Originally Posted by Doody

I hope I do not ruffle anyone's feathers with my opinions

I do see whining about not getting any candy for your uniform to be becoming of a good soldier. In my opinion, you do your job. If you choose to go above and beyond, that's up to you. But to do hard work with the expectation of getting an award is rather distaseful. I would advise you to read the recent book detailing the lives of soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor. A common characteristic shared by all of them is a sense that they did nothing that anyone esle had done. One guy in the Korean War thought he was getting court martialed when he was called into see some officers after he was no longer a POW.

As for other people getting awards that don't deserve it, welcome to life and the military. How many times have you witnessed someone getting an award that did not deserve it? I worked my butt off on setting up the 55th Anniversery of the 101st dropping into Normandy dinning out for 30 days. A freind of mine came in the night before and wrote the names of VIPs on little name cards for the tables. He gets an AAM and I got jack. That senario is repeated time and time again in the military. As I said, welcome to life.

Lastly, No offense to JROTC, but I firmly believe that they give out too many awards. Last year I was involved with a veterans day parade. One of the high school ROTC groups were there. The leader of them had more awards than Patton. I have never seen so many awards hanging off that guys uniforms. Every soldier standing in our formation shook their heads.