ALEXANDRIA, Ohio – Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense took down thousands of news articles and other content. The removal of articles was part of the DEI purge initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Articles removed from the website included records of Jackie Robinson’s World War II service and the Navajo Code Talkers, who played an important role in the war’s victory.
Michele Adkins, whose father Allen Pratt served in the Marine Corps alongside the Code Talkers in the Pacific during WWII, felt the effects of that decision in Ohio. Adkins said her father, who died in 2010, never talked much about his time in the Marines.
“My father suffered from PTSD. He had suffered from depression his entire life. He rarely discussed it,” she said.
So when she had the opportunity to hear him tell stories, she listened intently.
“He says, you know, I drove the code talkers across the Pacific. I was a jeep driver. I said, “I didn’t realize you were a Jeep driver.” He replied, “Yeah, I drove those men everywhere.” They most likely would not have won the Pacific War without those gentlemen, because the Navajo language, like the other native languages, is passed down from generation to generation.
It’s not a written language. You and I couldn’t just go find the Navajo language written and try to figure it out. Unless you are Navajo. So it was an unbreakable code,” she recalled from a conversation with her father before his death.
When Adkins discovered the’scrubbing’ of government websites, she was devastated.
“The Department of Defense sent out an email essentially deleting all information about African Americans and Asian Americans, which had a significant impact on my life. It also included disabled women, which bothered me as I have a disabled daughter.
So, the scrubbing of materials has a significant impact on individuals. You can’t get rid of history. So I hope they make progress in putting everything back together.”
Adkins has an archive of old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and telegraphs from her father’s time in the Marine Corps. Before being drafted, Allen Pratt played basketball for Middletown High School. Because he was 18 years old, he was drafted before graduating and before the team’s season ended. In 1944, the team won the Class A state championship.
They sent Pratt a photo of the team holding the trophy, and Pratt’s father informed him of the victory via telegram.
His story is just one of thousands that could be lost to history if it weren’t for archives, stories, articles, and collections like his daughter Adkins’.
“When my father was shipped off to Peleliu, he had never left Ohio, except for basketball tournaments. So what a shock it was to go from a sandlot kid to, you know, 18 years old, sitting in a foxhole on the beach in Guadalcanal or Okinawa,” Adkins explained.
“I wish the Department of Defense would look at a person like myself and say, wow, there was a person behind the code talkers and my aunt and Arlington National Seminary Cemetery, there’s people behind it, you know, it’s disheartening that they just got rid of that information.”
“Regardless of a person’s opinion on DEI, I’m not making a political statement because it’s simply a matter of respect. These people gave their lives.
They waved a magic wand and erased everything, including history, based on culture or race, and, while my father was not Native American, he had a strong connection to those people. “And you can’t change that,” she said.
Since the Pentagon removed thousands of articles from its website, there has been a push to replace many historical artifacts.
“Even if they scrubbed them and then reinserted them into the record, it’s upsetting for that brief period. To think that this information was removed arbitrarily, you know, there are people and families behind these individuals.
It makes no difference in terms of race, color, nationality, or gender. There are people and families who are involved with them. So do not scrub them. “Celebrate them,” Adkins stated.
The Code Talkers were Navajo military members who worked secretly for the US military to secure communications in a language only they knew. They were not recognized for their service until they received Congressional Gold Medals in 2001.
The program remained completely secret until 1968, when it was declassified. Adkins believes it is critical to understand the history.
Nobody thinks much about DEI until it affects them as individuals. And it had an impact on me because I was so connected to my father and his history with the code talkers. Adkins explained that he drove the code talkers around the Pacific Islands in those jeeps.
Arlington National Cemetery also recently changed their website layout, removing references to notable gravesites for ‘Hispanic, African-American, and Women.’ On March 19, the Cemetery published a message clarifying that those notable individuals were not removed from the website, but rather moved to a different category after race and gender were removed.
Adkins’ Great Aunt Mary was a Lieutenant Colonel at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.
“My aunt was serving at the same time, as President Eisenhower’s private duty nurse in Washington, DC. He had his gallbladder removed. She cared for a large number of people buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and she would have been heartbroken if you couldn’t find information on women or minorities,” Adkins said.
Adkins is extremely proud of her family’s military history and plans to continue advocating for veterans and their families in the future. She wrote letters to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump, asking them to reconsider the removal of military history from government websites.
“The military is extremely important to this family and its history. And I do not want it to disappear. Even though our government is attempting to correct those by scrubbing and reintroducing them into the record, it is still very painful when you have a whole family that was involved in World War II,” she said.
Thousands of articles and profiles have been restored to the Pentagon’s website since the initial DEI scrub.
