Sometimes, you look at an article twice just to make sure it’s not from The Onion. That was certainly the case when I read last Friday’s Washington Post, which featured an op-ed from Simon Waxman demanding the U.S. military drop the references to Native Americans from its helicopter names.

This of course comes in the wake of the recent controversy surrounding the Washington Redskins.

But Waxman, the managing editor of Boston Review, created a false equivalence between a football team named after a term generally considered to be a racial slur—“redskin”—and products named after the proper names for Native American tribes—Apache, Kiowa, etc.

A quick tip for op-ed writers. For something to be offensive, people generally need to be, well, offended in the first place. Yet notably absent from Waxman’s missive are any quotes from irate Native American leaders—a particularly glaring omission.

Nor did Waxman appear to have even bothered to contact the U.S. military for an explanation. Fortunately for rational people everywhere, I was on hand to do a little research. It took little more than a quick Google search to put me in touch with the remarkable staff of the U.S. Army Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker in Alabama.

Even most Army helicopter pilots are baffled as to just how the ground combat branch came to name its aircraft for Native American tribes. The staff of the Aviation Museum helped clear things up.