Archive for May, 2025

Racism at the Pentagon: Insidious and out in the open

Tuesday, May 27th, 2025

Racism comes in countless forms. It is an older-than-dirt, can’t-be-killed, sick-to-its-core tree with many branches. It is one person, or a group, or an entire nation believing themselves superior to one person, or a group, or an entire nation, because the latter is different from the former.

As an example of racism, what I would like to explore today concerns the renaming of American military bases, specifically, Georgia’s Fort Benning and North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, although there are others I could also name.

Fort Benning was established in 1918 as a training base for World War I soldiers. It was named for Confederate General Henry Benning, who, before the Civil War, was an Associate Justice of Georgia’s Supreme Court. He was also an ardent secessionist and the owner of 89 slaves on his 3,265-acre Georgia plantation. He was an able tactician and became a Brigadier General during the War.

At the 1861 Georgia secession convention, which he briefly chaired, Benning said,

“What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery… If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?”

In 1918, at the request of the Columbus, Georgia, Rotary Club, the U.S. Department of War named the newly established World War I training camp for Henry Benning.

In 2023, the Biden Administration wanted to purge military installations of any connection to slavery and Confederate assets.

Which brings us to Lieutenant General Hal Moore and his wife Julie, who, all by herself, changed a significant part of the culture of the U.S. Army.

General Moore served with distinction in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. He won the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest battle award after the Medal of Honor, for his actions at the 1965, four-day battle of Ia Drang Valley, one of the fiercest battles of the entire war.

Moore was also one of the creators of the air-mobile concept and the all-volunteer army. Toward the end of his 32-year military career, the Army appointed him to the post of Deputy Chief of Staff at the Joint Chiefs level.

Perhaps eclipsing the accomplishments of her husband, it was Moore’s wife, Julie, who did more for Army wives and families than anyone else.

From the Civil War all the way to Vietnam, the Army informed families of a soldier’s death by telegrams and taxi-cabs.

telegram-war-dead.jpg

As CBS News chronicled on Sunday Morning last Sunday, Julie Moore changed that heartless, dispassionate formula for one of compassion and service. As Elaine Quiano reported, Julie knew her husband Hal, a Lieutenant Colonel at the time, was part of the ongoing Ia Drang battle, and, as she described in a letter, a taxi driver pulled up to her house: “When he rang the bell I decided not to answer; that way, everything would be all right,” she wrote. “I finally said to myself, ‘Come on, Julie, you have to face up to what’s to come, so go answer the door.”

It turned out the driver only wanted directions.

Her son, Greg, said, “At that moment, she knew what it felt like to get that telegram, and she never wanted to have anybody else get that telegram and not have somebody physically with them.”

So, Julie Moore made a deal with the local Western Union office: they would call her whenever a telegram came.

The 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers” portrayed how Julie Moore would rush to comfort the widows.

Thus began her passionate quest to have combat death notices delivered by caring service members who would also deliver needed assistance in the days following.

Because of Julie Moore, since the late 1960s, trained personnel, including chaplains, have notified thousands of families about the death of a loved one in the service of the nation. They are followed within 24 hours by a visit from a survivor assistance officer who will help with anything the family needs in the immediate aftermath of the worst news they could possibly get.

Julie Moore never stopped fighting for compassion.

And that is why in 2023, the Biden Administration renamed the Fort named for slaveholder Henry Benning to Fort Moore in honor of the patriotic contributions of Hal and Julie Moore.

But that is not the end of the story.

In 2025, just a few months ago, one of the first things the new Secretary of Defense, the incompetent and unqualified, but very loyal-to-Trump Pete Hegseth, did was to restore the name of Fort Benning. Gone was Fort Moore, along with the virtue of Hal and Julie, but even Hegseth could not advertise he was bringing back Henry Benning (even though he was). No, he reached down into the nation’s war dead and found another Benning. This time, Army Cpl. Fred G. Benning, who fought in World War I. And, yes, he was a hero, having won the Distinguished Service Cross (just like Hal Moore) for exceptional bravery in 1918 just south of Exermont, France.

Hegseth gave no explanation as to why he deep-sixed Fort Moore. This is just a guess, but I think it might have had something to do with Fort Moore being a Biden Administration change. Couldn’t have that. Or, it could be that the relationship to slavery and racism was too powerful to lose among the faithful. We might never know.

He has done the same thing with all the other Army posts named after Confederate secessionists and slavers.

North Carolina’s Fort Bragg had been named for the slave-owning Confederate General Braxton Bragg. It briefly became Fort Liberty under the Biden Administration, a situation Hegseth immediately corrected. In March, he brought back the name Fort Bragg, this time saying he had renamed the Fort after Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a native of Maine, who, in July 1943 at age 23, enlisted in World War II  and won a Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge.

There may have been other Braggs he could have chosen, but he picked Roland. Perhaps he couldn’t resist the story of the doomed warrior Roland at the bridge in La Chanson de Roland, but even La Chanson de Roland might be a little too high-brow for the less-than-scholarly Secretary Hegseth.

Regardless, these insensitive re-renamings show the world the deep racism that runs through the blood of Trump and his team of sycophants. It’s so insidious, most Americans don’t even notice it anymore.

Having served their purpose, I would wager that the names of Pfc. Roland L. Bragg and Army Cpl. Fred G. Benning have seen their day and have now been confined to some dank and dark closet in the Pentagon’s basement, perhaps right beside the portraits now facing the wall of the former Secretary of the Army Mark Esper and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who, according to Donald Trump, was “a woke train wreck.”

He ordered their portraits removed less than two hours after being sworn in for his second term.

 

 

 

Memorial Day 2025: Different from all the others

Friday, May 23rd, 2025

Note to readers:

Due to illness, I’ve been away from these Letters for nearly a month. Nothing serious, let alone life-threatening. But it was tiring in the extreme and irritating beyond that. All is well now, though, just in time for some thoughts about one of my favorite subjects: Memorial Day and veterans. Next week, I’ll offer my perspective on the many down-the-rabbit-hole events that have happened during my keyboard absence.

Now to the topic at hand.

Memorial Day 2025

In 1867, General John Logan,  Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, wanted to establish a day to memorialize the approximately 620,000 Civil War dead, the greatest number of American dead in any of its wars. He called it Decoration Day. The concept caught on quickly and evolved to honor all soldiers who died in the service of their country. Decoration Day became Memorial Day, and the first national observance happened on 30 May 1868. Memorial Day has been celebrated annually since then, but it wasn’t until 1971 that it became a federal holiday, always celebrated on the final Monday of May.

From the Revolutionary War to 2024, well over one million American soldiers died in service to their country. World War II saw more than 405,000 perish. These are the dead Donald Trump, looking at row after row of neatly aligned white crosses in Normandy, France,  called “suckers” and “losers,” according to General John Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff during his first term.

Before World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt had been looking for a way to help Great Britain as it defended itself from Hitler’s assaults, but large pockets of isolationist politics throughout the country prevented him from doing anything meaningful and large-scale. Then Japan struck.

The United States declared war on Japan the day after it attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, “a day that will live in infamy,” according to Roosevelt in his address to Congress. By declaring war on Japan, we also declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, because each was allied with Japan. Consequently, overnight, the U.S. was fighting a global war on two fronts, Japan in the  Pacific and Germany/Italy in the European theatre.

At the time, our army was tiny and untrained; our munitions and equipment, dated and woebegone. Most held over from World War I. But America’s resources were enormous, and her population was large and growing. In 1940, the U.S. population was 132 million, Great Britain’s was 43 million, and Germany’s was 70 million. Because of its limitless potential, the day America entered the war marked the beginning of the end for Hitler.

In the European theatre, that end became evident in mid-1942.

First, Hitler broke his alliance with Russia’s Josef Stalin and invaded Russia. His blitzkrieg offensive had initial success, but eventually and inevitably, he sank into the same Russian quicksand that had swallowed Napoleon Bonaparte 130 years earlier.

While Stalin was beginning to eat German armies in the east, and after months of a quick ramp-up, the U.S. joined Great Britain in attacking Erwin Rommel‘s Afrika Corps in North Africa in mid-1942.

American and British forces drove the German and Italian armies completely off the continent, beginning in Casablanca in the east and ending nine months later with Tunis in the west. German and Italian prisoners numbered 250,000; most would be sent to prison camps in America.¹

Thursday, 20 May 1943, marked the official Allied victory in North Africa and a grand parade to celebrate it in Tunis.

The day before, in Washington, DC, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress after meeting for two weeks with President Franklin Roosevelt and American and British senior military staff as they argued the war’s next phase — Sicily, Italy and up into France and Germany, favored by the British, or the American plan for a dash across the English Channel directly into France. Ultimately, they settled on the Italian campaign first to be followed a year later by the Channel crossing, D-Day.

That was a good decision, because North Africa had proven the Americans were unprepared for the enormity of the Normandy invasion. In North Africa, their unproven leaders and soldiers, beginning at the top with the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, had made mistakes costing thousands of lives. But they learned from their mistakes; Eisenhower went from an indecisive administrator, who had never been in battle in his 30-year career, to a commanding, even ruthless, presence. Commanders who had come up short were removed. The soldiers who had slogged through the nine months of battle had learned the value of terrain and stealth. They knew now what it was to be bombed, shelled, and machine-gunned — and to fight on. Better-trained and equipped soldier replacements began arriving, their numbers growing every week. The Americans began to prove themselves to their British colleagues, who had been fighting since 1939.

When it was all over, World War II would cost 60 million lives — one every six seconds — and countless numbers of wounded and traumatized.

In his speech to the Congress, Churchill said:

By singleness of purpose, by steadfastness of conduct, by tenacity and endurance — such as we have so far displayed — by this and only by this can we discharge our duty to the future of the world and to the destiny of man.

The African campaign, Operation TORCH, had been America’s first test of the battle-readiness of itself and its citizen-soldiers. Its army had outlasted the German opposition, but had paid a fearsome price in doing so. Allied killed in action numbered more than 70,000 in the nine months it took to conquer North Africa. The combatants had fired millions of artillery shells. Sixty years later, 200-300 landmines of World War II vintage are cleared annually, and about 40 Tunisians a year are still being killed by the unexploded ordnance. The U.S. State Department reports that at least 2,000 civilians have died from landmines since the end of the war. 

On this Memorial Day weekend, as we remember and honor those who have given their all, we find our soldiers and sailors under the leadership of a man named Hegseth, a man of little competence and zero qualifications to be where he is. Memorial Day 2025 finds the sycophantic Mr. Hegseth focusing his efforts and busily getting ready for a full-scale, $45 million military parade through downtown Washington, DC, the kind of parade Russian and North Korean dictators love, complete with great big tanks to tear up the streets. Ostensibly, this parade will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States Army, but in reality, it will be a birthday homage to Donald Trump, who will turn 79 on the day of the parade, 14 June.

Could have picked any day; he picked that one. His narcissism knows no bounds. There will be countless other homespun and devotional parades across the nation on Memorial Day 2025, but none like the one Trump is demanding: The Donald Trump Fealty Parade. Maybe we’ll have a flyover by a certain big jet from Qatar.

This Memorial Day, we don’t have a Franklin Roosevelt. Neither do we have a Dwight Eisenhower, or an Omar Bradley, or a Douglas MacArthur, or a George C. Marshall, and even if we did, Donald Trump would have fired them all.

But we do have our honored dead — the greatest generation and all the other generations that sacrificed everything so this plot of land between two great oceans, this land we call home, can remain the place where dreams come true and men and women live their best lives, free of the evil from those who would do them harm to enrich themselves. That has become infinitely more challenging in 2025, but Americans have proven time and again that when their backs are to the wall, they are up to the task of moving the nation back onto the moral and lawful track, the high ground, the “virtuous” path our Founders intended 236 years ago when they gave us the Constitution that has guided us ever since.

I hope on this Memorial Day 2025, you have time to thank a veteran and to spend a moment thinking of those honored dead who gave their all for you and me and have now faded into the fog of time.

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¹ The German prisoners of war were housed all over the country. In 1943, while my mother was sunning herself with some friends at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, a bus pulled up by the boardwalk and about 40 young men got out under guard. They were German POWs given a day of R&R. Some of them spoke English, and my mother spent half an hour in conversation with them. As she thought of my father fighting his way through Italy and France, she couldn’t help thinking the Germans were a friendly group enjoying the public beach, notwithstanding the guards with the heavy artillery. Those Germans were the lucky ones.