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View Full Version : Medal of Honor TV program on now 11/5



1stRad2671
11-05-08, 08:06 PM
Reminder from the news section.. It's on now at 9pm EST. Channels 22 and 26 on DirectTV



PRIMETIME

By PHIL MUSHNICK


November 2, 2008 --

Producer/director Roger Sherman was wise to allow the program's preamble to be handled by John Finn, Pearl Harbor hero and salty dog of the first and highest order.

Finn: "September the 15th, 1942, I was awarded this medal. It's a bronze piece of brass, costs about 85 cents, and it hangs from a pale blue ribbon. And it's got the Goddess Minerva repelling Discord, this little dude down here in the corner with snakes in his hands.

"This is the highest military decoration that the United States can give to its soldiers, sailors, Marines, Coast Guard or airmen, the Medal of Honor."

"Medal of Honor," a 90-minute documentary that stirs gratitude and awe for its winners will air (Wednesday at 8 p.m. on PBS-Ch. 13. To miss it - not to record it at least - would be a pity.

There's a reason that the highest ranking general must initiate a salute with a Medal of Honor winner, why Medal of Honor winners are invited to Presidential Inaugurations. This documentary makes it clear as to why.

Hershel Williams, twice rejected as too short for the World War II Marines only to become a Medal winner on Iwo Jima, tells of President Truman hanging the medal around his neck. "He put his left hand on my shoulder and said to me, 'I would rather have this medal than to be President of the United States.' "

Williams explains what several other honorees explain, that their heroism was part of no pre-existing, excessive sense of bravery, but rather as a response to a collision of circumstances. When he told his commander that, as the company's only trained flame-thrower not yet killed or wounded, he'd "try" to eliminate enemy pillboxes, well. . .

"I don't remember what I said. Others said I said, 'I'll try.' That sounds like me, like I might say that."

Oddly enough, most of the first recipients were rewarded not for conspicuous valor but as incentive to reenlist in the Union Army during the Civil War.

By World War I, the standard had been elevated minimally to include courage above and beyond what men and women - Civil War battlefield surgeon Mary Edwards Walker is the only female recipient - could reasonably provide.

Since the Vietnam War, after all, only seven Medals of Honor have been awarded - all posthumously.

When Mike Thornton, Navy SEAL during Vietnam, was nominated, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo Zumwalt initially provided the only resistance. His reason? Upon hearing details of Thornton's rescue of wounded soldiers from behind enemy lines - Thornton did this while wounded - Zumwalt frankly couldn't believe that Thornton could still be alive.

"Medal of Honor" tries to skip nothing, thus it tells the tale of Charles Liteky, a Vietnam Army chaplain who became the only recipient to renounce and return his Medal of Honor. In 1986, Liteky left his at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, in protest of U.S. conduct in Central America.

And there's Alfred Rascon, Mexican immigrant and 19-year-old Vietnam battalion medic who admittedly was frozen by fear before he decided to risk his life repeatedly to save the lives of others.

Within the 90 minutes, there were a couple of padded moments that caused me to blanch. Korean War hero Ron Rosser tells of rolling his last hand grenade into an enemy bunker - with accompanying footage of what appears to be an explosion so enormous that a single hand grenade unlikely could have caused.

And while we see the brief document carrying the second appeal on behalf of Alvin York's exemption claim as a religious objector - it's dated May 17, 1917, his address given as Pall Mall, Tennessee - it might have been left in view long enough to read.

rickyracer
11-06-08, 01:37 AM
I wish I had read this post before now.

I would have loved to watch it.

sscjoe
11-06-08, 09:15 AM
Check your local PBS listings. They will most likely show it again.

TetVet68
11-06-08, 02:32 PM
America's oldest living Medal of Honor recipient, living his 100th year is former enlisted Aviation Chief Ordnanceman (ACOM), later wartime commissioned Lieutenant John W. Finn, USN (Ret.). He is also the last surviving Medal of Honor, "The Day of Infamy", Japanese Attack on the Hawaiian Islands, Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, 7 December 1941.

Visit my photo album tribute which displays large scale images:

http://news.webshots.com/album/141695570BONFYl


San Diego, California