The Medal

It's been sixty-five years and the letters are still lying in a velvet box separated by years: 1950, 1951, and 1952, tied with pink ribbons. The three-cent purple stamps on the first letters are perfect. You can see Thomas Jefferson's head etched on the stamp. Later you see the sixcent red airmail stamps with an airplane etched on them and later still free postage. The red, white and blue edging on the airmail envelopes are bright in color, even the postmarks are legible and clear. The addresses change from time to time, from Kentucky to California, then an APO number in Japan and Korea. The letters have moved with me from house to house and are now in the same velvet box under a table beside my bed. From time to time I read them. Only lately I have read them searching for something that may or may not be in the letters: information about the medal, the medal that Jack received while in the Army: The Bronze Star. Jack wrote to me almost every day we were apart. His letters are all documented with the date by day, month and year. Every word is correctly spelled, every "t" crossed and every "i" dotted. Of all the letters I've read, I've not found where he received this honor - The Bronze Star. Maybe I overlooked it. He never talked about it. I never saw it. But on his honorable discharge, dated October 29, 1952, under decorations it's listed along with the Korean Service Medal, the Army Occupation (Japan) and the United States Service Medal. I'm sure we read his discharge when we received it in the mail later after he was discharged, maybe not. We were just glad he was home so we could get on with our lives. Put away in a box of important letters, we never looked at it again until 2002. After Jack passed on May 11, 2002 we had to get a copy of his discharge for the hospital and the funeral home. One of the kids exclaimed, "Look Mom, Pop was awarded The Bronze Star!" They pointed it out to me; there it was. "I'm too busy now. I'll think about it later." Along with his monument I received a service plaque from the Armed Forces to honor Jack and a record of his service to his country. 6 | The Medal Appearing on the service plaque was this information: Ronald E. Land CPL US Army Dec. 4 1928 May 11 2002 Bronze Star Medal Jack Maybe everyone received one, I don't know. I contacted Gene Leads, the man from our local VA and the person who led the full military ceremony and who had presented me with a folded American flag at the cemetery. I asked him to find out when, where and why Jack had received this medal. He tried. My son tried on the internet, but it said that all records were destroyed in a fire; and sixty-five years later I still don't know. I've asked a lot of people and no one has any answers. I finally put it aside and the years have slipped away until I got the letters out and this time I started reading different parts. Before, I had just read the "I love you" parts and the "missing you, wish you were here" parts. This time I started reading the other parts: the dates, places, time. What a lot of information I'd missed. What a lot of letters; what a lot of history about the Korean War, about Japan, a country we'd only read about in school. This book is a compilation of our letters back and forth describing the daily lives of newlyweds with a husband deployed to Korean and a wife waiting anxiously at home. The search for the history regarding the Bronze Star continues, perhaps someone reading this book will recognize and remember events that lead up to the award.