This is most minor footnote to what is, after all, a terribly large tragedy, but last week’s shootings at Fort Hood reminded us of a question that has long rattled around in our heads: why does the U.S. Army continue to maintain so many bases named after Confederate generals?
Fort Hood is named after General John Bell Hood, a hard charging Kentuckian who commanded a brigade of Texans at Bull Run and Gettysburg, and who lost an arm and a leg in combat. Texas is also home to Camp Maxey, an Army National Guard training facility named after Samuel Bell Maxey, who parlayed an undistinguished military career into a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Texas is hardly alone in honoring rebel generals. Virginia has Fort Lee, named after Robert E. 
Lee, the south’s most distinguished leader; Fort A.P. Hill, named after Lee’s gutsy but frequently illness-wracked subordinate, and Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard installation, named for the George Pickett, anofficer best known for his disastrous attack at Gettysburg and his hair-do (perfumed ringlets).
North Carolina has Fort Bragg, named for Braxton Bragg, an irascible and largely incompetent commander. Louisiana has Camp Beauregard, named after Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a general with a natty name and neat goatee who commanded the forces that fired on Fort Sumter and started the war, and 
Fort Polk, named after Leonidas Polk, a bishop who was named a corps commander because of his friendship with President Jefferson Davis, and who is best known for being decapitated by a cannonball fired by an uncannily accurate Yankee gunner. In Georgia there’s Fort Gordon, named for John Gordon, a competent commander during the south’s declining years; Fort Benning, named after Henry Benning, whose troops fought well at Burnside’s Bridge, Devil’s Den, and other engagements where apostrophes aren’t required; and Fort Rucker, named after cavalryman Edmund Rucker, a colonel who was presented with title of general after the war stopped.
It’s not hard to see why bases were named after these men–tender local feelings, a desire to mend the nation through magnaminity, the invocation of a native son’s martial example. But as we get farther and farther away from the Civil War, it’s hard to see why we continue to honor men who, after all, did secede from the union, and who did fight for a racist government in the cause of preserving Negro slavery, and who did, ultimately, lose the war, thanks in part to strategic and tactical mistakes committed by these very generals. Surely the almost endless 
conflict in which we have been engaged for the century and a half since the Civil War has produced heroes worth honoring who are encumbered by less baggage than these men, whose principle claims on distinction were for actions perpetrated against the United States and the soldiers in its service.
It could be more embarrassing. There was a time when there was a Camp Forrest in Tennessee, named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the slave trader, general, and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Lucky that’s been deactivated.