{"id":68159,"date":"2016-09-26T12:03:08","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T16:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=68159"},"modified":"2016-09-26T12:03:08","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T16:03:08","slug":"junior-howell-gets-his-purple-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=68159","title":{"rendered":"Junior Howell gets his Purple Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Junior<\/a><\/p>\n

Poetrooper sends us a link to the story<\/a> of 91-year-old Junior Howell who was just awarded his Purple Heart 72 years after he was wounded on Peleliu in the Pacific as a 19-year-old Marine private;<\/p>\n

“They were firing down \u2014 snipers,” Howell recalled during a recent interview. “I could see their faces as plain as I can see you. The drivers have both got their hatches closed. They didn’t know what was going on \u2026 I crawled up between \u2014 there’s a passageway next to the motor \u2014 I crawled past that, grabbed hold of them, and I said, ‘Back out, back out. They’re hitting us.’ ”<\/p>\n

After the vehicle reversed and made a turn, it was struck by an armor-piercing shell. “It knocked the track off the drive sprocket,” Howell said. “We stopped just like that.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Marine Corps denied his request in 2003 for a Purple Heart award citing a lack of evidence – until medical records were uncovered;<\/p>\n

[Nate Jones, veterans affairs service officer for Delaware County], who got to know Howell at weekly breakfast meetings at the Oasis Bar & Grill, discovered that Howell’s medical history had been overlooked during the previous Purple Heart application.<\/p>\n

Dated Sept. 21, 1944, the history includes the following notes: “Howell, Junior Eugene,” DOB 6-18-25, “6th Amphib,” “Pacific,” “Diag: Wound Fragment Mortar Buttock,” “Not Misconduct,” “With Command,” “Work,” “Negligence not apparent,” “Wounded in action against organized enemy.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Howell says that this award marks the end of World War II for him.<\/p>\n

“I am happy to have served in the Marines, but it was a bad f—– time. The only good day I had was when I got out.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poetrooper sends us a link to the story of 91-year-old Junior Howell who was just awarded … Junior Howell gets his Purple Heart<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[184],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-corps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68159","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=68159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/68160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}