Awarding Minimum Standards

American military personnel engaging the enemy must follow certain Rules of Engagement (ROE) as commanded by their leadership. Though the ROE necessarily evolves to accommodate current battlefield conditions, soldiers and Marines understand that one of the constants of each issued ROE is that targeting civilians is a no-no. Should a soldier or Marine engage and wound or kill a civilian when such could well have been avoided, they understand that they will face criminal charges. If convicted, they are given a suite at Ft. Leavenworth's Military Prison.

Now, apparently, all of those who do not - which is to say all of those who now stand ready on the front lines because they haven't already been removed for such actions - would be eligible for President Obama's idea for a new commendation, the Courageous Restraint Medal.

As liberals have been doing now for years, they yet again are striving to bestow superlatives on Americans for less than stellar performance. It is just another way to knock down those who do great things and accomplish amazing feats to the level of the average schmo. They dumb down our public schools so that no one can stand above any other by way of academic brilliance because the curriculum would hardly challenge the brain dead. They take money from me and give it to the next hoser in the welfare line. They apologize for and deny the existence of American Exceptionalism to the rest of the world. In nearly every political move they make, they seek to level the playing field – not by raising up the lesser among us but by diminishing the great.

We saw the perfect example of this when then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki took the black berets from the Ranger Regiment - berets that have long stood to mark soldiers of elite status, the green berets of the Special Forces and the maroon berets identifying Paratroopers are, perhaps, better known - and made them the standard uniform headgear for all soldiers. The Rangers then adopted a tan-colored beret so as to stand out from the sudden incorporation of so many other elite soldiers.

Instead of elevating the training of Army personnel to qualify them for elite status, Shinseki simply lowered the standard for being elite. The black berets were just another award for mediocrity. What really makes the whole thing reek is that the everyday soldier, whose most arduous task I likely to be changing a Humvee tire or fixing a computer glitch, has no clue how to actually wear the beret. A properly prepared and cared-for beret looks sharp; it makes tough guys look down-right scary. The berets, on the heads of the non-elite who have no idea how wear the damn thing, look more like soggy Frisbees and the soldiers look more like beatnik rejects rather than, well, soldiers.

While I don't know very much regarding the Courageous Restraint Medal, I do know that I don't want it for essentially the same reasons that I don't want the Purple Heart Medal. Most infantry soldiers have a special name for the Purple Heart: the enemy marksmanship badge. I can only imagine what the surprisingly creative lower-enlisted soldiers will come up with for the Courageous Restraint Medal. Perhaps they'll call it the "You Didn't Shoot So I Got Killed" medal, or the "Outrageous Restraint" medal, or maybe even the "I Didn't Know What To Do" award.

What is particularly troubling to me is the fact that this award is based on proving a negative. How can a commander recommend anyone for an award for something that never happened? If a soldier was ever in a position to have, say, killed a child but didn’t, then that soldier ought to be looked at for this new medal. I don’t get it. How would the recommendation be written?

“On January 1st, Private Schmuckatelli provided security while in an over-watch position at the Al Fun market teeming with women, children, old men, and a few goats. He was armed with the M2 .50 caliber machine gun and loaded with armor-piercing incendiary rounds. Had he opened fire on the crowd, there is little doubt that the death toll and amount of physical damage would have been devastating. However, Private Schmuckatelli did not fire on the crowded market and so demonstrated enormous Courageous Restraint. His lack of action bears credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.”

I wonder if it has even crossed the mind of the Commander in Chief (CINC) that it is the more deadly military that wins wars. Granted, brains are equally valuable; but, brains without brawn are utterly useless. Even the best devised plans and strategies require bullets and badasses to implement them. Learning to discriminate targets is one of the many skills soldiers learn – especially in today’s version of war. Again, target discrimination is one of a great many considerations a soldier must take onto the battlefield . . . there is no need to award soldiers for executing this aspect of their job, just as there is no need to award soldiers for changing their socks or cleaning their weapons. To put it another way for the sake of redundancy, we don’t hand out medals to soldiers for not driving drunk. For those who do drive drunk, we award them with a jail cell.

As it is, awards and medals are handed out like candy and the more this happens, the less the medals actually mean. The last thing the military needs is to make heroes out of the non-heroic. Soldiers need actual heroes to hold up as models; we, as the citizens who are protected by these soldiers, do not need soldiers who aspire to mediocrity.