The Complications of Graham Platner’s Veteran Identity
A few weeks before Graham Platner dropped out of the race for U.S. Senate in Maine, he reflected on the kind of veterans who typically serve in Congress. “It’s not grunts who got in drag-out fights and know exactly what it feels like to taste the blood in your fucking mouth,” he told me, but, rather, “reservist officers,” who serve part time while pursuing a civilian career or an education.
For most American politicians, military service is a safe, useful credential. Thirty-one Presidents have served in uniform, as have around a hundred current members of Congress. The prototypical service candidate is straitlaced and clean-shaven, someone who speaks about their service in bloodless shorthand, heavy on duty, light on pain. They are expected to have seen some action but not to carry any wounds, a tension that has given rise to acts of stolen valor, in which some candidates embellish or fabricate their military record in order to make it seem more intense.
Platner, a Marine Corps and Army veteran, had different problems. Critics pointed to his Ivy League-educated father and his brief stint at a prep school as evidence that his working-class image was exaggerated. But, within the military class system, one thing was certain: he was at the bottom. In fact, he was on the ground. Platner deployed four times after 9/11, including two Marine combat tours in Iraq and one Army tour in Afghanistan. He struggled with alcohol and with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of his service, and his Senate-primary campaign was consumed by revelations about his postwar conduct: racist, misogynistic, and nihilistic posts he’d made on Reddit; a Nazi symbol that he’d drunkenly got tattooed on his chest; sexual text messages he’d sent to other women in the early days of his marriage. The Times interviewed several of his former partners, three of whom described him as volatile. One woman, Lyndsey Fifield, alleged that he had been physically rough with her. Another, Jenny Racicot, said that, in 2021, Platner arrived at her house, drunk and uninvited. She called his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling” but declined to elaborate, saying only that she had cut off contact with him soon after.
I interviewed Platner twice for this story. Our first conversation was in June, and the second one took place a little more than a week ago. When we spoke in June, in the wake of the Times article, Platner denied any physical aggression (and still does), but he also acknowledged that some of these controversies stemmed from a dark period in his life. He invoked the language of recovery and accountability—one of the running themes of his campaign. “There were many years when I was deeply insecure and deeply unhappy with who I was, for a myriad of reasons,” he told me. “And it takes a lot of work—putting yourself in uncomfortable positions, building new relationships with people and all of that—to get through it.”
I spoke with several combat veterans who said that they identified with Platner’s struggles. Others felt he was using P.T.S.D. as a political crutch, perpetuating the stigma that all veterans are damaged and dangerous. One of Platner’s most vocal critics, Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts congressman and a former captain in the Marine Corps—he’s now a reservist officer—went on CNN before Maine’s primary and said that Platner’s tattoo was “personally disqualifying,” adding, “I hope Maine voters agree with me.” They didn’t: on June 9th, Platner won the primary with seventy-two per cent of the vote.
Shortly after his primary victory, Platner told me he believed that Maine voters understood his struggles. He cited the deepening divide, in America, between communities that fight wars and those that have the privilege of viewing armed conflict “in this real vague, sort of romanticized way.” Within this divide, he enjoyed a geographic advantage: Maine has one of the highest per-capita concentrations of veterans in the country. “One of the things that the political class in this country forgets is that a lot of Americans actually deal with the repercussions of war quite directly,” Platner told me. “People in places of power, people that live in the rarefied air, they don’t have, like, a cousin that went and got fucked up in Fallujah. They don’t have a neighbor who’s a woman veteran who suffers from military sexual assault.”
A month later, Racicot accused Platner of rape. In an interview with Politico, she gave more details about the night that Platner showed up drunk at her home, alleging that he forced her to have sex with him, despite her repeated objections. Platner vehemently denied the allegations, though he said that he would take “the time to reflect on the best path forward.” Meanwhile, his major endorsements evaporated, and the Democratic Party threatened to revoke his access to money and voter data. On July 8th—two days after the publication of the Politico piece—he suspended his campaign; the Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention this Saturday to nominate Troy Jackson as its replacement candidate for Platner, setting up a November matchup against Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent.
Last week, Platner told me that his hesitation to drop out of the race stemmed from his belief that, based on his decisive primary victory, he had genuinely convinced voters of his personal transformation. “I mean, Jesus Christ,” he said, “we had polling where I was still quite competitive.”
Platner’s candidacy ultimately became a test of how much baggage a candidate can carry, and keep insisting he’s worked through, before it becomes disqualifying. His race also became a #MeToo story, with a specific institutional backdrop: the military, and its potential to be an animating force of masculine dysfunction. In a country stubbornly attached to myths about the military’s positive transformative power, Platner presented a stark counterfactual. Still, how much of his behavior should be read through the lens of what combat did to him, and how much of it is simply who he is, independent of war?
“Just because you have PTSD, doesn’t mean you are excused to treat women in a disgusting manner,” Joslin Joseph, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, wrote in a June op-ed. After all, Platner is far from the first political candidate to face such allegations; Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales, the two most recent members of Congress to suspend campaigns or resign in the wake of sexual-misconduct allegations, had no combat record to invoke.
At the same time, intimate-partner violence is a pervasive issue among current and former members of the military, with researchers positing that this abuse is, at least in some cases, an “extrapolation of [military] attitudes and interpersonal styles into relationships and family life.” A 2005 study by the National Institutes of Health found that veterans with P.T.S.D. are up to three times as likely to be aggressive toward their partners as nonveterans are. Racicot herself invoked Platner’s military trauma when messaging with an acquaintance whose friend was romantically interested in him, back in 2023. Racicot wrote that he was “not all bad”—he could be “charming” and “funny,” she wrote, but also “consensually careless at times.” She said that the behavior flared up when Platner was “drunk. Plus ptsd.”
Kayla Williams, an Army veteran and a former director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Center for Women Veterans, told me she sees a troubling pattern of hate and misogyny in Platner’s past. (She added that misogyny “can be deepened or enhanced” by military service, and that, in some people, P.T.S.D. “does manifest in negative behaviors.”) She believes people can grow, but is skeptical that Platner has, because of his “decision to hide all the shit,” rather than proactively address it.
Similarly, Paula Coughlin, a Navy veteran who blew the lid on the infamous 1991 Tailhook scandal, in which Navy and Marine officers sexually assaulted or harassed eighty-three women and seven men, said that Platner’s past should disqualify him from a seat in Congress. “There is absolutely no way I would tolerate that bullshit out of anybody,” she told me.
After her military service, Coughlin, like Platner, became angry and started to drink heavily; she wanted so badly to escape her military identity that she changed her last name. She placed some conditional “hope” in Platner’s eventual redemption, if for no other reason than that so many other men today are embracing violent masculinity. “I see Pete Hegseth as trying to dive even deeper into that dark abyss of toxic masculinity and misogyny,” Coughlin said. “I would say that Graham is trying to see the bigger picture and his place in the world as a good person, working through his experiences in the military.” Coughlin reasoned that these two high-profile post-9/11 veterans “are going in opposite directions.”
Before Platner suspended his campaign, Tony Ursone, a squad leader in his platoon during his first deployment in Iraq, cast his candidacy as a test of how far America’s empathy for military veterans truly extends. “It gets fucking crazy how people think they can dominate this conversation, and say, ‘Thank you for your service,’ and then turn around and talk shit about somebody like Graham, who has grown from his service and has grown in spite of it,” Ursone said.
Platner estimates that his “childish idealism” about the military was cemented by age two. One early influence was a record titled “Hoorah for the Red, White, and Blue!,” pressed in 1958. Platner memorized all three stanzas of track five, “The Halls of Montezuma,” the official hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps. By age six, he was fixated on police, firefighter, and military uniforms; a neighbor later stitched him a makeshift Union Army uniform, which he wore for a classroom presentation on the Civil War.
When Platner was ten, he visited the home of a family friend named Jack Deane, Jr., a four-star general known for joining his men on the front lines during the Vietnam War. In a 1967 newspaper article, an Army comrade said that the general’s military feats made “war stories out of those blood-and-guts men’s magazines read like ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill.’ ” Platner visited the house a dozen or so times, and would spend hours listening to Deane, Jr.,’s vivid combat stories, often in a wood-panelled library where the general displayed his military brass.
For three summers in high school, Platner worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire, building trails and clearing brush. The lodge where he slept was named for a marine killed at Iwo Jima, and one of Platner’s superiors was active in the Corps. “Everything was about intensity—everything was about physicality,” Platner recalled. “The more you were suffering, the harder you were working, the better everything was.” At eighteen, Platner got his first tattoo to memorialize the experience: two crossed axes and the peak of a white mountain.
As Platner approached his high-school graduation, Deane, Jr., encouraged him to apply to West Point, his alma mater. But Platner was not interested in military management. “I like doing the work,” he explained. “I don’t really wanna tell people to do the work.” Platner graduated in 2003, the same year that the U.S. invaded Iraq, and by his own account had already developed a bone-deep, if naïve, belief that an upstanding troop could meaningfully influence conditions on the ground. Shortly after graduating, Platner went backpacking through Europe, where he met several marines. After returning to Maine, he snuck his birth certificate from his father’s office and enlisted. On March 1, 2004, Platner’s mother, Leslie Harlow, dropped him off at a DoubleTree motel in Portland where he was set to fly to boot camp the next morning. She cried all the way home.
“We take these young, vulnerable human beings, men and women, and we put them into this thing that they are absolutely not prepared for,” she told me. This thing—the military—aims, at least in Harlow’s eyes, to turn boys into tools for brutal battlefield aims.
Platner’s first deployment, in early 2005, began at the Abu Ghraib prison complex, part of which the military had rechristened Camp Redemption. A year earlier, the prison had become the center of a detainee-abuse scandal that shook the nation. When Platner arrived, the place seemed haunted not only by American misconduct but also by Saddam Hussein’s use of it to imprison and abuse political dissidents during his reign. Donnie Briere, who deployed there with Platner, told me that even some of the bigger, tougher marines “were crawling out of their skin.”
When Briere first met Platner, he thought that Platner had accidentally boarded the wrong bus. He was “way smarter than the rest of us,” Briere said, and engaging with him “felt like walking into an upscale winery” when you were used to drinking Miller Lite drafts. But his skepticism waned after he saw Platner confidently lead men during training. “His voice helps,” Briere added.
The unit’s first major combat came in April, 2005, during a surprise evening mortar and small-arms attack on the prison, which included suicide car bombers targeting the complex’s perimeter. Ursone, a squad leader at the complex, recalled coming upon the aftermath of a different mortar attack by the mujahideen: “There’s bodies everywhere,” he said, “limbs blown up and all that stuff.” One of the casualties was a young boy. On another operation during this deployment, Platner’s vehicle got hit by an improvised explosive device northeast of Fallujah, which gave his friend a serious head wound.
Platner’s tour was punctuated by hopeful moments, too, including his first mission: monitoring the 2005 Iraqi elections. “We managed security at a voting site,” he recalled. “All these people came down and lined up to vote, and we worked really hard to keep the crowd calm. And it was excellent. It was cool.” But Platner also came to doubt the doctrine he’d been trained to trust; the military’s dehumanization of the enemy, and its often indiscriminate attacks, seemed at odds with “hearts and minds” missions, such as handing out water and candy to locals. “I really don’t understand what’s going on,” he remembers thinking.
He described his experience in the military as both stunting and transformative. It didn’t promote growth but, rather, a “hardening” of his angsty, boyish instincts, he told me. Briere agreed. “You don’t fully mature in the military,” he said. “You, as a human, stay a teen-age boy.” This is especially true of the infantry, he argued, which fosters a hyper-insular “primitive” subculture.
Ursone reckoned that the distinct rites and language of their marine tribe would, to polite society, resemble hieroglyphics. “It has its own language, its own swagger, and this whole all-encompassing—and, when we were in, it was all-male—vibe,” he said. That culture, several veterans told me, is a stew of pent-up sexual energy, existential anxiety, and brotherhood, producing a mix of childish dick jokes, homoerotic hazing rites, sexism, and self-destruction. “You almost have to, like, live in a world of offensiveness, because what you do for work is offensive to the soul,” Platner said.
Thomas Brennan, a former marine who served in Iraq the same year that Platner did—and later exposed a marine revenge-porn ring for the news nonprofit he founded, The War Horse—said that all-male infantry units made it “widely accepted to look down on women marines, to talk negatively about women marines, to hypersexualize women marines.” Brennan admitted that he had participated in that culture himself. Coughlin, the veteran who exposed the 1991 Tailhook scandal, recalled a female marine being called “a walking mattress,” in her day: “It was really baked in.” Indeed, a 2017 article in the Journal of Peace Research argues that military sexual violence is inculcated through core military socialization processes that treat sexualized hazing and assault as appropriate forms of punishment or bonding. In a 2020 Reddit post, Platner wrote that he envied West Coast marine veterans because “they get to bang LA chicks, whores in TJ [Tijuana], and hit up Vegas.”
While Platner and his men fought in Fallujah, a wave of public forgetting was already under way. A kind of abstraction set in about what was going on overseas. After his first deployment, Harlow attended a homecoming at Camp Lejeune, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where she remembers being greeted by the sight of car dealerships, tattoo parlors, and strip bars blaring patriotic messages, followed by a muted event for the marines, many of whom were dazed and injured, with no elected officials present. “Nobody from Congress or the Senate or the mayor of Jacksonville,” she recalled. “There was nobody there to thank these guys. You just felt so empty.” Platner’s father, Bronson, was also absent; he disapproved of both the war and his son’s choice to enlist.
After Platner got off the plane, he and his mom ended up at a Hooters, where, over wings, she found herself thinking, We’ve gone through all this, and this is what you do?
According to an archived Reddit post, Platner spent the next six months “solidly drunk.” He then returned to Iraq and spent eight months in Ramadi.
Twenty minutes after Platner dropped “[his] shit at the hooch” at Camp Hurricane Point in Ramadi, an I.E.D. attached to an oil tanker exploded nearby. He would later recall, on Reddit, “looking east at a gigantic fireball rising, framed by a sky full of tracer fire.” He continued, “While it was my second deployment, at that moment I started to feel really scared.” Platner said that leadership suggested the soldiers take up smoking in order to deal with the stress; before long, he was smoking two packs a day. The tour was marked by blistering heat and perpetual violence, which he later summed up on Reddit as “Spring Break Ramadi 2006: You were chillin’, we were killin’!”
During his third and final Marine tour, in 2007, Platner got a skull-and-crossbones tattoo—a Totenkopf, originally an S.S. symbol—while drunk with buddies in Split, Croatia. He says the tattoo was meant to look cool and commemorate brotherhood, nothing more; he had it covered up, last October, after journalists pointed out its Nazi provenance. Some alleged that he knew the symbol’s original meaning long before then. “There is no way he spent twenty years—showering at gyms and everything—and nobody ever said, ‘Wow, bro—seriously?’ ” Kayla Williams, the former director of the V.A.’s Center for Women Veterans, argued. “And he never Googled it? That strains credibility past the breaking point.”
Other veterans pushed back, citing similar instances of service members’ unwittingly getting offensive tattoos. Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy SEAL and founder of the political group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, told me that, at the end of his time at Marine Corps Scout Sniper school, he heard plenty of graduates discuss getting “S.S.” tattoos, which were meant to denote “Scout Sniper.” “I was, like, ‘Whoa, dude, let’s pump the fucking brakes for a sec,’ ” Barkhuff recalled. “ ‘You do not wanna go through life with an S.S. tattoo.’ And they’re, like, ‘Why not? Scout Sniper!’ ”
Brennan, who has extensive ink of his own, told me that the skull-and-crossbones image was a common template at tattoo parlors near Camp Lejeune. “I’ve looked at those walls for ideas quite a few times, and that image was included in the flash art at many, many tattoo parlors,” he said, adding that the walls did not mention the symbol’s Nazi origins.
After his time in the Marines, Platner studied Arabic and history at George Washington University. He then joined the Army for one more tour, in Afghanistan, and came to see the war there as one built on dubious metrics, similar to the one in Iraq. Before a second, abbreviated stint there as a State Department contractor, he moved back to Maine and lived with his mother for a year. “Graham was here holding me up, and I was kind of holding him up,” Harlow said.
For years, Platner had experienced symptoms of P.T.S.D. and depression, struggling to shed the military value system that had shaped his life in the past. “Virtues in a combat-infantry unit are not virtues in the real world,” he told me. “To leave that and then go out into the real world—for me, personally, I felt so unmoored.”
Barkhuff said that the military’s transition-assistance programs, which typically offer instruction on résumé writing and V.A. benefits, are ill-equipped to handle reintegration. “We haven’t cracked the code on magically taking men who were in war and then bringing them back to peacetime,” he said. “The Odyssey is about coming home from war and, metaphorically, all the dangers that can trip you up along the way. It’s, like, women, right? Like, the sirens, you know? It’s drink, right? It’s violent behavior.” The U.S. military has the highest divorce rate of any career field, along with elevated rates of alcohol abuse, extremist thought, intimate-partner violence, and criminality.
Ursone described falling into a pattern of “drinking, fucking, and fighting” after coming home. Coughlin, too, became angry and self-destructive, reaching for “Grey Goose out of the freezer” as her marriage unravelled. In 2013, Platner wrote on Reddit that “the only time ‘PTSD’ ever rears its disruptive head” is through “significant amounts of alcohol consumption.” He went on, “It’s not PTSD, it’s being piss drunk, acting like an asshole, and having an excuse most of society buys.”
When I asked Platner how one reconciles that sentiment with his more recent rhetoric, he chalked up the 2013 post to “macho bullshit” that he was using to minimize his mental-health struggles before entering V.A. care, in 2017, where he was matched with a therapist whom he still works with today. By 2021, he was posting on Reddit in favor of therapy: “Not a big deal at all, and with serious benefits.” Ursone told me that, if Platner hadn’t “bullied” him into getting therapy, “I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
In the years that followed, Platner learned to farm oysters by hand, served as a local harbormaster and planning-board chairman, bought a house, got married, and quit smoking. But this recovery narrative is gravely complicated by the allegation that he raped Raciot in 2021 while very drunk. Last week, I spoke with Platner over the phone; his wife, Amy, was also on the line. In our conversation, he said that sometime in his mid-thirties—which roughly aligns with the alleged assault—he came to understand that his alcohol consumption was leading “to shame and self-destructive behavior,” and that he quit drinking for a while before reëstablishing healthier relationships.
Even as he opened up to me about these broader struggles, he continued to deny Racicot’s claims. This dismissal—and his video announcing that he was suspending his candidacy, in which he attributed her story to a larger smear campaign—stood in sharp contrast to his greatest perceived asset: his candor and vulnerability in acknowledging mistakes. “I don’t know how one is supposed to be vulnerable about things that aren’t real,” he said, of Racicot’s allegations, which are buttressed by Facebook messages she sent years before Platner launched his Senate bid. (“One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot told Politico—hardly indicative of a smear campaign.)
“The whole thing is very jarring,” Platner continued, over the phone. “I have not felt the kind of stress I felt this week since I was in combat.” Amy, for her part, suggested that the public was still digesting scandals that she and Platner had worked through long ago. “When we were sharing our story, it was new to everyone who was watching and listening,” she said. “But, for us, we’ve been doing hard work behind the scenes for a really long time.”
Just before our call ended, Platner told me that he still dreams of creating “a world in which we offer people grace, the ability to transform, and redemption. A world in which people, especially men, can see openness, vulnerability, and the willingness to open up as signs of strength rather than signs of weakness. A world in which we, as a nation, begin to reckon with the very serious emotional outcomes of sending a whole generation off to fight in a pointless war.”
For a few brief months, Platner spread this message far and wide. But it didn’t go according to plan, and Maine will now pick a new Democratic Senate candidate. Platner told me he would still do it all again, knowing everything. Serving as a messy public avatar of military trauma and, perhaps, growth, he concluded, was “an honor.” ♦