Wait, you’re required to wear your medals? All the time? I would have assumed that you only would wear on the most fanciest of dress occasions, and that some folks might have so many of them that they would pick and choose the most prestigious instead of having their jacket be weighted down with so many of them.
You don’t wear the medal, just the accompanying ribbon.
In most militaries its generally a violation of uniform regulations not to wear the medals/badges/ribbons you are authorised to wear, with the particular uniform. Authorised means “you will wear it” not “you may”.*
*Depending on the uniform, the medal and the military you may have a choice. However, the choices will be specified, the individual soldier cannot decide what he wants to wear for himself.
Keith Payne VC has a DSC and a Silver Star received whilst working with US forces in Vietnam.
I don’t know about the other services, but in the US Navy it’s either all of them or the top three.
You know how when you’re watching a movie or TV show, and you see an officer in uniform, they’ve got a bunch of colorful stuff on their left breast (Example of Gen. Petraeus)? That’s the ribbons for the medals they’ve earned. And almost all soldiers end up with a few: For instance, if you were in the Vietnam War and didn’t get into trouble, you’d have at least four of them. A high-ranking officer will have been in the service for a while, and so accumulated a fair number just from serving during various wars and such, even if all of their time was completely unexciting. On the other hand, if you see a young serviceman with a breast as cluttered as Petraeus’s, then you know that they’ve been involved in a lot of excitement (probably a lot more than they’d have preferred). Of course, if you learn the patterns of each of the medal ribbons (each one is different), then you can tell specifically which medals a soldier has. The Medal of Honor’s ribbon is light blue with white stars on it, and is traditionally worn on a row all by itself to make it even more distinctive.
That’s all I was correcting.
I don’t think I’ll actually look into it, but the inclusion of Romania on that list must be the result of some serious back-room politics.
Romania was a major player on the Balkan/Austrian front, as outlined in the wiki article on the Allies of World War I:
It doesn’t look they were particularly successful militarily, but they had the effect of tying up Austrian, Bulgarian and German troops, and also staying in the War after Russia collapsed.
Did they give their lives to repair electronics?