Minnie Bardenhagen

Editor-In-Chief 

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“Some of you are not going to like the rest of this. I take responsibility,” Jack Segal said to a crowd of community members and veterans, “Today, I watch with concern as a former TV personality has become our Secretary of War.”

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The day before his 80th birthday, Jack Segal made a speech during NMC’s Veterans’ Day ceremony on Nov. 11. Segal is an army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam and a retired diplomat who, among many things, was a primary crafter of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Agreement between the United States and Russia. His journey brought him to Northern Michigan, where he became an active member of the NMC community.

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In his speech, he cautioned listeners about the leadership that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth brings to the Pentagon. Segal spoke of his opposition to Hegseth’s efforts to make the military less “woke,” saying that it takes attention away from strategy and focuses excessively on soldiers’ genders and looks. He expressed particular disgust at Hegseth’s message to military leaders who gathered in late September of this year, where he lectured them on grooming and fitness.

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Segal warned of the increasing need for the Pentagon to focus on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the growing relationships between the US’s adversaries, such as China and Russia, technological advancements, and the strategies and challenges that come with them.

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“This is not reality TV, this is reality,” Segal said in his speech.

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Before becoming President Trump’s Defense Secretary, Hegseth was primarily known for being a TV personality on Fox News starting in 2014. However, Hegseth has a military career that started in the early 2000s. After becoming part of the Minnesota National Guard, he was deployed to Guantanamo Bay, where he guarded the detainees. In the years that followed, he volunteered in the Iraq War, where he served as a civil affairs officer in Baghdad. Between 2011 and 2014, Hegseth taught at a Counterinsurgency Training Center in Afghanistan. 

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Segal made clear he does not think Hegseth’s military experience gave him enough knowledge to run the Pentagon, “Guarding 20 geriatric prisoners at Guantanamo, then going off to make money on Wall Street, then volunteering to serve in Baghdad as a public relations staffer, then finally, another resume-building, short-term training the last class of Afghan army officers in Kabul. And then back to Fox TV. It was an unlikely path to leading the two million military and civilian experts of our Department of Defense.”

 

“He goes to the Pentagon, he starts firing three and four-star generals… They will have 20, 30 years of experience… I just think he's so horribly unqualified and that the president should have seen that right away at the beginning,” Segal told the White Pine Press. He pointed out the chat leak in early March, where Hegseth revealed details of a military operation to a group chat on the app Signal that accidentally included a journalist.

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“What I am worried about is the control of our nuclear forces, and that should not be in the hands of somebody as incompetent as Hegseth. He's got way too much power.”

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Segal was drafted into the army at the age of 19. He was considered for an officer position in the army, as he was a college student. 

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“That's part of the indoctrination process… which I mean analytically, I look back at it… I mean, I was just a kid living in Philadelphia. I had never had a gun in my life.”

He went to Fort Benning, Georgia to undergo training to become an officer. While there, he had a roommate named Larry Stefan. Stefan and Segal were close, as they were both experiencing the same unknowns of being drafted. They ended up taking different paths in Vietnam. Stefan died four weeks into the war.

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Segal keeps a picture of his gravestone, which shows how short his life was cut, “We were really brothers, 'cause he didn't know anything either.” Stefan’s name is inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.

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For nine months, Segal evaded death and watched as soldiers in his platoon died or contracted serious injuries. That was until he was injured in an explosion, which sent him to the hospital for three months. His second tour in Vietnam consisted of more planning and paperwork before he quit to become a diplomat and work to help the US avoid future wars.

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“Diplomacy backed by power gives us the leverage to seek opportunities to demonstrate our wisdom, to deescalate conflicts, and pursue wise solutions to our disagreements with our adversaries,” Segal said in his speech, “A future of more endless wars, more Vietnams, more Iraqs, more Afghanistans, more lives cut too short, like Larry Stefan's was, need not be our destiny.”

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Segal and his wife, Karen Segal, are former co-chairs of the International Affairs Forum (IAF) at NMC. This program brings international affairs experts to the college to talk about current global issues. Segal also taught classes at the NMC centering around world affairs.

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Segal will be a featured panelist for IAF’s The True Cost of Defense documentary screening on Dec. 10 at 7pm in the Dennos Milliken Auditorium. The event is free of charge, and tickets are available on the IAF website.