When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January of 2025 one of the first things his newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did was ban books in the Pentagon and Armed Forces academies and other libraries and schools that tell the story of institutional racism faced by segregated African American soldiers during WW II and when they returned to the United States. When American art teacher Solace Wales and her husband bought in the early 1970s a small house in the mountain-top village of Sommocolonia in Italy, she had no idea about the U.S. military institutional racism faced by U.S. black soldiers that fought on the Gothic Line in and around that part of Tuscany. But after a decade of spending summers in the small village the stories of what happened in 1944-45 set her off on a journey with notebook, tape recorder and pen in hand. She thus began a 30-year research journey including extensive interviews with many U.S. black veterans that served on the Gothic Line in Tuscany. Her story tells of black soldier bravery and as well as the treatment by white racist military commanders from the segregated U.S. south determined to prove their supremacist views that black soldiers were inferior. In 2020 Wales, now based in northern California outside San Francisco, published Braided in Fire: Black GIs, Tuscan Villagers and Italian Partisans on the Gothic Line 1944. Besides detailing the story of how Lieutenant John Fox gave his own life in Sommocolonia to save his fellow soldiers, the story also gives a compelling account of how local villagers - many whom were her neighbors - navigated the treachery of the Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation, roving bands of local bandits, Italian Partisan freedom fighters and their relationship with undercover American secret agents as well as the Allied Force Gothic Line armies. The latter included the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division Buffalo Soldiers, who were the first African American infantry soldiers to face combat in WW II, and an elite African American artillery battalion. Both were deployed in the second half of 1944 when the U.S. Army, desperate for replacement soldiers, finally allowed the African American infantry to enter the battlefield. Among the latter was Fox, who called in artillery fire he knew would end his life but would allow his fellow soldiers to escape a surprise Christmas-time German counter-offensive. In the podcast interview Wales tells how the white commander of Fox's battalion knew about the German counter offensive but did not inform the under-manned black troops stationed over Christmas in Sommocolonia. It took more than 50 years for Fox to posthumously receive the U.S. Medal of Honor when former U.S. President Bill Clinton awarded it to his widowed wife at the White House. Present that day were other African American veteran Medal of Honor recipients who also had been denied bravery recognition because of a racist narrative that lingered for decades in the U.S. military after WW II. Also present was Solace Wales and she recounts that emotional day in Washington, D.C.