Rebekah Sanderlin: Longer Wars, Fewer Medals of Honor
Rebekah Sanderlin is an Army wife, a mother of two and a freelance writer and editor who lives near Fort Bragg, N.C. She is on the National Advisory Board for Blue Star Families and blogs about military family life at rebekahsanderlin.com.
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.
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....