I'm grateful to Ed Hooper for writing about ongoing efforts to make the Medal of Honor more common. I wouldn't have known this was going on if he hadn't. Hooper objects to these efforts, and I think he's absolutely right. We need a few standards in life; no need to keep changing them. And in particular, I wonder why politicians think we need to start giving out more Medals of Honor at a time when we have fewer military personnel in combat than we did during Vietnam, Korea, or World War II, when the relative rarity of these awards seemed perfectly adequate.
So I have little to add to Hooper's argument, except to corroborate it with my own experience. Growing up as a military dependent, I had some feel for the relative value of certain military awards prior to my own active duty. In Vietnam, it was clear those standards had been considerably relaxed. A campaign ribbon used to be hard-won, denoting participation in a combat effort of some duration and difficulty. In Vietnam, they were issued routinely every six months just for being in a combat zone, so your ordinary tour of 12 or 13 months would earn you two, possibly as many as a soldier might have acquired in WWII even serving for "the duration," as many did.
The bronze star, too, while not the highest recognition, was still a coveted and meaningful decoration in the 1940's and 1950's but by Vietnam, it seemed to have become a predictable going-home present, at least for officers, and even I came away with one that I felt was unearned. Maybe politicians thought they were helping motivate the troops in an unpopular war, but my impression was most of "the troops" thought it was a joke.
So let's stop "award inflation" and as Mr. Hooper suggests, let military men themselves maintain the honorable standard that has been established, and let's keep both politicians and veterans' families out of it.
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