This form of exclusion is in some ways harder to fight than a simple refusal. There was no recourse to the Army for recognition of the injuries, because the discharge papers said there were no injuries. There was no recourse to the Veterans Bureau for disability compensation, because the same discharge papers provided no basis for a claim. The gap was between the physical reality of his condition and the bureaucratic fiction of his discharge record.
He spent the remaining years of his life in that gap.
## Closing: The Bolo Knife and the Medal
The connection between the bolo knife that Henry Johnson used at Outpost 20 on May 15, 1918, and the Medal of Honor that President Obama placed around his representative’s neck on June 2, 2015, is a connection of 97 years.
In those 97 years: a war ended. The country returned to economic growth and then crashed and then grew again. Another world war was fought and won. The Army’s Black soldiers fought in that war too, in segregated units, still under-decorated, still being denied the full recognition of their service. The Army was desegregated by executive order in 1948. The civil rights movement overturned the legal structure of segregation. Black Americans served in Korea and Vietnam and in the decades of military engagement since, in an integrated Army that was no longer the institution that had given Henry Johnson a discharge without documentation of his wounds.
The bolo knife had been a tool that became a weapon in a specific moment of necessity. The Medal of Honor is a tool of institutional memory — a formal object that records what the Army has decided to acknowledge about the service of one of its soldiers.