As the sight of armed, uniformed National Guard troops became ubiquitous in Washington, D.C., over the past year, one voice has been notably absent from the public discourse around the deployment: the guard members themselves.
"I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way," one guard member who was part of the deployment for several months recently told NPR.
Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., for more than a year now, in what has become President Trump's largest and longest domestic military deployment. Their presence has become a common, and controversial, topic of conversation among D.C. residents and constitutional experts alike, raising concerns about the normalization of armed troops in a city for an extended period of time.
Members of the military are not allowed to speak to the press without authorization. Under this administration, those rules and the ramifications for breaking them have gotten even stricter.