Anyone here care to share family Purple Heart, Wounded Stripe, Sacrafice Medal, Médaille Commémorative Française, or Verwundetenabzeichen stories?

My great uncle Vince got his in WWI, gassed in the trenches.

My father got his as a Marine on a spit of sand called Eniwetok in the South Pacific, 1943. Japanese shrapnel to the forehead. He woke up in a line of bodies with a chaplin giving Extreme Unction to the body next to him. Patched up in a hospital in San Diego, shipped off to Boca Raton for “Tropicalization Training” as if he needed it after a year in the Pacific. He was on a troop train headed for San Diego for further shipment to the invasion of Japan when the bomb was dropped.

My brother got his during his first tour in Nam as an Army combat medic. Took a round in the ass upon arrival at a hot LZ. He did a second tour with the Riverines in the Delta.

My great great Uncle died after too much revelry when he and his pals overturned a Battery wagon in the Civil War. Sometime during the days prior to the battle of Chickamauga in Georgia. I think, the story went, that he and his buddies had gotten their hands on some booze and then had to move camp at some point during the night and in the dark they overturned the wagon on a hill and it crushed my Uncle.
The war didn’t kill him but the whiskey did.

No medals of honor for him. lol

Sometimes the Purple Heart isn’t what you think. My former brother-in-law got one when he was in Vietnam. He was injured (wounded) when several men ran for cover as they were getting shelled and one of them stepped on him, breaking his ankle.

My Uncle, Staff Sergeant Malcolm Clay Dalton (affectionately known as “Bill”) is one of the heroes of WWII. Bill’s many awards include: Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star, Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Air Medal. Bill was 22 years old and was killed when his B-24 Liberator Bomber was shot down while dropping bombs on the oil refinery near Ploesti Rumania on 8–1-1943 (“Operation Tidal Wave”)

My Grandfather was Sturmführer with the SS. A true patriot. I am so proud.

Ooops, forgot our German local here. Sorry, @ragingloli . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0

My dad never got a purple heart, though he came close to death a few times and lived with death every day for a long time after the war. He served his country for 21 years in the army. He left half way though his senior year in high school, having earned enough credits already to graduate, so he graduated in absentia. From 1942 to 1945 he served in the Merchant Navy. He was part of a flotilla that was supplying Allied forces in North Africa while the U-boats were still very active around the Strait of Gibraltar. I think it was New Years Day, 1943 and half of the flotilla was sunk trying to get to Egypt. He then made trips when Italy was won back. They unloaded much needed cargo and then loaded up with some sort of ballast. I think I remember him saying it was some type of black sand. My dad had dozens of stories about seeing 21 countries by the time he was 21. After the war, my dad signed back up to serve with the Graves Registration Service. He travelled all over to help recover bodies of the fallen, often working side by shoulder, digging up the make-shift graves with Russian soldiers. He was in Berlin when it was being divided. He worked all over Europe, even along the Norwegian coastline looking for downed airmen’s bodies. He documented quite a bit of his work, but didn’t know what to do with it after the war. He knew what he was doing was historically significant and needed to be witnessed. When we lived on a farm in rural Wisconsin, some of my older siblings found his photographs and books in a shed. He was so devastated that his kids were exposed to such horrors of war, he burned almost all of it.

In WW1, my father lost all his uncles. My paternal grandfather had been injured in a logging accident and couldn’t serve because his knees had been crushed and he walked with a painful limp, so he, alone, lived to have a family and pass on the name. I have a Great Uncle Steven who is buried in Northern France.

The sacrifice people made and still make, every day, to fight oppression and injustice and corruption MEANS something in my family. It isn’t a medal. It isn’t a trophy or a certificate on the wall. It is remembering and passing down the history and the stories and getting our children to feel the sense of loss and the absence of those people whose lives were cut short and won’t get a chance to tell their own stories or tell their own children. It is remembering WHY they put their lives on the line and what, exactly, they were fighting for and what the causes meant. Not all causes are the same but the sacrifices still deserve our respect. My father didn’t support the Gulf Wars, but he supported the troops. The Bushes turned him from a Republican to a Democrat. I learned all this from my father, who proudly served his country of the United States of America for over 20 years. He lived a long, amazing life and I’m just glad he’s not alive today to see this cluster-fuck of an election and how many people are there and ignorant of history and keep repeating the same damn mistakes and perpetuate lie upon lie because they are happy little puppets. Sorry, but now, I’m crying. I sit here watching from the sidelines in a privileged country in Western Europe. Thanks to the events in WW2, the Nazis don’t have the oil in the North Sea, Norway and Scotland do and I sit here like a pretty pretty princess with my social welfare and free University education for my son. I know who to thank. They didn’t all get medals. My father dug up their remains, wrote out a toe tag, put them in a bag and sent what he could find back to their families.

Had a friend who got frustrated in college, walked out of class into a Marine recruiting office and several weeks later found himself in Vietnam. He got a purple heart for getting the tip of his nose shot off but to this day claims he doesn’t know whether it was shot off or scraped off as he dove for cover. He got another for getting a bullet across the shins running ammo to the machine gun. Didn’t even break the bone, just went through the pants leg and took the skin off. He said that experience was surreal, that what he experienced was like being in a slo-mo movie; as he ran time slowed down and he saw the bullets kicking up the dirt as they hit all around and actually saw the line that included the one that hit him coming toward him on an intersecting course.

He also liked to tell of the first time he witnessed a B-52 bomb strike. They were taking fire from a nearby hill and called in the bombers. When they heard the planes they all dove in and burrowed down deeper into their foxholes and waited. The planes passed, nothing happened and they figured that was not the one for them. As they emerged from their holes all hell broke loose and the hill erupted into a mass of smoke and fire and splintered wood. They had neglected to account for the time it took for the bombs to fall from the bombers altitude to the ground. Next time they waited until the bombers had passed out of sight before worrying about taking to ground.

There is no equivalent in the British Army. One of my uncles was awarded permanently damaged lungs following a gas attack in World War I and another was awarded a grave in France (He was only 17).

Dad received a Purple Heart, although I wasn’t aware of this until shortly after his death in 1992.

In the US Army, he requested to be a rifleman. It’s not surprising; he learned how to shoot a shotgun at an early age for the purpose of bird-hunting. Dad ended up being shipped off to Europe and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. His battalion was the first to enter the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

The reason for the Purple Heart was for getting nicked in the chin by a bullet.

@ragingloli You’re sweet! I’ll bet that you’re so proud of the genocide orchestrated by Hitler’s brutal SS. Oh I forgot that the The Holocaust never happened. My bad.

@ragingloli Why do you even bother with 99% of your rude and offensive replies? You rarely, if ever, contribute anything noteworthy here.
Do you get off just being an asshole at every opportunity? Sure seems that way.

I especially love all your American hate when your countries lineage is so tainted and now, you think it is amusing to claim pride in your twisted SS heritage?

Just mind blowing.

@coloma
There is not a shred of honour to be derived from being a soldier.
What is offensive is you lot patting each other on the back over the fact that your ancestors were state employed murderers. It repulses me.
Whether it is Wehrmacht,SS, Soviet, Chinese, Roman, Greek, or ISIS. It is of no consequence.
They were, are, and always will be, nothing but filthy killers. The lowest form of Human.

@ragingloli So we Americans should have just allowed slavery to continue and turned a blind eye to avoid defending an oppressed group of individuals? Should we have not helped take down Hitler or allowed our ancestors that left England to get away from oppressive religious mandates and build a free country and just bent over and let our original oppressors take over again? Pffft! I don’t like war or killing either but sometimes it IS a necessary evil and honoring those that gave their lives to help their country and others is somehow wrong, how?