![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/twostar-300x200.jpeg\")
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BG Paul Stanton had no idea what was awaiting him at promotion to Major General.\u00a0 The night before his promotion, his father, retired LGEN Edgar Stanton III, gave him a letter with silver two-star insignia pinned to it, and a letter (what in my world we would describe as a letter of provenance) describing how these stars had been passed on: to Stanton the Elder from his mentor via two other major generals to General George Patton.<\/p>\n
\nPatton\u2019s widow, Beatrice Ayer, passed the stars to the general\u2019s WWII-era operations officer \u2014 Gen. Paul Harkins \u2014 when he received his second star and took command of the 45th Infantry Division during the Korean War. Harkins went on to become the first commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam in 1962.<\/p>\n
Harkins in turn gave Patton\u2019s insignia to Maj. Gen. William Mundie<\/a>, a former aide, when he took command of Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, in 1975.<\/p>\n
Stanton\u2019s father, who was Mundie\u2019s aide during his tour at the helm of Army Recruiting Command, received the stars from his mentor in 2006, with instructions to pass them on to his son \u2014 should he reach the two-star rank.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was an ounce emotional when my dad handed me the stars at the kitchen table,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt was pretty powerful \u2014 I literally did not know those stars existed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stanton said he\u2019s bound to the wishes of Mundie, who died in 2019, when it comes to where the stars will go next.<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t decided how I\u2019m going to memorialize it and hang onto it [in the short-term],\u201d he shared. \u201c[Long-term], I have basically two options: I can hand them to a future two-star general or I will dedicate them to the museum at [West Point].\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n