conspicuous gallantry (12. 246)

On New Year 2021, the US senate established a commission to redesignate Department of Defence properties previously named in honour of Confederate army figures of the American civil war, including the military installation established in 1918 outside of Raleigh North Carolina as an artillery range, whose namesake General Braxton Bragg, also a veteran of the Mexican-American and Second Seminole War, was considered among the worst leaders and poor advisors to president Jefferson Davis of the break-away states and often cited by historians as a major contributor to the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat. The garrison was reflagged as Fort Liberty in the summer of 2022, at a cost of over six-million dollars. Last week, Secretary of Defence Hegseth issued a memorandum directing the army to rename Fort Liberty back to Bragg again—though not the original eponym but rather one PFC Roland Leon Bragg (among hundreds of suggestions from the public nominated to the committee during its initial commission), a paratrooper and mechanic in World War II, awarded a high commendation for commandeering a German ambulance during the Battle of the Bulge and rescuing a fellow soldier by getting him to a hospital in Allied Belgium. Neither the Pentagon nor the department of transportation have released estimates on the price tag of this switch and is telling typical of how this administration skirts congress and the law (plus the spirit of the change) by picking out an uncelebrated, obscure individual who did not have a Wikipedia page until the day of the announcement.