Purple Heart

With reference to Barbara Rona's May 13 letter concerning the Purple Heart awarded to the three recent POWs: The Purple Heart is awarded to any military individual injured as a result of hostile actions. It was apparent from the initial photographs of the three soldiers that they had been injured. Consequently, they deserved being awarded the Purple Heart. Our nation's highest military honor is the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is, indeed, awarded for valor above and beyond. And, yes, the three former POWs do not qualify for, nor would they even seek, the Medal of Honor.

SAN FRANCISCO — This is a story of two politicians who share private horrors, a special bond and, now, a rare honor. Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey, the former eight-term Bay Area congressman, led six bayonet charges as the head of his platoon while in Korea. The holder of two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and the Navy Cross, he returned home to dedicate his public life to fighting for peace and the environment. Now 84, with a square face and shock of white hair, McCloskey prefers not to recount the battles that twice left him wounded, telling a documentarian not long ago that recounting his experience would be "unseemly" braggadocio.

Four U.S. soldiers injured during a bloody Taliban uprising at a fortress in Afghanistan received Purple Hearts from the commanding general of Army Special Forces at a U.S. military hospital in Germany on Saturday. Honoring the four in a ceremony in a small room at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey C. Lambert said they "have given their blood fighting in the war against terrorism." "We'll do everything we can to stamp it out," he said.

Lexi Thompson will be spending her prom night pretty much like any other high school student. Except that the 17-year-old golf sensation, wearing a dress chosen with a Hollywood stylist, will be followed by a camera crew from E! Entertainment Television and accompanied by a date she chose through a nationwide online contest . "It's going to be a lot of fun," said Thompson, whose online search was limited to military veterans who are part of the group Wounded Warriors.

The U.S. ambassador to West Germany, Richard R. Burt, presented a Purple Heart medal Wednesday to a U.S. soldier badly injured in the April 5 bombing of a West Berlin discotheque. The ceremony took place in a West Berlin hospital where Staff Sgt. James Goins, 25, of Ellerbe, N.C., was being treated. Both his legs were amputated after the blast, which killed two people and injured more than 200. The Purple Heart is awarded to U.S.

A death row inmate convicted of murdering a 78-year-old woman was awarded the U.S. military's Purple Heart on Friday for his service in the Vietnam War. Manuel Babbitt received the decoration at a small, private ceremony at San Quentin state prison, witnesses said. Babbitt earned the medal, awarded to members of the U.S. armed services who are wounded or killed in battle, for injuries he received in 1968 during the siege of Khe Sanh.

Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp, the Oceanside woman killed Sunday by terrorists during the hijacking of an EgyptAir airliner, will be awarded a Purple Heart during funeral services in Oceanside on Saturday, her mother said. Hetty Peterson said dignitaries from Malta and Great Britain would attend the funeral, along with a representative from the White House. Rogenkamp, 38, was shot and dumped from the Boeing 737 airliner in Malta before Egyptian commandos stormed the plane and ended the hijacking.

Thomas J. McGowan has five Purple Hearts, five Bronze Stars and the French Croix de Guerre attesting to his bravery on the battlefield during World War II. But now he has finally achieved the kind of recognition that most Californians can appreciate: a personalized Purple Heart license plate, 0026PH. McGowan, 69, is the first Los Angeles-area resident to be given the plates issued under a new state law recognizing those who were wounded in combat.

In a deliberately subdued ceremony, family members, friends and officials gathered here Saturday to bury Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp, the only American killed in the hijacking of an Egyptian airliner last weekend. During the half-hour graveside rites, an Air Force officer presented Rogenkamp's parents with a Purple Heart in recognition of her service as a civilian employee of the Air Force. The Purple Heart, said Col. John C. Novak, "recognizes her contribution to world peace . . .

The first Purple Heart in the Gulf War will be awarded to a Southern California Navy medic wounded by shrapnel while his unit traded fire with Iraqi troops just across the Kuwaiti border, officials said Sunday. Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Clerence D. Conner, 21, of the Riverside County community of Banning, was recovering Sunday after having a jagged piece of metal removed from his right shoulder. "I'm damn proud of him," said Marine Brig. Gen. Thomas V. Draude in Saudi Arabia.

Thirteen Los Angeles Police Department officers were recognized for heroism during a recent ceremony in Hollywood. Police Chief Charlie Beck last week presented the officers and detectives with the department's highest honors, the Medal of Valor and the Purple Heart. This was the second year the Purple Heart was bestowed on officers who suffered grave injuries in the line of duty. The officers included men and women, some injured or put at risk while on patrol, on undercover assignments or headed home after work.

WASHINGTON - The Purple Heart dates back to 1782 when Gen. George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit to recognize meritorious action. The medal, which features a likeness of Washington, fell into disuse after the Revolutionary War but was brought back in 1932 and is awarded to members of the military killed or wounded in combat. Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress to expand the eligibility for the medal to include members of the armed forces killed or wounded in a domestic terrorist attack -- an effort to recognize military victims of the 2009 shootings at Ft. Hood , Texas, and at a Little Rock, Ark., military recruiting station.

Whenever Rafael Martinez Jr. set out for a drive ? whether in his neighborhood or on a long journey ? he always made sure his dark blue Chevy Silverado pickup truck was stocked with the essentials: water, antifreeze and a can filled with gasoline. It wasn't that Martinez, of the San Diego County community of Spring Valley, was an especially cautious man, said his wife, Christine Martinez. Instead, his actions grew out of a deep sense of charity and goodwill. There was the time he happened upon a man who had been trapped upside down for hours in his car after an accident on a desolate stretch of California freeway, for example.

The men filed in slowly, one wearing a vintage green uniform emblazoned with a Purple Heart. Another rolled in on a chair, his head held high with a Veterans of Foreign Wars hat laden with medals. Some had lost frozen fingers, others toes. All had left behind friends 66 years ago in one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of World War II. These men are the last of a kind, the surviving veterans of the Battle of the Bulge. "Soldiers who fought in the Battle of the Bulge led the free world to victory," said Geert Criel, Belgium's consul general in Los Angeles, who hosted 50 members of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge on Saturday.

A somber procession on Tuesday morning snaked its way through downtown Los Angeles as thousands honored LAPD SWAT Officer Robert J. Cottle, who was killed March 24 in Afghanistan while on Marine Corps Reserve duty. During a private service at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Cottle was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Cottle's casket, covered in an American flag, was carried in a horse-drawn carriage from Los Angeles Police Department headquarters to the cathedral, accompanied by law enforcement officers, including Chief Charlie Beck.

Especially at a time when the United States is fighting two wars, valor in battle is venerated by citizens, even those who may disagree with the policies that put our warriors in harm's way. So it's particularly despicable for political candidates or others to lie about having received military honors. But the proper response to such repellent resume padding is exposure, scorn and, where politicians are concerned, rejection at the ballot box -- not arrest and imprisonment. Congress apparently disagrees, and in 2006 passed the Stolen Valor Act, which expanded a previous law against fraudulently wearing a service medal to include falsely representing that one had received that honor.

An Army pilot from Culver City and 14 other U.S. servicemen have been awarded Purple Heart medals posthumously nearly a year after they were killed in a widely reported friendly-fire incident over northern Iraq. Erik Scott Mounsey, 28, was flying one of two U-60 Blackhawk helicopters shot down by U.S. Air Force jets in the April 14, 1994, incident that killed 26 people, 15 of them Americans. Mounsey, a native of Westchester, was married to his high school sweetheart, Kaye.

Col. Robert L. Howard, one of the most decorated soldiers in the Vietnam War and a Medal of Honor recipient, has died. He was 70. Howard died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer at a hospice in Waco, Texas, said his son-in-law, Frank Gentsch. "He was a soldier's soldier," Gentsch said. "He loved his family, especially his grandchildren, but he was very much his whole career about taking care of soldiers." Howard, who was wounded 14 times in Vietnam and awarded eight Purple Hearts, was nominated three times for the Medal of Honor, the most prestigious award for U.S. combat veterans.

The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a death sentence for a decorated Korean War veteran, ruling for the first time that combat stress must be considered by a jury before it hands down the harshest punishment. "Our nation has a long tradition of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service, especially for those who fought on the front lines as [George] Porter did," the justices said in a unanimous, unsigned opinion. "Moreover, the relevance of Porter's extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably . . . but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter."