If Ron DeSantis becomes president of the United States, he would be the first commander in chief since George H. W. Bush three full decades ago to have served his country in uniform in a combat zone.Bill Clinton famously avoided the Vietnam draft. George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard but remained stateside. Barack Obama was too young for Vietnam and never seemed to seriously consider military service. Donald Trump skipped out on Vietnam receiving medical deferments for a purported bone-spur diagnosis and later told Howard Stern that avoiding STDs in the randy '60s and '70s was his own "personal Vietnam." Joe Biden received five student deferments and then, in 1968, was "disqualified from service because of asthma as a teenager."
Ron DeSantis, after his undergraduate years at Yale and Harvard Law School, joined the Navy during the turmoil of the Iraq War.
As Howard Altman and Emily Mahoney reported for the Tampa Bay Times in 2018:
During the surge, DeSantis served as a senior legal advisor to the SEAL who commanded Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah, Navy Capt. Dane Thorleifson.
DeSantis was responsible for helping ensure the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets in that wide swath of the Western Euphrates River Valley were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated, said his commander at the time.
"He did a phenomenal job," Thorleifson, 55, said of DeSantis in a Times/Herald interview. "It was a pretty complex time, with Iraqi sovereignty starting to take hold."
During this period, task force troops rounded up about 100 detainees, said Thorleifson. They were mostly military-aged males, some of which were found with suicide vests while others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was up to DeSantis, the lone lawyer with the Judge Advocate General Corps., or JAG, to not only assure these men were treated humanely and interrogated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military regulations, but to make sure that, when warranted, they were handed off to the proper legal authorities in Iraq for prosecution in that country's nascent judicial system, Thorleifson said.
Ron DeSantis's military service in Iraq is honorable. And, outside of political junkies, it's little known. Think of your only vaguely political sister-in-law or your golfing buddy who occasionally listens to Joe Rogan: Do they know that Ron DeSantis was awarded the Bronze Star in Iraq while most of his former Yale and Harvard Law classmates were mid-career on Wall Street or at white-shoe law firms?
If he hopes to win this fight, DeSantis's team had better make sure that every center-right voter in America knows at least one biographical fact about the Florida governor: When his country needed him, Ron DeSantis put on his nation's cloth.
DeSantis won the Bronze Star in Iraq serving the SEAL teams