That’s how long it’s been since Germany awarded an “Iron Cross” for valor to one of its soldiers.

Germany’s participation in Afghanistan has produced some notable examples of bravery, and it is fitting that her soldiers be recognized. Four men were awarded the Iron Cross for the first time since the end of World War II.

From The Times
July 7, 2009
Germany honors four soldiers with new version of Iron Cross
Cross of Honor

(Herbert Knosowski/AP)

It’s official: Germany is again allowed to brag about its military heroes.

A politically correct, newly minted version of the Iron Cross — awarded to German soldiers since 1813, but withdrawn after the Second World War — was pinned on the chests of four senior non-commissioned officers yesterday.

In 1974 I went to Germany for three years. I met some aged German men, my dad’s age, maybe a little older, and on a few rare occasions I got snippets of the war from the other side: A doctor who’d served with the Afrika Korps worked in our medical facility. A fellow amateur radio enthusiast who was a radio operator for the Wehrmacht. The translator at our MP station downtown was a late-war Luftwaffe pilot who lost his last plane and WALKED back from the Eastern Front. An old guy I met one afternoon was once a young soldier like me, in the turret of a tank with a different symbol on the side. But that was another war a long time ago, and Germany tries to forget horrible things.

Bravery is not a horrible thing. It is time to recognize it.

They had dragged comrades and children to safety after a suicide bomb attack in northern Afghanistan.

Brave enough?

“In my trips to Afghanistan I have seen for myself the conditions under which these men have to serve,” Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, said at a ceremony attended by German military top brass in the Berlin chancellery. The award of the bravery medal — known as the Honor Cross, although it has the same shape as the Iron Cross — marks a breakthrough in the way that Germany sees itself.

Germany today is like America. Its veterans of WW II are in their eighties and dying off by the hundreds each month. It’s hard enough to get the stories from our veterans, and we won. Imagine how difficult it is to collect the tales of the side that lost.

Until now, Germans have done everything they could to avoid the impression that their soldiers were in the fighting business — indeed, after the Second World War it was constitutionally forbidden for the West German Army, the Bundeswehr, to serve in combat missions abroad. The only medals on offer were for good or long service, and even they resembled school prefects’ badges.

After unification, successive governments realized that the country could no longer avoid international peace-keeping missions.

Hitler’s Germany did horrible things, rightfully deserving to be destroyed. Sadly though, men of honor and valor stood under the wrong flag with their backs against their homeland. I am reading the story of one now.

Being a soldier myself, though, I didn’t give thought to the fact that I went into the army in late 1968, under the ending term of Lyndon B. Johnson, a dishonorable lying bastard of the first cut. I went in because I was American. It was time to stand for MY country. Not Johnson’s country, MY country. I suppose young men in other lands under other flags do the same.

The paraphernalia of heroism, however, was not in place: no regimental traditions, no flags bearing battle honors and no role models.

Every army unit in the US Army has its own unit standard with streamers for the campaigns from its history. I know of infantry regiments with streamers from the Civil War. Our regiments have mottoes like “Rock of Chickamauga” and “Speed and Power”. I hear the French do much the same, with battalions named “Red Carpet”, Doormat to the Seine” and “This Way to Paris”.

The four officers who received the Honor Cross yesterday had gone to the aid of a German patrol vehicle after it was attacked by a suicide bomber on October 20 last year.

The dangers facing them were real — two soldiers died in the blast and two were injured, along with a number of civilians. The incident happened ten days after the bravery medal was introduced.

When fit hits the shan, the guy in the neat uniform isn’t sitting in a hole saying “I feel completely in line with my leader’s goals and therefore I have the motivation to put my life on the line.” No, it’s about buddies and people in danger and maybe you can drag that guy who fell over there out of the way before he gets shot up worse.

It had not been an easy passage. Many argued that it was too similar in function and design to the Iron Cross — millions of which were awarded during the First World War, with Adolf Hitler one of the more prominent recipients.

Yeah, and they got paid in German marks, too, but who gives a crap. It is only fitting and correct that bravery be rewarded, and if it looks like the old Iron Cross, then it is well that the thought be of the thousands who it won since its inception in the Napoleonic Wars, based the high ideals of all soldiers, bravery in the face of the enemy.

So German military heroes are welcome once again — as long as they remember not to mention the war.

And to the four real heroes who received the awards, I salute you.