Here’s a great story involving the latest Medal of Honor recipient, Staff Sergeant Romesha, who is now working in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota.
The Grand Forks Herald has this: (h/t Rob Port SayAnythingBlog.com)
The Minot man presented Monday with the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama made the unusual decision to decline the invitation of the first lady to sit beside her during the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night in Washington.
“I’ve done some soul searching,” he said. “As much as a great honor it would be to be a guest of the first lady, it’s also kind of hard to break away from the friends and the family and all the great guys here” from Black Knight Troop, who came to Washington to see Romesha honored. “I just need to spend a little more time with them.”
Meanwhile, here’s a story that is rankling folks in the community of veterans. I heard about via the VFW’s twitter feed this morning, and immediately started getting reaction from callers to our statewide radio talk show after I mentioned this story on the air.
The headline in the Military Times reads: “New medal for drone pilots outranks Bronze Star.”
Here’s an excerpt:
The Pentagon is creating a new high-level military medal that will recognize drone pilots and, in a controversial twist, giving it added clout by placing it above some traditional combat valor medals in the military’s “order of precedence.”
The order of precedence came as a surprise to Doug Sterner, a military medals expert and the curator of the Military Times Hall of Valor, the largest database of military medal recipients.
“It’s got me puzzled,” Sterner said in an interview Wednesday. “I understand the need to recognize the guys at the console who are doing some pretty important things. But to see it ranking above the Bronze Star [with] V?”