OAN Staff Abril Elfi
11:30 AM – Friday, June 27, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. Navy ship Harvey Milk will be renamed in honor of a World War II Medal of Honor recipient — Oscar V. Peterson, a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy during the second world war.
The official re-naming of the ship was first announced in early June.
On Friday, Hegseth explained that the U.S. Navy ship that had been named in honor of gay civil rights activist Harvey Milk will be renamed the “USNS Oscar V. Peterson.”
“We are taking the politics out of ship naming,” Hegseth said in the announcement.
“We’re not renaming the ship to anything political. This is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration. Instead, we’re renaming the ship after a United States Navy congressional Medal of Honor recipient, as it should be.”
Hegseth stated that Peterson was a chief watertender on the USS Neosho in 1942, when the ship was severely damaged by Japanese dive bombers and the entire repair crew was either killed or severely injured.
“Peterson himself was gravely wounded, yet he managed to single-handedly close the bulkhead stop valves, thereby helping to keep the ship operational,” said Hegseth. “In performing his historic actions and heroic actions, Peterson received additional injuries and burns which tragically resulted in his death.”
According to Hegseth, Peterson’s actions were consistent with Navy traditions, and he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Harvey Milk, who died in 1978, was California’s first openly homosexual politician to be elected to public office. In 2016, during the Obama administration, the ship was named in his honor. Milk enlisted in the United States Navy during the Korean War, but opted for a “other than honorable” discharge rather than face a court-martial for homosexuality. Following his discharge from the military, he pursued a career in civil rights advocacy and politics before being assassinated in San Francisco in 1978.
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