My sporting endeavors were limited to the sand lot. There were no trophies awarded in those neighborhood games. I was a boy scout. Any badges I obtained were earned. They were called merit badges. I wasn’t in the military. I didn’t come from a police culture that gave out awards. As a cop, the highest accolade one could hope for was a shrug, a sigh and an acknowledgement, “Well at least you didn’t fuck that up to bad.” I guess it was a different era. Tucker Carlson reports that the Pentagon has got in on the scheme. It is offering participation medals.
What’s next? How about a Purple Heart to those troops in DC that got food poisoning? Oh the war stories they could tell. I got this medal for… There I was, in a DC garage, shitting my brains out due to food poisoning….
I had a friend who was awarded two Silver Stars in Viet Nam. He called then his “fuck up badges.” He claimed that while the citations mentioned two occasions where he charged enemy positions, the reality was more prosaic. He was merely trying to get out of the line of fire and ran the wrong way.
I don’t know if the Pentagon has settled on a design for the medal. Let me be the first to offer a suggestion. It could be called:
