Before the debate ends on whether the Medal of Honor has been “feminized,” let me remind readers of the medal issued 100 years ago to a soldier who fought in the first Iraq: the Philippines.
In a 1906 standoff against suicidal Muslim Moros, U.S. Army First Lt. Gordon Johnston took part in the killing of 600 to 900 men, women and children hiding in a volcanic crater.
Only 15 Americans were killed in the confrontation, and after reading the first accounts of the fighting, Mark Twain called it a massacre. Twain wrote:
“Apparently Johnson was the only wounded man on our side, whose wound was worth anything as an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any similarly colossal event since ‘Humpty Dumpty’ fell off the wall and got injured.”
Enemy fire. Of course, it was not as simple as Twain described it. The Moros were given several chances to surrender peacefully, they did shoot back, and the wounded Moros who came out then tried to kill the American medics trying to help them.
Lt. Johnston’s experience confirms there was a day when the Medal of Honor was awarded in connection with large numbers of enemy dead.
On the other hand, it was not Johnston who killed all 600 to 900 Moros. He just happened to have put himself in a vulnerable place, where he was wounded in the right shoulder either by Moro bullets or U.S. artillery.
Saving lives. A Wall Street Journal piece and then a post on The Moral Liberal this month tried to make the case that all the recent Medals of Honor were not for inflicting casualities on the enemy, but for saving lives. This “trend” was supposed to be the “feminization” of the award.
Many took offense at the suggestion recent Medal of Honor recipients were acting feminine in any way when they risked their lives in the face of enemy fire. It also turned out that almost all these heroes, including Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, had taken enemy lives while also saving American buddies.
In Giunta’s case in Afghanistan, he killed at least one Taliban fighter, and the American whom Giunta saved died a day later in surgery.
A few men. The record is unclear on how many of the enemy, if any, Lt. Johnston killed in 1906. But we know he risked his life in the combat mission of the day. So did Sgt. Giunta in 2007. Debate all you want, but that kind of valor almost always is the work of a few special men.
Frank Warner
Comments