National Guard troops recently dispatched to Washington, D.C., were notified last week they would be authorized to carry service weapons “solely in response to an imminent threat,” according to a Guard statement.
Many guardsmen, however, were unaware the imminent threat posed would come in the form of unkempt flower beds and tree debris, their weapons akin to those wielded by an Anglo-Saxon fyrd under Alfred the Great.
But such is the reality for many of the 2,300 or so troops deployed to stem the “magnitude of the violent crime” in the nation’s capital, where threats of high-priced coffee, spandex-clad cyclists and more salmon pants than a Ralph Lauren factory loom around every pothole-riddled corner.
Beckoning deployed troops to these war-torn environs are custodial and landscaping duties, which have been colorfully labeled as “beautification” despite a police-call reality that has devastated enlisted morale since the Bronze Age.
Such D.C.-based chores reportedly once fell to National Park Service staff, but in the wake of significant NPS cuts, the administration, which has a well-established affinity for landscaping, has determined that personnel wearing orange reflector vests atop camouflage have the warrior ethos necessary to beautify.
Various critics, meanwhile, have suggested the beautification work runs counter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s oft-repeated mission statement of bringing “a warfighting ethos back to the Pentagon.”
“Everything else that distracts [from lethality] shouldn’t be happening,” he told a reporter scrum back in December.
True warfighters instilled with the warfighting ethos, however, know that a warfighting ethos is only at its warfighting ethos-iest when warfighters are fighting a war on boredom.
And here among the embattled mulch beds of D.C., cousin, boredom is ah-boomin.
“I think it’s nice, as a D.C. resident,” one Guard member told the Washington Post. “But there are different things we could be doing.”
That might be the case for many of the D.C.-based troops here, or those who came from Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia or Ohio, some of whom are spending their first days ever in the nation’s capital tending to patches of dirt.
But inside the soul of each unwitting service member is a warfighter who grows more lethal with each cigarette butt lifted from the mean streets of the National Mall.
Few training methods, after all, guarantee a better fighting force than boredom-induced annoyance.
To date, beautifying has reportedly commandeered so much time that junior enlisted have even given up observing the time-honored custom of throwing rocks at other rocks, a ritual medically proven to enhance one’s morale.
But who needs optimism — or even general mission directives — when one has earned the privilege of making rake and mulch as much a part of their being as their own beating heart?
“This is my rake. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”
Full stop. Period. American flag emoji.
Observation Post is the Military Times one-stop shop for all things off-duty. Stories may reflect author observations.
J.D. Simkins is the executive editor of Military Times and Defense News, and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.
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