HOMER — Edward Robertson thought he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
It was his first day of basic training in January 2018 at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks, more than 700 miles from his northeast Georgia home. As he stood outside in 9-degree temperatures with a freshly buzzed head, he began to second guess whether God had really called him to join the U.S. Army.
Six years later, he concedes that he developed into a damn good soldier. His training took him to Oklahoma and Texas. His missions carried him to Kuwait, Romania and to lengthy deployments in Bahrain and United Arab Emirates.
During that time, he was surrounded by peers with varied backgrounds and views. He saw how citizens of other countries manage desperate situations and dealt with upheaval. Those experiences left the Banks County native with this outlook: this country will endure, whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris wins.
That doesn’t mean Robertson doesn’t have a preference. He’s going to vote for Trump, just like most of Banks County. In the last presidential election, 88.5% of voters in this county, one of the reddest in the state, opted for Trump. But Robertson doesn’t buy all the dire predictions about what a win for the Democrat Harris or the Republican Trump could mean for the United States.
“Neither candidate is going to fix all the problems, or probably any of them,” said Robertson, now 25 and married with a 1-year-old daughter. “I don’t expect either candidate to really change anything. The only thing that can save this country is God.”
His four years in the Army reshaped his way of evaluating things.
“I wanted it to go by faster, but I knew I would miss it once it was over,” said Robertson, who works as a lineman for Pike Electric. “And I still do every day.”
His Army stint was split evenly between two top bosses — first Trump and then Democrat Joe Biden. And really he can’t say he noticed much of a difference.
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
He grew up in a conservative family. But, after his time in the military, he tends to search for common ground. Among those he knows, it’s a rare stance. Some family, friends and acquaintances on social media think the winner of this election will save or destroy the country, he said.
The Second Amendment is a key issue for him. He grew up hunting and fishing with his father. He believes in being self-sufficient. Two or three days every week growing up, Robertson stepped off the school bus to see his dad waiting with a pontoon or jon boat ready to head for water. They hunted in all seasons — for deer, turkey, squirrel, you name it.
Robertson is proud of his gun collection. He has rifles, shotguns and handguns — he doesn’t know how many. “It’s nobody’s business what I own or how many I own,” he said. “I’m not breaking any laws or doing anything wrong.”
He has enough ammunition stockpiled to last years and a variety of weapons for the different game he hunts. He also enjoys the competitiveness of target shooting.
That said, Robertson added, “guns can be potentially be dangerous” in the wrong hands.
He draws on persuasive writing lessons from his school days when thinking through and discussing politics. In a five-paragraph opinion paper, at least one should be dedicated to the other point of view. “I get all sides of it,” he said, though it irks him that responsible gun owners are lumped in with negligent ones and criminals.
It’s just one of the ways Robertson is frustrated by the way politics “are sold” to people in this country. He doesn’t trust that candidates from either party will follow through with promises. He doesn’t trust the media either, especially television news stations like CNN and Fox News.
But, he said, it’s his duty to vote. He’s been in countries where people don’t have that ability. He’s seen people “living in concrete huts” and was told they worked for less than $1 a day. That reinforced for him how great the United States is, no matter how divided it feels.
So, come November, if Harris is declared the winner, he expects he’ll go to work, just like any other day.
“I never had the expectation,” he said, “that Trump was going to save this planet.”
About the Author
