What Honor Looks Like

Posthumous award due to hero soldier killed in Bronx apartment fire...
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Honor Sought for US Soldier Who Died in Bronx Fire Rescue
8 Jan 2018 — Sen. Chuck Schumer wants the Army to posthumously honor a soldier who raced repeatedly into a burning apartment building.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer wants the Army to posthumously honor a U.S. soldier and native of Ghana who raced repeatedly into a burning New York City apartment building, saving four people before he died in flames that also claimed a dozen other lives. Army National Guard Pfc. Emmanuel Mensah, 28, "was many things: a soldier, an immigrant, a first-generation American, a New Yorker — but above all else he was a hero," the New York Democrat said in a letter to the Army requesting that Mensah be formally awarded for his sacrifice. Mensah perished Dec. 28 on a frigid night inside the five-story Bronx apartment building where he lived before joining the military a year earlier, Army officials said. He was home for Christmas after finishing National Guard basic training in Fort Lee, Virginia.

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Firefighters respond to a deadly building fire in the Bronx borough of New York.​

The fire, the city's deadliest since 1990, was accidentally started by a child playing with a gas stove, fire officials said. After the boy and his mother fled, flames spread up a stairwell and consumed the inside of the building. When the fire broke out, he was sleeping on the first floor, according to Schumer, who cited reports from police, first responders and other witnesses. He was able to exit the building, the senator said. But Mensah then ran back into the inferno multiple times, helping four people escape before succumbing on an upper floor, according to a New York National Guard statement that cited police reports. A fire department spokesman said fire officials could not confirm details involving Mensah's specific actions.

Schumer has written to Army Secretary Mark Esper urging the military to issue the soldier a posthumous award recognizing "the Army values of personal courage, selfless service and duty." Col. Richard Goldenberg, a National Guard spokesman, said the military is working with Mensah's relatives to decide on final arrangements, services and ceremonies. Mensah was to begin drills this month with the New York Army National Guard's 107th Military Police Company, based at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. "I knew from the moment I met him his heart was as big as our National Guard family," National Guard Staff Sgt. Ruben Martinez-Ortiz, who recruited Mensah in 2016, wrote on an Army website. The fire took the lives of eight adults and five children, including 27-year-old Holt Francis, who was critically injured and died Thursday. Francis' wife, 19-year-old niece and two daughters, ages 2 and 7, also died.

Honor Sought for US Soldier Who Died in Bronx Fire Rescue
 
Long overdue recognition...
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Secret WWII Commandos Rewarded for Valor
2 Apr 2018 -- The secret agents would arrive at the American base in England with little time to spare before their planes took off for occupied Europe under cover of night. They traveled in cars with tinted windows, and were bundled so securely in scarves and hats, even their genders were a mystery.
And for more than 40 years after World War II ended, Army sergeant Keith Cole was forbidden from uttering a single word about what he saw and did. But on March 21, Cole and roughly 20 of his former colleagues in the Office of Strategic Services were ushered into the bright lights of the U.S. Capitol's Emancipation Hall to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian award. "It was something I never thought would happen," says Cole, 93. The super-secret OSS, formed in 1942 to disrupt Axis operations via espionage and arming resistance groups, would become the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Special Operations Command and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It counted 13,000 personnel during the height of the war, with luminaries that would include future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey and Richard Helms, Nobel Peace Prize negotiator Ralph Bunche, Hollywood director John Ford, actors Sterling Hayden and Marlene Dietrich, and chef Julia Child. In fact, nearly one-third of the OSS agents were women.

By time the Gold Medal ceremonies got underway, an estimated 100 were still living. One of those -- Cole -- retired to Sarasota 26 years ago. The OSS operators were freed from their security oaths in 1987, but by then, says Cole, the war was old news and nobody much asked about what happened way back then. "We had no idea what he did in the war, so it came as a real surprise," says daughter Peggy Cole-Gibbons, visiting from her father's native Michigan. "We knew he was in the Army, we knew he was in England, but that was about it." Given the high levels of compartmentalization, Cole was almost as clueless about the scope of OSS operations as his daughter, at least until the gag order was rescinded. Then he began reading everything he could get his hands on. His own insights into the mission were narrow and restricted. No two missions were alike for 'Carpetbaggers' Cole joined the Army Air Corps at 17 with hopes of becoming a pilot, but poor eyesight kept him out of the cockpit.

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Keith Cole of Sarasota, FL recently received a Congressional Gold Medal for his service in the Office of Strategic Services.​

He wound up with the 492nd Bomb Group, which transferred to OSS operations in 1944 under the nickname "Carpetbaggers." Employing B-24 bombers stripped of most of its guns, missions involved flying out of England on moonlit nights, dropping below enemy radar coverage at 400 feet, and reaching rendezvous points as far away as Yugoslavia. As a dispatcher, Cole was positioned in the rear, and his job was to make sure the bombers unloaded their payloads directly over given coordinates. Whether ferrying canisters of supplies suspended from bomb bay shackles or saboteurs hoping their counterparts below would be waiting, no two missions were alike. Cole participated in nine drops, and never knew if they ended in success or failure. Flying too low and fast to be challenged by enemy warplanes or ground fire was no guarantee against catastrophe, however. Cole says several Carpetbagger crews were lost after slamming into high hills. But it was only on V-E Day, when he got a daytime bird's-eye view of Europe, did Cole realize what he'd been spared from his quarters across the Channel. "We actually spent two days flying over France and Germany, Belgium, Holland, looking at the total destruction of the war," Cole recalls. "You'd go over rivers and there were no bridges left at all, or none that I could see. You could tell where there had been a tank battle, there 8 or 10 dead tanks in a row, or you'd see pockets of anti-aircraft batteries that had been abandoned and were still standing. It was absolute devastation."

For the elderly OSS agents who didn't know each other existed until last week's reunion in Washington, D.C., the extent to which their efforts helped shorten the war will never be known. But sometimes special operations function best when they're hiding in plain sight, says Cole. "I used to listen to the BBC news every night, and I found out later that the first few words in every broadcast contained coded messages to resistance forces about who was going to was going to receive supplies that night, things like 'Uncle Jean has two shillings in his pocket' and 'Tell Marie to wear her galoshes,'" he says. "I think that's pretty interesting."

Secret WWII Commandos Rewarded for Valor

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US Senator to Award Medal to Navajo Code Talker's Family
2 Apr 2018 - A New Mexico U.S. senator plans to honor a deceased Navajo Code Talker posthumously for his service during World War II.
One of New Mexico's U.S. senators plans to honor a deceased Navajo Code Talker posthumously for his service during World War II. Sen. Martin Heinrich will present the Congressional Silver Medal to the family of Adolph Nagurski during a ceremony Tuesday at the New Mexico Veterans' Memorial.

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A member of the Navajo Code Talkers views a performance by Marine Corps Band New Orleans during a parade for National Navajo Code Talkers Day in Window Rock, Ariz​

Heinrich's office says Nagurksi had earned the medal but never received it. The Navajo Code Talkers were a group of Marines who developed a code based on their language to communicate during wartime. The Japanese never deciphered it, and the Code Talkers were credited with helping win many key battles in the Pacific during World War II.

In 2000, the Congressional Silver Medals were authorized by Congress and produced by the U.S. Mint to recognize the dedication and valor of the Code Talkers.

US Senator to Award Medal to Navajo Code Talker's Family
 

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