What the Medal of Honor Is, Who Awards It and How a Citation Is Written

There is a small decoration that a President places around a soldier's neck, and when he does it, every person in the room stands. Generals stand. Members of Congress stand. Men who outrank the recipient by five grades come to attention for a sergeant. In a government that spends most of its energy on rank, protocol and precedence, the Medal of Honor reverses the order. The highest person in the room salutes the person who did the most.

It is worth understanding why. The Medal of Honor is the nation's highest award for valor in combat, and its rules, its history and even its mistakes explain a good deal about how a free country decides what to honor. Let me walk through them in order: where the medal came from, how it was nearly cheapened and then rescued, what the standard is, how a case moves from a battlefield to the White House, and how to read the citation at the end.

Where it came from

The medal began in the Civil War, and it began with the Navy.

In 1861 the Union had a small Navy and a large problem. Congress, at the urging of Senator James Grimes of Iowa and others, passed legislation creating a Navy medal of valor for enlisted sailors and marines. The Navy medal was authorized on December 21, 1861. The first medals were authorized for petty officers, seamen, landsmen and marines who distinguished themselves by gallantry in action during the war. I paraphrase the statute, and I would send you to its text to confirm the wording.

The Army followed. A resolution approved on July 12, 1862, authorized a medal for enlisted men of the Army who distinguished themselves by gallantry in action, and an act of March 3, 1863, extended the Army medal to officers. The first Army medals were presented in March 1863 to six volunteers of the raid behind Confederate lines in Georgia known as the Great Locomotive Chase, the Andrews Raiders.

Two points about the origin deserve a moment.

1. It was created by Congress and signed by the President. The Constitution gives Congress the power to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces (Article I, Section 8, Clause 14), and the medal is a creature of that power. It is not an executive invention. When we say that the President awards the medal "in the name of Congress," we are repeating the original arrangement.
2. It began as an honor for enlisted men. The Army's first medal was for enlisted soldiers, and officers were added a year later. A republic that wanted to honor valor did not start with its generals. It started with its privates.

The purge of 1917

Now the embarrassing chapter, which is the reason I trust the modern medal more than I otherwise would.

In the decades after the Civil War, the standards for the Army medal were loose. Medals were given for acts that were not combat valor at all, and in some cases for reasons that were closer to politics or favor than heroism. The most notorious case is that of the 27th Maine, whose men had agreed to stay beyond their nine-month term of enlistment to help defend Washington in 1863. Some 300 volunteered, but 864 medals were made and handed out to men the colonel remembered staying. Once an award can be had for staying a little longer, the award has lost its meaning.

In 1916, Congress ordered a review. A board reviewed every Army medal ever awarded, and in 1917 it struck 911 names from the rolls. That figure includes 864 medals given for the 27th Maine, and the rest included a handful of notable people. William F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill," who had been awarded the medal as an Army scout, was among those struck, and so was Dr. Mary Walker, the Civil War surgeon and the only woman ever to receive it. Their medals were restored decades later, Walker's in 1977, and Cody's in 1989.

I want to underline what happened. The government looked at its own highest honor, concluded that some of it had been given wrongly, and took it back. That is not a small thing. It is the reverse of the way most bureaucracies treat their awards. A medal that can be revoked for being undeserved is a medal that means something, and the 1917 review is the reason the modern standard is as strict as it is. It is also one of the best examples I know of an institution correcting itself without a scandal forcing it to.

The review also led to a second reform: the criteria for the award were put into statute in 1918.

The standard

The words of the standard are the heart of it, and they have been quoted so often that they have become a slogan. They are not a slogan. They are a legal test.

The Army statute, in its present form, requires that the person has distinguished himself "conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty" and adds that the act be in action against an enemy of the United States, or while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force, or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.

Take that apart, because every phrase does work.

• Conspicuously. The act must be visible to others. It must have been seen and reported.
• Gallantry and intrepidity. The act must show courage, not mere competence or endurance.
• At the risk of his life. There must be a real danger of death, accepted knowingly.
• Above and beyond the call of duty. The act must go past what duty demands. A soldier who does his duty at great cost has not met the standard. A soldier who does something no one could have required of him has.
• Against an enemy. The medal is for combat. It is not given for lifesaving in peacetime, for long service or for administrative excellence, however great.

The last point shows that the medal is narrower than the public sometimes believes. Many extraordinary acts do not qualify, and the services have other honors for them. The Medal of Honor is a particular honor for a particular kind of act.

The three versions

There are three versions of the medal, one for each of the military departments.

1. The Army medal, a gold-colored star hung from a light blue neck ribbon, is awarded to soldiers.
2. The Navy medal, which is also awarded to Marines and to members of the Coast Guard, is a star of a different design, hung from the same neck ribbon, with the figure of Minerva repulsing discord on it.
3. The Air Force medal, authorized after the service's creation, with a design finished in 1965 and first awarded in January 1967, is a star with a wreath and a figure of the Statue of Liberty's head.

All three hang from the same light blue ribbon with white stars. The same ribbon on three different medals is, to my mind, a good symbol. Each service has its own tradition, and the honor is one.

From the battlefield to the White House

A medal does not appear by itself. The path of a case is long, and it is slow on purpose.

1. A recommendation. Someone who witnessed the act, usually in the recipient's chain of command, writes a recommendation, with witness statements, within a time limit set by statute, a matter of a few years from the act.
2. Review in the chain of command. The recommendation moves up through the recipient's unit and service. Each level reads the evidence and can approve, downgrade or reject.
3. Review at the service level. A board of the service reviews the file and the evidence, and the service Secretary decides whether to forward it.
4. Review by the Secretary of Defense. The Department of Defense reviews the recommendation. The standard of evidence is high, and downgrades to a lesser medal such as the Distinguished Service Cross, or the equivalent Navy Cross, are common. That is the system doing what it is supposed to do.
5. The President. Under the statute, the President awards the medal in the name of Congress. If the time limit has passed, Congress has to pass a law waiving it. Congress has done this many times, and in some cases the waiver has come decades after the act, as in the Benavidez case, which is covered in Five Medal of Honor Citations Read Closely and What Each One Asks of Us.
6. The ceremony. Usually at the White House, with the President fastening the medal on the recipient, or, if the recipient has died, presenting it to his family.

Ask what the length of this process does. It builds in skepticism. The standard is hard, the witnesses are required, and the system errs toward refusal. That is why the medal has held its value.

Posthumous awards and later upgrades

A large share of the awards in modern wars have been made posthumously. The medal goes to the next of kin, who receive it from the President. Since 1941 more than half of the awards have been posthumous, which reflects the nature of the acts: men who threw themselves on a grenade, or who stayed with a gun until they were overrun, did not live to be recommended.

Then there are the later upgrades, cases in which a lesser medal was awarded at the time and the file was reopened. The reasons vary: a witness comes forward, a record surfaces, or an earlier review is judged to have been affected by something it should not have been. Congress has ordered reviews of whole groups of awards. Whatever one thinks of any individual case, the pattern is that the government is willing to reopen a file when there is new evidence. It is another version of the correction in 1917.

A fair reader will wonder whether upgrades risk cheapening the medal. They could, and the safeguard is the same: evidence, witnesses, the standard in the statute and the personal approval of the President.

The strongest objection

Some people say that the Medal of Honor should be abolished, or at least that it distorts our sense of what war is. It encourages, the critic says, a view of war as a series of individual heroics, when it is really an enormous collective enterprise, mostly of logistics, planning and routine. It also, the critic adds, is distributed unevenly, with some branches and some kinds of action more likely to be recognized than others.

I think the first point has something to it and the second is partly right, and I will answer both.

1. The medal does not claim to describe war. It claims to honor a quality. A country can understand perfectly well that wars are won by supply and planning and still honor the man who does the extraordinary thing. We honor Olympic gold medalists without claiming that sport consists of nothing else.
2. Unevenness is a reason to improve the process, not to end the honor. The record shows that the government has reviewed awards for fairness and has, in several cases, corrected earlier omissions. A flawed process that corrects itself is better than none.
3. The honor does work for the republic. A republic needs citizens who will risk their lives for it, and it needs to say what it values. A medal that stands for one clear standard says that the country values courage on behalf of others, and every soldier knows it.

How to read a citation

A citation follows a pattern, and once you know it, you can read any of them.

• The opening. Name, rank, service, unit, and the place and date. Notice that it is exact. The first sentence is a record, not a tribute.
• The standard. The words "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty," or the Navy's equivalent. This is the legal predicate.
• The narrative. The sequence of actions, in order, in plain language. Look for the verbs. They tell you what he did, and the number of them tells you how long he did it.
• The wounds and the outcome. Whether he was hit, whether he survived, what happened to the men he protected.
• The closing. A one-sentence judgment tying the act to the traditions of the service. It is the only evaluative sentence in the document.

Read this way, a citation is like a short legal opinion. It states the facts, applies the standard and reaches a result. For a reading of five of them, see Five Medal of Honor Citations Read Closely and What Each One Asks of Us. For a single recipient's story told in full, see Desmond Doss Refused to Carry a Rifle and Saved About 75 Men on Okinawa, and for a Black soldier's act at Fort Wagner later honored with the medal, The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong.

Why it matters to the rest of us

Americans who will never wear a uniform are still part of the medal's story, because it is awarded in our name. The statute says "in the name of Congress," and Congress acts in the name of the people. When a President puts the medal on a soldier, the gesture belongs to all of us.

That is the reason I think every American should know what the medal is. A free people ought to know what it honors. It honors, above everything else, the willingness to risk one's life for others. Almost every other country in history has found a way to turn that into a cult of the commander. We turned it into a decoration for a corporal.

The case in brief

1. The Medal of Honor began as a Navy medal in December 1861 and an Army medal in July 1862, created by Congress under its power to make rules for the armed forces.
2. In 1917 a review board struck 911 names from the rolls, including 864 medals given for the 27th Maine, to restore the medal's meaning, and the government corrected itself without a scandal forcing it to.
3. The standard is conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty, in combat with an enemy.
4. There are three versions, for the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, all on the same ribbon, and the path from recommendation to presentation is long and skeptical on purpose.
5. A citation is read like a short legal opinion: the facts, the standard and the verdict.

What you can do: look up the Medal of Honor recipients from your own state in the official records, and visit or read about one of them.