk.

Growing up people usually had the same response whenever they discovered my father died in America’s war in Vietnam. It was a version of: What a waste.

They weren’t saying my father’s life was a waste. They were saying his life mattered and it was a damn shame that he was sent to fight in a war that should never have been waged. You know, like the one Hegseth and Trump are waging now.

Vainglory.

I know something personal about the sacrifice of a soldier’s family when that soldier is sent to fight in a war that should never have been. Trump is a draft dodger. He is the most dishonorable man to ever serve as commander-in-chief. As Pat Conroy wrote in My Losing Season, Trump should’ve gone to Vietnam and earned the right to send others to war. Instead, he lied – something he has spent his whole life doing. He lied to get out of service. He probably should’ve died in Vietnam and saved all of us the heartache that he now inflicts upon the world.

I blame the Vietnam Veterans that voted for him.

The first betrayal I ever felt was that which I experienced as a child realizing that our nation didn’t give a care about what happened to our family after Daddy was killed in action. I grew into a very angry adult as a result of that hurt, that deep betrayal, the lack of care for my mother, a Gold Star widow, and my father’s mother and father, Gold Star parents. Outside the close knit community in East Tennessee no one cared one iota about what happened to any of us following Daddy’s death.

I was in my 40s the first time I met other adults who had lost their fathers in America’s War in Vietnam. I was in my late 40s the first time I tracked down the men who served alongside my father, the men who were there that day he died. Those who knew the real story of his death.

This letter was from my father’s commanding officer and it is full of lies. Lies that I did not uncover until I was in my late 40s and was able to confront him face-to-face and to interview the men who were with my father the day he died on July 24, 1966.

I was in my late 40s when I first attended a ceremony at the Vietnam Wall. It was there that I found some peace for all the anger I felt over this nation’s betrayal of families like ours. It took years, but I was a long way into healing that childhood hurt when I heard Trump take to the airwaves and condemn the Khan family, a Gold Star family of a U.S. Army captain killed by a car bomb in 2004 while guarding the gates of his base in Iraq.

The Khan family are Muslim and Trump suggested that Mrs. Khan was prohibited by her religion from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. He took it further when he suggested it was Muslims who were at fault for terrorism around the world. He followed that by putting in place a ban on Muslims entering the country after he was elected. And, just as he does now, bad-mouthing and bullying anyone who dares to challenge his failures as a man, which are too many to name here.

It was his attack on this family and so many more that put me on the path I continue to pursue – calling his failures out at every turn, which is why I blame the Vietnam Vets who voted for him.

You would think no one would be more keen to rally people against Trump than Vietnam Vets. After all, no one knows better the cost of a wrongheaded war than Vietnam Veterans. Drafted at 17, 18, 19, sent by the tens of thousands to the front lines of a country half-a-world away, these young boys watched their friends get blown up, torn from limb to limb, watched them bleed out the way my father did, crying all the while for their lives to be spared.

They came home grieving. They came home angry. They came home knowing exactly how they were handpicked to do the sacrificing for rich men and their entitled sons. You would think they would have seen that Trump was the fulfillment of entitlement. You would think those veterans would have resented Trump for being able to bribe his way out of the draft. Not once but five times. You would think those Vietnam veterans would loathe a man so privileged that he bullied Gold Star families. A man so racist he found a multitude of ways to inflict harm on blacks and Latinos. Vietnam, after all, was where so many draftees made their first friendships with Blacks and Latinos. It was also where they made their first friendships with the Vietnamese and Hmong people. And it was Vietnam veterans who supported giving refugee status to the masses of Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians affected by the wrongheaded war that had cost them so much.

So you’d think these Vietnam veterans would have called Trump out for the fool he is when he first ran. Who could ever imagined after four years of his oppressive regime that they would support him again?

Yet, they did. By the tens of thousands.

And that remains the greatest hurt of my adult life. To be betrayed by the very same Vietnam veterans who promised they would never forget my father’s sacrifice, even as they tromp all over it.

I will never understand their betrayal.

Never.

Nor will I ever forgive it.

I have seen the damage war does up close and personal. I have lived it. And it is because I have lived it that I grieve every single death in Trump’s War in Iran. Every soldier. Every child. Every infant. Every man. Every woman.

But you know who isn’t grieving those deaths?

The men who caused it – Trump and Hegseth.

They can’t even be bothered to lower the flag to half-mast because they are hoping you forget about the dead and their families, too.

Every soldier, every person, every child, every infant that is killed in Trump’s War on Iran, dies simply for this man’s vainglory, and no other reason.

Shame on the Congress that allows him to do it. Shame on the American people for not taking to the streets to stop this insanity.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of After the Flag has been Folded (HarperCollins).