(Image: AP)
It’s award season, with the recent Golden Globes and Grammy telecasts and lots of buzz about the upcoming Oscars, so it’s no wonder that the Pentagon didn’t want to be left out of the fun. That’s why they’ve come up with a new medal to award for “extraordinary achievement” in the field of drone warfare.
The “Distinguished Warfare Medal” is considered a “combat-related” medal and is the first such award to be created since the Bronze Star in 1944. The brave men and women who control these highly lethal flying machines from their bases in the American West will now have something to show for their heroism. It’s difficult and taxing work to liquidate human beings, especially children, on the other side of the world, and then go home and tuck your own kids into bed. At this point, it is unknown whether the Purple Heart will be awarded to those who suffer cramping from long hours sitting at their computer screens.
It also is unclear how the government will reconcile issuing the new medal to remote drone operators with its public refusal to admit that the CIA drone program exists. Rumor has it that a shiny new medal awaits the PR genius who figures it out.
I’m surprised they didn’t give these craven bastards a yellow hankie.
Purple Heart requires being killed or wounded/injured as a result of enemy action in combat operations.
As the Air Force uses fewer and fewer manned aircraft, and more and more is being done by unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones), it becomes important to Air Force officers and to the Air Force as an institution that its officers get a suitable proportion of medals.
Any awarder or awardee of this medal is an asshole.
Piloting a jet on a suicide mission into a building and killing people makes you a terrorist and a coward.
But remotely piloting a drone from a safe location and bombing people to death makes you a hero and earns you a medal.
What a sick f*cking joke.
At an event in Parliament last week organised by the ‘Orrible Henry Jackson Society, Bremer got his award – a pair of shoes- from an Iraqi:
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/02/11/watch-neo-con-paul-bremer-has-shoe-thrown-at-him-in-parliament/
Whether too big or too small, that’s much more fitting!
(and he managed to grin!)