Trump's View on the Military was Profoundly Shaped by his Draft Avoidance during Vietnam
As we know, his wealthy father had a quack doctor jimmy up a fake diagnosis, and there were probably additional shenanigans with the Brooklyn-Queens draft board to get him his IV-F medical classification. He was fully qualified for the draft, had attended military school, and was by most accounts a passable student athlete at baseball (he himself, of course, claims that he could have been in the major leagues). There is little doubt that he would have been drafted upon completion of his student deferments (in June 1968!), and it's quite likely that he would have been sent to Vietnam, Republic of in the Winter 1968-1969. The months immediately after Trump's graduation from college, and the end of his student deferments, were among the bloodiest of the war (see especially Ronald Spector's excellent After Tet).
He was scared. As were many.
His rich father orchestrated his IV-F classification.
At the end of Tim O'Brien's story "On the Rainy River," O'Brien's narrator, in a similar situation to Trump, having completed his college deferments, is drafted, and contemplates fleeing to Canada. He gets halfway across a Minnesota river, almost there. At the end, however, he does not go. He returns, and is in short order sent to Vietnam. The story ends poignantly with the following two sentences: "I was a coward. I went to the war." O'Brien deliberately refuses to include a transition between the two clauses, leaving the reader to fill in the meaning (and then? because? however? and? but?).
For Trump, there's no need for the second sentence. Trump was a coward. And he knows it. Every utterance he makes about the military contains that fundamental psychological kernel.
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