A lifelong friend texted the group chat the other day.
His father — later a Conrad scholar and Caltech professor out of Pomona College and CGU and a famous bon vivant in Southland literature circles — landed on the Iwo Jima beach as a lieutenant in the United States Marines.
My friend’s text: “My dad would be rolling over in his grave.”
David Smith had led a contingent of 46 Marines (of whom only seven survived) to take a hill from the Japanese Imperial Army in an engagement known as Cushman’s Pocket. “And we paid the price, particularly as they were mostly behind us, and one son of a bitch among them was a first-rate sharpshooter,” David once wrote in an homage to a Glendale high school buddy he served alongside in the Pacific. “Within minutes of the first light he killed my favorite among the men, a kid of 18; my sergeant, George, bullet between the eyes. It was instantaneous. And he got me in the solar plexus. The ironies abound, for if my rifleman was a kid of 18, George and I were kids of 22.”
David was a real Marine. The experience created in him “a central core of pride that has governed my life these past 45 years.”
And that’s the reason David, who died too young 35 years ago, would have been appalled by what a commander-in-chief who never served has done in ordering 700 Marines with training in combat but no training in law enforcement during civil unrest into duty not overseas but in Los Angeles.
It’s sick. It’s unnecessary. It’s a PR stunt by a president who lives to stunt. The LAPD is more than capable of policing both the demonstrations by those justifiably outraged by ICE actions and the crooks and looters who are taking advantage of the unrest.
And when I say more than capable, I mean that literally. A bit too capable sometimes. L.A. officers may have made strides in recent years in not cracking so many heads first and asking questions later during political demos, but a certain head-cracking mentality continues to prevail.
KCRW’s Madeleine Brand on her “Press Play” show Wednesday played audio of an L.A. demonstrator asking an officer for his badge number or name — cops are legally required to answer — and the officer said he was going to shoot him instead, and then he did. With a rubber bullet, yeah, but less-than-lethal still hurts a lot. Another demonstrator was part of a group Downtown that was told they were an unlawful assembly and then were immediately shot by police. “I was definitely walking backwards,” Robert Meraz, a 51-year-old public defender from Van Nuys told The Intercept while holding an ice pack against bandages soaked in blood, “but I guess not backwards fast enough.” He said an officer held a bean-bag-loaded weapon against his gut before firing.
This is in great part nothing more than another cash grab by the president. As Jim Rainey points out in the Los Angeles Times, Trump wrote to his financial supporters in a fundraising appeal last week about his military intervention, concluding: “If we had not done so, Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”
No, it would not have been. The Guard and the Marines have done nothing. It’s all for show.
“Los Angeles would be burning just like it was burning a number of months ago, with all the houses that were lost,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Los Angeles right now would be on fire.”
No, it would not be. Nor would the few small blocks of Downtown where the demos are intense. Sure as shooting, regular law enforcement is cracking down just fine.
The press is not exactly being treated with kid gloves, either. A dozen scribes and photographers covering the unrest have been “detained” by law enforcement and shot with rubber bullets and foam projectiles for doing their jobs.
Police rounded up a CNN crew, shot a New York Times reporter and a woman journalist from Australia with rubber bullets, shot a CalMatters reporter with a foam grenade. “A freelance photographer for the New York Post was hit in the head by a less-lethal round while covering the protests on California’s 101 freeway,” The Guardian reports. He was wearing a press pass. CHP shot him from 100 yards away. All the world’s a stage, and the White House drama queen is getting the drama he craves.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.