Why did the Department of Defense delete a Medal of Honor recipient from its website?
In 1970, Charles Calvin Rogers was awarded the Medal of Honor, the United States’ highest military decoration, for defending an artillery base from enemy attack despite being wounded three times. You can read the full Medal of Honor citation on Rogers’ Wikipedia page, which concludes with this statement:
Lt. Col. Rogers’ dauntless courage and heroism inspired the defenders of the fire support base to the heights of valor to defeat a determined and numerically superior enemy force. His relentless spirit of aggressiveness in action are in the highest traditions of the military service and reflects great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.
If you do a Google search for “Charles Calvin Rogers,” one of the top results used to be a “Medal of Honor Monday” article published on the U.S. Department of Defense’s website. (The article still appears in Bing’s results.) Clicking on that result, however, resulted in a “404 — Page Not Found” error.
Ordinarily, that’s not a big deal. Websites get restructured, and sometimes, webpages just fall through the cracks, leading to broken URLs and 404 errors. This is commonly referred to as “link rot,” which can be fixed by implementing redirects that automatically take users to updated URLs. In this case, however, something sketchier and more nefarious seems to be happening.
Here’s the URL of Rogers’ article as it appeared in Google’s search results:
But that URL no longer works. Instead, it redirects you to a new URL on the Department of Defense’s website that returns the 404 error:
Notice how “DEI” has been prepended to the new URL’s final segment, changing medal-of-honor to deimedal-of-honor. Now, it’s possible that someone in the Department of Defense changed the URL to reflect their belief that Charles Calvin Rogers received the nation’s highest military honor, not for his “dauntless courage and heroism,” but because of the Nixon administration’s DEI efforts. Which would be incredibly offensive.
A more likely (though no less stupid and offensive) reason for the URL change is that someone flagged the original article — which can still be read on the Internet Archive — because it briefly mentions Rogers’ efforts to improve “gender and race equality” in the military. (You can, by the way, still read 30+ pages’ worth of other “Medal of Honor Monday” articles. It appears that only Rogers’ article has been flagged and deleted.)
Unfortunately, “gender and race equality” has become synonymous with “DEI,” which is officially anathema in the Trump administration. Government agencies and departments are now scrambling to remove anything that might portray diversity, equity, and/or inclusion in a positive light.
This has led to several examples of anti-woke idiocy, including: removing educational materials that mention the Tuskegee Airmen and female WWII pilots; flagging photos of the “Enola Gay” (the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima); deleting information about Black, Hispanic, and women veterans; banning events for Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and other observances; and now, it seems, diminishing the valor and legacy of a military hero simply because he sought to improve the lives of his fellow soldiers.
Update (3/17): The Department of Defense has restored Charles Calvin Rogers’ “Medal of Honor Monday” article at its original non-DEI URL, albeit in an edited form. (“Gender and race equality” has been changed to “sex and race equality” and the article is longer tagged with “black history.”) In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson said that “[t]he story was removed during auto removal process.” Edits aside, this is obviously a welcome development, but it doesn’t mean we can stop being vigilant for similar erasures.