Highest-Ranking Black Medal of Honor Recipient Erased in Pentagon DEI Purge | Military.com
Category: News & Politics
Via: tacos • one month ago • 32 commentsBy: Blake Stilwell (Military. com)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Military.com|By Blake StilwellUpdated March 17, 2025 at 2:30pm EDT | Published March 17, 2025 at 11:00am EDT
The latest casualty in the Department of Defense's sweep of all things related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is Charles Calvin Rogers, a Black Army officer who received the Medal of Honor for his gallant defense of a firebase near South Vietnam's border with Cambodia in 1968. He'd spent his entire career challenging discrimination in the Army.
The DoD's popular "Medal of Honor Monday" series spotlighted then-Lt. Col. Rogers' story in a November 2021 feature. Over the weekend, the story was taken down and its URL altered to include the letters "DEI" in the web address, a change that author and Afghanistan veteran Brandon Friedman first noted on BlueSky.
The changes were likely part of President Donald Trump's executive order to end all "mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities" related to DEI across the federal government. As of March 17, the page and URL were restored following a broad outcry.
"The story was removed during auto removal process," a defense official told Military.com
Charles Rogers was born in 1929 in West Virginia. His father served in the U.S. Army as a mail clerk during World War I and, like many West Virginia natives, returned home to work in the state's coal mines. Rogers attended a segregated school during his early years, where he excelled academically, played football and was a member of the drama club. He would later attend the all-Black West Virginia State University under an ROTC scholarship, graduating with a mathematics degree and entering the Army in 1951.
Rogers' first assignment was as an officer for an all-Black artillery unit in Germany, one that was still segregated until six months after his posting there. Even after the Army was fully integrated, he still experienced discrimination and nearly resigned over it.
"Discrimination has been a fact of life in the Army and American society throughout my career, he later said. "It took until the late '50s or early '60s until changes for the better began to be noticeable."
Rogers commanded two batteries before he was sent to his battalion's S-3 (plans, training and operations). After that, he was promoted to major and sent to the Army's Command and General Staff College, graduating in 1964. He was sent to Germany to train the 24th Division's artillery before taking his first battalion command at Fort Lewis, Washington.
In July 1967, Rogers was deployed to Vietnam in command of 1st Battalion, 5th Artillery, 1st Infantry Division, where he would spend the next two years. On Oct. 31, 1968, his unit was stationed at Fire Base Rita, strategically located near the Cambodian border and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. U.S. and South Vietnam troops were still pushing the North Vietnamese back from their successes during the Tet Offensive earlier that year and disrupting the Viet Cong's ability to move on targets in the South.
As the day turned to night, Rogers knew there was increased activity along the border, but he could not fire into Cambodia -- all he could do was wait. He didn't have to wait that long. He couldn't see the enemy approaching the base, digging in and waiting to penetrate the outer perimeter with bangalore mines. At 3:30 in the morning on Nov. 1, the attack finally came.
Amid the call of bugles, North Vietnamese regulars hit the base with a sudden hail of mortars, rockets and RPGs, followed by the first of three massed human wave attacks. As the enemy penetrated their perimeter, Rogers moved through the fusillade of bullets, fragmentation and explosions to get his dazed men back on their guns. They were firing horizontally to prevent the masses of men from overrunning the artillery.
Rogers was knocked to the ground by an explosive that peppered his body with shrapnel, but quickly got back up and led a counterattack against enemy soldiers who had reached his howitzers. Though wounded once more in that counterassault, he pressed the attack to repel the enemy. He had just enough time to reestablish his defensive positions before the next wave came at them.
This time, the attack was directed at another area of the base. Rogers directed his artillery gunners at the oncoming enemy before leading another counterassault to clear the communists from that part of the fire base. Encouraged by his leadership, Rogers' men began to rally, fighting through the night as he directed their fire and urged them on.
At dawn came the third human wave, and once again, Rogers moved to counter it. When one of his howitzers was knocked out by a mortar, he jumped in to man the gun like a regular crewman, firing rounds into the oncoming mass of enemies. While loading the howitzer, he was struck by a mortar and could no longer physically continue, but still provided direction and encouragement. With the coming day, the U.S. regained its airpower and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was forced to retreat.
On May 14, 1970, President Richard Nixon presented the Medal of Honor to Rogers at a White House ceremony for his gallant leadership in defending Fire Base Rita. He then returned to combat duty in Vietnam. Rogers' storied Army career continued until his retirement as a major general in 1984. He also received the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.
"We still have and will have what the Defense Department describes as institutional racism," he told the Newport News Daily Press in 1975. "It's there. In many cases, it's inadvertent. In some cases, it's deliberate. We're never going to eliminate racism in the Army. As long as we do everything to reduce it, we're making some legitimate progress."
He became a minister in his post-military career and died of prostate cancer in 1990. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
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Story Continues Related Topics: Military HistoryMedal of HonorArmyVietnam WarDepartment of Defense - DoDPentagon
Blake Stilwell
Blake Stilwell is a former Air Force combat photographer with degrees and experience in Graphic Design, Television and Film, International Relations, Public Relations and Middle Eastern Affairs. Instead of using any of that, he (eventually) became a writer. His work has appeared in Recoil Magazine, Military Times, Coffee or Die, Skillset Magazine, and more. Blake is based in Ohio but is often found elsewhere. Read Full Bio
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There’s nothing “auto” about writing a program that assumes a black Medal of Honor recipient during Vietnam was some kind of DEI thing. That’s simple racism.
And this is doubling down on it. Some racist POS made the decision to put “dei” in front of “medalofhonor” in the web address. That’s not automatic. That’s racist.
Yes, there is a "MAGA Agenda" and it is ugly...
Why two stories on this?
Because i didn’t see the other. Why are you mad? Feeling guilty for supporting this crap?
I was just pointing it out to you.
It is customary to take down a seed if somebody else already posted it.
If that seeder wants me to take it down, I will. If you don’t want to comment here, you don’t have to. I won’t discuss it any further here.
maga doesn't like inconvenient truths that are difficult to spin. notice how fast they're moving to correct it.
This is the second posting of this story. I do wish there was more information in it including screen shots. The only place I see the 'dei' included in the web address is in the story. When clicking on that link, it takes me to the DOD website for Army Major General Charles Calvin Rogers and it does not have 'dei' in the url.
Medal of Honor Monday: Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers > U.S. Department of Defense > Story
So the story still exists on the DOD website and the only place I can find the 'dei' included in the web address is in the story for this link. It does not show in the DOD website. Without any other evidence I doubt the accuracy of this story from Military.Com.
So, here is a screenshot. I wanted to seed this story from NPR , but the NT seed retrieval process wouldn’t load all of the pictures. So, I loaded this seed instead, without issue.
Interesting, thank you for that. As you can see from my link the story is there and does not have the 'dei' in the address. If you click on my link and alter the address to include the 'dei' it pulls up the same page and removes the 'dei' from the address.
I'm not sure what to make of this. Was this a mishandling or poor timing of someone in DOD attempting to fix things according to their understanding of the EO from Trump, was it someone trying to make a point, someone who's angry at Trump? I don't know. All I do know is what I can see and the page for this individual is there, it can be seen and read.
Nor do I, but I thank you for your research. I think the most likely explanation is simply that the site was down to bring it in line with current government policies and then went right back up. I don't think it had any nefarious intent, at this point. Further developments may change my mind.
My local newspaper (which leans decidedly left) had the following this morning.
So if accurate in the reporting and truthful from the spokesperson, this would indicate that the algorithm to find the 'DEI' content also automatically removed it from public view. With all the various reporting that has come out detailing the removal of such from public view only to be returned later does lend credence to the idea that it was a computer program that searched AND removed items.
Having spent the majority of my working life in IT, I can believe this to be true. I've met many younger programmers who built code but only tested their coding to insure it did what they wanted it to do and never really tested for any issues that were outside the planned results.
I have seen this claim before, and I reject it. It may be comforting to assign responsibility for this to a mindless, soulless computer algorithm, but an actual human being programmed that algorithm. Some part of that programming was clearly to search for items connected - however vaguely or distantly - to women, minorities, and lgbt people.
There are other parameters could have been included, that focused on connection to actual DEI policies or programs, or focused on any sign of legitimate merit. It is apparent to me that one or more human beings decided not to bother with the search for merit, which they claim to hold in high regard.
Way to not understand what I said. I also had this in the post...
Yes, a human built the code that did the work. But as I explained, I've met several younger programmers who only tested to insure that their code did the find & delete but didn't fully test the code to insure it didn't do anything else. It's a poor way to write code but people are intrinsically lazy at times and frequently grasp the first solution that seems to do what they want as good enough.
A better way would have been to run the process to identify the 'DEI' data and list it out for later human review rather than immediately remove it from public view. But that's obviously not what happened here.
You can reject it all you want but I've seen this issue in action many times over the years. Had you comprehended my entire post you might have realized that I wasn't just assigning blame to a computer algorithm but was in fact pointing out the failure in testing by the human who wrote the computer code in the first place.
I understood you just fine. You refuse to acknowledge that this isn’t just laziness or inexperience. It’s racist laziness.
Any of this inflicted on our national records, property, history, and image is unacceptable. The people responsible should be publicly held to account.
You think it is fair and credible to imply that these many reports of minorities being excluded as part of the DEI purge by this administration is a result of programmer laziness / error?
The kinds of programmers you are referring to write code to implement rules. They do not create the rules, nor are they responsible for the side-effects of the rules. The rules come from bureaucrats and politicians implementing Trump policies. The programmers are responsible for accurate encoding of the rules they were charged to implement; they are not responsible for the failures of the rules. Blaming programmers as a way to excuse bad policy (rules) is normally the kind of crap IT people deal with from their user community.
Tacos! has expressed a far more accurate scenario of how IT works than you have.
I disagree, and the 'coding' is a red herring anyway. No one is being excluded, as far as I can tell. What they appear to be doing is taking down sites infected with DEI nonsense, disinfecting it and then putting them back up. We knew this was going to happen because we were told well in advance this was going to happen. It is not racist. It's the opposite of racist. It is getting rid of making the servicemembers race as the primary achievement of the servicemember and, instead, returning primacy to what they accomplished as men and women of the armed services.
What do you suppose was the reasoning to disable the webpage (and others like it)? I suspect most people understand that there is no need whatsoever to disable a webpage in order to change its content. And certainly no reason to disable it in order to put it on a list for review. If there was something that need to be reviewed and/or changed, that could all be easily (and gracefully) accomplished. Nobody would even know the webpage was under review.
So why, in your estimation, was the URL mangled to produce a 404 (webpage not found) error (essentially taking the page down)? What purpose, do you suppose, that served?
What are you talking about here?
Do you have specific examples of this kind of thing?
I do not know what you mean by 'mangled' but as for the rest, I can only speculate. In speculating, I'd say they did it this way to make sure the public was aware that they were intentionally disinfecting the site from DEI related content, possibly to avoid a charge of 'sneaking' DEI out of the content. Frankly, I doubt it matters much how they did it as, however they did it, the same people would essentially be making the same accusations of racism regardless.
Of the various articles I've read on the subject, the impression I get from them, that is, what the article seems to lead us to believe, is that minorities and their achievements are being eliminated from the DoD website.
No, nothing specific. For instance, concerning the website you showed in 2.1 , I do not know if it was only the address that was changed in order to purge it of the dei portion of it or the content of the actual page was changed as well. For all I know, the dei portion of the address was the only change made and the purpose of dei appearing in the link in the first place was because maybe somewhere higher on the DoD site map there was a button for dei and all links with dei appeared there. No way for me to know without being able to see the article before and after the change. Nor do I know what the DoD had to say about DEI in general, before the purge.
Rather, my comment is based on my opposition to DEI in the first place, as I find DEI to be fundamentally racist.
It's lazy in how they build the testing of their coding. I've seen it way too many times where they build the test cases to only test to see if the code does what they want it to do and don't test for extremes or data outside the norm. The coding likely has a list of words they are searching for and when they hit on one of the words, the program does what it's designed to do which is to remove the entire url from public viewing.
When testing is limited to only look at what they wanted to code to do, that IMO is lazy testing. That's what I mean by laziness.
I agree, there are better ways to manage this. IMO the sites flagged should have been listed for manual review rather than just removed from public view. It appears that the first demand of this process has been speed rather than accuracy.
Yes. As I've said, I've seen this happen many times in the past where coders when testing their code will carefully set up the data to test only what they programmed to code to look for and ignore real-world data. They do not perform full break testing, rather they limit the test data so they can get the results they wanted.
And this is a more accurate scenario of how IT works, I've seen it many times as I worked in IT for many years.
What they are NOT responsible for are the failures of the bad rules they were given to implement. That is the fault of the user community / client who asked for those rules to be implemented.
Come on Snuffy, you are intentionally missing the point. I acknowledged that there are lazy / incompetent programmers who will not fully test their implementations. What I am saying is that a perfectly competent programmer who tests all the boundary conditions and produces a perfect implementation of a rule will NOT be responsible if the rule itself is flawed.
In this case, it is very likely that it was the rule, not the programmers, that was flawed. The programmers were likely told to mangle (append DEI to) the URL of all pages containing certain content (e.g. the word 'segregated' or term 'all-black'). A perfect implementation of this would cause a 404 error for every page that contained (in this example) the word 'segregated' or term 'all-black'. [ And yet again, I am just offering an example for clarity since the rule would almost certainly be more complex than a single word or term. ]
That is not a failure of a lazy or incompetent programmer but rather a failure of the rule since this rule (again, using an example) would inappropriately take down the page in question.
To wit, I find it far more likely that the problem was a faulty rule rather than a faulty implementation of the rule. Especially since the rule took down the webpages rather than simply create a database of candidate webpages to be reviewed for removal.
That is a very interesting approach to cut & paste to reply to as the only place these sentences exist is in your post of 2.1.15. Quite the approach to write out something and make it look like it's mine and you then reply to it. Problem is I never said anything about bad rules, my comment was about lazy testing.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion as am I. But please, if you are going to try to respond to me I request you respond to what I actually say and don't make it up.
Yes, Snuffy, I am the one who spoke of the bad rules. I explained this in crystal clear language as part of my challenge to your hypothesis about programmer incompetence / laziness. You blame the programmers and I note that it is more likely that the problem lies in the rules the programmers were charged to implement rather than incompetence / laziness on their part.
It is utterly dishonest for you to claim I have made anything up. I have repeated your claim in my posts and then challenged that exact claim. You clearly have no rebuttal so you instead resort to writing a blatantly dishonest reply. Just sickening.
If you were in charge of this operation, would you have instructed programmers to just disable webpages automatically based upon rules (aka criteria) or would you have created a database of webpages that potentially fall under the criteria for removal and then allow for a verification process before they are removed?
Note: the two phase detect and verify process would NOT be a call of a programmer but rather of the authority who has established the criteria. So clearly this authority chose to have these webpages taken down if they match criteria before any verification. More evidence that the problem was not introduced by the programmers but rather the authority defining the criteria for removal.
You are the one who typed in your own line as if it was a line from me that you were responding to. That's as dishonest as one can get. Own it, you fucking lied.
I accidentally quoted my first sentence. It was a typo, a faulty click of a button; posters do that accidentally all the time. I did not even notice it until now. Besides my words were simply acknowledging a point you made.
That does not misrepresent you in any way.
You have argued that the disabling of these webpages are likely the result of incompetent / lazy programming.
I have acknowledged and repeated your argument properly. I have then rebutted your argument.
You have yet to counter my rebuttal. You ignore my questions. Instead you resort to dishonestly trying to turn a mere typo into a conspiracy. Pathetic.
If you were in charge of this operation, would you have instructed programmers to just disable webpages automatically based upon rules (aka criteria) or would you have created a database of webpages that potentially fall under the criteria for removal and then allow for a verification process before they are removed?
Note: the two phase detect and verify process would NOT be a call of a programmer but rather of the authority who has established the criteria. So clearly this authority chose to have these webpages taken down if they match criteria before any verification. More evidence that the problem was not introduced by the programmers but rather the authority defining the criteria for removal.
I would be a little more understanding if you had acknowledged this when it was first pointed out back in 2.1.16, but instead you double-downed on your partisanship. I would say that your attempt to double-down is more dishonest as you attempt to browbeat me into submission.
Nope, that is not what I said at all. I said lazy and/or incompetent TESTING of their code lead to the improper labeling of pages that were then deleted. You have rebutted nothing, all you have done is make a counter-opinion. What's pathetic is your attempt to claim your opinion is more likely when in truth you have an opinion just as I do with no evidence to back up either side. Thing is I never attempted to state that my opinion was correct, all I ever said was I had seen the issue with lazy testing many times in my career in IT.
As we don't know what the instructions were, it's just as possible that the programmer took it on themselves to delete pages in an attempt to complete the task faster. We just don't fucking know.
You have your opinion, I have mine. I'm done with you now as it's obvious that other possibilities will not be entertained.
More bullshit. You cannot deal with my argument so you engage in chickenshit hunting.
Pathetic and obvious.
A distinction without a difference. More chickenshit attempts to coverup that your logic is ridiculous.
You think that the fault lies with the programmers. But as I pointed out, programmers do not determine that webpages needed to be taken down nor do they determine the criteria for taking them down. Those decisions come from the user community.
The fact that the user community established criteria that would take down this webpage (which has nothing related to DEI but does have words that indicate the subject was a minority who achieved success) is on them. The fact that the user community determined that the web pages meeting their criteria would be taken down rather than simply be marked in a database for verification is on them.
You trying to blame programmers is yet another pathetic attempt to make excuses for the Trump administration fucking up yet again.
They did the the same to the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie Robinson, and the Flag Raising at Iwo Jima.
Pure laziness to allow an algorithm to tear down everything based on certain words without human context or human knowledge of American history, the veterans and their service.
Veterans deserve better than letting computer algorithms determine what is deserving of honor and preservation.
No one in DOGE is an honored veteran and you can rest assured they never studied American history or even cared what happened.
Veterans public outcry over the disrespect is the only reason some portions have been restored or partially restored.
Imagine that. Charles Calvin Rogers is in the CMOH database.
Amazing what a google search and site search will turn up.