About The Medals.

About That Vietnam Campaign medal you say you've got...

My last three months in Vietnam I was Awards And Decorations Officer for a helicopter company. Almost daily I saw men who were the carefully selected and rigorously trained best our country had, our Kingsmen flight crews and support people, making heroic decisions and choices, and performing self-sacrificing acts of extreme risk to accomplish the mission or to protect the lives of others. These men all fulfilled the stated requirements for receiving many of the awards and medals, in Spades, like the Aces on the front of our ships. They did their part toward earning those decorations, not just on one rare heroic day in their tour, but every few days or so. It of course goes without saying that very few of them actually got the medals they deserved.

The admin process was the obstacle. First, somebody had to go through the steps of formally putting somebody in for something. Somebody then had to go find and interview others involved in the action, when they weren’t out getting shot at, and to get their statements documented. Next, there had to be a good writer in the loop, as the recommendations had to be very rigorously formatted, to include certain very specific language describing the action as prescribed in the regs for each different award. Without those specific words, it is rejected. To be selected by other admin people higher up the pile, people up at Division who read a stack of them every day, the description of the action had to read like a good adventure novel.

Then each page of each recommendation had to be duplicated in seven copies. Seven. (7!) The paper those who “support the troops” sold to the US Army those days was the crudest heavy acid-woodpulp stock made, not even newsprint grade, simply the worst paper in the world’s history. While paper made of papyrus or hemp (yes, that hemp) lasts thousands of years, the records of the Vietnam years are blackened and crumbling today. Our typewriters were huge ancient newsroom Royals, on which things were literally pounded out. Using carbon paper, it was possible to make one clear copy, and one barely legible fuzzy one. To make seven copies, every page had to be typed without error three times, or four if that last fuzzy one wasn’t legible.

I kept two clerks working full time just typing up recommendations for awards, and I wrote a lot of hyperbolic descriptions of the truly heroic things we Kingsmen were doing out there every day. I wish I’d had half of the super document processing tech we have today, and a lot more of that elite club of gray old vets now could say, “Yeah, I got the bones, with a V.”

I believe we who wear such things and hold them in high esteem as I do, are most likely to agree that having them is no big thing among ourselves, and they do not set those who have them apart from those who do not. Even so, the recognition by a grateful nation that you can show to your grandkids when it’s all just history to them is a meaningful thing, something to be held in honor for.

When so many who deserve that honor were not recognized, it is truly an indication of a very weak and not-so-clever character for a person to claim that honor to himself, when it is not deserved. Pretending to be a veteran to pick up girls at the country club bar is one thing. Girls know guys will lie about anything in the bar, so caveat emptora. Whether by innuendo or outright lie, however, saying it for the purpose of obtaining political power is a BIG RED FLAG. This guy wants to get elected for the wrong reason. Next he’ll be claiming the ghost of Ronald Reagan told him God wants him elected.

James Nathan Post