It’s probably a good thing there are no Confederate veterans left, as they would likely be denied care by today’s Veterans Administration.

VAMural3
Courtesy: Marjorie Haun

To most Americans, the Confederate flag is part of our history, but to the VA, it’s a symbol worthy of erasure and political correctness.

Or more specifically, repainting.

The VA Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado recently commissioned a mural depicting American military history. It features a solider wearing a gas mask during World War I, as well as a jeep and fighter plane from World War II. All told, the scenes include imagery from the Revolution to the Iraq war.

It also includes two soldiers eye-to-eye with crossed muskets. One is in blue while the other is in gray. Behind them are the Union flag and the Confederate battle flag.

After the mural was made public, a call came to hide the Confederate flag, CBS 4 reports. Workers covered it with a poster for the VA Medical Foster Program.

“The decision was made that we would have to modify the painting, so we called the artist and asked him to ‘rework’ that part of the mural,” Paul Sweeney, Chief of Customer Relations and Public Affairs at the Grand Junction VA, tells Watchdog.

Sweeney claims the order came from on high.

“It was outside of Grand Junction. It could have been regional or it could have been national,” he says, apparently not wanting to divulge to taxpayers the identity of the real PC police.

The VA will now spend $200 to repaint the mural’s Confederate flag into an American one.

“I think we did the right thing in asking (the artist) to come in and redo the work. It’s his vision, it’s his inspiration,” according to Sweeney.

Suffice it to say the artist, Lee Bowerman doesn’t think much of the VA’s request.

“I’m going to paint what they want painted because we’re living in a political environment,” the 72-year-old artist tells the Grand Junction Sentinel.

And he defends his work.

“I got black, brown, white, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, POWs and MIAs,” Bowerman says. “I got a mule in there with a gas mask on.”

But none of that matters to the VA. They’re more concerned about the reaction historical fact may trigger in a few people.

No media outlets cited any complaints or complainers.

But the Junction Sentinel quoted resident Gary Parrott as saying, “You’re altering history.”

“We don’t want to eliminate that history. We need to recognize and learn from it,” he insists. “How do you learn from past mistakes if you erase and obliterate them so they never happened?”