Medal of Honor rarely awarded to living recipients

Larry Shaughnessy, CNN’s Pentagon producer, asked a question I was about to ask: why are all recent Medals of Honor awarded posthumously?

“I’ve been asked this question many times,” said Gary Littrell, a Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War. “There is a possibility that the award is overprotected.”

After reports of multiple occasions of Marines and soldiers jumping on grenades to spare their team members – only to be awarded the Navy Cross or Silver Star – Mr. Littrell has a point.

“I think it has something to do with the level of intensity of the conflict,” [Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James] Conway said. “If you go back and look at some of the fights that took place in Vietnam, Korea, World War II, there were massive numbers of troops involved in massive engagements over a period of days. That’s not the type of conflict that we are seeing in a type of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

True to a point – while there aren’t tens of thousands of North Koreans pouring down valleys in today’s conflicts, our troops still find themselves in positions where they exhibit (as the medal’s criteria states) “personal bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the individual” and involve “risk of life.”

I hope to get better answers in a forthcoming article.