{"id":37999,"date":"2013-10-15T18:31:06","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T22:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=37999"},"modified":"2013-10-15T19:00:21","modified_gmt":"2013-10-15T23:00:21","slug":"in-the-valley-of-ganjgal-gar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=37999","title":{"rendered":"In the valley of Ganjgal Gar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our buddy, ROS has a long piece at Victory Girls Blog<\/a> on Captain Will Swenson who was awarded the Medal of Honor today in the White House. You should go read it. <\/p>\n

Captain Swenson has asked to return to active duty, according to a Breitbart link<\/a> sent to us by SGT K.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Mary sends us a link to McClatchy<\/a>, which for some reason doubts accounts that led to the award of the Medal of Honor for Dakota Myer, who was alongside WIll Swenson for that battle.<\/p>\n

Sworn statements by Meyer and others who participated in the battle indicate that he didn\u2019t save the lives of 13 U.S. service members, leave his vehicle to scoop up 24 Afghans on his first two rescue runs or lead the final push to retrieve the four dead Americans. Moreover, it\u2019s unclear from the documents whether Meyer disobeyed orders when he entered the Ganjgal Valley on Sept. 8, 2009.<\/p>\n

The statements also offer no proof that the 23-year-old Kentucky native “personally killed at least eight Taliban insurgents,” as the account on the Marine Corps website says. The driver of Meyer\u2019s vehicle attested to seeing \u201ca single enemy go down.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McClatchy was unable to find anyone who would to say that Myer didn’t deserve the medal, and they probably won’t find anyone here either. Not from me anyway.<\/p>\n

Hours before this McClatchy report was published, the Marine Corps inserted a disclaimer into its official online account of Meyer’s heroic actions. The Web page now reads that the summary “was compiled in collaboration” with Meyer and Marine Corps Public Affairs.<\/p>\n

A prominent historian of military medals, Doug Sterner, expressed disbelief at the idea that the Marine Corps would publicize an account of a complex battle based solely on the recipient’s recollections.<\/p>\n

“Give me a break,” Sterner said. “A recipient is responsible for writing his narrative? I have never heard of such a thing.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my opinion, there’s no one at McClatchy qualified to pass judgement on any award that the military awards, right down to my Army Achievement Medal, so whatever it is they’re trying to do, they’d better back right the f*ck off.<\/p>\n

So I agree with Doug Sterner;<\/p>\n

Sterner said errors in citations had always haunted recipients and that many Medal of Honor winners had been cited for things they didn’t do. He added that the mounting pressure to find a living recipient has made mistakes in details almost inevitable.<\/p>\n

“Did this man deserve the Medal of Honor? If the answer to that is yes, then the details of the citation become secondary,” Sterner said. “But we do need to keep the record as accurately as we possibly can.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our buddy, ROS has a long piece at Victory Girls Blog on Captain Will Swenson who … In the valley of Ganjgal Gar<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37999","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\/37999","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}