For the New Yorker, Type Media Center fellow Jasper Craven examines Graham Platner’s military career and veteran identity in light of his failed campaign to become Senator of Maine.
He writes:
I spoke with several combat veterans who said that they identified with Platner’s struggles. Others felt he was using P.T.S.D. as a political crutch, perpetuating the stigma that all veterans are damaged and dangerous. One of Platner’s most vocal critics, Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts congressman and a former captain in the Marine Corps—he’s now a reservist officer—went on CNN before Maine’s primary and said that Platner’s tattoo was “personally disqualifying,” adding, “I hope Maine voters agree with me.” They didn’t: on June 9th, Platner won the primary with seventy-two per cent of the vote.
Shortly after his primary victory, Platner told me he believed that Maine voters understood his struggles. He cited the deepening divide, in America, between communities that fight wars and those that have the privilege of viewing armed conflict “in this real vague, sort of romanticized way.” Within this divide, he enjoyed a geographic advantage: Maine has one of the highest per-capita concentrations of veterans in the country. “One of the things that the political class in this country forgets is that a lot of Americans actually deal with the repercussions of war quite directly,” Platner told me. “People in places of power, people that live in the rarefied air, they don’t have, like, a cousin that went and got fucked up in Fallujah. They don’t have a neighbor who’s a woman veteran who suffers from military sexual assault.”