When you look back, do you feel angry that you were part of that violence? Regret? I have a complicated relationship with it, because I am still proud of being a Marine. I am very proud of my service and the service of the guys that fought next to me. We tried our best, we truly did. But it doesn’t matter if you try your best inside of a flawed policy and a flawed system. It’s flawed from the top down. It’s bound to fail, it’s bound to bring an immense amount of violence upon people who in no way, shape or form are deserving of it. We destroyed Iraq and we destroyed Afghanistan, and all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying, all the displacement — we, the United States, did that. And that I’m ashamed of.
The anger that I feel is for the people that sent me, who are frankly still the same people who are sending people off right now to be in harm’s way so we can have this stupid war with Iran. Susan Collins voted to send me to Iraq, and she’s also there to help Donald Trump continue this absolutely insane conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. If I have any anger, it is reserved for the political system itself and the people in it who view war not as a thing that has a human toll but as a political game.
I want to come back to something else that happened during your time in the Middle East: You got a tattoo in Croatia when you were serving, and it resembles Nazi insignia. It’s a skull and crossbones. I got a skull and crossbones with a bunch of other Marines in a tattoo parlor in Croatia because skull and crossbones are things that Marines get. I had it for 17 years. I took my shirt off. I was out in public. I took pictures with it. I went through two security clearances where I got screened for gang and hate tattoos and it never once came up on a screening. Until after the campaign started, and then the establishment candidate got in the race, and suddenly they drop all this opposition research, and part of it is that Graham Platner has this tattoo with white-supremacist ties or Nazi ties. At that point I took a look at the thing and I’m like, Well, I don’t want something that has that kind of connotation on my body, so I promptly got it covered up.
Did other people get the same tattoo? Yeah. Other guys in my unit.
You say it’s opposition research, and that may well be true, but ultimately it is hard for voters to know why you got it. That doesn’t seem to be the case for people in Maine. I’ve talked about this ad nauseam.
Have you made outreach to Jewish voters, and how have they responded? Half of my family is Jewish. In fact, the video in which the tattoo is displayed, which was the video that was shared, was at my brother’s wedding to my Jewish sister-in-law with her whole extended Jewish family where I was taking my shirt off and dancing. If I had thought I had something that was this obvious antisemitic thing, I would not have done that, because that would be utterly insane. We have a lot of close supporters who are in the Jewish community in Maine, primarily because I’ve been close with people in the Jewish community in Maine my entire life.
