The statue honoring Henry Johnson near the Madison Avenue entrance to Washington Park. In March, the Pentagon took down a web page noting the renaming of Louisiana's Fort Polk in his honor; last week, President Donald J. Trump announced the base would restore its former name.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who likes to bloviate about “lethality” and the “warrior ethos,” last week served up a surpassing insult to one of this nation’s most lethal warriors.

That would be Albany’s Henry Johnson, a Black soldier who on the night of May 15, 1918, was serving in the Argonne Forest — under French command, because America’s armed forces were still segregated. When he and another soldier were set upon by a German raiding party of more than a dozen men, Pvt. Johnson repelled the attack with grenades, rifle, bolo knife and his bare hands. He suffered 21 wounds in the melee.

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