One more point: You didn't address the point of percentage of Medals awaraded per population density.

i did mention that the grenada operation produced gongage slightly in excess of 1.5 per man including people who never left their bases in the usa.
 

Gen Shoomaker (Sec. Army) forced a change in the way the US Army trains shortly after taking the post.

Current doctrine dictates that EVERY us soldier should be trained to call for fire and operate every crew served and individual weapon in the unit.

Soldier skills are improving by leaps and bounds.

(Thankfully, being that I just dropped my retirement papers, I no longer have to listen to "But I'm a (mechanic/cook/paperpusher)! I'll never have to do that!")

  Warning Flame Thrower!!!!

The article states that:

"A HERO dog has won an animal Victoria Cross for sniffing out a terrorist bomb ? then sitting by it until help arrived"

 

perhaps the article was misleading but I was not.  From reading the article I get the definite impression there is some kind of VC for animals.  Before I half in jest said they should re-name the medal but with no jest I'll just state flatly that they should definitely re-name it.

 

As to Grenada I have already explained what I felt what happened.  A bunch of Bozo's overreacted to the first taste of combat in many years and to my knowledge it hasn't happened again in any of the other conflicts the US has been involved in.  And it didn’t happen at all with the Marine Corps which is the Specific part of this discussion in question. Some of you people from the commonwealth countries seem to feel very free to criticize US armed services medal distribution criteria.  On the other hand when one points a finger at the beam in your own eye you seem to get very touchy.  As if everything you guys did in the name of empire was always perfectly legit.  Sometimes things go sideways and there is nothing you can do about it but just shrug your shoulders make sure its just an aberration and march on/ Follow orders.  If the service in question has any worth whatsoever things will be corrected in due time for things to be righted in time.

 

The article that I posted above was about an incident that happened not to long before some Tommy in Basra was awarded a VC for what I thought was basically getting captured, being rescued, and not getting killed.  Well that’s fine because it’s not my service and there’s probably some other reason at this time that they (the Brits) decided give out the medal.  Maybe not all that happened was in the citation for security reasons but then again maybe it was a publicity stunt: who knows?  Above my pay grade!

 

But you see I had already read the above story and to my knowledge there was never anything anywhere in the Marine Corps Handbook about Driving a vehicle and coordinating supporting fires with both your arms blown off (and he wasn't even the guy who got the BRONZE star- the dead guy did).  Maybe I missed that part.  Maybe if had been a member of a service that hadn't fired a shot in anger in over sixty years while living under the security umbrella of those dumb incompetent southern schmuks I would have had the time to be cross trained between deployments into some course that would have explained these things to me.  Or maybe if I had dodged the draft and went up into the great white north and been welcomed with open arms I could have gotten those courses.  But then again things are what they are and you deal with them as best you can, this is part of the American way.  How many medals have been issued in Canada in the last sixty years?

 

Speaking of dodging things your still dodging the point about the percentage of medals distributed versus the population density of troops who have actually seen combat. 

the article names the blasted doggy medal but they did refer to it as a canine vc.  guess the reporter was trying to explain the heirachy of doggy medals?

the amount of brass handed out in vietnam was also rather high per capita i've read.  grenada simply being the one where the number stuck with me.  my comment was that the us armed forces hand out gongs etc rather more freely than commonwealth countries seem to.  if the marine corps is an exception to this trait good for them but my comment was about the armed forces as a whole.

 

As if everything you guys did in the name of empire was always perfectly legit. 

glad you're beginning to see the light ;)

 

mike you should really learn more about what the canadian army has been doing since we invented peacekeeping half a century ago.  you may want to look at the battle of medak or the siege of sarajevo as examples of the kinds of unpleasantness we've had to handle.  only rarely is/was there any press coverage of what we have done.  you want a nervewracking job try peacekeeping sometime. 

 

how is over 1.5 medals per person involved in the grenada operation lacking in specificity?

 

talked to a soldier on a city bus one time in seattle.  dunno where he was headed but he had literally a chest full of brass and yet when i talked to him he'd been a clerk for a few months in vietnam and spent a year in germany.  never been shot at in his career and spent less than a year and a half outside the usa and somehow he had accumulated 5 rows of whatever they give medals to clerks for.  i thought i'd fallen across another audie murphy at first.

sas guys don't get gonged while they are active duty or at least the medals are awarded when they stand down from what i've heard.  i'd also be quite leery of accepting any VC chatter about a live soldier.  it's much more commonly a posthumous medal than not.