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Claiming false medals is demeaning

August 2, 2009 · 1 comment

A recent NYT article discussed the rash of false medals/military honors since the long war on terror has greatly increased the number of “everyday” people with some plausible wartime service.

(For example, I recently met an in-house attorney with JetBlue who was in the Army National Guard during law school and then deployed to Iraq. That’s not easy either.)

I found this language to be odd:

Some First Amendment scholars worry that laws regulating the use of symbols are similar to those against flag burning, which the Supreme Court has said are unconstitutional limitations on free speech. Others have also questioned whether overzealous activists risk slanderously and erroneously accusing people of fraud because of missing or misprinted military documents.

I agree completely with the “wearing a medal” issue, even more vehemently if it’s protected speech criticizing the military and the government. We protect the Constitution so that we can keep these rights; I’m one of the only former military folks I know who doesn’t have a problem with flag-burning. I believe that it’s great for other people to take out their frustration and anger on a US flag rather than on a citizen or soldier, sailor, airman, or marine.

But to accuse someone? That would take some serious self-righteousness and some serious proof. I doubt that anyone who actually held any of these medals would take it on themselves to throw stones at someone else without being absolutely convinced; the idea of denigrating a soldier who was deservedly decorated would seem to me to be the type of conduct that these folks would find outrageous. I, for one, have no problem detailing the extent of my “action” in the Army: the unit I was to join went to Panama in 1989 but I was waiting for OCS and never joined the unit; I was in OCS during Desert Storm, and all of Ft. Benning was worried about thousands of casualties; at OCS we openly talked about the School’s prominence in turning out 2LTs, many of whom went to Vietnam and promptly died; but we stayed home and the war was over; I was in Hawai’i during Bosnia, and my old boss went to Somalia. I didn’t do any of those things. All I did was stand ready to do whatever was asked of me, and that’s enough. I know people with actual medals, who’ve actually fought. I can’t imagine demeaning them by pretending I did something I hadn’t. I don’t know who would.

This quote is both heartening and disturbing:

Special Agent Mike Sanborn, who since 2007 has led the unit in the F.B.I.’s Washington office that handles stolen valor cases, said that while the bureau did not keep statistics on the crime, the biggest increase came after 2006 with the passage of the Stolen Valor Act, which made it a federal crime to falsely claim, verbally or in writing, that a person had been awarded a medal. Previously, the law only prohibited wearing a medal that a person did not earn.

I know of someone who apparently (and I won’t name him or how I know; he knows the truth; his name certainly doesn’t appear on this list) noted the award of a Silver Star to his resume at one point early in his career. It hasn’t appeared in a recent bio (he recently held an admittedly high-profile government job) and I didn’t see the resume with my own eyes. I guess he certainly won’t be punished for violating this law (ex post facto rears its ugly head), but he knows if he should be.

That’s the end of it. Even knowing that I don’t believe him, I’m humble enough in the face of thousands who did vastly more than I did to give him the slightest benefit of the doubt by letting the world sort it out. It’s not my place to pretend that I’m protecting the honor of the heroes I know by challenging one misguided fellow; I honor them by displaying the character traits they taught: courage, competence, character, commitment; by living up to the motto many of them lived and fought by; and by raising my children to be honorable themselves.

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Should judges sentence you to the Army?

January 30, 2009 · 0 comments

In response to this WSJ law blog post, I provided the following comment:

Almost loathe to comment on such a complex issue. First: I am a former Army infantry officer who directly led troops; my own leadership/discipline resume includes enlisted infantry basic training, officer candidate school, airborne school, Ranger School, and a few others.

There were kids in my basic training unit who had been in various amounts of trouble. Many turned themselves around, perhaps as much because of being out of their old environments (including sometimes rotten parents) as because of the oversight of caring and skilled drill sergeants.

However, it’s hard to fail in that environment unless you do something outright stupid (like sneak out and try to buy pot). Where soldiers really face the risk of getting into trouble is when they reach an actual operational unit and have to balance freedom and responsibility much like the rest of us. For those who had difficulty doing it at home, increased responsibility probably only increases the pressure rather than removing the temptation. Good NCOs take the “idle hands” admonition to heart and recognize that if you let “Joe” sit around bored, he’ll get into trouble. We look at that as a leadership failure. (What do you call it when parents leave their teens similarly unsupervised?)

As for the performance of this class of soldiers under the unimaginable stress of combat like our soldiers have endured for several years, I am not qualified to opine. I note that with our own citizens, let alone the world’s, so eager to harp on any accident as military run amok, I would not, as a leader, want undisciplined soldiers in my command, particularly when we hold commanders responsible for the actions of subordinates.

The branches have their own standards for accepting recruits. That should be a necessary and sufficient answer to this question. If a judge chooses to give a defendant some option in the form of an ACD or parole if the defendant meets the service’s requirements, then there’s no real issue and it remains a judicial question, not a military one. But we should certainly not let judges shortcut the process sua sponte. After all, whether you support the death penalty or not, you cannot be entirely convinced that judges, appeals courts, and high courts combined can separate out the factually innocent from the guilty well enough to keep them from getting executed. How can we assume judges will be able to make the close calls of which fallen apples are ripe and which are rotten?

The underlying idea could probably not be more fuzzy. The reference to letting people join the King’s army is indicative of either silliness or subtlety. Soldiers in the middle ages simply died most of the time — wounds became  fatal (infection) and those in charge cared little for peasants and criminals, using manpower as a resource to be expended rather than protected. So, to me, the authors are either implying that it’s no big deal if these people die or that the military cares so little when its own people die that it’s a good analogy. The world has shifted so dramatically in terms of the nature of military conflict that we can scarcely imagine it. 400,000 Americans died in WWII, some 50,000 in Vietnam, and still less than 5,000 in the Iraq war. We have continued using dollars to buy bullets rather than bulletstoppers. It’s offensive to draw a comparison to today’s professional officer corps and those who headed armies 700 years ago. I can’t bring myself to read the full article.

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