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Dear Doug Collins

The Valor Review 24: Denied by Prejudice, Read Again at Last

Every one of these twenty-four men had already been decorated for the same act. The Army had judged their courage once, in wartime, and written it down — then stopped one step short of the nation's highest honor, in case after case, along lines of race, ethnicity, and faith. It took a childhood friend who refused to drop the matter, an act of Congress ordering the files reopened, and a twelve-year review of 602 Distinguished Service Crosses to establish what the wartime record had said all along. This page is the documented record of the Valor Review 24: what the men did, why the medal stopped short, and what it took — and what it still has not taken — to set the record straight.

The service and the promise

The twenty-four served in three wars: seven in the Second World War, nine in Korea, eight in Vietnam — infantrymen, machine gunners, medics, radio operators, and Special Forces soldiers, most of them young, many of them immigrants’ sons.

Each performed an act his own chain of command considered extraordinary. That is not a characterization added later: each man received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest decoration for valor, for the very action at issue. The wartime Army read these files and agreed the deeds were real. The question the review would eventually pose was narrower: why, in these cases, did recognition stop at the second-highest award?

The promise made to men like these is the same one made to every soldier: the honor follows the deed, without regard to who performed it. What follows is what that promise was worth to men whose deeds were never in dispute — only their eligibility, in the eyes of the institution that judged them, to be honored at the highest level.

What happened

There is no single battle to narrate here; there are twenty-four. But the pattern can be seen in a few of the files the review pulled.

In Korea, on March 6–7, 1951, near Yangpyong, Pfc. Leonard M. Kravitz was an assistant machine gunner whose position was overrun. When the machine gunner was wounded, Kravitz took over the gun. When his unit was ordered to withdraw, he voluntarily stayed behind it, pouring covering fire into the attacking force so his platoon could get out — and drawing the enemy’s fire onto himself. Friendly troops who retook the position found him dead behind the gun, surrounded by enemy dead. His stand saved his platoon. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. He received the Distinguished Service Cross.

In Vietnam, all three of the men who would still be alive in 2014 performed their acts within a few months of one another in 1969:

Rodela, Morris, and Erevia each received the Distinguished Service Cross. So did the other twenty-one:

What happened to these men, institutionally, is the subject of this page: the deeds were honored at the second level, promptly, in writing — and the first level was not reached. For most of them, that was where the record rested for the rest of their lives.

What the institution did afterward

The file did not reopen itself. It was reopened by a friend.

Mitchel Libman had grown up with Leonard Kravitz in Brooklyn and served in the Army himself. He believed his friend had been denied the Medal of Honor because he was Jewish, and he refused to let it rest — he and his wife Marilyn spent years writing letters and working with Congress and the military, in President Obama’s words, “to get this done.” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, inducting the twenty-four into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes the next day, called Libman “the driving force behind this effort to award the Medal of Honor to Jewish and Hispanic service members who had earned it, but had never received it because of racial or religious discrimination.” “He never gave up,” Hagel said.

Congress acted on the question Libman had pressed. Through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002, Congress ordered a review of the war records of Jewish American and Hispanic American veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam who had received the Distinguished Service Cross — to ensure, in the White House’s words, “those deserving the Medal of Honor were not denied because of prejudice.”

The Army’s review examined 602 Distinguished Service Cross awards. Its findings came in two parts:

The other services ran the same exercise over their own second-highest awards — and returned a different answer. As a Pentagon spokesman reported on the day of the ceremony, the Air Force reviewed 186 cases and the Navy reviewed 89 cases of sailors and Marines, and both services decided not to upgrade any of them. No case-by-case reasoning from either service was published with that result. The Army’s twenty-four files were explained man by man, in citations. The Air Force’s 186 and the Navy’s 89 were answered with a single number: zero.

The review Congress ordered in 2002 took twelve years. On March 18, 2014, in the East Room of the White House, President Barack Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to all twenty-four men, in one of the largest Medal of Honor ceremonies in the Army’s history. Three of them — Rodela, Morris, and Erevia, all Vietnam veterans — stood in uniform to receive the medal in person. The other twenty-one were awarded posthumously, accepted by their families. “Today we have the chance to set the record straight,” the President said. “No nation is perfect. But here in America, we confront our imperfections and face a sometimes painful past, including the truth that some of these soldiers fought and died for a country that did not always see them as equal.” The following day, March 19, the twenty-four were inducted into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, where Hagel named the occasion for what it was: “We are also here to correct an injustice of history — to help right 24 wrongs that should have never occurred.”

One name in the class carries a second, unfinished accounting. Cpl. Joe R. Baldonado, honored for Korea, remains missing in action; at the ceremony the President noted that Baldonado is still unaccounted for, and that the nation retains its obligation to give the families of its missing a full accounting. His medal was corrected. His fate, on the record, is still open.

Where it stands now

For the twenty-four themselves, the account is closed — completely, correctly, and too late for almost everyone in it. Twenty-one were dead before the review that vindicated them was even ordered. The three who lived to stand in the East Room were in their late sixties and seventies, receiving for acts of their twenties a medal one paperwork step away for forty-five years.

What the correction consisted of is worth stating exactly, because it is the institution’s own verdict on itself. No new evidence about the deeds was discovered in 2014. The citations were built from the wartime records — the same records the wartime Army had read when it awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. What changed was the reading: reviewers ordered to ask whether prejudice had stopped these files one step short concluded, in nineteen cases, that it had — and the President said so at the ceremony, on the record, in the institution’s name.

What remains open is the other half of the 2002 mandate. The Air Force’s 186 cases and the Navy’s 89 produced no upgrades and no published case-by-case explanation, and that silence has never been filled in: the same standard, applied to the same wars, yielding twenty-four upgrades in one service and none in the other two — unexplained. The question has since been put to the services again: in 2021, the Secretary of Defense directed a new review of Service Cross awards to African American and Native American recipients of the same three wars — the groups the earlier reviews had not covered — with the services’ work due by August 2, 2026. Whether that review answers the question the 2014 one left standing is, as of this page, the live item in this file.

And notice what carried it. Not the institution’s own audit — there was none for fifty years. A statute, demanded by a citizen: one Brooklyn childhood friend of one dead machine gunner, writing letters with his wife for years until Congress ordered the Army to read its own files again. The Army, ordered to read them, read them honestly and said what it found. That sequence — outsider pressure, congressional order, honest review — is the whole mechanism by which this wrong was righted.

The ledger

The Valor Review 24 is this section’s group-scale “finally accounted” exhibit: the wrong was systemic, the review was ordered from outside, and the correction — for the Army’s twenty-four — was total.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Five films: the ceremony itself, and the three living men in their own words and their service’s telling.

The ceremony. The complete March 18, 2014 East Room ceremony: President Obama presents the Medal of Honor to the three living recipients and to the families of the twenty-one.

Rodela, in his own words. CBS News, March 18, 2014: Jose Rodela recalls the 1969 fight in Phuoc Long — eighteen hours of combat, and the machine gun that had pinned down his company.

Morris, on the eve of the ceremony. Stars and Stripes' interview with Melvin Morris, March 17, 2014 — the day before he received the medal for Chi Lang, forty-five years after the fight.

The Society-style portrait. The American Veterans Center's "Profiles in Valor" film on Melvin Morris: one of the Army's first Green Berets, wounded three times bringing his fallen commander home.

Erevia, interviewed by his own service. The U.S. Army's interview with Santiago Erevia ahead of the March 2014 ceremony — the radio operator who destroyed four bunkers while tending his wounded.

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.