I was 34 when I learned, rather stupidly, that you never say that people "won" awards in war; you say that they "received" them, or were "awarded" them. It's not just that war is not a sport where people die and you can win prizes; it goes deeper, I think, into the changing purposes of military awards.
So, if you really look at the stories of people who were awarded the Medal of Honor, some of the earliest awards are people who fought and sometimes died for flags - literally, battlefield flags - during the Civil War.
Second Lieutenant John G. B. Adams, for instance, "seized the 2 colors from the hands of a corporal and a lieutenant as they fell mortally wounded, and with a color in each hand advanced across the field to a point where the regiment was reformed on those colors."
A Medal of Honor was sought in 2017, for example, for Sgt. Thomas Henry Sheppard, who spent 505 days as a prisoner of war in Confederate prison camps and still protected his unit's colors.
As our nation's wars went on, the Medal of Honor citations change. During World War II, you start to see more and more people who received a Medal of Honor not only because of battlefield successes, but also because of tragedies.
So, the Medal of Honor archives record the story of Sergeant John Basilone who single-handedly manned a 1919 Browning machine gun - a 31-pound weapon! - and helped hold an American defensive line against Japanese on the island of Lunga; he later died on Iwo Jima.
But they also record the story of Corporal Charles Joseph Berry who jumped on a grenade during Iwo Jima, saving his friends' lives by absorbing the blast with his own body. Charles Joseph Berry was awarded the Medal of Honor.
During the attack on Pearl Harbor, Captain Mervyn S. Bennion was mortally wounded but stayed at his station and protested being evacuated, attempting until his last moments to save his ship. So he received the Medal of Honor.
During the war on terror, the tragic dimension of it starts to come to the fore, as part of an increasing truthfulness as to events.
Specialist Salvatore Giunta's patrol was ambushed, and he had an insane-sounding fight with grenades and exposed himself to enemy fire to save his squad leader's life. As he advanced, he saw the enemy carrying away one of his friends, and he engaged and killed them both, then tried to save his friend's life. So Salvatore Giunta received the Medal of Honor.
The way it was explained to me, actually, that you don't talk about other people's medals, not even for them, someone asked me: well what if Sal asked me about why I'm out there on front street with my decoration? Do you think we're trying to celebrate any of this?
For me, the stories of Medals of Honor really go back to the first one I ever heard about:
Corporal Jason Dunham was killed near Karabilah, Iraq when he shielded his teammates from a grenade with his helmet and his own body; they were advancing to aid their Battalion Commander's convoy, which had come under attack. And so he received the Medal of Honor.
Jason Dunham was 23 years old.
The way I think about medals is, this is one of the ways in which America encompasses trauma.
Our nation is a composite of immigrants from multiple peoples, united by allegiance, but borne in war, sustained by war's industries, and now protected by the most expensive war apparatus in the history of the world.
This is how we try to attain some sense of closure with dignity, by validating people's war experiences symbolically and recording to national memory the truth of what happened, as clearly and in the most verifiable fashion possible.
One of the things about the way that we fight war now - in the sense of indirect, multi-spectrum, whole-of-society supremacy struggles at the edge between low-intensity conflict and outright declared war - is that there aren't going to be any medals awarded for it, I don't think.
No one has to die for what we are doing right now, directly, to work. People will die from sanctions and the systemic economic damage they inflict, I have zero illusions about that; people will die from the weapons we’re sending to help another country fight off an unjust attack on not only them, but on the system of international rule of law itself.
But we don’t have to send Americans to go risk their lives and die somewhere in order for what we’re doing to work. We don’t need to ask for more from the Jason Dunhams of our country.
Maybe there will be awards in the intelligence community that we'll find out decades later, but those are a different thing than the kind of national ritual of trauma constituted by awards, and for that matter Memorial Day.
There will be no medals for American hybrid war, I don’t think.
And I don't think that's a significant net loss at the end of the day.