It also persists because it is part of a larger story that is unfinished. The specific pattern of under-decoration for Black soldiers has been partially corrected through the posthumous award process, but the conditions that produced it — the racial organization of American military and civic life that made it possible to discharge Henry Johnson without documentation of his wounds — were not corrected by those awards alone. The awards are acknowledgments; the larger project of acknowledgment is ongoing.
The soldiers who serve today at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, serve on ground that carries Johnson’s name because the Army acknowledged, eventually, what it had done and not done. Whether they know the specific story — the wire cutters at 2 a.m., the bolo knife, the 21 wounds, the discharge papers that said nothing — is a question about education and institutional memory rather than about the historical record. The historical record is clear. It has been clear since William Irwin published his account in 1918. What the country has been doing since then is working out how to respond to what it already knew.
## The Regimental Motto and Its Meaning
The 369th Infantry’s association with the motto “Can Do” traces to the regiment’s lineage through the 15th New York Infantry, which carried the motto from the period of the regiment’s service in China at the turn of the century.
The motto — simple, direct, assertive — had a specific resonance for a regiment that spent its entire American military career being told what it could not do: could not train alongside white soldiers, could not march in the Rainbow Division’s parade, could not serve in the American line because the Army would not place Black soldiers there, could not receive the full recognition of its own country’s military decoration system.