Opinion: Tom Cotton’s Staggering, Shameful Hypocrisy Over Trump’s Arlington Debacle
In his 2019 memoir, Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour of Arlington National Cemetery, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) recounts the 16 months, beginning in early 2007, he spent as an Army officer assigned to The Old Guard, the fabled unit that oversees a grassy expanse made holy by American heroes.
During this time, Cotton periodically filled in for his commanding officer and personally supervised several internments in Arlington National Cemetery’s Section 60, where the dead from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried.
“I understand why some people call this bucolic patch of land the saddest acre in America, but I prefer to think of Section 60 as the noblest acre in America,” he writes in Sacred Duty. “The nobility of Section 60 runs deep in the soil of Arlington and in the soul of our nation.”