Photograph Source: m Spiess – CC BY 3.0
I appended the following paragraph to the incomplete ending of this article. It speaks for itself:
I stopped working on this piece at this point when news of the rape allegation broke and Platner suspended his campaign. There’s an abundance of reporting and commentary on this allegation available on the internet, and I will not go into its merits here; my own opinion is that this was the ‘kill shot.’
At that stage, this was still work in progress and – if you have a chance to read it – should be read as such. In places, it was not even ready for polishing, the sequencing and transitions needing attention to more clearly link the diverse themes I was addressing. That said, there is still I believe much of value in this effort, not least is bringing Graham Platner’s ptsd more centrally into the conversation; it was an area in which, on close observation, I felt the campaign had ignored to its detriment, an argument for another occasion.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers,
which indeed appear beautiful outward,
but are within full of dead men’s bones,
and of all uncleanness.
+++
Graham Platner, 41, typically identified as a combat veteran and oyster farmer, is the Maine Democratic Party candidate who hopes to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins in the midterm elections this November. Platner has been diagnosed with combat-related ptsd (post-traumatic stress disorder).
In “The Broken Veteran Excuse” (The Atlantic, June 14, 2026), Mike Nelson accuses Platner and his “surrogates” of exploiting that diagnosis to cover “a decade-long trail of questionable behavior,” to include having once had his chest inked with a Totenkopf, the ‘death head’ – skull and crossbones in the vernacular – adopted as a symbol by Nazi SS units during World War Two.
Nelson, like so many other pundits and commentators who’ve piled on Platner about his “trail of questionable behavior,” puts a special emphasis on this tattoo to disqualify the candidate. Platner has denied knowledge of the Nazi link to the tattoo, and has stated repeatedly that he abhors Nazi ideology. A Marine buddy got a matching tatt during the same drunken episode in 2007 on shore leave in Croatia because he thought “it was cool” and they wanted to do “something to commemorate their comrades who’d fallen in Iraq.” Platner, was 23 at the time, and had already served multiple combat tours.
I will take issue with Nelson on a number of points, somewhat circuitously; first, his play of the goodie-goodie card.
Viewed in wider contexts, social and cultural, that skull and cross bones is on the costumes donned by virtually all the child pirates on Halloween Eve. When some of these boy pirates transitioned to members of the Hell’s Angels near where I lived in the East Village in the seventies that symbol was still cherished among them. In contemporary movies or series in which biker gangs are portrayed, the presence of similar regalia is not uncommon.
The juvenile delinquent was a stock character of the fifties from Blackboard Jungle to Rebel Without a Cause. Here’s one origin story that long predates that fifties’ social archetype: For a quarter century, beginning in the 1880s, tales of a mischievous boy – indeed “a vicious little swaggerer” who carried practical jokes to an extreme – were consumed with relish by a wide readership in the U.S. On my own grandfather’s bookshelf when he died in the mid-fifties there was a copy of Peck’s Bad Boy.
“The “bad boy” represents an iconic figure in American culture (and I’ll assume in cultures globally as well). We identify these errant protagonists one dimensionally and diametrically. The “ bad boys stand in contrast to the “good boys.” One insidious fallacy embedded in the smears against Platner is that rebellious boys and young men, if not the rule, are also hardly the exception. As adults they adapt in their fashion. That’s all commonplace. The great change is that what was once shared by only a small circle might now be displayed to an infinitely larger universe in the digital world. We all live in glass houses. So, on that score, the self-righteous goodie goodies, indeed the whited sepulchers we are warned of in Matthew 23:27, can go stuff it.
Veterans with ptsd aren’t broken; and neither is Graham Platner. We suffer from a mental health condition that is not infrequently a result of experiences in warfare. Platner sticks mostly to his own story, and when he speaks of other vets, it’s not around their ptsd but as a defender of the Veterans Administration against Trump’s predatory depredations. Nelson nonetheless manufactures a fantasy, and expresses it in apoplectic prose, that Platner’s discussion of his flaws in the context of ptsd is “insulting to veterans…[who] despite… their wartime experience” not only return from combat without that diagnosis, but “are among our nation’s most accomplished, ethical, hardworking , and patriotic citizens and leaders.”
Ten-Hut! We have a crepe paper patriot in the room!
This is a blanket letter of recommendation covering, as Nelson expounds, “the literally hundreds of combat veterans I know and fought with.” Claiming to know “hundreds of combat veterans” is one glaring example of how Nelson often relies on unedited and wild hyperbole throughout this piece. If we were to turn the lives of all Nelon’s saints inside out we would expose a garden variety of Americans living the dream, undoubtedly tarnished in many places as for the rest of us. And if my veteran sources are accurate and I read the news reports correctly, veterans who’ve seen combat are more likely to be divorced, homeless, suicidal, prone to substance abuse and domestic violence than their non-veteran counterparts. “In war,” it has been observed “there are no unwounded soldiers.”
As a veteran of the Vietnam War, subsequently afflicted with the same diagnosis as Platner, I have no doubt that his postwar behavior has been shadowed by ptsd. Yet I by no means imply that he gets a pass on that, especially around issues of particular concern to women which might yet cost him votes in the general election. It will depend on whether or not voters find Nelson’s “allegations of demeaning, disturbing and physically threatening behavior to former girlfriends” – two or three if I recall – credible or, as Platner insists, politically motivated. Platner denies acts of violence, while admitting he was not always a good boyfriend. Hey, am I making a novel observation here that especially casual intimate relationships at any age can be messy on all sides of the gender divide? Platner, nonetheless, during the campaign has repeatedly and profusely apologized for his “past mistakes,” and the vast majority of Maine voters who chose him in the primary where he crushed his opponent Janet Mills, Maine’s sitting governor and darling of the party establishment, have seemed to accept his mea culpa. Among Maine’s 482 municipalities, Platner would lose in only three of them.
In returning to civilian life, Platner was freighted by years of intense combat at a young age. He occupied a “dark place” in those years, he says. I probably know both the personal dimensions and history of ptsd more than most. Yet nothing I’ve read in a legitimate source, analyzed on my own, or heard from a practicing shrink would suggest the disorder absolves you from accountability for bad behavior. It strikes me that Platner is belatedly learning not to be controlled by his ptsd, but to control it. In my experience it never goes away and will require life-long maintenance. But Platner’s “dark place” also brings me back to my own war.
I served reluctantly in the conscription era Army during the Vietnam War, an intelligence officer attached to a combat infantry unit, choosing a belated entry into a ROTC program to avoid the draft and finish my degree. By the time I came home, I had morphed from a total ignoramus about any historical context for the Vietnam War, into a highly informed and enraged antiwar activist; the war had messed with my head and my conscience; it changed me irrevocably. I came on the Movement scene at a seismic moment that would help hasten the end of the war. The My Lai massacre occurred on March 16, 1968, when American troops slaughtered over five hundred Vietnamese non-combatant villagers, mostly women and children. But not until November 1969 was this atrocity revealed in the US, splashed in headlines and heard on the tv and radio news accounts across the nation. This disturbing news did not improve the public’s ambivalence toward the war.
For returning veterans who felt as I did, news of the My Lai massacre opened a space where we, although only recently back in “the World,” could openly and militantly oppose the war we ourselves had fought in, even as it was still going on, an historical moment for which I find no precedent. Out of this conjuncture, the mass of veteran opposition evolved quickly and was replicated throughout the land. But the heartbeat of this movement was in New York City, where Vietnam Veterans Against the War, founded two years earlier as a component of an antiwar demonstration, would in a flash expand its membership into the thousands. Within this unique organizational frame, veterans were offered two pathways to unburden themselves, one public, the other private. Organizers like me seeking to publicize a landscape of US war crimes in Vietnam exponentially beyond the horror of My Lai, began to recruit veterans to speak out publicly about the atrocities they themselves had witnessed. Through this war crimes movement, many Vietnam combat veterans became leaders and activists in VVAW, the organization’s impact perhaps best remembered by the mass veteran occupation of the Washington Mall in April 1971, designated Dewey Canyon III after an infamous infantry operation during the war, and later that year by the Winter Soldier Investigation.
But the private option offered to at least some VVAW members became the seedbed for the recognition of combat ptsd (and by extension the many other contexts for which the diagnosis is now applied). But only after years of pressure from within the psychiatric community would the disorder be added in 1980 to the DSM-III, the psychiatric diagnostic bible. Several New York based pioneering psychiatrists, including Hy Chatan and Bob Lifton – best-selling author of Home to War – began to lead veteran “rap groups” to explore what they were observing as “post-Vietnam syndrome,” linked perhaps somehow to the “survivor guilt” which was Lifton’s particular area of study. Many of the veterans in these groups, and among those I was organizing, were living in “dark places.” In my own case I sublimated the symptoms – obvious to others, of course – within the political struggles that distracted me for three decades before getting my own diagnosis, and only after a statistician who crunched data from every VA ptsd clinic in the country discovered a spike among aging Vietnam veterans, men then in their fifties like me, which he described as “late onset ptsd.”
What The Atlanta’s Mike Nelson fails to grasp is how combat ptsd can distort social reintegration for some veterans transitioning from the military to the civilian world. It’s astounding when reading Nelson’s article how obvious it is that he expresses no curiosity about ptsd and if he actually has some grounding in the topic, he goes to great lengths to not reveal it to the reader.
So, who is this Mike Nelson, Graham Platner’s star spangled antagonist? Nelson served in the Army Special Forces for 23 years, and like Platner, had several postings in the forever wars. Nelson, like Platner, seems to have taken to the warrior culture with a certain verve. Otherwise, searches on the internet produce scant additional biographical information on Nelson, beyond some post service work in the field of “national security,” and mention of an undergraduate degree from the Virginia Military Institute where, in the 1840s, Stonewall Jackson served on the faculty and commanded a VMI infantry unit at the hanging of John Brown. Nelson writes frequently for the Dispatch, and News Nation, the latter of which according to The Washington Post has found a “viewership niche” in UFO coverage. Both publications lean heavily to the right.
I only served for two years – the last three months in the TB ward of Valley Forge Army Hospital – bounding into the antiwar movement almost instantly on my release. For my crowd of junior officers, and for virtually all the guys I have known who served in the enlisted ranks, Nelson would be viewed as a reviled “lifer,” a gung ho true believer with an abusive arsenal of command authority to bedevil them often just for the hell of it, bent on a service career defending the imperial agenda that many of us had come to despise. That’s a bias I make no attempt to hide. If Nelson meant to go beyond the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, the point of retirement for many career Army officers, he may have been “passed over,” making his retirement obligatory because in the Special Forces there were likely few slots for full Colonel. So let’s conclude he was evaluated as competent, but didn’t set his branch on fire.
I can call Mike Nelson competence into question as a writer, however. He has attacked Plater for exploiting ptsd to excuse his episodes of unattractive behavior, and for insulting other veterans who survived combat without suffering ptsd, neither of which accusations, as I argue, is accurate. Platner did not invoke war veterans as a class within his personal struggle around his personal struggle with ptsd. For the true motive of Nelson’s attacks, we must look elsewhere.
From roughly the beginning of June this year in the final days before the Maine primary on the 9th, the regurgitation of Platner’s already much publicized peccadillos spewed by pundits and news commentators on media of every category, became so incessant that I couldn’t keep up with it. Almost immediately the “bad press,” to the consternation of it progenitors, increased Platner’s numbers in Maine. Most of the attacks I did see came from the center left, aka liberals, aka corporate or establishment Democrats attacked Platner personally, but almost never referred to his political message. New York Times opinion writers’ copy read like sensational fact starved articles in the National Enquirer.
I cite here one example of this collective pile on I found uncannily fascinating, given the placement and prominence of its two interlocutors. On June 16, 2026, the New York Times opinion videographer Ezra Kline conducted an hour and 18 minute long interview with Chris Hayes the star news commentator on the tv opinion show MS Now. A few excerpts will suffice to give a taste of their casting about to understand a political phenomenon that clearly had them stupefied:
- How did Platner come from nowhere and dominate a primary in which his opponent was the sitting governor…? Platner has the most important political resource – attention.
- The reason this worked was because of the charisma. There was a period when the formula didn’t take into account charisma. It was bio, social capital, connections, ability to raise money… we’ll get them a good team and they’ll be fine. I think charisma matters more now because attention matters more, and charisma is the talent for grabbing and holding attention. You have to have a theory of attention for a successful campaign right now. In this case it was… finding a person who genuinely has real, obvious raw political talent and charisma.
- This is not a primary where there was s an open primary of nobodies. This is a situation where Schumer had a candidate in mind, Mills. And what happens very, very quickly is that Platner squeezes Mills out attentionally… the charisma gap between them.
- He out campaigns her on the ground. He just outworks her.
Here Hayes seems to get, at least intuitively, that Platner’s approach to the campaign was fundamentally different from the hyper-traditionalist Mills. And while it’s true that Mills has all the charisma of Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian candidate, she was until recently owing to political betrayals which inflamed her progressive base, extremely popular here across the left political spectrum. But Platner has changed the rules of the game. He had entered the campaign not only as a candidate, but as an organizer. And he brings an organizers’ energy to the task, mobilizing thousands of volunteers and holding town hall assemblies in every municipal nook and cranny in the state, well over eighty at this writing to zero for Susan Collins. He’s amazingly relaxed, articulate and easy to talk with, the antithesis of creepy. Kline and Hayes are absolutely on target noting that Platner doesn’t codeswitch, tailor his comments to the demographics of his audience. Politicians, they say, are all code switchers, as devastatingly satirized by Key and Peele in the Obama Meet and Greet video. [Don’t miss it on YouTube].
Over the course of their discussion, Kline and Hayes systematically retail all the ambiguous slanders attached to Platner, dissect the candidate from every angle from what is a shockingly narrow, even provincial vantage point: Two elites “based” in New York who can’t quite get the real Maine into focus. You knew that when Kline stumbled in the first paragraph with his reference to “lobster farmers,” worse was yet to come, like when the videographer projects what one might imagine as his own deep seated class anxieties into a pop sociological caricature about the pitiful downward mobility of a young man who scorned the entitlements of the professional middle class into which he was born. For Kline these are privileges to cash in on, not squander.
There is a respected grandfather architect in the Platner family mix, known for designing the interiors of the 9/11 demolished Window’s on the World Restaurant and the New York headquarters of the Ford Foundation. So a bit of capital there, and maybe the source for the tuition at the prep school Platner attended barely long enough to get expelled from for skipping his classes; he went there at his parent’s insistence, he says, but against his will.
An alternative reading of Kline’s muddled projection of the Platner family story reveals Platner to have been raised by a single mom who, when he was six, divorced his father, a small town lawyer whose own mobility was constricted by the limits such a practice offers. His mother eventually opened a restaurant, described in the wiki entry as “upscale,” and as “fancy” by Ezra Kline. I made some unwelcome comments about Maine restaurants in Exploring Maine on Country Roads and Byways (Crown, 1990), not the lobster shacks and comfort food dives a majority here would seem to prefer, but mostly those that cater to summer visitors, have nonprofessional staff, most consequentially in the kitchen, and often serve mediocre food. Maine has grown up a lot since I wrote that book, and you can probably get a decent meal in her place, but it’s the last business you’d go into to make your fortune. No doubt it’s pricey. What isn’t these days, but upscale?
Kline and Hayes essentially conclude that Platner’s exceptional charisma has scattered rock star fairy dust into the eyes of Maine voters, and that his popularity is not sustainable. When in fact, from the start, Platner has been delivering a concrete, consistent and non-histrionic message that thousands of Mainer are eager and ready to hear.
Platner convincingly reinforces what many already know: the status quo doesn’t work in their interest and they, the people, have the latent power to change that. He breaks down complex issues so anyone can understand, like how hedge funds – what’s a hedge fund, right? – have gobbled up housing stock in Maine thus driving up rents and purchase prices for young first home buyers. The way he talks about the iniquities in the tax system is bound to stick in anyone’s craw who’s not among the superrich. And on from there, basically Bernie Sanders’ menu but fleshed out in greater detail, and presented face to face to the voters. His entire program is extensive and detailed and worth checking out; to implement it would require minimally a New Deal on steroids
We have seen clearly in the recent surge of generational support for that message in key electoral contests in a number of states. It’s an open question if these Gen whatever’s can make common cause with the traditional blue collar workers whose support the Democratic Party had taken for granted, and then squandered. It is this coalition that Graham Platner had stitched together here in Maine. The charisma isn’t the message, it’s simply the medium in which the message is delivered. This message seems to have spread confusion among Platner’s horde of left-leaning critic, and one has to wonder if the enthusiasm for Platner’s platform has them so unnerved, that in their own dark places they are rooting for him to fail and Collins to prevail? In the meantime, momentum pushing Platner’s campaign seems to have stalled, if we take on face value the recent Times’ poll showing his lead over Collins has shrunk to 2 points. We will see in four months if it holds.
I stopped working on this piece at this point when news of the rape allegation broke and Platner suspended his campaign. There’s an abundance of reporting and commentary on this allegation available on the internet, and I will not go into its merits here; my own opinion is that this was the “kill shot.”
