Tarnishing the Memory? (A True Hero – Part IX)

Sgt Rafael Peralta’s story of sacrifice is one that was closely followed by Curt. Curt writes of this fellow Marine in 2004:

I heard about this incident this morning on the way to work and got choked up. This Marine, a Mexican Immigrant who loved his new country so much he signed up to fight for it, placed his body on top of a grenade to save his buddies.

Curt went on to do a series of posts on Rafael Peralta.

This morning, I came across this heartbreaking NYTimes article chronicling the additional pain and emotional rollercoaster ride Sgt. Peralta’s mom has had to go through:

ON NOV. 15, 2004, several Marines in dress uniforms came to Rosa Peralta’s San Diego home to tell her that her 25-year-old son, Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta, had been killed in Falluja by an improvised explosive device. Rosa Peralta was widowed three years earlier when her husband, a mechanic, was crushed to death in a freak accident while working on a garbage truck; now her son’s death seemed every bit as senseless.

A few days later, while watching the nightly news, Peralta heard a different account of her son’s death. According to the televised report, Rafael Peralta emerged as the hero of the Second Battle of Falluja after deliberately sacrificing his life to save fellow Marines. He was with a unit clearing houses of weapons and insurgents when a group of insurgents attacked from the back room of a home the Marines had entered. A firefight ensued, and Peralta took a bullet in the head — a friendly-fire ricochet. Then an insurgent threw a grenade. Despite his injury, Peralta pulled the grenade under his body before it detonated. By absorbing the force of the blast, he saved the lives of an estimated six of his fellow Marines.

When I visited Rosa Peralta in December, she choked briefly with emotion as she remembered hearing, for the first time, her son called a hero. Shortly after the news story appeared, the Marine Corps informed her that what she heard was true and that the Marines were initially mistaken about the circumstances of her son’s death. Around this time she was also told unofficially, by Marines who knew her son, that he had been nominated for America’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor, and that he was considered certain to receive it.

“I didn’t know anything about medals,” Peralta told me. But she said that the idea that her son would be remembered as a national hero slowly became a source of comfort to her. The Peralta family, which includes Rafael’s three siblings, moved to San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico, when Rafael was a teenager, and he joined the Marines the first moment he could legally do so, on the same morning he got his green card. Though the Peralta parents spoke little English and felt like foreigners in Southern California, Rafael “really loved this country” and loved being a Marine, Peralta told me. As the months after his death wore on, she began to look forward to the day when she would receive the Medal of Honor on his behalf.

But that day never came. Almost four years later, on Sept. 17, 2008, Peralta was summoned to the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, where Lieut. Gen. Richard F. Natonski informed her of the Pentagon’s decision: Rafael Peralta would not be awarded the Medal of Honor after all. Instead he would receive the Navy Cross, the second-highest American military decoration that can be awarded to a Marine. Natonski was not able to offer an explanation at the meeting, but George Sabga, a former Marine who has known Rosa Peralta since her son was killed (and now works, pro bono, as the Peraltas’ lawyer), soon uncovered the story: after Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates reviewed the findings on the circumstances of Rafael Peralta’s death compiled by a review board made up partly of civilian medical specialists, he decided that it could not be determined with sufficient confidence that Peralta deliberately pulled the grenade under his body.

Rosa Peralta was stunned. Her family had received thousands of letters expressing admiration for her son’s already-famous heroism. When Marine officials asked her how she would like to have his Navy Cross presented, she declined it. “I said no,” she told me. “I can’t take that medal now.” In the year and a half since, Peralta has continued to refuse to accept the Navy Cross on Rafael’s behalf, a decision that has placed her in the thick of a growing controversy over how — and how often — Medals of Honor are being awarded.

This kind of reminds me a bit of the Pat Tillman story.

I don’t know who’s at fault, if anyone. But it is cruel to put military families who have lost a loved one through this kind of farce, where you are led to believe your son/daughter/father/brother/sister/mother died heroically; then told he did not. It’s a real kick in the gut.

Sgt. Peralta will always be a hero, for his service, whatever the specifics may be of what transpired that day in Fallujah, and irregardless of whether the Medal of Honor is rightly deserved or not. He served the country he immigrated to, and he died in service to it and in service to his fellow Marines.

And a military mom still grieves without closure.

Katherine Zoepf’s piece goes on to talk about the issue of so few medals being issued at all in recent years:

Since that article was published, President Obama, on Sept. 17, presented the sixth post-9/11 Medal of Honor to the family of Army Sgt. First Class Jared C. Monti for his heroic efforts, under intense enemy fire, to rescue a wounded fellow soldier in Afghanistan in 2006. Monti died in the attempt. In fact, all six medals since 9/11 have been awarded posthumously. For service during World War II and the Vietnam War, by comparison, roughly 60 percent of all Medals of Honor were awarded posthumously.

The steep decline in the awarding of Medals of Honor — along with the absence, post-9/11, of any Medal of Honor bestowed on a living serviceman — has spurred many military officers and veterans to speak out in protest. These servicemen complain that higher-ups at the Pentagon either downgrade valor-award nominations — as with Peralta’s Navy Cross — or reject them altogether. Petitions supporting a Medal of Honor for Peralta have circulated widely, and there have been calls to reconsider awarding the Medal of Honor to other servicemen, like Army Staff Sgt. Travis Atkins, who received the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously for tackling a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2007, shielding several nearby soldiers from the blast. On the blog of the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center, based in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Major Niel Smith wrote: “I, like many commanders, have submitted soldiers for combat valor awards which have been knocked down at higher levels. I defer to their judgment, but I think we are overhesitant to reward bravery that doesn’t result in death.”

Last year, in response to the controversy, Congress required the Pentagon, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, to review its criteria for Medal of Honor awards. (The report is scheduled to be released on July 31.) A Defense Department spokeswoman, Eileen M. Lainez, assured me in an e-mail message that the criteria for awarding the Medal of Honor are “longstanding and have not changed.” Addressing the drastic drop in Medal of Honor awards, she cited changes in the nature of warfare, noting that the enemy forces of Vietnam and earlier wars typically engaged in “close conflict” with U.S. forces, whereas today’s “non-uniformed insurgents” rely on “remotely detonated improvised explosive devices (I.E.D.’s), suicide bombers and rocket, mortar and sniper attacks” — all tactics, her statement implied, that create fewer opportunities for U.S. soldiers to demonstrate the traditional valor of close-quarters combat.

In January, I sat down with Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the U.S. Central Command, at Washington’s Fairfax hotel, to ask him about the Medal of Honor controversy. I raised the issue of Sergeant Peralta and asked why his nomination was downgraded. Petraeus declined to address Peralta’s case (internal deliberations over Medal of Honor recommendations are kept confidential, and Peralta was not under Petraeus’s command at the time he was nominated for the medal), but he did speak of a generalized anxiety among commanders, surrounding the Medal of Honor, about getting a recommendation wrong. “They’re something that everyone in the chain of command wants to ensure is done absolutely right,” he said.

Petraeus emphasized the thoroughness of today’s review process, noting that the packets of data that are circulated to review-board members about Medal of Honor nominees are often as thick as phone books. “They want to ensure that these medals are approved for those who have earned them, but they also want to make sure that they never, ever, in a sense, get it wrong,” he said, referring to the review boards. “There’s a band there, and the difference between the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross is sort of in the eye of the beholder on a given day. And that’s tough. But decisions do have to be made.”

IS THERE LESS heroism today, or fewer opportunities for it, than in earlier eras? Has the Pentagon, despite its insistence to the contrary, raised its standards for what counts as bravery? Has a rigorous review and investigation process made it all too easy to raise doubts about individual acts of bravery? In an age of the all-volunteer military, is the Pentagon taking sacrifice for granted and failing to recognize “today’s heroes,” as many servicemen and veterans are arguing?

Some analysts agree with the Pentagon that there is less heroism today — at least in its traditional forms — as a result of the nature of modern warfare. When I spoke with Michael E. O’Hanlon, a defense-policy specialist at the Brookings Institution, he argued that counterinsurgency efforts, which place greater emphasis on avoiding the use of force (to minimize civilian casualties), call for “a quieter daily kind of courage,” one that rarely requires “that moment of extreme valor” typically honored with a medal.

Many combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan dispute this explanation. Duncan D. Hunter, a Republican congressman from Southern California, served two tours as a Marine in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 and one tour in Afghanistan in 2007. He led the effort last year to include the language in the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Pentagon to review its criteria for Medal of Honor awards. When I met with him recently in his Washington office, he insisted that moments of extreme valor are still occurring frequently — almost as frequently as they did in Vietnam or during World War II. “Warfare has changed,” he said. “But 90 percent of it hasn’t. You’ve still got to take ground, and you’ve got to hold it.” He raised the possibility that, in today’s all-volunteer military, expectations and standards have gone up: an action that would have been considered heroic in the mid-20th century is seen today almost as routine conduct — “just being a Marine.”

Other observers have suggested — and Petraeus’s comments to me could be seen to support the idea — that the military, after its recent experiences with Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, is hesitant to publicize or otherwise herald tales of heroism, for fear of later embarrassment. Both Lynch, in 2003, and Tillman, in 2004, were initially celebrated as war heroes. But Lynch herself was highly critical of those who described her as a heroine, later testifying before Congress that she had been falsely portrayed as a “little-girl Rambo from the hills.” Tillman’s family also testified before Congress, suggesting that his story was deliberately manipulated by officials in order to gather support for the war effort. “They have to be very careful,” O’Hanlon told me. “The idea of first building up this great story and then having it proven factually inaccurate would be very damaging.”

For many criticsof the Pentagon’s handling of the Medal of Honor, Rafael Peralta’s case is a vivid example of the perils of an overly cautious, overly bureaucratic approval process. The standard for awarding the Medal of Honor has always been “incontestable proof of the performance of service,” but critics charge that in recent years the standard for “incontestable” must have been raised. “The eyewitness accounts, it seems, they mean much less than they used to,” Hunter told me. “Now there’s much more weight placed on forensic evidence.”

George Sabga obtained redacted copies of the Medal of Honor recommendation packages that were submitted for Rafael Peralta by the Marine Corps in 2005, which he shared with me. The contents of these packages suggest that, long before the case reached the Pentagon, a pathologist working on an earlier-level review of Peralta’s Medal of Honor case raised questions about his gunshot wound. The pathologist expressed the opinion that, given the particular location of the head wound that Peralta received at the start of the firefight, he would have been cognitively disabled and could not deliberately have brought the grenade in toward his body. A letter included with the pathologist’s report suggests that Peralta’s “scooping/grabbing” was more likely to have been a result of “involuntary muscle spasms” than of a conscious act of courage.

After the pathologist’s report, the packet was returned to Peralta’s division for reconsideration. General Natonski, then commanding general of the First Marine Division, was evidently unconvinced by the pathologist’s interpretation. He ordered a thorough review of the investigation, enlisting medical specialists of his own. In a letter addressed to the secretary of the Navy, dated Aug. 8, 2005, Natonski restated the case on Peralta’s behalf: “This package is being resubmitted based on re-interviews and sworn statements from eyewitnesses as well as new statements from three neurosurgeons with outstanding credentials who have given their medical opinion. These doctors opine that Sergeant Peralta could have scooped the grenade under his body despite his head wound. However, regardless of the medical opinions rendered after the fact there is sufficient eyewitness testimony and physical evidence (grenade fuse lodged in Sergeant Peralta’s flak jacket) to support this award recommendation.” But the pathologist’s original opinion, it appears, continued to sway those in the Pentagon reviewing the file.

MUCH OF THE anger expressed by officers and veterans groups about the decline in Medal of Honor awards reflects their perception that Pentagon officials are disrespectful, even dismissive, of eyewitness accounts by servicemen. The feeling is compounded by the fact that, in today’s military, younger servicemen sometimes have far more combat experience than their seniors now working in the Pentagon, who often progressed through the military hierarchy in a time of relative peace: after Vietnam but before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In a phone conversation with me, Robert Reynolds, one of the Marines who was with Peralta during the firefight in Falluja, expressed frustration that his testimony was not taken seriously. He, like Peralta, was shot during the firefight, and he said he clearly recalled Peralta smothering the grenade. “Knowing what Sergeant Peralta did for me,” he said, “it angers me to know that the Marines that day are basically called liars.”

Peralta is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. One recent afternoon, Rosa Peralta, along with Rafael’s 19-year-old brother, Ricardo (only weeks from beginning Marine Corps boot camp himself), and George Sabga, drove to the cemetery with me. As we stood around Peralta’s simple white marble headstone, Sabga recounted the moment when he and Rosa Peralta learned that Rafael would not receive the Medal of Honor. General Natonski had slid a copy of the Navy Cross citation across the table to Rosa. “Without hesitation and with complete disregard for his own personal safety,” the citation read, “Sergeant Peralta reached out and pulled the grenade to his body, absorbing the brunt of the blast and shielding fellow Marines only feet away.”

The wording of the citation is strikingly similar to the description of the events as Peralta’s fellow Marines have related them, not as the pathologist interpreted them. “I asked the general, ‘How can you say that there were doubts and yet you give us a Navy Cross citation that says that Sergeant Peralta did the exact same thing that the Marines say he did?’ ” Sabga recounted. “I told him, ‘Every single Medal of Honor from now on is going to be tainted because of what’s been done to Peralta.’ The Marines are never going to give up. We’re never going to give up fighting for Peralta’s medal.”

Sounds like a Medal of Honor hero to me.

Previous posts:
A True Hero
A True Hero – Part II
A True Hero Pt III
A True Hero Part IV
A True Hero Part V
A True Hero Part VI
A True Hero – Part VII
A True Hero – Part VIII