New names could heal wounds
The Opinion page is an arena — sometimes a battlefield — for the exchange of ideas.
Fire from the right, fire from the left. Fire from behind and from the front. And the newspaper, of course, fires its own salvos.
When I was the editor of the opinion page, a ceasefire, in the form of an especially thoughtful op- ed or letter, was always welcome.
One of the thoughtful people during my tenure was a guy named Ron Kurtz, of Monroe.
In a letter published on these pages earlier this month, Kurtz suggested “rededicating military posts named after Confederate generals with names of those who received the Medal of Honor for their selfless heroism on the battlefields.”
That’s a grand idea. Not only were these Confederate generals trying to tear the country apart, some were spectacularly inept.
Let me just seize on Kurtz’s idea and push it forward a couple of notches:
Name a base after Michael J. Daly, of Fairfield — no relation to me — who was awarded the medal in August 1945 by President Harry S. Truman.
Daly was awarded the medal for his “selfless heroism,” as Kurtz put it, in the Allied assault on the ruined city of Nuremberg in April of that year.
While advancing over a wall — a task he took on rather than sending other men — he was shot in the neck. One of his men cleared Daly’s airway of tissue so he could breathe. Daly survived the war and died in Fairfield in 2008 at age 83.
Through the serendipity of a shared name — my mail to him; his to me — we became acquainted. Through a shared love of writing we became friends. In addition to his other attributes — compassion, humility, gentleness — he was a fine writer.
Some of his works — scores of brief but beautifully composed notes he wrote to me regarding this column or that, and a blazingly powerful short autobiographic sketch he prepared for delivery to a high school class — are among my treasured possessions.
Were a soldier in training — or an officer or drill instructor teaching those young soldiers — be curious enough to look up the story of Michael J. Daly, they’d see — far beyond the heroics of that long- ago day in Nuremberg — the qualities that constitute the citizen- warrior.
And I’ll throw forward another thought: Dr. Mary E. Walker is the only woman to have been awarded the Medal of Honor. She worked as a surgeon for the Union during the Civil War, 1861- 65. In 1864, according to the U. S. Army website, army. mil, she was captured by Confederate troops and held as a prisoner of war for four months until her release as part of a prisoner exchange.
In 1865, president Andrew Johnson awarded her the medal.
But in 1917, an Army medal review board stripped more than 900 people of their medals for a variety of reasons. Cited in Walker’s case — and others — was the fact that she was a civilian.
Walker, who was also an ardent feminist, refused to surrender the medal and wore it until her death in 1919.
President Jimmy Carter restored Walker’s medal in 1977 and she remains on the official list of some 3,500 people who have been awarded the nation’s highest military honor.
Another choice candidate for renaming is Army Sgt. William H. Carney, the first AfricanAmerican service member to earn the Medal of Honor, the first of 88 African Americans who hold the distinction.
Born into slavery in 1840, Carney was presented with the medal in May 1900, 36 years after his heroics in a battle at Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1864.
According to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, delays in honoring black military valor have been common throughout American history.
Following a study in the early 1990s, seven men were identified as having been overlooked because of racial disparity.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded the seven men the Medal of Honor. Only one of them was still alive.
These are just some of the possibilities for honoring genuine heroes with their name on a U. S. military post.