Word: medal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Picking up on this attractive advertising gimmick, the U.S. Army has apparently introduced its own brand of "get a check," but this time, it's called "get a medal. You just had to have had something--anything to do with last October's Grenada invasion and you would get a medal...
...Associated Press reported in late March that the Army handed out 8612 medals to reward individual performance. This notwithstanding the fact that the Army only sent about 7000 officers and men on the three-week jaunt. To play "get a medal," the Army showered prizes on planners in the Pentagon, staff and support troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne Division, and Army Rangers at Fort Stewart in Georgia and Fort Lewis in Washington state. The brass at the Army's Forces Command in Atlanta also figured in for some silver "attaboys" and other treats...
...hard not to feel a little disturbed by the spokesman's comment. Certainly you have to think about medal-inflation and wonder if a little Government Department levelheadedness about dispensing praise and awards might not be in order here...
Those members of the 82nd Airborne Division who parachuted from helicopters as Grenadian soldiers fired at them from the ground were, quite rightly, granted medals. But so were a number of chairbound bureaucrats who got no closer to the fighting than an office in the Pentagon. While there were 275 decorations for valor, wounds or combat deaths, the Army also honored some troops who remained in the safe environs of Army bases like Fort Bragg, N.C., waiting to be called. Defending the awards, which the other services handed out more conservatively, against charges of "medal inflation," Army Spokesman Major Robert...
When it came to squashing a grapefruit in some dame's face, no one could be more hard-boiled than Actor James Cagney. He is still pretty tough, but Cagney, 84, got misty-eyed in Washington last week, when he was one of 14 honored with the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. The President got a little sentimental himself, saying, "As a great star at the same studio where I started [Warner Bros.], he was never too busy to hold out a hand to a young fellow just trying to get under...