Roger That: Confederate flag removed from military college chapel

Less than a week after nine people were fatally shot in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, leaders at The Citadel — the Military College of South Carolina — have voted to remove a Confederate Naval Jack flag from the campus chapel, according to the Charleston Regional Business Journal.

One of the victims of the shooting was a Citadel Graduate College alumnus, and six Citadel employees lost family members in the massacre, according to a statement issued by Citadel President Lt. Gen. John W. Rosa. The statement did not identify which victims were connected to the school.

The Citadel’s board of visitors voted 9-3 Tuesday evening to move the Confederate Naval Jack from Summerall Chapel to an “appropriate location on campus,” Rosa said. Before it can be moved, though, state legislators must amend the South Carolina Heritage Act.

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The Veterans Affairs Department knew there were 4,000 World War II veterans who had been exposed to mustard gas during chemical experiments, the existence of which wasn’t declassified until the 1990s, according to Government Executive magazine.

But the agency’s effort to track them down and compensate any who suffered injuries went almost nowhere, according to exclusive findings by NPR’s investigative unit in a report broadcast Tuesday.

“In more than 20 years, the VA attempted to reach just 610 of the men, with a single letter sent in the mail,” NPR reporters said. “Brad Flohr, a VA senior adviser for benefits, says the agency couldn’t find the rest, because military records of the experiments were incomplete. There was no identifying information, he says. No Social Security numbers, no addresses, no ... way of identifying them.”

But an NPR research librarian, working just two months using VA’s own list to scour public records, found more than 1,200 of the subjects.

The radio journalists interviewed more than 40 living test subjects and family members. The volunteer troops had been unwittingly subjected to mustard gas to test the effectiveness of masks inside a gas chamber — at a time when U.S. intelligence feared use of such gas by the Germans and Japanese.

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The U.S. military is designing a hovering vehicle eerily similar to the hovercraft in the Star Wars movies, according to the Washington Post.

The prototype, which is being developed by Malloy Aeronautics and SURVICE Engineering, doesn’t come with blaster cannons. But the Defense Department is imagining the carbon-fiber Hoverbike as a “multi-role tactical reconnaissance” vehicle that can be used to support a variety of missions, such as carrying supplies or gathering intelligence, according to Reuters.

The two companies have a contract with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, to do research and development on the Hoverbike.

The real selling point for the U.S. Army appears to be that hoverbikes offer a cheap, reliable alternative to traditional helicopters. It has fewer moving parts and is therefore easier to maintain, according to Malloy.

This story was originally published June 26, 2015 at 11:07 AM with the headline "Roger That: Confederate flag removed from military college chapel."