Stephen Decatur was an early 20^th-century U.S. Navy hero.

Tripolitan pirates were kidnaping American merchant sailors in the Mediterranean. In 1803, they seized the USS Philadelphia, a 36-gun American frigate. Decatur led a sixty-man boarding party aboard. At the cost of one man slightly wounded, Decatur’s sailors killed twenty pirates and set Philadelphia ablaze. The British admiral, Horatio Nelson, called it the most daring action “of our age.”

(Above) Decatur kills a Tripolitan Pirate; the USS Philadelphia ablaze.

In the War of 1812, Decatur commanded the USS United States. His ship pummeled the British frigate Macedonian so severely that the ship surrendered and was captured. The battle lasted seventeen minutes.

In 1815, commanding the frigate President, he became a British prisoner after his ship was defeated and captured. Decatur and his executive officer were hit by flying splinters; Decatur was hit in the chest and forehead; his lieutenant, standing next to him, lost his leg. The battle lasted eighteen hours.

After that war, he was put in command of the Navy’s Mediterranean squadron and, in 1820,, finally forced the “Barbary Pirates,” based in Tripoli, to surrender.

USS Harvey Milk; Secretary Hegseth

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth today ordered the oiler USS Harvey Milk renamed. Milk was a U.S. Navy diver during and after the Korean War. He was the San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978. In both his naval and political life, Harvey Milk was fearless. His assassination and Hegseth’s order both stem from the fact that Harvey Milk was a gay man.

Harvey Milk was gay.

So was Stephen Decatur.

The shame lies in neither Milk nor Decatur. Pete Hegseth owns it today.

Naval Academy cadets on parade. My beloved brother-in-law, Steve, a husband and father, would have seen the Tripolitan Monument many times. Steve was an Annapolis grad. This is his memorial in the Academy Columbarium.