I assume it’s possible? I’d just have googled, but I thought maybe some people here had actually been through the process and might have some advice.
My dad served in the Navy on a destroyer from 1949 to 1953. He was a boiler tender. (Just got back from his ship reunion. Wow, they really don’t have any black people in Salt Lake City, do they?) He lost all his Navy stuff years ago in a house fire. I assume he had, you know, a good conduct medal, a Korea medal of some kind, that sort of thing. Nothing spectacular.
I assume the first step is to get his military records, which I’ve seen a link for online but I think need to be mailed in, right? So assuming we can do that (the fire just burned Army and Air Force records, right?) there’s a process to get ribbons and medals redone? How much does it cost? Is it even possible?
Given that, does anybody have any ballpark figures on how much it costs to get a nice shadowbox done up for him?
As for the medals and ribbons, if it is difficult to get them from the Navy, you can go to one of many companies on line that sell such things. Likethis.
Well, according to this site, there are 4,472 African Americans in Salt Lake City.
If you know your father’s service number or Social Security number, you should be able to get his record of discharge, which will include awards (medals and ribbons) he received. Using that, he can purchase replacements of the awards.
People get this idea that military awards are minted in some private, secretive factory and only given out by the military. They figure that since the award is hard to receive, that the actual piece of metal is hard to obtain.
That’s not the way it works. In your records, there’s a section that says what medals you’re allowed to wear. When you get the medal awarded to you in a ceremony, there’s nothing special about it. The unit just orders some, or takes some from their stock, and sticks a certificate on it.
You can pick up as many medals as you want from any clothing sales store on any military post or you can order them online. Hell, you can buy a Congressional Medal of Honor if you wanted to. If you have his discharge paperwork, then it’s no harder to get a medal than it is to buy a DVD at Wal-Mart.
There was an article in todays newspaper about people who falsely claim to have received military medals or awards. A group called Stolen Valor is trying to get this restored to a prosecutable offense (apparently it is technically illegal but a few cases that have been taken to court have been ruled protected by freedom of speech). Anyhow, in the article they mentioned how easy it is to get pretty much any medal or uniform you want. Which is a large part of the problem, any number of companies make and sell this stuff, and they don’t check people’s creds before a sale to see if they deserve to have them.
True up to a point. All Medal of Honors are issued from the DoD. They are numbered and engraved on the back. Replacements must be ordered through the DoD. Its illegal to make or sell them.
A couple of years ago my father passed away. He was a vetran of three wars. I googled the Vetrans Administration for information on medals, and awards, and corresponded with a guy, and found out:
I was able to order replacements for all my father’s awards for the purpose of creating a plaque in his honor.
They were free.
My father didn’t wear his medals when he was working in the Pentagon. (I remember his medals being two rows of three ribbons. He was actually entitled to wear ten ribbons, and four other awards for things like combat infantry, weapons qualifications, and unit citations.)
My father was an expert with a machine gun!! (Grandpa was a Tommygunner!)