Decorated veteran

A writer to my my local paper worried in a January 12, 2021 letter about the apparent lack of concern for the “military veteran” killed during the January 6th attack on the capitol because “she was white.”

That veteran was Ashli Babbitt. Before the circumstances of her death were known, she was often described (especially in the earliest reporting in conservative outlets; a lot of that cooled off as the circumstances became clearer) as a “decorated Air Force veteran”.

Context is everything, of course. While honorable, her service was not particularly remarkable. She had four years of active Air Force service and eight more years with the reserve and Air National Guard. In these years, she attained the rank of Senior Airman (E-4) and received an Army Achievement Medal (presumably for duties in a joint USAF-Army environment). Her other decorations were service awards. While not without meaning, these are the same awards her peers also received for also going where they were supposed to when told to go there. Veterans who do not acquire one or more of these are a rarity. Further, most enlisted members advance to the rank she attained during their first two years of service, and many advance further during a single four year enlistment. However honorable her service, she was not setting either the Air Force, the reserves or National Guard on fire.

Babbitt’s recent social media presence included support for QAnon conspiracies, “vetbro”-style anti-government rants, and frequent retweets of Lin Wood (formerly Richard Jewell’s attorney, and now a far-right cartoon character peddling hate speech). If Ashli Babbitt were Muslim, her evolution would almost certainly be described as “radicalization”. In her final hours, she expressed excitement about her travel from California to Washington and enthusiasm for marching to Capitol Hill. Babbitt was shot inside the capitol. She was trying climb through a broken window and enter a corridor where a member of congress was fleeing the crowd she was at the front of.

In the final moments between the bullet striking her and her last breath, did “decorated Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt” reflect on the series of bad decisions that led her death? Did she long to be comforted by of a loved one instead of strangers in a criminal mob? Or did she die doing what she loved? Would there have been a different outcome if she had “just complied”, a standard many unarmed Black men have been held to.

Civilians should understand that neither decorations nor a DD-214 are inoculations against bad decisions or criminal actions, whether still serving or as veterans (ask Timothy McVeigh, Oliver North, Michael Flynn or John Poindexter, just to name a few). We should focus less on her military resume, and more on the context of how she wasted her life’s final act.