Family of WWII veteran who fought alongside Navajo Code Talkers responds to DEI scrub from Pentagon

Yahoo

24-03-2025

ALEXANDRIA, Ohio (WCMH) – The United States Department of Defense removed thousands of news articles and other content earlier this month. The removal of articles was part of the DEI purge set in motion by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Records of Jackie Robinson's service during World War II and the Navajo Code Talkers who were integral in winning the war were just two examples of articles removed from the website.
The impact of that decision was felt here in Central Ohio by Michele Adkins, whose father Allen Pratt served in the Marines alongside the Code Talkers in the Pacific during World War II. Adkins recalled her father, who died in 2010, never really talked a lot about his time in the Marines.
'My father suffered from PTSD. You know, his whole life he suffered with depression. He never very rarely talked about it,' she said.
So, when she had an opportunity to hear him tell stories, she listened closely.
'He says, you know, I drove the code talkers all over the Pacific. I was a Jeep driver. I said, well, I didn't know you were a Jeep driver. He said, yeah, he I drove those men everywhere. They probably would have not won the Pacific War without those gentlemen, because they, the Navajo language and the other native languages are, passed down from family to family. It is not a written language. You and I wouldn't be able to just go find the Navajo language written and try to figure it out. Unless you were Navajo. So it was a code that was unbreakable,' she recalled of one conversation with her father before he passed.
When Adkins saw the 'scrubbing' of government websites she was devastated.
'The Department of Defense put, you know, this email out, basically to scrub, any information on African-American, Asian Americans, a big impact on my life. It also included disabled women, which was very bothersome to me considering I have a disabled daughter. So, the scrubbing of materials has just a huge effect on individuals. You know, you just can't get rid of history. And so I hope they make progress in putting it all back.'
Adkins has a collection of old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and telegraphs from her father's time in the Marines. Before he was drafted, Allen Pratt was a basketball player for Middletown High School. Since he was 18 years old, he was drafted before he graduated and before the team finished their season. That team won the State Championship in Class A in 1944.
They sent Pratt a photo of the team with the trophy, and Pratt's father let him know of the victory via telegram.
His story is just one of thousands that may be lost to history if not for archives, stories, articles, and collections like his daughter Adkins'.
'When my father was shipped off to Peleliu, besides the basketball tournaments that he had been in, he had never been out of the state of Ohio. So what a shock that was to go from a sandlot kid to, you know, 18 years old, sitting in a foxhole on the beach and, you know, in Guadalcanal or Okinawa,' Adkins said.
'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 what a person's opinion is on DEI, and I'm not making any kind of political statement because it's just a matter of respect. You know, these people gave their life. They waved a magic wand, got rid of everything and all the history and, you know, based on culture or race and, you know, although my father was not Native American, he had just a strong connection with those individuals. And you can't remove that,' she said.
Since the Pentagon removed thousands of articles from it's website, there has been an effort to replace many of the historical artifacts.
'Even if they scrubbed them and then you put them back into the record, you know, just for that short period of time, it's hurtful. To think that this information was just arbitrarily removed, you know, there's people behind, there's family behind these individuals. It doesn't matter what race or what color or nationality or gender. There are people and there's families that are associated with them. So don't scrub them. Celebrate them,' Adkins said.
The Code Talkers were Navajo military members who worked in secret for the United States military to secure communications using a language only known to them. They weren't given credit for their service until they received Congressional Gold Medals in 2001. The program was a complete secret with no recognition until the program was declassified in 1968. Adkins believes it's important to know the history.
Nobody thinks a whole lot about DEI until it affects you as an individual. And it did affect me because I was so intertwined with my father and his history with the code talkers. He transported the code talkers in those jeeps all over the Pacific Islands,' Adkins explained.
Arlington National Cemetery also recently changed their website layout, removing references to notable gravesites of 'Hispanic, African-American, and Women.' The Cemetery did publish a message on March 19 clarifying that those notable individuals were not removed from the website, but placed into another category after mentions of 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, and she was, President Eisenhower's private duty nurse in Washington, DC. He had his gallbladder removed. She cared for an awful lot of people that are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and she would have been heartbroken to have fought that you couldn't find information on women or minorities,' Adkins said.
Adkins is very proud of her family's military history, and hopes to keep advocating for veterans and families in the future. She wrote letters to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump asking them to reconsider removal of military history from government websites.
'The military is very important to this family and the history. And I don't want it to disappear. Even though our government is trying to correct those, scrubbing and you know put it back into the record, it it still is very hurtful when you have a whole family, you know, that was involved in World War Two,' she said.
Since the initial DEI scrubbing, thousands of articles and profiles have been returned to the Pentagon website.
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