Today, President Obama will award the Medal of Honor, the United States’ highest military decoration, to Sgt. First Class Leroy A. Petry, who lost his right hand in 2008 while tossing away an insurgent grenade that could have killed two of his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan. It will be only the second time that the medal has been given to a living soldier in the nearly 10 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, and only the ninth time the medal has been awarded to an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran.
J.D. Leipold/United States
Army
President Obama will present Sgt. 1st
Class Leroy Petry with the Medal of Honor on Tuesday.
In fact, when you compare the length of the current wars and the number of Medals of Honor awarded in connection with the Vietnam War, about 270 more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans should have received it by now. The disparity only increases when you compare the current wars with all of our nation’s previous wars, except the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The highest number of Medals of Honor was awarded during the Civil War, with an average of nearly 32 for every month of the war, sometimes while the soldiers were still on the battlefield. And yet here we are, a military and civilian population exhausted and demoralized after almost 10 years of constant fighting, with only nine Medal of Honor recipients in our ranks, and only two of them alive to actually wear it.
Even the relatively smaller size of today’s fighting force doesn’t explain the discrepancy. Though there were far more troops involved in the previous wars, a study in 2009 by the Army Times newspaper found that during World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, the number of Medal of Honor recipients ranged from 23 to 29 per million troops. For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been just one award per million troops.
The scant number of Medal of Honor recipients among contemporary veterans is something I started thinking about several years ago while sitting in a crowded Fort Bragg gymnasium watching my husband and several other soldiers receive valor medals. At that time, no living service member had received the Medal of Honor and, listening as the award citations were read aloud, I wondered why not. It wasn’t that I thought the men being honored that day should have received the Medal of Honor — l didn’t — but surely, I reasoned, some living warrior from my generation had done something to deserve America’s highest honor. And so in the months and years that followed I began to pay closer attention to the award citations for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and I started reading the citations for Medal of Honor recipients from previous wars. It didn’t take long before I noticed that some of the citations for soldiers who have received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross or the Air Force Cross and even the Silver Star — the second and third highest valor awards, respectively — for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, read like the Medal of Honor citations from previous wars.
I’m hardly the first person to draw this conclusion. There was a Congressional hearing on the matter in 2006, and last year the House Armed Services Committee directed the Department of Defense to survey military leaders to determine if there was a trend of downgrading valor awards.
Cynics speculate that military leaders are exercising extreme caution in awarding the highest honors out of fear that a recipient’s blemished background could become an embarrassment, something that was not as great a concern in the pre-Internet era. These days, some suspect, a soldier’s exploits in daily life are just as important as those on the battlefield in deciding his worthiness of military honor. And then there’s the other sort of politics: The Pentagon suffered a huge loss in credibility when it became known that the real stories of the actions of Pfc. Jessica Lynch and of Cpl. Pat Tillman didn’t exactly match the heroic tales that were released to the media. Corporal Tillman’s Silver Star has been seen by many as a Pentagon attempt to buttress its original, incorrect version of the football star and Army Ranger’s death — in fact, he was accidentally killed by his fellow Rangers. Considering the embarrassment that followed when the Lynch and Tillman narratives were discovered to be fiction, it’s understandable that military brass would want to be absolutely certain before appearing to herald another hero.
For their part, Pentagon officials have tried to explain the small number of recent Medals of Honor by insisting that the exclusivity and the integrity of the award be maintained, and saying that an increased dependence on “standoff” weapons, such as drones and attack aircraft — or homemade mines on the part of the enemy — means that there are fewer “individual combat actions.” In other words, we are relying more on technology these days and are, therefore, less likely to have heroics on the battlefield — an explanation so obtuse as to be offensive.
What, then, are we to make then of the brutal battle for Falluja? Of Debecka Pass? The troop surge in Iraq? The painstaking house-by-house efforts of soldiers and Marines in Iraq? The cat-and-mouse game of clearing compounds in Afghanistan? The ever-mounting American death toll in Helmand Province? These battles have all involved boots on the ground, men and women engaging in firefights, being targets of mortar rounds, facing down homemade mines and making split-second decisions as to which person in civilian dress is innocent and which is the enemy — decisions that could cost them their own lives, and sometimes do. Time and again, American troops in our present-day wars have put their own safety aside and performed heroic and sometimes herculean acts in order to save the lives of others — and yet only nine have been deemed worthy of our highest honor.
To say that the nature of war has changed is simply false. Technology, and our reliance on it, has indeed changed, just as it has with every war in all of human history, but war fighters today are the same as they’ve always been. Moreover, the members of our present-day military volunteered to serve knowing that they would go to war, and many have gone back for fourth, fifth, sixth or more deployments. That alone is heroic.
Our service members aren’t likely to demand higher honors for themselves; that responsibility falls to the rest of us. For the recipients, the medals often represent the worst day of their lives, a day when, likely as not, someone close to them was killed or seriously wounded. The event they are honored for is one that is dredged deeply in survivor’s guilt. Likewise, military medals are rarely found hanging prominently in a home. They aren’t usually displayed on shelves with karate, soccer and bowling trophies. You aren’t likely to find them on the fireplace mantel or tacked to the wall beside the deer heads and the mounted fish. Often as not, they are kept in their cases in the backs of dresser drawers, tucked away under threadbare socks and underwear. Similarly, recipients will quickly correct you if you call them “winners.” They don’t feel like winners. Most will tell you that they would happily give their medals back if it meant their lost buddies could come home.
Our newspapers should — and could — be filled with the inspiring accounts of soldiers like Sergeant Petry and Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, the other living Medal of Honor recipient from the most recent wars. There are more troops like them, living and dead, men whose heroic actions I’ve learned about in my research and in the years I’ve lived at Fort Bragg, where there are parking spaces reserved for Medal of Honor recipients. But those spaces are always empty.
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