Hegseth Says Wounded Knee Soldiers Will Keep Their Medals of Honor

Any ethos that honors the massacre of women and children is an ethos I don't want and will never respect.

We never should have named military installations after Confederate leadership, never should have paid money to change their names only to change them back, never changed the name of the DOD, and while many have received the MOH that never should have, all of these things I am not interested in paying money to either change or investigate. Why have DOGE and then go spend money on these items?

MAJ Byron Oyler - DOGE... was a smash-n-grab. It had nothing to do with government efficiency, and everything to do with Elon Musk data-mining our government for no legal or legitimate purpose, as a reward for... what exactly? In the FY that just ended (with our government now closed) the deficit grew every month from what had been projected. Where are those DOGE savings?? And BTW - where is the $17 trillion dollars of tariff revenue that the President claims has been collected?? The whole federal budget for 2025 was ~$7 trillion, so we should have plenty of funding right now, right?

By all means. Virtue... endures. The truly valorous...endures. It would stand up to scrutiny now, and in the future. Show me the award citations for those Soldiers at Wounded Knee? Which of them braved enemy fire to save their fellow Soldier? Which covered the withdrawal of their unit against overwhelming force? BTW, pretty sure I read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" as an assignment, while in Army ROTC. We were never afraid of re-examining our past, until recently.

COL (Join to see) Ive read it too and its a very ugly piece of history and a stain on the Army.

Again, are we going to review every MOH from the past? Lindbergh faced zero enemy fire crossing the Atlantic, yet was awarded the MOH and a DSC for the act. Others were awarded the Medal for simply capturing an enemy flag or crossing a stream to retrieve watercraft. One Soldier was awarded the Medal after being evacuated from Corrigedor. Why isnt his award being reviewed?

LTC Trent Klug - They aren't getting reviewed because the standards are different. Part of the problem here is that prior to WWI there really were no individual medals other than the MOH. So if you did anything of note against the enemy, you'd get an MOH. The criteria was there much much different and so it's really difficult to hold those awarded in the 19th century to today's MOH standards. So the question to me really isn't "Let's review all these cases to see what medal they should get" but rather "Do these soldiers at Wounded Kneed deserve a medal for these actions at all?" And unlike they examples you provided, I'd say "Absolutely not"

LTC Trent Klug - That would be a lot of $$$ to change the awards of dead people.