As of Tuesday night, the House and Senate may have the votes to override the president’s veto of the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. The military budget has been passed with an NDAA for every year since 1961. It’s as old as I am and apparently just as prone to being vetoed by interested parties.
If that happens then military, mainly Army, installations across the nation will be renamed because their current names recall Civil War Confederate generals. Forts Bragg, Gordon, Hood, Polk, Lee, Rucker, Hill, Pickett, Benning, and Camp Beauregard would be, it is rumored, named after Army recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. This is not a bad idea in principle.
But the names above had a purpose. They were named in the late 19th century to honor Confederate dead and help the South heal the wounds of the Civil War. These named forts are all in formerly Confederate states. I have a personal stake in this. I spent a good part of my youth at Fort Bragg. But I guess it and the other posts are supposed to be shoved down an Orwellian memory hole.
Many point out that these Confederate generals were in open rebellion against the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of US soldiers, not to mention they fought for an odious cause. Thus, why should a US Army post be named after them? Because like it or not they are part of our history. It’s a history that is not perfect. But the forts honored the battlefield bravery of the men of the region, not the seditious cause they fought for. But there is another catch.
Some in DC do not want to rename the posts after military heroes, or after anybody else in the military for that matter. LifeZette has learned there are those on the hard left of the Democrat Party who want to rename them after what they call “peace figures.” Believe it or not, names being bantered around in the hard left offices of DC include posts named after American Communist Angela Davis, Anti-US military activist and former AG Ramsey Clark, Pvt. Eddie Slovik (A United States Army soldier during World War II and the only American soldier to be court-martialled and executed for desertion since the American Civil War), and…wait for it…Jane Fonda. Yes, Fort Jane Fonda. We are not making that up.
Others names on the list are Ho Chi Minh, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Fidel Castro. Any good hard left Democrat will tell you, they are all fine upholders of truth, justice and the American way and great fans of the US Army, especially Uncle Ho. Thus the president may have had good reason for vetoing the NDAA. If he loses the override fight, and he is likely to because of other acceptable parts of the bill, let’s hope that military posts are named after American military heroes. Anything less would be a disgrace to our armed forces and a further disgrace to history.