Who is Fort Bragg named after now?
It’s Still Cultural Genocide! Meet Roland Bragg, the MAINE soldier, who stole a German ambulance to save a soldier
When Debra Sokoll first heard Fort Liberty in North Carolina would be renamed after her father, Pfc. Roland Bragg, she didn’t believe it. Sokoll’s reaction came a day after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed a memo restoring the name of the Army post known as Fort Liberty since 2023 to Fort Bragg.
Roland Bragg was a 21-year-old paratrooper from Maine when he found himself pinned down by artillery fire near the end of World War II, out of ammunition as the Germans closed in. He hunkered down inside an old stone barn, while all around him, his fellow paratroopers lay wounded on stretchers, some barely conscious, none with any medical supplies on hand.
As the shells exploded around them, Bragg stole a Nazi ambulance, loaded four men inside and drove a harrowing 20 miles to an allied hospital, bullets whizzing past the whole way. He never saw those men again and assumed them all dead — until 50 years later. In 1993, the old paratrooper got a letter from John Martz, a soldier he’d saved that day, who could only remember German shells knocking him down six or eight times. He’d written every survivor in his unit asking for answers, until his letter found…