![]() I collapsed onto the hardwood floor when I received the news. He had one month left on his tour of duty when he was killed by a roadside bomb. On the last page, he told Jordan that he had written all he could think of - favorite Bible verses, how to choose a wife, lessons in how to be a man - in case he did not make it home. He wrote that he hoped to make us proud with his service to our country. He filled that journal with 200 pages of wisdom and expressions of love for us. That is because Charles took a journal with him to Iraq and wrote to our son, even before he was born. Jordan never knew his dad, but in many ways, he knows his father better than many children whose dads are living. He looked at me like I was trying to sell him a bag of air. Even so, I told Jordan that the president had denied making the remarks. The statement almost sounded like a question, and my anger boiled over. By the next morning, when Jordan brought up Trump again, it became clear how distressed he was. “It never stops.”īut then my son had popped into my room before I could grab the remote control and turn off the television. ![]() “Don’t lean in to this latest loop on the Trump roller coaster,” I told myself. Still, I tried hard to ignore the emotions stirring so viscerally within me, telling myself that President Trump knew nothing of my brave, sweet, humble soldier. I thought, too, about all the other Gold Star families who must be confused and hurt by even the possibility that the president had made those insulting and incendiary remarks. I had tried to shield Jordan from this news, which broke in The Atlantic on Thursday, while working through my own anger and pain - sensations so palpable that I became nauseated and short of breath. But I had never expected that I would need to remind my son of his dad’s honor and sacrifice. I have spent Jordan’s childhood filling in the blanks, making sure that he knew his father, as a soldier and as a man. “We know the truth about your dad’s heroism.” “What do we care what anyone thinks,” I said and made a swatting gesture. My son reads me well, and so it took every ounce of my strength not to physically react. “Mom, is he talking about my dad?” Jordan asked, his eyes searching and his forehead furrowed in confusion. He was killed in Iraq in October 2006, when Jordan was 6 months old. ![]() He had come into my room and heard a snippet of a news report that President Trump had called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers” - soldiers like Jordan’s father and my fiancé, First Sgt. I struggled for the words to comfort Jordan, my 14-year-old son. My Son Knows His Father Wasn’t a ‘Loser’ or a ‘Sucker’ Read it and remember that the person who spoke of our war dead as “losers and suckers” is in the White House and is running for re-election. He knows his father was a warrior and a patriot. She says that “her son, Jordan, lost his father in Iraq. Jordan, now 14, at his father’s grave site.ĭana Canedy, a former New York Times journalist and the author of A Journal for Jordan, has an op-ed today responding to Donald Trump’s comments referring to World War I American casualties as “losers and suckers’ that appeared in The Atlantic on Thursday.
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