He Survived Four Tours. Then He Got Called 'Didn't Deserve to Live' by a Fellow Veteran.

Let me tell you about Teddy Daniels. On a sunny day in 2012, he was running patrol in Afghanistan with an Afghan interpreter beside him. The Taliban opened fire. Four times. The bullets hit him in the chest, the arm, the leg. He still managed to drag himself behind cover. He still managed to call for help on his radio. He got a Purple Heart for that day. And in 2019, a man named Graham Platner watched the helmet camera footage of that day and wrote on Reddit: "Dumb motherf---er didn't deserve to live." 2 Here's what I can't get past: Teddy Daniels wasn't killed that day. He survived. He came home. He's still alive, still walking, still breathing—and Graham Platner wishes he wasn't. "People like this don't say stuff like this to my face," Daniels said when confronted. "It's online, and that right there tells me, Graham, you're a coward." Think about that. A man who nearly died, who bled for his country, who was shot four times by people trying to kill him—and his reward from a fellow American, a fellow veteran, was that he should have stayed dead. 3 But this isn't just about Graham Platner. This is about what it means when the Democratic Party looks the other way. Elizabeth Warren called him "my kind of man." She said it on video. She said it with a smile. She said it before anyone knew about the Reddit posts, the Nazi tattoo, the praise for Hamas tactics, the dehumanization of wounded soldiers.