This week as we celebrate Veterans Day, I hope we will not fail to remember that our nation has depended upon soldiers from many different ethnic backgrounds and traditions.

I was unhappy to read in The Inter-Mountain that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has erased images of women and minorities from the Department of Defense website.

Most notable was Milton L. Oliver III, a soldier who saved his platoon in Vietnam by smothering a grenade. He was the first African American to receive the Medal of Honor in 1965. We are so fortunate to have citizens like Milton Oliver who have the courage to do what needs to be done to save others, and the idea that this man’s image has been removed from the DoD website is a sign that our popular culture has been moving in a direction away from equality.

Such a callous lack of appreciation for the history of diversity in this nation is fundamentally not American. As a TV personality, Hegseth has not had any real battlefield experience, but my father, who served as a doctor during World War II, and my husband, who was a forward observer in Vietnam, were both lucky to have diverse troops serving with them.

Immigrants and people of color were part of the “melting pot” that we grew up talking about with great pride. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” That was long before anybody used the word “Woke” for anything except the past tense of waking up from sleep.

It is time that we all wake up from Sleepy Hollow and think about who we are as Americans. We are not a nation where women and people of color should be made to hide their talents and believe that their services are inferior and should be low-paid.

This is not a new idea that some liberals made up recently. This is something that both of my parents believed 80 years ago before I was born, when my mother was in medical school.

Even as a child, I remember Henry Wolmack working at a filling station on Randolph Avenue. He was a dear African American friend of mine, and I knew Henry’s name started with an H like mine, so we always greeted each other by first names with joy while he was filling the gas tank. It was not until I was older that I learned how Mr. Wolmack suffered from his experiences during World War I; nevertheless, he was always kind and cheerful with me.

In his World War II journal, my father mentions several African American examples of soldiers who were brave and smart when they were in difficult battles in Europe.

In 1969, when he was a forward observer, my husband noted that there were inner-city African Americans serving alongside West Virginia Mountaineers in his artillery unit near the DMZ in Vietnam.

Diversity is — and always has been — part of what really makes America great.