This article compares the awarding of the three highest war decorations in Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States for actions undertaken in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2018 to examine ...contemporary expressions of military heroism. The comparison shows Norway tends to award leadership, and gaining respect from prestigious allies, whereas the United States and the United Kingdom tend to award individual acts of courage, involving great risk to one’s own life. In the case of the United States, these acts were predominantly aimed toward rescuing fellow soldiers, whereas the U.K. cases were aimed toward defeating an enemy. The Norwegian war decoration regime, in which the highest decorations are detached from the traditional military value of sacrifice, illustrates that while professional forces may act heroically, heroism, contrary to war decoration regimes, cannot be professionalized.
When the smoke cleared on Iwo Jima in March 1945, 19,000 American Marines had been wounded and 7,000 were dead, a casualty rate of nearly 39 percent. Lasting over a month, Iwo was the Marines' ...bloodiest battle of the war and the only Pacific battle in which a U.S. landing force suffered more casualties than it inflicted. It was also the most highly decorated single engagement in Marine Corps history. Focuses on the twenty-two Marines and five Navy personnel who received the Medal of Honor and the actions that earned the award: Accounts of men at war showing gallantry under fire in one of the country's most storied engagements; Recounts the entire Battle of Iwo Jima through its most dramatic moments.
Tom Williams Wins TTTC Award Ward, Bob
Computer (Long Beach, Calif.),
2011-Feb., 2011-2-00, Letnik:
44, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Former IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors member Thomas W. Williams recently received the IEEE Computer Society Test Technology Technical Council's Lifetime Contribution Award.
This article traces the history of one genre of commemoration, the U.S. Medal of Honor, from its inception in 1861, early in the Civil War, to the present. We begin by locating the Medal of Honor ...historically in relation to other genres that memorialize wartime military service and in so doing construct narratives that address wartime trauma. The central sections of this article identify the main elements of the Medal of Honor as a genre that works to define ideals of military honor and bravery. We present our methodology for analyzing the citations. We code the criteria for awarding the Medal and find a decisive change during the Vietnam War when Medals of Honor increasingly were awarded for defensive heroism, actions that saved the lives of fellow soldiers or retrieved the bodies of fallen comrades, rather than for offensive heroism, efforts to kill enemy soldiers, and thereby further battlefield success. We explain how that change allowed the military to construct a progressive narrative from defeat in Vietnam that also spoke to broader cultural changes in the 1960s. We relate that shift to the transition to an all-volunteer military. We conclude by analyzing on how post-Vietnam narratives of honor affect the ways in which the United States has sought to elicit support from soldiers and civilians for subsequent wars.
