One has to salute the sailors at Naval Station Great Lakes. I’m not so sure I would be a happy camper serving under our current commander-in-chief.

But these sailors soldier on, following orders, some handed down from on high. Like moving a Navy destroyer once on station in the Red Sea to our southern border.

The ship’s Mideast mission was shooting down missiles and drones, protecting the fleet and others from Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen who insist on firing at commercial vessels. Soon, the ship will be on station, presumably off the San Diego coast, working to halt illegal immigration and drug smuggling along with the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection. The maneuver, in military parlance, is known as a force multiplier.

Like sailors being trained at Great Lakes to join the fleet, active-duty military folks eventually leave the service. Some leave after their initial enlistments, others following 20-plus years in uniform.

Thanks to what is happening under the administration of President Donald Trump, these future veterans will be facing many uncertainties when they process out. It’s not unusual for former military to join other governmental agencies, such as the National Park Service for one.

Prior to President Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, an estimated 3,000 military veterans were working in national parks across the nation, others in the U.S. Forest Service. With the administration’s rush to cut the federal workforce, their numbers are dwindling.

The Park Service is not in control of the venerated Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where some 400,000 veterans are buried. It is overseen by the Department of the Army. It is there that Trump administration minions have decided to dismiss many veterans and what they contributed during their service to the nation.

If you have never visited Arlington, it is a solemn pilgrimage being surrounded by stark white marble gravestones with history overflowing across its 639 acres.

The land once belonged to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and is the final resting place for service members dating back to the Civil War, including two presidents and more than 400 Medal of Honor recipients.

According to the cemetery, last year it was estimated that 27 to 30 funerals were held daily; between six and eight services on Saturdays. Amid the Civil War, the administration of President Abraham Lincoln, the favorite son of Illinois, used a portion of the property as a settlement for freed slaves, known as “Freedmen’s Village”.

Americans wouldn’t know this if they visited Arlington this month. That’s because references to that and dozens of “notable graves” of Black, Hispanic and female service members, have been wiped from the cemetery’s memory bank by the administration in its relish to erase any mention of what some consider DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) across the wide spectrum of the federal government.

Task & Purpose, an online publication covering the military community since 2014, first reported on scouring race and gender-related language and personages from the once-sacred annals of Arlington. The site found many of the erasures didn’t even adhere to DEI topics.

These now-“unpublished” facts of those residing in Arlington include information about Army Lt. Vernon Baker who received an upgraded Medal of Honor in 1997 for heroism during the World War II Italian campaign, according to Task & Purpose, which called him, “a one-man wrecking crew as a platoon commander during an assault on a German artillery post.”

On Arlington’s social media offerings, phrases like “civil rights” and “racial justice” were erased in favor of “service,” Task & Purpose discovered. This whitewashing of historical records apparently includes removing photographs of the Enola Gay, the Army Air Force Boeing Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945, hastening the end of the final chapter of World War II.

The pilot of the B-29, Col. Paul Tibbets, named the plane after his mother. Perhaps someone will come to their senses and figure out the plane’s name has nothing to do with gender relations in the military. Whomever they are, they surely don’t know how to interpret the past.

There’s an old military adage: “I will back you if you’re right. I’ll back you if you’re wrong. I won’t back you if you’re stupid.” Ignoring those who served and buried honorably is stupid.

Gutting history and those interred at Arlington, no matter race or gender, deserve more respect than this from their fellow Americans.

Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.

sellenews@gmail.com

X: @sellenews