As America observes Veterans Day, Pete Hegseth picks which vets to honor — and which to abuse

Display at the Obama Presidential Center Museum on the Department of Defense joining militaries around the world in allowing trans soldiers to serve openly in 2015. It’s a policy President Donald Trump reversed, ordering trans vets to be summarily kicked out of the military. But often their comrades refuse.

     Wednesday is Veterans Day — originally Armistice Day, begun in 1919 for the first anniversary of the end of World War I, which wasn’t called that at the time, since nobody knew another was coming. It was called “The Great War” or “The World War.”
     The first Armistice Day was a dramatic moment in Chicago — at 10:55 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1919, soldiers in Grant Park let off a fusillade of artillery and small arms fire, promptly stopping at 11 a.m. — the war had ended, famously, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Cops paused Loop traffic. L cars stopped. A full minute’s silence, then a cheer went up and LaSalle Street became a blizzard of confetti.
     Armistice Day became Veterans Day in 1954, acknowledging the millions of Americans who had served in World War II and the Korean War.
     There is no possessive in Veterans Day — it isn’t “Veterans’ Day” — for the simple reason the day does not belong to them, but to us. It is a time when the American public is supposed to reflect on our debt to those who served our country. (And are still alive; we honor the fallen on Memorial Day.)
     But which veterans should we honor? Do Black veterans count? Black people have served since the Revolutionary War, but the Army wasn’t integrated until 1948. This was done over the objections of the brass, such as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley, who argued that mixing races would lower morale, hurt unit cohesion and turn the military into a social experiment rather than a fighting force.
     This wasn’t accepted by President Harry Truman, nauseated by the horrific abuse Black soldiers suffered when they returned home to the segregated South, which instead of honoring Black vets often brutalized them for the crime of wearing crisp uniforms and carrying themselves with pride.
     Truman said he was from Missouri, and his forebears were Confederates, but: “My very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers just back from overseas were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten. Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President, I know this is bad. I shall fight evils like this.”
     He did, by desegregating the military. But what one president giveth, another may take away. Donald Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has waged an open battle against Black service members, blocking or stalling promotions of Black and female senior officers, claiming any advancement had to be due to DEI rather than merit. Others have been dismissed or forced into retirement. Online tributes to historic Black service members have been taken down while books by Black authors were removed from military academy libraries.

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