I think every buck private will get a service ribbon just for showing up, by definition.
I’ve always wondered about the cultures of recognition in general in the military, and wonder how closely, and for which ranks or MOS their meaning or simple referent is read.
For people in the same service and within a campaign or theater they are more understandable, I guess, as are Medal of Honor and other biggies.
But aside from sheer visual impression, would it be taken amiss if one officer was unaware, e.g., “did you serve in ,” or (although this would never be spoken out loud or phrased this way) “I didn’t know you were exceptional in [y]”.
I understand that the display is not expected or designed for comprehension by all, except for the pride, simple historical declaration, and honor of each individual individual wearing the decorations.
FWIW, the topic is wrought in my memory with the horrible suicide in 1996 of Admiral Jeremy Boorda, who enlisted at 17 and rose to Chief of Naval Operations [cite from Arlington], after an award was called into question (follow-up on the case).
I now see that this account is added/taken in full in the Arlington Cemetery page. And, FTR, the issue was over a “device,” a complement to a serice ribbon with it’s own significance.
There was probably something else going on there with Boorda, but it is undeniable military folks wear their resume, so to speak. Most of the time for most service members this isn’t done, when I was in the .mil it was during a semi-annual inspection or maybe a change-of-command ceremony, something like that. So you’d look at your buddies uniform and say “Hey, when did you get an air medal!?” etc.
I don’t think most people either know or care what ribbons are on display, but there is a significant number of people who do. These days, with everyone having the ability to freeze a news video, it is quite likely that an imposter will be caught. Of course it’s not just medals but people who never even served, or at least not where they claim to.
Speaking only for myself…
I scan the top couple rows of ribbons in someone’s ribbon rack to see what’s there - that’s where the most important stories are told. For someone with multiple rows of ribbons, *most *of the stuff below the first row or two is what we call “I was there” decorations. For example: you were with a unit during a certain date range, that unit was awarded some sort of meritorious unit award, so you get to add yet another ribbon to your ribbon rack (this becomes a PITA after a few years in…). Of the 22 ribbons & medals in my ribbon rack when I retired, only a handful actually mean anything to me because of what I did/where I was when I earned them. The rest are just fluff and “I was there”.
There *is *a segment of the veteran community that is constantly on the prowl for “stolen valor” types, and will pounce on someone who’s wearing something they shouldn’t be (or wearing something THEY think the person shouldn’t be). Personally, I have better things to do with my time.
Not quite true. The National Defense Medal is awarded to someone who serves in the military when we’re mad at someone. Of course, lately we’ve been mad at someone pretty much all the time. Elvis Presley served in the army from March 24, 1958 to March 2, 1960 and so, would have not received one.
In the navy we called it the gedunk medal – gedunk being naval slang for junk food, from the term gedunk bar. Mine was awarded with no ceremony whatsoever. We were in line to get our ID photo taken. I was still blinking at the spots from the flash when a small, blue box was slapped into my hand. In it was the medal.
Ribbons are worn in a particular order, the order of precedence, and there are charts available for each service showing what that order is. An army captain told me how he was once sitting in his office, minding his own business when in walked the Grizzled Old Sergeant. “Sir, I have a problem. I have to go to this <copulating> awards ceremony with my medals and I don’t know the order or precedence is!” then proceeds to dump a boxful of medals on his desk. He’d been in since WWII (this was about 1970) so there were awards there nobody recognized and it took about a half hour to get it sorted out.
No one but the extremely obsessive could recognize every single ribbon for their own service, never mind the other services. As JHBoom says, you start scanning at the top which is where the valor ribbons are and after the first row or two, it doesn’t matter so much.
When I was in I could read a USAF rack like a book. A really big rack might have a couple of random vocabulary words on it that I didn’t recognize, but because of order of precedence I could make a good guess at their significance from context.
Since I worked with the Army for awhile I got sorta good at theirs too. But I was never fluent. US Navy or foreign may as well be Sanskrit. JHBoom totally nails the day to day interaction we had with each other’s ribbons. The significant ones, if any, are on top. Based on rank and age which are both proxies for length of service we all knew what the typical progression and volume was. Somebody with far more or fewer than typical would be looked at twice for curiosity. Which might or might not turn into suspicion.
I could certainly imagine someone with a long career ending up with a mistake on their chest. Every time you get another one you need to buy a new rack holding the new quantity. Then transfer or replace everything. They’re made of grosgrain cloth and deteriorate or get soiled over the years. Ending up with an oak leaf cluster or a star on the ribbon next to the one it belongs on is a plausible mistake that one might never notice unless one was big on auditing their own shirts vs the occasional printouts one gets from HR.
While I was in I never thought that people still in the service would ever fake that stuff. It seemed like a lie that you’d be almost sure to be caught in fairly soon with disastrous social and career consequences.
The idea of a discharged veteran “juicing his resume” is, to me, a *lot *more plausible. Naturally more so for folks with few awards & decs to begin with and not much life after discharge. There’s a lot more fake "SEAL"s with 3 years service than 30.
The Army has the Army Service Ribbon. You are authorized to wear it after graduation from AIT. It simply says that you are a member of the US Army. Privates now come out of AIT with their first row of ribbons. The Army Service Ribbon, the National Defense Medal and the GWOT Service Medal.
Hmmm, your right, Loach, but it was effective in 1981 so Elvis still wouldn’t get one. This was after I was out of the navy anyway. At least you have to graduate basic before you get one. In my story you’ll notice it was handed to me pretty early on in boot camp. I suppose they might have taken it back if I’d washed out.
I served for 7 years, but I never swallowed the hooah punch, and so unlike LSLGuy, I never bothered to learn medal/ribbon colors. If I had to add one to my bar, I’d look it up in a book. I also never learned the names of weapons I never used, the history of my unit, the name of the Secretary of the Army, or any other “just testing you” trivia.
I’m not putting down LSLGuy in any way, I’m just saying some soldiers are like him, some like me. So don’t go making any assumptions about who can translate what.
Sure, but he’s not talking about the NDM. He said “service ribbon.”
And it can be more, depending on circumstances. I mentioned in another thread that anyone who was sent off to the Vietnam War would end up with a minimum of four, if they didn’t get into any trouble.
It’s possible for servicemembers to get medals/ribbons from allied nations, right? How do those fit into the precedence? Do you just figure what the equivalent award is from the US military, and assign it the same precedence, or do the Big Official Lists have to include all of the awards granted by all of the nations of the world? And is this precedence agreed upon between nations?
Are service members required to wear all their ribbons? If, for instance, a grunt got an award but didn’t feel it was deserved, can they just leave their bronze star (or GWOT, or whatever) off their rack? Or will a superior remind them they’re out of uniform (assuming the superior is in a bad enough mood to care about something like that).
In the Canadian Forces, you must wear your medals (or ribbons as per the dress of the day). I mentioned in another thread that this was an issue recently when the CF converted the wound stripe, which was not a medal and therefore didn’t need to be worn, to the Sacrifice Medal, which must be worn. Some soldiers didn’t want to be reminded of their injuries or didn’t want to advertise that they’d been injured.
I believe that the policy on medals is the same in the US and most other NATO countries.
Conversely, Israeli service members are *not *required to wear all of their ornamentation (they may be required on paper, but tradition trumps regulation in this case). There’s actually a great deal of subtlety in what pins a soldier chooses to display, and where. A lot of it’s just kids being kids, of course - some pins are cool, some aren’t. If you don’t know the difference, you’re not cool enough to know.
Pins, ribbons and medals are basically a way for soldiers to establish a pecking order - to determine who’s a badass and who isn’t. That means that there’s no point in wearing a ribbon that everyone else has. What would that prove?
I was using a web site or three to figure out what ribbons my father had and one stumped me at first. It had a unit citation box and once I stopped looking only at the Marine Corps ribbons I found it. It was the Army Presidential Unit Citation. So I asked him about it and he told me the story of HMX-1 and the rescue of the South Korean president, the army and others in Korea after the Chinese entered the war. He actually got 3 ribbons (and medals) for that. One was given to him by the Korean President in person.
The ribbons can tell stories, at least as long as there is someone alive who knows them.
I assume the answer is that it’s part of the uniform.
Awhile back I decided to research the various medals and ribbons my grandfather earned in WWII. The Silver Star and Purple Heart would fall under “badass”, however most of the ribbons appeared to be for participating in various military campaigns (still badass), completing particular training or just being in theater.