By David K. Shipler
Every November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution,
the Soviet Union staged a parade of drill-perfect troops and intimidating weaponry
through Red Square. And every November 7, the frigid breath of the coming
Moscow winter made the hours there a hardship. But I went in every one of the
four years I lived in Moscow, partly because it was my job as a New York
Times correspondent, partly because I’m a sucker for parades, even those of
my country’s adversary.
I grew up
with Fourth of July parades of fire engines in my hometown. And on the Maine
island where I spend summers now, I know a lot of the folks who roll by in
their decorated pickups, plus the vegetable gardener on her riding mower. (She makes
the world’s best pickles and relish.)
So, I went to the Army’s 250th
anniversary parade along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., partly because
it’s my habit to be curious, partly because I’m a believer in the power of
observation, even of killing machines. What I observed was less political and more
complicated than generally expected, not a Moscow-style display of
militarization.
There at the grass roots, we couldn’t
see President Trump and could barely hear his invited guests cheer his arrival.
We could not hear him swear in new recruits with an oath to the Constitution
that he violates hourly. His move to use the military inside his own country to
smother dissent, a step toward ideological totalitarianism, operated in a distant
dimension, real enough but confounded by a second dimension, the one you still
remember before the Trumpists came to power.
The mood was Fourth of July, a
crowd of people friendly with those they’d never met, laid back with no sign of
jingoism, families out for a pleasant day. Around me on Constitution Avenue,
they were almost entirely white—a rarity for DC—but sporting only a few MAGA
hats and a few more army and veterans’ caps and T-shirts. Many seemed to be
military buffs, having served themselves or, as one guy put it in a small sign:
YAY
ARMY
F… TRUMP
HERE
FOR
TANKS
Nobody bothered him, as far as I
could tell, nor did they challenge the fellow walking back and forth among the
onlookers holding a big poster saying, “TRUMP IS A RAPIST.” Trump’s threat that
any protests on his big day (also his birthday) would be “met with very big
force” turned out to be hot air, at least as far as DC police, army MPs and
uniformed Secret Service agents were concerned.
Such a threat in Moscow would have
been swiftly executed, of course, had any Russian waved a dissenting sign. Yet unlike
Constitution Avenue, where anybody could go, no ordinary Russians without
special passes could get to the Red Square parade through the series of
checkpoints. Non-credentialed people saw it only on TV.
In person, it was spectacular. With
Russians’ flair for pageantry, Moscow could surely win a theater critic’s award
over Washington, even Trump’s Washington. While the ageing Politburo was lined
up on the rust-red Lenin Mausoleum (equipped with heaters, we assumed), thousands
of troops in uniform great coats and fur hats goose-stepped in precise
unanimity across the vast plaza, with not a step out of tempo or a leg off
angle.
By contrast, ragged marching characterized
most of the US Army units along Constitution, perhaps because they were actual
combat forces. The Soviet soldiers looked suspiciously like trained drill teams.
Or maybe the Soviet army spent more time learning how to march than how to fight,
which has carried over to Russia’s flawed military performance in Ukraine.
Whatever the case, those troops in
Red Square, chins raised in a pose of haughty superiority, seemed formidable as
their chants, “Hoo-RAH! Hoo-RAH!” reverberated off the Kremlin walls. (Rumor
had it that they were recorded and amplified. But still!) On Constitution, however,
American soldiers marched practically in silence, with only the occasional lone
voice of a senior sergeant’s commands, none of those semi-musical cadence calls,
joined by all the troops, that you’re supposed to learn in boot camp.
The Soviet parades featured the
most ominous weapons of all, various nuclear-capable rockets, including
enormous international ballistic missiles dragged through Red Square on huge vehicles.
That missile-rattling show was abandoned for a while after the Soviet Union
collapsed but was performed most recently this spring to mark the 80th
anniversary of the end of World War II. As a statement of patriotic pride and international
menace, it gets the message across as Russia bogs down in its attempt to
conquer Ukraine: Remember, we’re a nuclear power.
Washington’s parade seemed less scary
because it contained no missiles, just a few unarmed mobile launchers. (The Army
doesn’t have ICBMs, which are controlled by the Air Force and Navy.) It felt
carefree and almost benign as drivers and gunmen waved and smiled from the
turrets of their tanks and other deadly vehicles. One nearby father kept trying
to whip up enthusiastic awe in his small son,—“Buddy, look at that! That’s the
101st! See that? Special Forces!”—but we won’t know for about a
decade if it worked on the young man. From my grassroots post, this parade did
not live up to its ominous billing as Trump’s militarized swagger toward
authoritarianism.
It was essentially a celebration of
the Army’s history, a retrospective of marchers and bands clad in colonial-era
uniforms, then those from the Civil War and updated as helmets changed shape through
World War I and II, Korea and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The evolution included humans’
capacity to develop imaginative tools of death, and the crowds along
Constitution were captivated by the long succession of olive-drab armored
vehicles, including the behemoth of all—the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank—which is too
big to be very useful in much modern warfare. It’s not clear whether it damaged
the capital’s streets as predicted, but I saw no harm being caused on venerated Constitution
Avenue. The reason, as a young fellow who’d spent eight years in the 82nd
Airborne explained to me, was that the tanks were heading straight, and treads
tear things up mostly when they turn. Steel plates had been installed at
corners.
That
guy gave me short courses on nearly every weapon that passed by, plus the best
and worst kinds of helicopters to jump from, the most and least maneuverable kinds
of parachutes, and the obsolescence of most of what we were seeing. Two small
surveillance drones flying along Constitution were the future of warfare, as we
both agreed, having watched Ukraine’s inventive use of them.
He asked if
I’d been in uniform. I said I’d been in the Navy—one hat I wear that
establishes an instant bond with people I might profoundly disagree with. But I
didn’t ask him about his politics. In our dimension, it didn’t feel like a
political day. I didn’t ask him how he felt about Trump using the military for domestic
policing. I was being a very bad reporter. I did wonder to myself, watching the
ranks of young troops in camouflage, how they would react to a clearly illegal
order, and what thoughts were going on inside their minds about what was
happening to America’s precious democracy.
Instead, having heard that he’d
made 45 jumps as a paratrooper, I asked him about his knees. “They’re broken,” he
said with a wan smile, as if acknowledging fate.
