Henry Johnson, who was born in the Jim Crow South, enlisted in the segregated U.S. Army during World War I and served in an all-Black infantry regiment. He was wounded 21 times as he singlehandedly fought off a surprise pre-dawn German attack in France in 1918, using grenades, his rifle, and his bolo knife.1 Ty Seidule and Connor Williams, A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), Chapter 7, 203-05.
Charity Adams endured Ku Klux Klan terror tactics in her South Carolina town and racist taunts from white officers in World War II to command the Army’s first battalion of Black women to serve abroad. Her troops sorted and delivered the millions of letters that were the lifeline between U.S. soldiers in Europe and their families back home. They finished the task in half the time the Army gave them.2 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 110, 114, 123, 133.
Richard E. Cavazos, the son of a Mexican American family in South Texas, led troops through a bloody battle for a contested hill in the Korean War and went back alone, again and again, under fire, to rescue wounded soldiers before letting medics treat his own wounds. He became the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general.3 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 142-43, 146, 152-53,165, 312.
These military heroes are among the 10 whose names were chosen in 2022, by congressional mandate, for Army bases in the South that honored Confederate traitors who fought in the Civil War to preserve slavery. It marked the first time that the names of U.S. installations included those of Black men and women.
The renaming came amid the national reckoning over racial injustice—and the renewed call to dismantle Confederate symbols embraced by supporters of racial hierarchy—that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
The new names resulted from a rare moment of bipartisanship. On January 1, 2021, Congress overrode President Donald Trump’s veto and outlawed naming military assets for Confederate insurrectionists. The 2021 law established a Naming Commission, composed of retired military leaders and military experts, to select new names for nine Army bases that would better reflect and inspire a diverse modern military and engage new Army recruits, 59% of whom are nonwhite.
The Naming Commission chose heroes who served through five wars in a military that had evolved, in fits and starts, from the Jim Crow era that deemed Black men lacking in the courage and intelligence for combat through President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 order desegregating the armed forces. They came from the rural South, the central plains, and the industrial North. They were grandchildren of enslaved people and children of immigrants and the Choctaw Nation, sons and daughters of tenant farmers, schoolteachers, ministers, and maintenance workers.4 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 12-14, 23, 115, 269.
They were, as The New York Times wrote, “a multicolored swath of Americans”—men and women, Black, white, Hispanic, and Indigenous. They ranged from forgotten soldiers like Henry Johnson to Hal and Julia Moore, a career Army couple whose heroism during the Vietnam War was portrayed in the movie We Were Soldiers, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general who led the Allies in World War II and later became president. Some fought not only foreign adversaries, but also racism and gender barriers at home.
“No mansions graced their childhoods,” the Naming Commission’s co-chair, retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule wrote, contrasting their lives with those of the Confederates they replaced. “No legacies enabled their rise.”5 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 13.
The Naming Commission visited each base community and sought views of soldiers and civilians, veterans and civil rights groups, and business leaders and elected officials. It set up a public website; 34,000 suggestions poured in. The chair, retired Adm. Michelle Howard—the first Black woman to command a Navy ship—said the 10 names “reflect the courage, values, sacrifices and demographics of our military men and women.”6 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 9-10; The Naming Commission, Final Report to Congress, Part I: United States Army Bases (Aug. 2022), 5-6.
From generals to platoon leaders to noncombatants, the heroes chosen by the Naming Commission were winners of the Medal of Honor and countless other medals. They added up to a portrait of America, Seidule and historian Connor Williams wrote, that was the antithesis of the racially hierarchical society ruled by a white elite that the Confederates whose names they replaced had fought to preserve.7 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 12-14.
In 2023, the heroes were honored at base-naming ceremonies with surviving family members present. There were marching bands and stirring speeches. At the base in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, the name Leonidas Polk, who enslaved 400 Black people, was replaced with that of Henry Johnson. “If Sgt. William Henry Johnson doesn’t exemplify the warrior spirit in its purest form,” said the post’s commander, Brig. Gen. David Gardner, “then I don’t know who does.”
But in 2025, Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, restored the old names. “Bragg is back!” Hegseth posted on social media. To sidestep the 2021 law, he claimed the bases now honor people who happened to have the same last names as the Confederate traitors.
‘A Slap in the Face:’ Families React to the Removal of Heroes’ Names
When Albert Ochoa learned in 2025 that the base named for his late uncle, Richard Cavazos, was becoming Fort Hood again, he called it “a slap in the face to the Army and all the veterans.”
Over 100 Cavazos relatives attended the Fort Cavazos naming ceremony in 2023, he said. “You got to understand, discrimination was still very big, and he was Hispanic,” Ochoa said of his uncle. He said restoring Confederates’ names also signaled “that the Confederacy was OK.”
Restoring those names meant Fort Gregg-Adams—named to honor Charity Adams and the Army’s first Black three-star general, Arthur J. Gregg—became Fort Lee again in 2025, to the dismay of the Adams and Gregg families.
“The naming of Fort Gregg-Adams sent a powerful positive message to the future,” Stanley Earley, son of Charity Adams Earley, said. “Undoing it sends an even stronger, deeply negative message.” Alicia Gregg Collier, daughter of Lt. Gen. Gregg, said, “My father worked his entire life trying to move the Army and, as a result, the nation forward, and now we’re watching it slip backwards.”
In Albany, New York, the Times-Union protested the return of Fort Polk in an editorial headlined: “Re-erasing Henry Johnson.”
Here are stories of some of the heroes whose names were removed from U.S. bases in 2025:
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, an Army surgeon in the Civil War and a lifelong advocate for women’s rights, is the first and only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor.8 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 237.
Her parents were abolitionists whose farm near Oswego, New York, became an Underground Railroad station. In an era when women could neither vote nor enter most professions, her graduation from medical school in 1855 made her only the second American woman to earn a medical degree.9 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 236-39.
Early in the Civil War, as the Union Army’s need for doctors grew, Walker offered to serve as a surgeon. But Army officials—all men—were unwilling to grant a commission and salary to a woman. So she volunteered at a war hospital in Washington, D.C., where the director was so impressed with her work that he recommended her for a commission. When the Army refused again to grant her a commission, Walker volunteered at field hospitals, treating many soldiers wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. The New York Tribune reported that she could “amputate a limb with the skill of an old surgeon, and administer medicine equally as well.”10 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 247, 251.
In 1863, Walker obtained an unofficial contract as acting assistant surgeon for soldiers of the 52nd Ohio Volunteers. She served in Tennessee and traveled into Confederate territory to treat ill and injured civilians. Confederate officers arrested her for spying and incarcerated her for four months in a vermin-infested prison.11 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 252-55.
President Andrew Johnson, at the urging of Union Gens. William T. Sherman and George Thomas, awarded Walker the Medal of Honor in 1865 in recognition of her “services and suffering.”12 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 256.
In the war’s final months, Walker served as a doctor at a women’s prison and a home for war orphans. She testified in Congress in 1912 and 1914 in support of voting rights for women.
Sgt. Henry Johnson
Born around 1892 in North Carolina, Henry Johnson spent his childhood in a South defined by Jim Crow segregation and lynchings by white mobs employed to enforce racial hierarchy. In his teens, he headed to Albany, New York, in the first stream of the Great Migration. He landed a job as a porter at a railway station.13 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 205-06, 210-12. 
In 1917, after the U.S. entered World War I, Johnson joined the regiment that became renowned as the Harlem Hellfighters. W.E.B. Du Bois and many other Black intellectuals—and military recruiters—were calling on Black men to join the fight for freedom abroad. Many hoped their service would help achieve freedom and equality at home. That hope was to go unrealized.14 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 213, 216-17.
The president, Woodrow Wilson, had segregated the federal workforce in 1913 and held a White House screening of the film The Birth of a Nation, which lionized the Ku Klux Klan. Army leaders declared Black soldiers lacking in the courage and intelligence necessary for combat, and fit only for labor such as digging latrines and unloading ships. Johnson’s regiment saw combat only after Gen. John Pershing, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, dispatched them to the Argonne Forest to fight with the French army.15 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 204, 216, 221.
Johnson and a fellow Black soldier, Pvt. Needham Roberts, were on sentry duty in the early morning hours on May 15, 1918, when they heard the snip of wirecutters. They shouted the alarm as German grenades began flying into their trench. Roberts was almost immediately incapacitated. Johnson, who was also wounded, exhausted his supply of grenades. He fired his rifle at nearly two dozen attackers until he had no more ammunition, after which he swung it as a weapon. Finally he used his bolo knife to prevent the enemy from taking Roberts prisoner. The five-foot, four-inch, 130-pound Johnson killed four German soldiers and wounded many others. He kept the Germans from reaching Allied lines.16 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 204-05.
Johnson was nearly unconscious when he was carried off the field. A fellow soldier said “his legs were just hanging.” Doctors inserted a metal plate into his shattered left foot.17 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 203, 221-22.
Newspapers across the U.S. called it “The Battle of Henry Johnson.” He was promoted to sergeant and awarded France’s highest military honor for valor. Returning home a national hero in 1919, he rode with his regiment in a ticker tape parade up Fifth Avenue in New York City while Black and white Americans chanted his name.18 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 204-05.
The Army sent him on a speaking tour, without preparing him for the racist vitriol and violence erupting across the country during the Red Summer of 1919, much of it directed at returning Black veterans. He was criticized in the white press for a speech he delivered in St. Louis in which he reportedly claimed some white soldiers had refused to fight alongside Black men and were cowards. Back home, Black streetcar passengers were restricted to “the rear seats,” he was quoted as saying, but in combat, “they sent the Negroes up ahead.”19 Jeffrey T. Sammons and John H. Morrow Jr., Harlem’s Rattlers and The Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014), 457.
An arrest warrant claiming he should not have appeared in uniform was withdrawn after he agreed to apologize.20 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 227-28.
Johnson’s injuries prevented him from working regularly, but the Army denied him disability pay. In 1929, he died of a heart ailment, in his 30s, alone, and in poverty. The Naming Commission’s staff historian, Connor Williams, recommended naming a base for him not only to honor his battlefield courage, but “out of full respect for his life and because his story forces Americans to consider Jim Crow and our country’s failure to take care of its Black military veterans.”21 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 229.
Sgt. Henry Johnson was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2015. “We can’t change what happened to too many soldiers like him who went uncelebrated because our nation judged them by the color of their skin and not the content of their character,” President Barack Obama said at the ceremony. “But we can do our best to make it right.”22 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 231-32.
Col. Van T. Barfoot
Putting the lives of his soldiers first, Van T. Barfoot fought for a country that had brutalized his ancestors. His grandmother was a member of the Choctaw Nation, which was forced off its ancestral homelands in the South to enable white settlement. His parents were tenant farmers who grew cotton and corn in central Mississippi. In 1940, Barfoot enlisted in the Army. He shipped out after Pearl Harbor and soon was a technical sergeant leading infantrymen against Nazi forces in Italy.23 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 20, 23, 25.
He had already received a Silver Star for bravery when his unit reached the town of Carano. While awaiting orders, Barfoot scouted the terrain, deducing the location of land mines by watching enemy movements. The order to attack finally came. The National Infantry Museum describes Barfoot’s actions on May 23, 1944:
He advanced alone through the minefield, following ditches and depressions, until he came within a few yards of a machine gun nest…After taking out the gun and its crew with a hand grenade, he entered the German trench and advanced on a second machine gun, killing two soldiers and capturing three others. When he reached a third machine gun, the entire crew surrendered to him…Barfoot captured a total of 17 German soldiers and killed eight.
Then German forces counterattacked. Three tanks bore down on Barfoot’s position. He ran close to the tanks. He fired a shot that disabled the first tank’s tracks, causing crewmen to climb out and forcing the other tanks to change direction.24 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 41.
Then he carried two wounded American soldiers nearly a mile to safety.25 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 41.
His unit was fighting in France in September 1944 when he learned he would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions at Carano. He had been promoted to second lieutenant by then—and wounded three times. He asked for the ceremony to be held in the field so he could stay with his men.26 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 40.
In 1945, the Army had him tell his story to U.S. audiences to sell war bonds. At a Mississippi event, the state’s U.S. senators—segregationists Theodore Bilbo and James Eastland—asked him if it was true that “the nigras” in the Army were not good fighters.27 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 43.
No, said Barfoot. Combat had taught him “that the colored boys fight just as good as the white boys.”28 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 44.
Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley
In 1942, on leave from Army training, Charity Adams attended a South Carolina NAACP meeting with her dad, an activist and minister—and came home to discover the family’s house surrounded by carloads of hooded Klansmen. The family huddled in silence until dawn, when the Klansmen drove off.29 Charity Adams Earley, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (Texas A&M University Press, 1989), 63.
By 1944, Adams was a Women’s Army Corps major, leading nearly 700 of the 6888th Mail Delivery Battalion. In a still-segregated military, the “Six-Triple-Eight,” nearly all Black women, was dispatched to Birmingham, England, to sort and send millions of letters and packages to and from nearly seven million U.S. soldiers in Europe. Deliveries had been halted by the Battle of the Bulge. Adams organized her troops into three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week. Her unit handled some 65,000 letters per shift; it took three units of men to replace her battalion after it disbanded.30 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 130-32, 137.
She learned that white American soldiers had spread the story that her unit’s early curfew was because “all Negroes had tails that came out at midnight.” So she made sure her troops were seen in public after midnight, wearing skirts.31 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 154.
Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley inspects the troops of the Army’s 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.
One hotel was designated for white members of the 6888th. The Red Cross said Black troops would stay in a separate hotel—but relented after Adams and her troops refused to comply. Adams would later write about the white colonel who, after she had visited an Army officers’ club, ordered her to his office. He made her stand at attention for 45 minutes as he announced that he, too, was from South Carolina—and that her family “might have been slaves” to his family. She quoted him in her memoir:
So you are the Major Adams, the ‘negra’ officer who went into the officers club last night…Who had the nerve to invite you there? I don’t believe in race mixing, and I don’t intend to be a party to it…Don’t let being an officer go to your head; you are still colored…You people have to stay in your place.32 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 107-08, 160, 164-65.
When a white general arrived to review Adams’s troops, he was unaware that they worked in shifts around the clock. He dressed her down in front of her soldiers because they were not all present for inspection. “I’m going to send a white first lieutenant down here to show you how to run this unit,” he said.33 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 159-60.
Adams replied, “Over my dead body, sir.”34 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 160.
He set out to court-martial her, but never did. She was promoted to lieutenant colonel—and became the highest-ranking Black woman in the Army.35 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 160-62; Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 138.
Adams reminded her troops that many white Americans had opposed letting them join the 6888th in the first place. “The eyes of the public would be upon us, waiting for one slip in our conduct or performance,” she wrote. But experiences at home and overseas united them. “What we had was a large group of adult Negro women who had been victimized, in one way or another, by racial bias…This was one opportunity to stand together for a common cause.”36 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 126, 164-65.
Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg
Arthur J. Gregg’s grandparents were born into slavery. He grew up near Florence, South Carolina, in a farmhouse without running water, a three-mile walk to the segregated elementary school. His mother died when he was 11. His father, who had been denied an education, sent him to live with relatives in Newport News, Virginia, in hopes he would attend better schools there. He excelled in high school. He trained to become a certified laboratory technician and was hired by a Chicago hospital—but was barred from drawing white patients’ blood.37 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 77, 79, 81-82.
“It was demeaning,” Gregg said decades later. In 1946, he joined the Army. He was 17.
He was stationed in postwar Germany and quickly promoted. He was admitted to Officer Candidate School at Fort Riley, Kansas in 1949, the year after Truman’s integration order. In practice, “the Army was still segregated,” Gregg said.
Of 110 officer candidates in his class at Fort Riley, only 52 graduated. He was one of two Black candidates who graduated. Fort Riley was a segregated post. That meant its barbers would not cut the hair of Black candidates—who needed haircuts to pass Saturday morning inspections, Gregg remembered. So each Friday, the Black candidates had to travel to a town miles away to get haircuts.38 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 91-92.
He began his officer career at Fort Lee in Virginia. He and his wife were barred from dining in the officers’ club and swimming in the pool of a base named for a Confederate traitor. “When the country needed [Robert E. Lee] most, he resigned his commission and joined the enemy forces,” Gregg said later. “That’s a record and an image that should not be honored by naming a military base after him.”
Gregg devoted his 35-year Army career to the Quartermaster Corps and logistics—as he described it, the supplying of “uniforms, weapons, transportation, and all of the things our Soldiers need to fight and survive.” A Pentagon publication called him “one of the Army’s great logistics leaders of the 20th century.”
In Vietnam, he turned a 700-man supply battalion with a “not ready” rating into an efficient force of 3,600 soldiers supporting the war effort. In 1977 he became the Army’s first Black three-star general and directed logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg stands at the position of attention during the Fort Gregg-Adams Redesignation Ceremony on April 27, 2023.
When Fort Lee was renamed in 2023 for him and Charity Adams Earley, the club that once excluded him became the Gregg-Adams Officers Club. At 94, he was the only living U.S. military hero to see a base named for him.
Gregg said Black officers of his generation believed “that if we served well, we would make the environment better to achieve equal rights.”
Gen. Richard E. Cavazos
Serving in Korea and Vietnam, Richard Cavazos became one of the most decorated Army officers of his time. He was awarded two Silver Stars, and the first of his two Distinguished Service Crosses was upgraded to a posthumous Medal of Honor “for acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty” during a battle for a hill in Korea.39 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 142, 154.
Of 190 U.S. soldiers who fought Chinese troops that day in June 1953, all but 70 were wounded or killed. After holding the position for hours, Cavazos, then a first lieutenant, was ordered to return the company to friendly lines. He remained behind, alone, to make sure he brought all his soldiers back. He rescued five wounded men, one by one, under heavy artillery fire.40 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 153-54.
He then returned to the battlefield again. His Medal of Honor citation reads: “He found a small group of men who had become separated from the main assaulting force and personally led them to safety. When informed that men were still missing, Cavazos again returned to the scene of the battle and led another small group of men to safety.”
Cavazos then went back to the battlefield two more times, alone, to search for missing soldiers. When he was satisfied that none remained, on the morning of June 15, he finally allowed his own wounds to be treated. The rescue mission lasted seven hours.41 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 153.
Asked years later about the Distinguished Service Cross he was awarded for his actions that day, he said, “It was probably a consolation prize for still being alive the next day.”42 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 153-54.
Cavazos’s son was later asked what had motivated his father in that battle. “He loved his soldiers,” Tommy Cavazos answered, “and it was that love, that selfless love, of which there’s no greater love, that drove him up the hill that night in 1953 to collect the men of his company and get them to safety.”
In Vietnam, too, Cavazos, then a colonel, was known for leading alongside his soldiers, where dangers were greatest. Pfc. Bill Fee wrote, “We respected his courage…Most battalion commanders preferred the safety of…a Huey [helicopter] above. Not Colonel Cavazos.”43 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 161.
He grew up during the Depression on a Texas ranch where his father, a World War I veteran, worked as foreman. One of his four siblings recalled: “The language was Spanish, the customs were Mexican, but everyone knew their loyalty was to the United States.”44 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 145.
Decades later, Cavazos was lauded by Gen. Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as “an Army legend.”45 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 141, 145.
He became the Army’s first Hispanic brigadier general in 1976 and the first Hispanic four-star general in 1982. Cavazos was a role model for “us poor Hispanic kids,” Maj. Gen. Alfred Valenzuela said. “We all looked up to him…He was the guy we wanted to be. If we couldn’t be him, we wanted to be near him and serve with him.”46 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 141, 167.
Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael J. Novosel
A son of Croatian immigrants, Michael Novosel grew up in Etna, a steel town near Pittsburgh. His mother spoke only Croatian; he learned English in public school. No job or scholarship awaited him when he graduated high school in 1940, at the end of the Great Depression. So, at 19, he joined the Army Air Corps. He piloted bombers in World War II’s final days and joined the Air Force in the Korean War. He was an airline pilot in his early 40s when President John F. Kennedy’s assassination made him ponder the president’s words: “Ask what you can do for your country.” Novosel said, “I decided that I had to do my part in the Vietnam War.”47 Naming Commission, Final Report, 67.
The Air Force hinted he was too old. But the Army needed helicopter pilots to evacuate wounded soldiers from battlefields. Starting in 1966, Novosel flew 2,543 missions and rescued over 5,500 wounded men.
On October 2, 1969, his crew had already flown for eight hours when they learned that dozens of wounded South Vietnamese soldiers were stranded near the Cambodian border, out of ammunition, surrounded, and outnumbered by North Vietnamese forces. American warplanes were sent, but two were shot down.48 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 49-50, 66-67.
Novosel and his helicopter crew flew in under fire, again and again, transporting as many as nine men on each trip, until one wounded man remained. Novosel flew in low, backing up the helicopter so the engine and rotor would shield his crew from enemy fire. They were pulling away when he saw an enemy soldier with an AK-47 automatic rifle 30 yards away.49 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 67-71.
The soldier “stood up…with his AK and emptied it at me,” he later recalled. Bullets and shrapnel pierced Novosel’s leg and hand. He momentarily lost control of the helicopter and almost crashed. The last rescued man fell out—but clung to the helicopter’s landing skids and survived.50 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 71-72.
Novosel received the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. “As a direct result of his selfless conduct,” the citation says, “the lives of 29 soldiers were saved.”
Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Julia Compton Moore
Hal and Julia Moore were honored for representing the military family and for their lifelong service and sacrifice. While her husband became a decorated Army officer in Korea and Vietnam, Julia Moore raised their five children at home, orchestrating 28 family moves between 1945 and 1977.51 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 177; Naming Commission, Final Report, 16.
Hal Moore led troops into the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 in the first major battle between U.S. and North Vietnamese soldiers. Though his men were far outnumbered, and at times surrounded, he devised a strategy that ultimately forced enemy combatants to retreat. The cost was 79 American soldiers killed and 121 wounded in less than 72 hours. Though his decisions reduced those losses, “the deaths were devastating nonetheless,” the Naming Commission wrote.52 Naming Commission, Final Report, 16.
Back at Moore’s home base in Columbus, Georgia, where the Army’s casualty notification policy was in place, families opened their doors to taxi drivers delivering Army telegrams announcing that their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers had been killed or wounded, or were missing in action or taken prisoner.53 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 181-82.
Julia Moore began accompanying cab drivers, offering condolences to her fellow Army spouses and families. She wrote to Army leaders, asking for a change in policy. Her work led to the creation of notification teams comprised of officers and chaplains—and of survivor support networks that are still in place today.54 Naming Commission, Final Report, 16-17.