Stars and Stripes has announced that thanks to defense secretary Pete Hegseth the Reconciliation (a.k.a. Confederate) Monument that was callously removed from the Arlington National Cemetery in 2024 will be returned to its pedestal by 2027. Although stored at a secure Defense Department facility in Virginia, its return won’t be immediate because it needs about a $10 million refurbishment due to rough handling during its removal.
The statue’s removal was ordered by the “Naming Commission” proposed by Congress in 2021 to strip military bases of Confederate leader names. The monument in Arlington National Cemetery was the committee’s last casualty and its removal was approved in their third and final report issued September 19, 2022. It was removed despite earlier political promises that monuments in cemeteries would not be disturbed.
It is ironic that Arlington in northern Virginia belonged to Robert E. Lee, yet Stars and Stripes noted that “Confederate soldiers were barred from interment... until Congress passed a bill in 1900 designating a special area for their remains. In 1906, the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the effort to erect a memorial in the Confederate section.” The monument was endorsed by no less than three U.S. presidents and finally installed in 1914. It is located in the center of Section 16, surrounded by nearly 500 Confederate soldiers, sailors, and civilians including its internationally renowned sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, himself a Confederate veteran.
I was raised in a career Army officer’s globetrotting family and after graduating from college my draft number was up so I volunteered for the Army and became a second lieutenant after surviving Engineer Officer Candidate School. My first assignment as an officer was to Fort Bragg to gain some troop experience prior to Vietnam. It will always be Fort Bragg to me, and I’m not alone in this feeling. Most veterans and active-duty military I know who served at one or more of these renamed installations don’t recognize its forced DEI name. This background is why I was overjoyed to see both the original Army base names restored and the monument returned to Arlington.
Don’t blame Trump for what the Naming Commission did. Fox News noted that “Congress created the commission in 2020 after lawmakers overrode a veto by President Trump, who opposed renaming bases that honor Confederate leaders.” Obviously, it took a bipartisan vote in both houses to override a presidential veto.
Nevertheless, Trump now has the Reconciliation Monument headed back to Arlington and a clever way was used to restore all the original Army base names without honoring Confederate leaders.
The following is a list based on information pulled from Stars and Stripes:
Do these latest small wins mean that wokeness is forever gone from the military? No! Despite these and other positive anti-woke changes recently made under Trump, we are only one or two elections away from potentially bringing back the same type of “progressive” leaders that created the military’s original woke nightmare. Elections have consequences.
Image: Library of Congress