It’s important that I tell you about my Grandaddy’s medal, because I won’t let them erase him.

The “them” I’m referring to? The staff of the U.S. Defense Department, who recently egregiously purged references to the achievements of Black, Native, Asian, female and other nonwhite or non-male American military veterans.

The official explanation is compliance with the elimination of DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion measures. But it’s simpler than that. If you don’t talk about the racism and sexism that these remarkable Americans survived, you can pretend it didn’t exist. Jackie Robinson, the Navajo code talkers and the Tuskegee Airmen? They wanted them gone. Poof. Gone. Ghosts.

“As a veteran, it’s a slap in the face, but as a Black woman, I’m not surprised,” said my friend and Baltimore native Caron LeNoir-Kelly, a Black, female, disabled, dual-service veteran in both the Navy and Army between 1994 and 2008. She’s a member of the Women Veterans Interactive Foundation and the producer and host of the podcast “Sword and Pen,” which is part of Military Veterans in Journalism. Her story as the head a military family has been archived in the Library of Congress.

For now.

It doesn’t matter that some of the deleted pages of accomplished veterans were restored after public backlash. The fact is that the current administration wanted to disappear them, wave them into the ether.

“Knowing this history is about pride in your family line. By design, trying to erase history is about not allowing young Black girls and boys to feel pride about where they come from,” said Erica Chew, a professional editor who lives in Silver Spring.

Her great-grandfather Sonny Ross and uncle Tim Benjamin both served in World War II; Ross as a Navy corpsman and Benjamin a police officer with the Army. Benjamin was allowed to transport German prisoners as far south as Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, but then had to hand them off to a white MP because “they didn’t want to see a Black man with a gun on a white man, even if he were a German prisoner,” Chew said.

“There’s an African proverb that says that you die twice, once when your body dies, and when people cease to speak your name,” she said. “They literally want them to die.”

Not again.

As a young journalist, I interviewed many then-aging Holocaust survivors, who told their harrowing stories on camera so that the truth of their tragedy would live long after they died. In that vein, we need to record for posterity the firsthand stories of veterans, including the 66,000 or so U.S. WWII vets still alive in 2024, so that we know the truth — no matter what a website says (or doesn’t say).

I’ve known since I was a little girl that my Grandaddy, Edward Streeter, served stateside in the Army during WWII, in the very bad old days of Jim Crow. Later, he worked for decades as a civilian at what was then called Andrews Air Force Base (now Joint Base Andrews) in Prince George’s County. He had the honor of being one of the workers that fueled President Richard Nixon’s Air Force One.

In 1969, my grandfather earned the Civilian Medal of Valor for risking his life to shut off rapidly spreading fuel that caught fire in a hangar and had already killed a man. Sadly, the people best able to fill in the specifics of the incident firsthand — my dad, grandparents, aunt and uncle — are all gone.

So like a good reporter, I use the resources I have, like the ancient framed certificate which resides on a shelf in my living room, and my mom, Tina Streeter Smith.

“It was a big deal. It was in the news afterwards,” remembered my mother, and indeed I remember the yellowing, framed clip from The Washington Post that used to hang on the wall in my grandparents’ den. The article wound up in my parents’ Little Rock, Arkansas, home after my grandparents passed, along with the certificate and medal I have now, but sadly the clipping is long gone.

“Everyone was so excited, so proud of him, but — typical Ed Streeter — he was very quiet about it,” my mom said.

She pieced together what happened from the certificate, clipping and family stories — including “some of the more gross details” from my dad’s brother, Melvin. “I don’t remember what caused the explosion, if it was a spark, but something set the fueling truck on fire,” she said. “The driver unfortunately had already burned up in the truck, but the point was that Ed Streeter knew he needed to turn off the fuel pump, or it was going to get worse.”

So this man, by then a civilian in his late 50s, chose to throw himself into harm’s way because he was a good, brave person who deeply revered the oath he’d taken to this country that had not always been so good to him. “The newspaper story talked about his quick thinking, and used a word … I can’t remember exactly what, but something meaning that he was not thinking about himself. He knew what he had to do,” said my mom.

And there you have it. Instant hero. Like my mother said, Ed Streeter was a taciturn, soft-spoken guy who talked more about his garden and “Days of Our Lives” than his service. But he beamed whenever we mentioned that medal, even though the act that earned it was not easy. “I remember he had trouble sleeping after that,” Mommy said. “I don’t know if he got any counseling for it.”

I seriously doubt it. But those experiences happened. People who hate DEI imply that anyone who’s not a white man probably didn’t earn their jobs. My grandfather earned a damn medal. He was real, as real as my other grandfather, Lester James Sr., who was sent to Germany to guard prisoners who, you may imagine, were less than happy to see this Black man. Chew’s family is real. My great-aunt Vernice Evans Gilbert, who was in the women’s branch of the United States Naval Reserve, was real. LeNoir-Kelly is real.

Bigotry and cruelty must not dim these stories. If you have living veterans in your family, I beg you to talk to them about their experiences and record them. If they’ve passed, talk to those who know these stories. Post them. Keep them on your mantels and in your memories.

We must say their names. We will not let them die a second time.