Max Boot: McGinnis’s Medal of Honor

President Bush yesterday awarded a Medal of Honor to Army Specialist Ross McGinnis for awe-inspiring courage during the Iraq War. In 2006 a grenade was thrown into McGinnis’s Humvee and instead of escaping, he jumped on the explosive, thus saving his fellow crew members but sacrificing his own life. He is the fifth soldier to receive a Medal of Honor for actions in Iraq or Afghanistan. What do they all have in common other than their display of bravery far above and beyond the call of duty? Like McGinnis, all of the other medal recipients died in the course of their actions.

This is passing strange. Can it be the case that the only soldiers worthy of the nation’s highest honor are dead? Are there no living heroes? Actually, there are plenty of them. For instance, David Bellavia, who as a staff sergeant during the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004 single-handedly killed five insurgents and thereby saved the lives of there squads from his platoon. He received the Silver Star and the Bronze Star and he has been nominated for the Medal of Honor and the second-highest decoration as well, the Distinguished Service Cross. You can read his Medal of Honor nomination [1] here, or you can read his [2] memoir. Notwithstanding his superhuman feats of courage, Bellavia faces a tough obstacle in trying to get the Medal of Honor–the fact that he survived his ordeal.

It used to be fairly common for the Medal of Honor to go to living heroes, but the last time that happened was during the Vietnam War. [3] A hundred and five recipients are still alive, dating from Vietnam, Korea and World War II. Since then all seven of the medals have been awarded posthumously. (In addition to the five in Iraq and Afghanistan, two went for the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993.)

For some reason the award criteria have been redefined in such a way as to exclude many possible recipients. It’s right and proper to make this honor hard to get, and it is true that in the distant past the medal was often given out indiscriminately. Thus the highest number of Medals of Honor ever given for one engagement–a whopping total of 56–were handed out after the minor takeover of Vera Cruz, Mexico, [4] in 1914. Even Rear Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher, the commander of the operation, received a Medal of Honor, although his citation does not list a single example of “gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” (the current medal criteria). From giving out the medal too freely, we now seem to have swung to the other extreme, of extreme parsimony.

It would make good sense to relax the criteria a bit. That would not only deliver justice for a number of heroes but would also create goodwill ambassadors on behalf of the armed forces. Many commentators (see, e.g., [5] this Robert Kaplan article) have noticed that we don’t pay as much attention as we once did to military heroes. But might the armed forces themselves be partially at fault because they are no longer anointing living veterans with the nation’s highest honor, and the only one that most ordinary citizens will have heard of?

URLs in this post:
[1] here:
http://bamapachyderm.com/archives/2006/06/13/army-ssg-david-bellavia-medal-of-honor-nominee/
[2] memoir: http://www.amazon.com/House-David-Bellavia/dp/1416574719
[3] A hundred and five recipients are still alive:
http://www.homeofheroes.com/hallofheroes/1st_floor/wall/2living.html
[4] in 1914: http://www.history.army.mil/html/moh/mohmex.html
[5] this Robert Kaplan article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806u/medal-of-honor/2