By David K. Shipler            

            Every November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution,the Soviet Union staged a parade of drill-perfect troops and intimidating weaponrythrough Red Square. And every November 7, the frigid breath of the comingMoscow winter made the hours there a hardship. But I went in every one of thefour years I lived in Moscow, partly because it was my job as a New YorkTimes correspondent, partly because I’m a sucker for parades, even those ofmy country’s adversary.

            I grew upwith Fourth of July parades of fire engines in my hometown. And on the Maineisland where I spend summers now, I know a lot of the folks who roll by intheir decorated pickups, plus the vegetable gardener on her riding mower. (She makesthe world’s best pickles and relish.)

So, I went to the Army’s 250thanniversary parade along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., partly becauseit’s my habit to be curious, partly because I’m a believer in the power ofobservation, even of killing machines. What I observed was less political and morecomplicated than generally expected, not a Moscow-style display ofmilitarization.

There at the grass roots, we couldn’tsee President Trump and could barely hear his invited guests cheer his arrival.We could not hear him swear in new recruits with an oath to the Constitutionthat he violates hourly. His move to use the military inside his own country tosmother dissent, a step toward ideological totalitarianism, operated in a distantdimension, real enough but confounded by a second dimension, the one you stillremember before the Trumpists came to power.

The mood was Fourth of July, acrowd of people friendly with those they’d never met, laid back with no sign ofjingoism, families out for a pleasant day. Around me on Constitution Avenue,they were almost entirely white—a rarity for DC—but sporting only a few MAGAhats and a few more army and veterans’ caps and T-shirts. Many seemed to bemilitary buffs, having served themselves or, as one guy put it in a small sign:

YAYARMY

F… TRUMP

HEREFOR

TANKS

Nobody bothered him, as far as Icould tell, nor did they challenge the fellow walking back and forth among theonlookers holding a big poster saying, “TRUMP IS A RAPIST.” Trump’s threat thatany protests on his big day (also his birthday) would be “met with very bigforce” turned out to be hot air, at least as far as DC police, army MPs anduniformed Secret Service agents were concerned.

Such a threat in Moscow would havebeen swiftly executed, of course, had any Russian waved a dissenting sign. Yet unlikeConstitution Avenue, where anybody could go, no ordinary Russians withoutspecial passes could get to the Red Square parade through the series ofcheckpoints. Non-credentialed people saw it only on TV.

In person, it was spectacular. WithRussians’ flair for pageantry, Moscow could surely win a theater critic’s awardover Washington, even Trump’s Washington. While the ageing Politburo was linedup on the rust-red Lenin Mausoleum (equipped with heaters, we assumed), thousandsof troops in uniform great coats and fur hats goose-stepped in preciseunanimity across the vast plaza, with not a step out of tempo or a leg offangle.

By contrast, ragged marching characterizedmost of the US Army units along Constitution, perhaps because they were actualcombat forces. The Soviet soldiers looked suspiciously like trained drill teams.Or maybe the Soviet army spent more time learning how to march than how to fight,which has carried over to Russia’s flawed military performance in Ukraine.

Whatever the case, those troops inRed Square, chins raised in a pose of haughty superiority, seemed formidable astheir chants, “Hoo-RAH! Hoo-RAH!” reverberated off the Kremlin walls. (Rumorhad it that they were recorded and amplified. But still!) On Constitution, however,American soldiers marched practically in silence, with only the occasional lonevoice of a senior sergeant’s commands, none of those semi-musical cadence calls,joined by all the troops, that you’re supposed to learn in boot camp.

The Soviet parades featured themost ominous weapons of all, various nuclear-capable rockets, includingenormous international ballistic missiles dragged through Red Square on huge vehicles.That missile-rattling show was abandoned for a while after the Soviet Unioncollapsed but was performed most recently this spring to mark the 80thanniversary of the end of World War II. As a statement of patriotic pride and internationalmenace, it gets the message across as Russia bogs down in its attempt toconquer Ukraine: Remember, we’re a nuclear power.

Washington’s parade seemed less scarybecause it contained no missiles, just a few unarmed mobile launchers. (The Armydoesn’t have ICBMs, which are controlled by the Air Force and Navy.) It feltcarefree and almost benign as drivers and gunmen waved and smiled from theturrets of their tanks and other deadly vehicles. One nearby father kept tryingto whip up enthusiastic awe in his small son,—“Buddy, look at that! That’s the101st! See that? Special Forces!”—but we won’t know for about adecade if it worked on the young man. From my grassroots post, this parade didnot live up to its ominous billing as Trump’s militarized swagger towardauthoritarianism.

It was essentially a celebration ofthe Army’s history, a retrospective of marchers and bands clad in colonial-erauniforms, then those from the Civil War and updated as helmets changed shape throughWorld War I and II, Korea and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The evolution included humans’capacity to develop imaginative tools of death, and the crowds alongConstitution were captivated by the long succession of olive-drab armoredvehicles, including the behemoth of all—the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank—which is toobig to be very useful in much modern warfare. It’s not clear whether it damagedthe capital’s streets as predicted, but I saw no harm being caused on venerated ConstitutionAvenue. The reason, as a young fellow who’d spent eight years in the 82ndAirborne explained to me, was that the tanks were heading straight, and treadstear things up mostly when they turn. Steel plates had been installed atcorners.

            Thatguy gave me short courses on nearly every weapon that passed by, plus the bestand worst kinds of helicopters to jump from, the most and least maneuverable kindsof parachutes, and the obsolescence of most of what we were seeing. Two smallsurveillance drones flying along Constitution were the future of warfare, as weboth agreed, having watched Ukraine’s inventive use of them.

            He asked ifI’d been in uniform. I said I’d been in the Navy—one hat I wear thatestablishes an instant bond with people I might profoundly disagree with. But Ididn’t ask him about his politics. In our dimension, it didn’t feel like apolitical day. I didn’t ask him how he felt about Trump using the military for domesticpolicing. I was being a very bad reporter. I did wonder to myself, watching theranks of young troops in camouflage, how they would react to a clearly illegalorder, and what thoughts were going on inside their minds about what washappening to America’s precious democracy.

Instead, having heard that he’dmade 45 jumps as a paratrooper, I asked him about his knees. “They’re broken,” hesaid with a wan smile, as if acknowledging fate.