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My dad never talked about World War II or the Purple Heart he came home with. My mom told me the story, once, so he must have told her.
My dad captained an ship in the Pacific, carting US soldiers around to various islands that were occupied by soldiers from Japan. One day my dad was with his two first officers when shell fragments swept the bridge. The other two men died instantly, my father survived with a tiny wound on his cheek. My brother Mark was named for one of the men killed by the shell that spared my father. The shell didn’t leave any physical scar on my father. The military makes no distinction about the severity of a wound when setting the standards for a Purple Heart. If you are wounded in action, you get a Purple Heart. It’s a way to distinguish people whose service puts their lives at risk. |
Before they started sneering at Representative Murtha’s Purple Heart, Republicans mocked John Kerry in 2004 with Purple Heart bandaids, and CNN explained that Purple Hearts like my father’s were fair game for mockery:
Although he was grievously wounded in a later battle, [Senator Bob] Dole wrote in a 1988 biography that the first of his two Purple Hearts was the kind of wound the Army treated “with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart.”
Maybe the military should add a warning label to Purple Hearts:
Caution: This decoration can and will be used against you by people claiming to “Support Our Troops.”