{"id":34688,"date":"2013-03-23T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T10:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=34688"},"modified":"2013-03-22T08:48:51","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T12:48:51","slug":"better-late-than-never","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34688","title":{"rendered":"Better Late Than Never"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A 3 1\/2 year old injustice has finally been corrected.\u00a0 Unfortunately, another apparent injustice still remains.<\/p>\n<p>The Army has announced that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/news\/2013\/03\/marine-kenneth-westbrook-silver-star-ganjgal-will-swenson-dakota-meyer-032013-p\/\">SFC Kenneth Westbrook will receive the Silver Star<\/a> \u2013 unfortunately, posthumously.\u00a0 It will be awarded to his next-of-kin sometime this spring.<\/p>\n<p>SFC Westbrook was WIA during the Battle of Ganjgal on September 8, 2009.\u00a0 He died of complications from his wounds a month later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.\u00a0 He was on his last deployment prior to retirement.<\/p>\n<p>For those who may have forgotten:\u00a0 this the same action for which Sgt. Dakota Meyer, USMC, was later awarded the MoH.\u00a0 The battle also resulted in the award of 2 Navy Crosses and the award of at least 9 BSMs w\/V device.<\/p>\n<p>RIP, SFC Westbrook.\u00a0 This old soldier salutes you.<\/p>\n<p>SFC Westbrook had been recommended for the Silver Star by CPT William Swenson.\u00a0 Why the award was not approved earlier was not made public.<\/p>\n<p>And speaking of CPT Swenson . . . .<\/p>\n<p>There is still no update on the status of CPT Swenson&#8217;s MOH recommendation relating to the Battle of Ganjgal. \u00a0The Army reportedly recommended approval some time ago.\u00a0 One account indicates the recommendation was forwarded to the White House sometime in July of last year.<\/p>\n<p>I guess we\u2019ll have to simply keep waiting.\u00a0 But eight months does seem to me to be more than enough time to make a decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A 3 1\/2 year old injustice has finally been corrected.\u00a0 Unfortunately, another apparent injustice still remains. &hellip; <a title=\"Better Late Than Never\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34688\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Better Late Than Never<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}