With an Iran funding vote looming, Ruben Gallego urges Democrats to rethink how to support the troops

San Antonio (CNN) — The veteran who arrived a few minutes late to the matcha shop down the street from Fort Sam Houston hovered behind Ruben Gallego, trying to figure out where to sit.

Gallego stopped talking and turned around. With an edge in his voice that he tried to cover with a smile, Gallego pointed to his side and said, “Move that way.”

Quickly, the man found a spot at the table with the others. He and other attendees were there to discuss their struggles getting care from Veterans Affairs and their worries about the military getting politicized. Gallego was eager to hear them — as long as he didn’t feel like anyone was looming behind him.

“Makes me nervous,” he said to knowing nods.

Gallego talked about his own experiences, the 23 people he knew killed in action, the two improvised explosive device hits, including the one that killed his best friend right behind him in the convoy. The way he was initially waved away from a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis by a case worker who said he seemed fine and successful. How when he’d come back, all he wanted to do was “have a normal damn life,” how he was always gnawed by not being able to get back to the person he was before going to war. The calls he still gets regularly from men he served with, talking them out of suicide.

Mostly, he listened to others’ stories: the maddening rejections from prospective employers who said they didn’t have the right experience, going back to college in the hopes of resets that still haven’t come, therapy sessions that, because of VA cuts, have to be done remotely with the professionals in shared rooms.

The veterans in the room worried, they said, about how often they were seeing others on active duty starting to openly display their political affiliations, and about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who also served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has insisted about Iran, “This is not those wars.”

Generations of national Democrats are haunted by the political ghosts of the run-up to the Iraq War 20 years ago and the vote then to authorize use of force, from John Kerry’s famous “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” parse to Hillary Clinton being attacked for her “yes” vote to authorize force through her 2008 and 2016 runs.

Now many Democrats eyeing 2028 are treading carefully when it comes to the conflict, including over how to handle a potential vote over the $200 billion President Donald Trump wants from Congress to fund the war he launched. They’re caught between Republicans ready to say they’re squishes who won’t support the troops and a Democratic base ready to rage against those they’ll say are sellouts.

Gallego was 24 when he deployed as a Marine to Iraq. The ghosts he’s haunted by aren’t political. And as others in Washington gear up for the funding fight, the junior Arizona senator says now’s the time to change the conversation about what it really means to support the troops.

“The most patriotic thing you could do for veterans,” he said later that evening at a 300-person veterans town hall organized by the Democratic-leaning group VoteVets, “is to not send us to stupid wars.”

Not hiding national ambitions

Gallego has standing to talk about what he sees differently from national Democrats. He won a hard-fought Senate race in 2024 by 2.5 points on the same swing-state ballot where Trump beat Kamala Harris by 5.5 points.

“I think Washington knows that there’s something going on right now,” he said backstage at the town hall, his black Marines cap turned backward, “but I don’t think Democrats have figured out is how to talk to what people are feeling right now.”

He’s been leaning into that since the day after the 2024 election. He’s talked about what Democrats need to change to appeal to Latinos. And he’s been to quite a few politically conspicuous states.

He and his advisers are gauging whether there would be an appetite in 2028 for a 46-year-old freshman senator whom they acknowledge is a little short, a little underwhelming on the stump, a little too prone to winging it on big policy questions to keep his staff comfortable.

His ambition to be part of the presidential conversation, unimpressed critics tell CNN privately, has him trying to thread so many needles at once that eventually he’s going to get pricked by at least a few of them. He’s posted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than Trump decided to go to war. And he recently said he’s so disgusted with former Attorney General Merrick Garland not prosecuting more January 6, 2021, rioters during President Joe Biden’s administration that his portrait should never be hung at the Justice Department.

Gallego wasn’t expecting to be talking about a war in Iran when he started stirring presidential chatter. Now, he sees a geopolitical exclamation mark on what he’s been saying about talking to the working class in ways that matter in their daily lives. A Spanish phrase from his mother, “Cuando te conviene” (“when it suits you”), he says, describes an administration that he argues prioritizes military strikes over health care or food stamps.

The only place semantics about Iran matters, Gallego argues, is Washington.

“My general rule of, ‘Is it a war or not?’ is, if someone’s going ‘pew-pew’ to you and you’re going ‘pew-pew’ back, that’s a war,” he said, making finger guns with the “Star Wars”-style sound effects for emphasis. “That’s just very simple.”

Already those conversations, Gallego said, led him to get over his hesitation to endorse Graham Platner, another Marine veteran who served in Iraq now running against Senate Democratic leaders’ preferred pick for the nomination in Maine.

“I need to know someone understands the real danger of all of this,” Gallego explained of Platner, who has expressed similar pushback to the war. “I need someone to actually have the same intensity that I have when it comes to keeping us out of stupid wars.”

Max Rose, a former New York congressman who now serves as an adviser to the group VoteVets, which hosted the town hall, called Gallego “an essential messenger” against a president who promised to address affordability and end forever wars, leaving voters “angry because they were lied to and scared because this administration is doing nothing to address affordability.”

“When Ruben Gallego talks about the necessity for Congress to be the one to declares war, he is saying that because Ruben Gallego more so than anyone on that body understands the costs of war,” said Rose, who was wounded while serving in Afghanistan and awarded both a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

‘Over and over again’

Gallego had just finished dinner last Sunday when he saw South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News that the US could invade the key Iranian energy depot of Kharg Island because “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this — my money’s always on the Marines.”

Two bourbons in, Gallego stopped himself from responding to Graham, who served for three decades in the Air Force and the reserves, notably as a lawyer in the judge advocate general corps. What Gallego said he wanted to post was, “Only an Air Force JAG officer would actually believe that.”

Careful to note he’s not denigrating anyone’s service, Gallego said there’s a difference between politicians who are veterans who saw combat and those who didn’t, among both Republicans and Democrats. A Graham spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

“It really did piss me off, just because it’s so flippant. Of course, I know the history of Iwo Jima and how many men we lost, how many were injured—and also how many Japanese civilians were killed, too, by the way,” Gallego said after the town hall.

“It tells me that you really have no thought about what these men and women — young men and women — are going to have to do, how dangerous it is, the consequences to these families, and the long-term consequences they are going to deal with.”

One of those families was sitting in the audience of the town hall, as a woman stood to say her brother was a Gold Star recipient and wanted to know how America could possibly be in another open-ended war.

Before answering, Gallego stopped to ask where her brother was killed — Iraq, December 28, 2003 — then walked down to hug her before answering.

“We thought we’d have learned. We should have learned after the Vietnam War. We didn’t. We should have learned after what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn’t,” Gallego said. “And again, President Bone Spurs Thinks he’s fricking (Ulysses) Grant and he’s trying to send our men and women to another war and hoping and praying that things go well.”

Moments like that are why, Gallego said in the interview, he doesn’t want to hear from Trump, Graham or any of his Democratic colleagues that standing up to this war isn’t supporting the troops.

“They say that,” Gallego said. “And then more and more of our troops die over and over again.”

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