Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • July 18, 2012 kamikaze pilots. He was a Japanese patriot, but never got in the cockpit. Mifune made some fine movies. The fact that he never killed any Chinese or Americans makes it possible to enjoy his antics with a good conscience. William Manchester was wounded on Okinawa. However, Manchester implied that he had been on Guadalcanal and Saipan. While he never lied outright, he never corrected anybody who made a mistake in that direction. He was a real combat-wounded veteran and a good writer, and he used a combat career that was expanded, though not concocted, to pole-vault into publication. Norman Mailer took more of a reach. Mailer was in the Army. After arriving in the Philippines -- not during an assault landing -- he ostensibly dreamed of being the next Ernest Hemingway or Erich Maria Remarque. He pointed off to a distant mountain, and asked his buddies if they thought there were any Japanese up there. Everybody said there might be, so Mailer swung his trusty M-1 toward the mountain, squeezed off a few rounds, and pronounced himself a combat veteran. The story ran in LIFE magazine and Mailer never sued LIFE or demanded a retraction. Americans are not the only people who steal valor. A lot of people claim they were with the French Resistance in Europe when they were really black marketeers. The French, with their usual cynical honesty, have done postwar studies that show about one Frenchman in 200 was an active Resistance member during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but the numbers bumped to about one in 10 when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. The most objectionable way Americans stole valor had nothing to do with blowhards in saloons lying about how many medals they had won. At some point during the early days of World War II, a bunch of good ol’ boys in politics appear to have decided that “colored people” were never going to get a Medal of Honor. Neither a single black American nor a single Japanese-American was awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II, or in the immediate aftermath. Then something called civil rights happened, and black Americans and Japanese-Americans started to become congressmen/congresswomen, senators, and governors. These new statesmen and women along with attorneys and chairmen of the Indian tribes and MexicanAmericans, began to ask why their guys never seemed to win the Medal of Honor. Black volunteers and draftees had deliberately been held back from combat, even when they asked to serve in battle, for a cogent reason: Black combat veterans of the Civil War and World War I had pointedly refused to take any guff from racist whites, and race riots with guns on both sides had broken out, leaving dozens of dead and wounded on both sides. Black soldiers who served in segregated units -- the rule before 1948 -- often established fine combat records in World War I and World War II, but the whites who never saw them fight told one another that all the blacks could do was dig ditches and drive trucks. This was a saloon lie fueled by alcohol and sustained by racism, but the black combat veterans seldom got the U.S. decorations they needed to dispute the falsehood. The case of the Japanese-Americans, who were definitely not kept out of combat, was nothing short of preposterous. Japanese-Americans in Italy and southern France were used as assault troops, and were widely respected by white and black American soldiers. Audie Murphy mentioned them with respect in “To Hell and Back” and Dore Schary made a film about them called “Go for Broke” using actual combat veterans as featured players and extras. Hidoshi Minamura became the first Japanese-American to be awarded the Medal of Honor -- in the 1950s. He was captured by the Chinese communists while fighting during the Korean War and the U.S. decided not to decorate him until they got him back, which was a sane and compassionate decision. By the time every member of Congress from Hawaii was a Japanese-American, and Japan had the world’s second largest economy, somebody finally convinced the government to go over the records. The investigation disclosed that Japanese-Americans in World War II had won 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 560 Silver Stars, 4,000 Bronze Stars, and 9,486 Purple Hearts, many of them multiple -- and exactly ONE Medal of Honor: Minamura’s. A review of just the Distinguished Service Cross citations showed that at least 21 Japanese-Americans were qualified for the Medal of Honor – and they finally received those medals. Further investigation showed that seven black soldiers also qualified for the Medal of Honor, and they also received the medals, posthumously in every case but that of Vernon Baker. Medals of Honor also went to a handful of Jewish guys and a handful of Mexican-Americans whose superiors had somehow just forgotten to recommend them. Conversely, the U.S. had given out 20 Medals of Honor for the “battle” of Wounded Knee in 1890, which started out as a skirmish due to mutual suspicion and ended as a disgraceful Indian-shoot in which many of the dead were women and children, some of them pursued on horseback before they were murdered at point-blank range. Let us remember the Holocaust as a deliberate mass murder, but let us consider that most other war crimes have clear parallels among American forces. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far from America’s finest hours. Flawed Americans can “steal valor” by claiming decorations they never earned or by citing services they never performed. Flawed American politicians also “stole valor” from a lot of Japanese-Americans, and black, Jewish, and Mexican soldiers because the politicians were racists. I think they were far worse than the blowhards who told people they personally killed Tojo. I expect that future Americans will find both groups equally despicable, but should not waste taxpayers’ money by sending them to prison. Expensive prison cells are for dangerous offenders, not for liars and windbags. Stolen valor has been very much in the news lately. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court struck down a jail sentence for a guy who obtained a security-related government job by claiming he had been a Navy Seal and had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He lied. The list of medal winners was not hard to find, but Mr. Blowhard did not know that, and neither did the folks who hired him. One of his rivals did. The fake medalist got fired, which was entirely just. The Supreme Court recently decided that he could not be sent to prison or fined for lying about having had a military career. A number of people, some of them decorated combat veterans, said firing the fake war hero was adequate. Others, including some who had never been in the service, wanted him jailed, deported, or lynched. Here is a second case: A guy who spent some years in the service appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and told a story about how he had been hit in the head by a rocketpropelled grenade while clearing enemy-occupied houses in Afghanistan and had stuttered ever since. Then he sang and brought tears to the audience. A few days later, the fact emerged that the amateur country singer, after a couple of mostly stateside hitches in the Army for want of a real job, had served a month in a non-combat unit, and left Afghanistan due to an intestinal disorder. He had never been in a combat situation, and had apparently faked the stutter and the injury. He had already been eliminated due to vocal qualifications, but his fakery led him to be pilloried by a large part of the audience. Stolen valor was once again invoked, but the Supreme Court judgment would appear to have kept him out of Leavenworth. Valor is very much at risk of being stolen -- but just how much valor people are allowed to steal appears to be a result of how popular they are with the audience. Lee Marvin was Mr. Marine in the movies, including a Marine Corps-approved documentary, and told everybody he had been wounded on Saipan. Marvin said that during a bloody Japanese ambush, he bent over to pick up a stricken buddy, felt a blow to his back, and saw pink blood, meaning a lung shot, which is almost always fatal. He woke up on a hospital ship. As it turned out, mean people discovered that Marvin had been wounded on Okinawa, and that he was shot in the buttock while lying flat on his face. (People who live through being machine-gunned generally adopt that position.) He was not wounded while saving a buddy, although he was a genuine combat veteran. Should we take away his medals or his career? I don’t think so. Marvin tipped us off when he described the bravest Marine he had ever seen as Bob Keeshan, TV’s “Captain Kangaroo.” Keeshan joined the Marines a few weeks before the war ended and never saw combat. Marvin once played in a sort of anti-war war movie with Toshiro Mifune, then Japan’s leading actor. Mifune was the definitive half-savage samurai, powered by courage, vengeance, and a dark sense of humor. In real life, Mifune was raised as a Methodist in a family of physicians, and his military service consisted of doling out farewell cups of sake to A matter of stolen valor Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: A week before school ended, a third grade teacher from Hawes School, John Otterstedt, knocked on my door and asked if I would like his class to plant some flowers in my front yard as part of a class project. I readily agreed and the next day, after school was out, John came and prepared several beds in front of my house, around trees, and along my driveway wall. This took him several hours. The following day he arrived with his 22 students and several parents and they got busy digging and planting. The children worked together well and soon my drab yard was turned into a yard with beautiful pink, white, red, and yellow flowers all about. They even put a cute concrete gnome in front and a colorful butterfly in among some of Delighted with garden surprise the plants. I am 76 years old, but feel young each time I go out and water my lovely gardens. I knew John when he was a new teacher at Hawes and I was about to retire in 1999, after teaching first grade there for many years. It was nice to be remembered and to see the children and parents of Hawes are as special as they were when I taught in this fine school. So thank you, John Otterstedt, and thank you, students and parents of 3-O. You have made me very, very happy. I also think my “black thumb” is actually getting “greener” every day! Mary Fritsch Ridgewood