{"id":1059,"date":"2026-07-24T10:38:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2026-07-24T10:38:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:38:06","slug":"the-complications-of-graham-platners-veteran-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1059","title":{"rendered":"The Complications of Graham Platner\u2019s Veteran Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A few weeks before Graham Platner dropped out of the race for U.S. Senate in Maine, he reflected on the kind of veterans who typically serve in Congress. \u201cIt\u2019s not grunts who got in drag-out fights and know exactly what it feels like to taste the blood in your fucking mouth,\u201d he told me, but, rather, \u201creservist officers,\u201d who serve part time while pursuing a civilian career or an education.<\/p>\n

Read more One Man\u2019s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail<\/a><\/p>\n

For most American politicians, military service is a safe, useful credential. Thirty-one Presidents have served in uniform, as have around a hundred current members of Congress. The prototypical service candidate is straitlaced and clean-shaven, someone who speaks about their service in bloodless shorthand, heavy on duty, light on pain. They are expected to have seen some action but not to carry any wounds, a tension that has given rise to acts of stolen valor, in which some candidates embellish or fabricate their military record in order to make it seem more intense.<\/p>\n

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Platner, a Marine Corps and Army veteran, had different problems. Critics pointed to his Ivy League-educated father and his brief stint at a prep school as evidence that his working-class image was exaggerated. But, within the military class system, one thing was certain: he was at the bottom. In fact, he was on the ground. Platner deployed four times after 9\/11, including two Marine combat tours in Iraq and one Army tour in Afghanistan. He struggled with alcohol and with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of his service, and his Senate-primary campaign was consumed by revelations about his postwar conduct: racist, misogynistic, and nihilistic posts he\u2019d made on Reddit; a Nazi symbol that he\u2019d drunkenly got tattooed on his chest; sexual text messages he\u2019d sent to other women in the early days of his marriage. The Times<\/em> interviewed several of his former partners, three of whom described him as volatile. One woman, Lyndsey Fifield, alleged that he had been physically rough with her. Another, Jenny Racicot, said that, in 2021, Platner arrived at her house, drunk and uninvited. She called his behavior \u201creckless\u201d and \u201cunsettling\u201d but declined to elaborate, saying only that she had cut off contact with him soon after.<\/p>\n

I interviewed Platner twice for this story. Our first conversation was in June, and the second one took place a little more than a week ago. When we spoke in June, in the wake of the Times<\/em> article, Platner denied any physical aggression (and still does), but he also acknowledged that some of these controversies stemmed from a dark period in his life. He invoked the language of recovery and accountability\u2014one of the running themes of his campaign. \u201cThere were many years when I was deeply insecure and deeply unhappy with who I was, for a myriad of reasons,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd it takes a lot of work\u2014putting yourself in uncomfortable positions, building new relationships with people and all of that\u2014to get through it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I spoke with several combat veterans who said that they identified with Platner\u2019s 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\u2019s most vocal critics, Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts congressman and a former captain in the Marine Corps\u2014he\u2019s now a reservist officer\u2014went on CNN before Maine\u2019s primary and said that Platner\u2019s tattoo was \u201cpersonally disqualifying,\u201d adding, \u201cI hope Maine voters agree with me.\u201d They didn\u2019t: on June 9th, Platner won the primary with seventy-two per cent of the vote.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cin this real vague, sort of romanticized way.\u201d Within this divide, he enjoyed a geographic advantage: Maine has one of the highest per-capita concentrations of veterans in the country. \u201cOne 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,\u201d Platner told me. \u201cPeople in places of power, people that live in the rarefied air, they don\u2019t have, like, a cousin that went and got fucked up in Fallujah. They don\u2019t have a neighbor who\u2019s a woman veteran who suffers from military sexual assault.\u201d<\/p>\n

A month later, Racicot accused Platner of rape. In an interview with Politico<\/em>, she gave more details about the night that Platner showed up drunk at her home, alleging that he forced her to have sex with him, despite her repeated objections. Platner vehemently denied the allegations, though he said that he would take \u201cthe time to reflect on the best path forward.\u201d Meanwhile, his major endorsements evaporated, and the Democratic Party threatened to revoke his access to money and voter data. On July 8th\u2014two days after the publication of the Politico<\/em> piece\u2014he suspended his campaign; the Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention this Saturday to nominate Troy Jackson as its replacement candidate for Platner, setting up a November matchup against Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent.<\/p>\n

Last week, Platner told me that his hesitation to drop out of the race stemmed from his belief that, based on his decisive primary victory, he had genuinely convinced voters of his personal transformation. \u201cI mean, Jesus Christ,\u201d he said, \u201cwe had polling where I was still quite competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Platner\u2019s candidacy ultimately became a test of how much baggage a candidate can carry, and keep insisting he\u2019s worked through, before it becomes disqualifying. His race also became a #MeToo story, with a specific institutional backdrop: the military, and its potential to be an animating force of masculine dysfunction. In a country stubbornly attached to myths about the military\u2019s positive transformative power, Platner presented a stark counterfactual. Still, how much of his behavior should be read through the lens of what combat did to him, and how much of it is simply who he is, independent of war?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cJust because you have PTSD, doesn\u2019t mean you are excused to treat women in a disgusting manner,\u201d Joslin Joseph, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, wrote in a June op-ed. After all, Platner is far from the first political candidate to face such allegations; Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales, the two most recent members of Congress to suspend campaigns or resign in the wake of sexual-misconduct allegations, had no combat record to invoke.<\/p>\n

At the same time, intimate-partner violence is a pervasive issue among current and former members of the military, with researchers positing that this abuse is, at least in some cases, an \u201cextrapolation of [military] attitudes and interpersonal styles into relationships and family life.\u201d A 2005 study by the National Institutes of Health found that veterans with P.T.S.D. are up to three times as likely to be aggressive toward their partners as nonveterans are. Racicot herself invoked Platner\u2019s military trauma when messaging with an acquaintance whose friend was romantically interested in him, back in 2023. Racicot wrote that he was \u201cnot all bad\u201d\u2014he could be \u201ccharming\u201d and \u201cfunny,\u201d she wrote, but also \u201cconsensually careless at times.\u201d She said that the behavior flared up when Platner was \u201cdrunk. Plus ptsd.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kayla Williams, an Army veteran and a former director of the Department of Veterans Affairs\u2019 Center for Women Veterans, told me she sees a troubling pattern of hate and misogyny in Platner\u2019s past. (She added that misogyny \u201ccan be deepened or enhanced\u201d by military service, and that, in some people, P.T.S.D. \u201cdoes manifest in negative behaviors.\u201d) She believes people can grow, but is skeptical that Platner has, because of his \u201cdecision to hide all the shit,\u201d rather than proactively address it.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Paula Coughlin, a Navy veteran who blew the lid on the infamous 1991 Tailhook scandal, in which Navy and Marine officers sexually assaulted or harassed eighty-three women and seven men, said that Platner\u2019s past should disqualify him from a seat in Congress. \u201cThere is absolutely no way I would tolerate that bullshit out of anybody,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

After her military service, Coughlin, like Platner, became angry and started to drink heavily; she wanted so badly to escape her military identity that she changed her last name. She placed some conditional \u201chope\u201d in Platner\u2019s eventual redemption, if for no other reason than that so many other men today are embracing violent masculinity. \u201cI see Pete Hegseth as trying to dive even deeper into that dark abyss of toxic masculinity and misogyny,\u201d Coughlin said. \u201cI would say that Graham is trying to see the bigger picture and his place in the world as a good person, working through his experiences in the military.\u201d Coughlin reasoned that these two high-profile post-9\/11 veterans \u201care going in opposite directions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Platner suspended his campaign, Tony Ursone, a squad leader in his platoon during his first deployment in Iraq, cast his candidacy as a test of how far America\u2019s empathy for military veterans truly extends. \u201cIt gets fucking crazy how people think they can dominate this conversation, and say, \u2018Thank you for your service,\u2019 and then turn around and talk shit about somebody like Graham, who has grown from his service and has grown in spite of it,\u201d Ursone said.<\/p>\n

Platner estimates that his \u201cchildish idealism\u201d about the military was cemented by age two. One early influence was a record titled \u201cHoorah for the Red, White, and Blue!,\u201d pressed in 1958. Platner memorized all three stanzas of track five, \u201cThe Halls of Montezuma,\u201d the official hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps. By age six, he was fixated on police, firefighter, and military uniforms; a neighbor later stitched him a makeshift Union Army uniform, which he wore for a classroom presentation on the Civil War.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When Platner was ten, he visited the home of a family friend named Jack Deane, Jr., a four-star general known for joining his men on the front lines during the Vietnam War. In a 1967 newspaper article, an Army comrade said that the general\u2019s military feats made \u201cwar stories out of those blood-and-guts men\u2019s magazines read like \u2018Jack and Jill went up the hill.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Platner visited the house a dozen or so times, and would spend hours listening to Deane, Jr.,\u2019s vivid combat stories, often in a wood-panelled library where the general displayed his military brass.<\/p>\n

For three summers in high school, Platner worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire, building trails and clearing brush. The lodge where he slept was named for a marine killed at Iwo Jima, and one of Platner\u2019s superiors was active in the Corps. \u201cEverything was about intensity\u2014everything was about physicality,\u201d Platner recalled. \u201cThe more you were suffering, the harder you were working, the better everything was.\u201d At eighteen, Platner got his first tattoo to memorialize the experience: two crossed axes and the peak of a white mountain.<\/p>\n

As Platner approached his high-school graduation, Deane, Jr., encouraged him to apply to West Point, his alma mater. But Platner was not interested in military management. \u201cI like doing the work,\u201d he explained. \u201cI don\u2019t really wanna tell people to do the work.\u201d Platner graduated in 2003, the same year that the U.S. invaded Iraq, and by his own account had already developed a bone-deep, if na\u00efve, belief that an upstanding troop could meaningfully influence conditions on the ground. Shortly after graduating, Platner went backpacking through Europe, where he met several marines. After returning to Maine, he snuck his birth certificate from his father\u2019s office and enlisted. On March 1, 2004, Platner\u2019s mother, Leslie Harlow, dropped him off at a DoubleTree motel in Portland where he was set to fly to boot camp the next morning. She cried all the way home.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe take these young, vulnerable human beings, men and women, and we put them into this thing that they are absolutely not prepared for,\u201d she told me. This thing\u2014the military\u2014aims, at least in Harlow\u2019s eyes, to turn boys into tools for brutal battlefield aims.<\/p>\n

Platner\u2019s first deployment, in early 2005, began at the Abu Ghraib prison complex, part of which the military had rechristened Camp Redemption. A year earlier, the prison had become the center of a detainee-abuse scandal that shook the nation. When Platner arrived, the place seemed haunted not only by American misconduct but also by Saddam Hussein\u2019s use of it to imprison and abuse political dissidents during his reign. Donnie Briere, who deployed there with Platner, told me that even some of the bigger, tougher marines \u201cwere crawling out of their skin.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When Briere first met Platner, he thought that Platner had accidentally boarded the wrong bus. He was \u201cway smarter than the rest of us,\u201d Briere said, and engaging with him \u201cfelt like walking into an upscale winery\u201d when you were used to drinking Miller Lite drafts. But his skepticism waned after he saw Platner confidently lead men during training. \u201cHis voice helps,\u201d Briere added.<\/p>\n

The unit\u2019s first major combat came in April, 2005, during a surprise evening mortar and small-arms attack on the prison, which included suicide car bombers targeting the complex\u2019s perimeter. Ursone, a squad leader at the complex, recalled coming upon the aftermath of a different mortar attack by the mujahideen: \u201cThere\u2019s bodies everywhere,\u201d he said, \u201climbs blown up and all that stuff.\u201d One of the casualties was a young boy. On another operation during this deployment, Platner\u2019s vehicle got hit by an improvised explosive device northeast of Fallujah, which gave his friend a serious head wound.<\/p>\n

Read more Grocery Shopping in the Age of Explosive Diarrhea<\/a><\/p>\n

Platner\u2019s tour was punctuated by hopeful moments, too, including his first mission: monitoring the 2005 Iraqi elections. \u201cWe managed security at a voting site,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAll these people came down and lined up to vote, and we worked really hard to keep the crowd calm. And it was excellent. It was cool.\u201d But Platner also came to doubt the doctrine he\u2019d been trained to trust; the military\u2019s dehumanization of the enemy, and its often indiscriminate attacks, seemed at odds with \u201chearts and minds\u201d missions, such as handing out water and candy to locals. \u201cI really don\u2019t understand what\u2019s going on,\u201d he remembers thinking.<\/p>\n

He described his experience in the military as both stunting and transformative. It didn\u2019t promote growth but, rather, a \u201chardening\u201d of his angsty, boyish instincts, he told me. Briere agreed. \u201cYou don\u2019t fully mature in the military,\u201d he said. \u201cYou, as a human, stay a teen-age boy.\u201d This is especially true of the infantry, he argued, which fosters a hyper-insular \u201cprimitive\u201d subculture.<\/p>\n

Ursone reckoned that the distinct rites and language of their marine tribe would, to polite society, resemble hieroglyphics. \u201cIt has its own language, its own swagger, and this whole all-encompassing\u2014and, when we were in, it was all-male\u2014vibe,\u201d he said. That culture, several veterans told me, is a stew of pent-up sexual energy, existential anxiety, and brotherhood, producing a mix of childish dick jokes, homoerotic hazing rites, sexism, and self-destruction. \u201cYou almost have to, like, live in a world of offensiveness, because what you do for work is offensive to the soul,\u201d Platner said.<\/p>\n

Thomas Brennan, a former marine who served in Iraq the same year that Platner did\u2014and later exposed a marine revenge-porn ring for the news nonprofit he founded, The War Horse<\/em>\u2014said that all-male infantry units made it \u201cwidely accepted to look down on women marines, to talk negatively about women marines, to hypersexualize women marines.\u201d Brennan admitted that he had participated in that culture himself. Coughlin, the veteran who exposed the 1991 Tailhook scandal, recalled a female marine being called \u201ca walking mattress,\u201d in her day: \u201cIt was really baked in.\u201d Indeed, a 2017 article in the Journal of Peace Research<\/em> argues that military sexual violence is inculcated through core military socialization processes that treat sexualized hazing and assault as appropriate forms of punishment or bonding. In a 2020 Reddit post, Platner wrote that he envied West Coast marine veterans because \u201cthey get to bang LA chicks, whores in TJ [Tijuana], and hit up Vegas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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While Platner and his men fought in Fallujah, a wave of public forgetting was already under way. A kind of abstraction set in about what was going on overseas. After his first deployment, Harlow attended a homecoming at Camp Lejeune, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where she remembers being greeted by the sight of car dealerships, tattoo parlors, and strip bars blaring patriotic messages, followed by a muted event for the marines, many of whom were dazed and injured, with no elected officials present. \u201cNobody from Congress or the Senate or the mayor of Jacksonville,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThere was nobody there to thank these guys. You just felt so empty.\u201d Platner\u2019s father, Bronson, was also absent; he disapproved of both the war and his son\u2019s choice to enlist.<\/p>\n

After Platner got off the plane, he and his mom ended up at a Hooters, where, over wings, she found herself thinking, We\u2019ve gone through all this, and this is what you do?<\/p>\n

According to an archived Reddit post, Platner spent the next six months \u201csolidly drunk.\u201d He then returned to Iraq and spent eight months in Ramadi.<\/p>\n

Twenty minutes after Platner dropped \u201c[his] shit at the hooch\u201d at Camp Hurricane Point in Ramadi, an I.E.D. attached to an oil tanker exploded nearby. He would later recall, on Reddit, \u201clooking east at a gigantic fireball rising, framed by a sky full of tracer fire.\u201d He continued, \u201cWhile it was my second deployment, at that moment I started to feel really scared.\u201d Platner said that leadership suggested the soldiers take up smoking in order to deal with the stress; before long, he was smoking two packs a day. The tour was marked by blistering heat and perpetual violence, which he later summed up on Reddit as \u201cSpring Break Ramadi 2006: You were chillin\u2019, we were killin\u2019!\u201d<\/p>\n

During his third and final Marine tour, in 2007, Platner got a skull-and-crossbones tattoo\u2014a Totenkopf, originally an S.S. symbol\u2014while drunk with buddies in Split, Croatia. He says the tattoo was meant to look cool and commemorate brotherhood, nothing more; he had it covered up, last October, after journalists pointed out its Nazi provenance. Some alleged that he knew the symbol\u2019s original meaning long before then. \u201cThere is no way he spent twenty years\u2014showering at gyms and everything\u2014and nobody ever said, \u2018Wow, bro\u2014seriously?\u2019 \u201d Kayla Williams, the former director of the V.A.\u2019s Center for Women Veterans, argued. \u201cAnd he never Googled it? That strains credibility past the breaking point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other veterans pushed back, citing similar instances of service members\u2019 unwittingly getting offensive tattoos. Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy SEAL<\/em> and founder of the political group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, told me that, at the end of his time at Marine Corps Scout Sniper school, he heard plenty of graduates discuss getting \u201cS.S.\u201d tattoos, which were meant to denote \u201cScout Sniper.\u201d \u201cI was, like, \u2018Whoa, dude, let\u2019s pump the fucking brakes for a sec,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Barkhuff recalled. \u201c\u00a0\u2018You do not wanna go through life with an S.S. tattoo.\u2019 And they\u2019re, like, \u2018Why not? Scout Sniper!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Brennan, who has extensive ink of his own, told me that the skull-and-crossbones image was a common template at tattoo parlors near Camp Lejeune. \u201cI\u2019ve looked at those walls for ideas quite a few times, and that image was included in the flash art at many, many tattoo parlors,\u201d he said, adding that the walls did not mention the symbol\u2019s Nazi origins.<\/p>\n

After his time in the Marines, Platner studied Arabic and history at George Washington University. He then joined the Army for one more tour, in Afghanistan, and came to see the war there as one built on dubious metrics, similar to the one in Iraq. Before a second, abbreviated stint there as a State Department contractor, he moved back to Maine and lived with his mother for a year. \u201cGraham was here holding me up, and I was kind of holding him up,\u201d Harlow said.<\/p>\n

For years, Platner had experienced symptoms of P.T.S.D. and depression, struggling to shed the military value system that had shaped his life in the past. \u201cVirtues in a combat-infantry unit are not virtues in the real world,\u201d he told me. \u201cTo leave that and then go out into the real world\u2014for me, personally, I felt so unmoored.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barkhuff said that the military\u2019s transition-assistance programs, which typically offer instruction on r\u00e9sum\u00e9 writing and V.A. benefits, are ill-equipped to handle reintegration. \u201cWe haven\u2019t cracked the code on magically taking men who were in war and then bringing them back to peacetime,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Odyssey is about coming home from war and, metaphorically, all the dangers that can trip you up along the way. It\u2019s, like, women, right? Like, the sirens, you know? It\u2019s drink, right? It\u2019s violent behavior.\u201d The U.S. military has the highest divorce rate of any career field, along with elevated rates of alcohol abuse, extremist thought, intimate-partner violence<\/em>, and criminality.<\/p>\n

Ursone described falling into a pattern of \u201cdrinking, fucking, and fighting\u201d after coming home. Coughlin, too, became angry and self-destructive, reaching for \u201cGrey Goose out of the freezer\u201d as her marriage unravelled. In 2013, Platner wrote on Reddit that \u201cthe only time \u2018PTSD\u2019 ever rears its disruptive head\u201d is through \u201csignificant amounts of alcohol consumption.\u201d He went on, \u201cIt\u2019s not PTSD, it\u2019s being piss drunk, acting like an asshole, and having an excuse most of society buys.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When I asked Platner how one reconciles that sentiment with his more recent rhetoric, he chalked up the 2013 post to \u201cmacho bullshit\u201d that he was using to minimize his mental-health struggles before entering V.A. care, in 2017, where he was matched with a therapist whom he still works with today. By 2021, he was posting on Reddit in favor of therapy: \u201cNot a big deal at all, and with serious benefits.\u201d Ursone told me that, if Platner hadn\u2019t \u201cbullied\u201d him into getting therapy, \u201cI probably wouldn\u2019t be here today.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, Platner learned to farm oysters by hand, served as a local harbormaster and planning-board chairman, bought a house, got married, and quit smoking. But this recovery narrative is gravely complicated by the allegation that he raped Raciot in 2021 while very drunk. Last week, I spoke with Platner over the phone; his wife, Amy, was also on the line. In our conversation, he said that sometime in his mid-thirties\u2014which roughly aligns with the alleged assault\u2014he came to understand that his alcohol consumption was leading \u201cto shame and self-destructive behavior,\u201d and that he quit drinking for a while before re\u00ebstablishing healthier relationships.<\/p>\n

Even as he opened up to me about these broader struggles, he continued to deny Racicot\u2019s claims. This dismissal\u2014and his video announcing that he was suspending his candidacy, in which he attributed her story to a larger smear campaign\u2014stood in sharp contrast to his greatest perceived asset: his candor and vulnerability in acknowledging mistakes. \u201cI don\u2019t know how one is supposed to be vulnerable about things that aren\u2019t real,\u201d he said, of Racicot\u2019s allegations, which are buttressed by Facebook messages she sent years before Platner launched his Senate bid. (\u201cOne of the reasons I didn\u2019t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,\u201d Racicot told Politico<\/em>\u2014hardly indicative of a smear campaign.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing is very jarring,\u201d Platner continued, over the phone. \u201cI have not felt the kind of stress I felt this week since I was in combat.\u201d Amy, for her part, suggested that the public was still digesting scandals that she and Platner had worked through long ago. \u201cWhen we were sharing our story, it was new to everyone who was watching and listening,\u201d she said. \u201cBut, for us, we\u2019ve been doing hard work behind the scenes for a really long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just before our call ended, Platner told me that he still dreams of creating \u201ca world in which we offer people grace, the ability to transform, and redemption. A world in which people, especially men, can see openness, vulnerability, and the willingness to open up as signs of strength rather than signs of weakness. A world in which we, as a nation, begin to reckon with the very serious emotional outcomes of sending a whole generation off to fight in a pointless war.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a few brief months, Platner spread this message far and wide. But it didn\u2019t go according to plan, and Maine will now pick a new Democratic Senate candidate. Platner told me he would still do it all again, knowing everything. Serving as a messy public avatar of military trauma and, perhaps, growth, he concluded, was \u201can honor.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more I\u2019ll Pay Twenty Thousand Dollars to Skip Your Jazz Show<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jasper Craven considers how much of former Senate candidate Graham Platner\u2019s behavior should be read through the lens of what combat did to him, and how much of it is simply who he is, independent of war?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-political-scene"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Complications of Graham Platner\u2019s Veteran Identity - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1059\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Complications of Graham Platner\u2019s Veteran Identity - 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