ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL — After the issue of what does or does not count as a deployment emerged as an issue in the 2024 election, polls have shown that vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a retired National Guard sergeant major, is rapidly gaining support among the crucial demographic of “guys who consider Kuwait a deployment.”
“I like Walz because he reminds me of myself,” said Carl Sutton, a former Army first lieutenant who served from 2006 to 2012 and once went TDY for two weeks to Hawaii. “Walz has seen the horrors of routine training events in partner countries. He’s the only one with the cold, hard experience to keep us out of foreign entanglements like Exercise Cobra Gold in Thailand, or a NATO conference in Belgium.”
Walz, who served 24 years in the National Guard, has been criticized by political opponents for never having deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. But Walz says that service in war is not the only mark of a true soldier. He says it will be his duty as vice president to bestow equal honors upon the heroes who have served in “such faraway lands as Kuwait, Germany, and [Fort Irwin National Training Center in San Bernardino County, California].”
As part of a holistic campaign to garner veteran support, Walz has vowed to expand benefits to malingerers, Marines who were administratively separated during boot camp, and sailors who “floated around on a ship in the ocean kind of near Iraq one time.”
“Walz is our country’s first political leader who has truly tried to answer the question every veteran has been asking: ‘Is Kuwait a deployment?’” said Jeffrey Isgro, a policy expert and Air Force veteran who was once on a logistical aircraft that stopped in Qatar. “This is the biggest win for our veterans since Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, who served in the Coast Guard reserve during the Civil War but never went on a boat.”
Experts agree that Walz is likely to keep the U.S. out of foreign wars because, like a typical sergeant major, he doesn’t want anyone to get medals that he doesn’t have.
“There’s no way Vice President Walz would let a bunch of privates and boot second lieutenants get combat patches for fighting against China, Russia, or anywhere else where their ribbon stack might grow bigger than his,” Isgro said. “His policy of reverse-ribbon chasing could usher in a new era of peace for the Western world.”
At press time, Walz told reporters that despite his support for non-combat veterans of all stripes, the Coast Guard still doesn’t count as the military.
Cat Astronaut is a demobilized mobile infantryman and the creator of medieval and fantasy satire site Ye Olde Tyme News.
