Brian Mast: ‘Proud’ to be only congressman to have worn US Army


The anti-Israel activists draped in Palestinian flags in the tony Beacon Hill neighborhood who yelled at and taunted the U.S. Army veteran and his family in Boston’s Public Garden couldn’t have known that they’d be partly responsible for shaping one of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Congress.Get more news about military mast,you can vist our website!

It’s not hard to figure out that I’m a veteran. I don’t have any legs, and I wear a hat that says ‘Army Ranger,’ so most people with half a mind can put two and two together,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) told JNS.

At the time, Mast had retired in 2012 after a dozen years of service as an explosive specialist who lost both legs to a bomb in Afghanistan in 2010. He was studying at Harvard University, and he and his then-pregnant wife, Brianna, and their two sons (they now have four children) would go to the picturesque Public Garden in the evenings so the kids could ride their bikes and play in the grass.

The protesters, who showed up weekly or so, decided to yell things like “You’re the big Satan” and “You’re a pawn” at Mast, the congressman told JNS. Mast, who is Christian, hadn’t followed Israel closely at the time, although he saw references on the news.
These people, who were out there to protest Israel, all of a sudden wanted to pick a fight with me, which is just fine. I don’t mind getting into verbal or physical confrontations with other people,” Mast, 42, a fourth-term congressman representing Florida’s 21st District, told JNS.

“It was the first time this fight had really ever been thrown at my feet in that way, where people were trying to drag me into what I was seeing in the news,” he said.

Mast found their verbal assaults hypocritical. He told JNS that he had said of the attacks on Israel in one of his Harvard classes, “If it was Mexico or Canada or some Caribbean country firing rockets into America, then guys like me would go and kill them, and every American would be proud of us for doing so.”

He came home after enduring the taunts one night and told his wife, “I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I’m going to find a way, and I’m going to go and show my support for Israel. I’m going to go out there and find a way to fight against this hypocrisy.”