>
Article snippet: WASHINGTON — When John F. Kelly stood in the White House briefing room on Thursday and described how the remains of American troops killed in combat are shipped home and then called on only reporters who knew families of dead service members, he held to an underlying theme: The military is an elite class separated from the American people by its infallible values. To some veterans, it was a genuine statement to a public with little understanding of the violence and loss of war. To others, Mr. Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, only expanded the ever-growing gulf between the United States’ all-volunteer military and the public it serves. “It was a microcosm of the divide,” said Phillip Carter, an Iraq war veteran and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “He both craves to be understood by society but also holds the military above and apart from society.” Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, lost his son Second Lt. Robert Kelly, also a Marine, to a land mine in 2010 in Afghanistan. He has repeatedly stressed that less than 1 percent of Americans are serving on active duty, a statistic that service members often point to when explaining the rift between themselves and their civilian counterparts. Although he has rarely spoken about his son’s death publicly, Mr. Kelly told reporters on Thursday what happened when his friend Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but in late 2010 was the assistant commanda... Link to the full article to read more