Military Honors Research Articles

The British Superpower, Irregular Warfare, and Military Honor

The British Superpower, Irregular Warfare, and Military Honor

‘To Die as a Soldier’: The Vital Romance of the Military Novel

AbstractCritics have generally dismissed the military novel as simply a minor version of the historical novel. This article reassesses the genre by examining what the Quarterly Review saw as the first ‘military novel’, Thomas Hamilton's Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827). It argues that, while his novel is modelled on Scott's historical novels, Hamilton also established an entirely new aesthetics, based on the soldier's suffering body. Reading this aesthetic in relation to a biopolitics of life emerging in the long eighteenth century, the article proposes that the novel constructs a new version of military honour for the modern nation.

Losing Max, the First Romanian Army’s Military Working Dog Hero

Max, a six-year-old German Shepherd, was the first military working dog of the Romanian Army who was buried with military honors. Max died in 2015, and the funeral procession was held in his memory, at the “Animals’ Heaven” Cemetery for animal companions. In presenting his case, we have used as sources of information articles, materials that we carefully selected from the Romanian media and from the Internet (most of them with reference on Max’s final year of life), as well as an interview conducted with Max’s handler regarding the handler–military working dog relationship and the emotion management in the context of Max’s death. Further, the current status and the future of military working dogs in Romania were discussed.

Nadie puede juzgar qué es bueno y qué es malo. Sexualidad masculina y sexo entre varones en los delitos contra el honor militar en la Armada Argentina, 1960-1980.

Resumen: Este artículo analiza la producción de sentidos y saberes sobre el sexo entre varones y la sexualidad masculina durante los juicios por delitos contra el honor militar en la Armada Argentina (1960-1980), en un contexto de ascenso del autoritarismo. Sostengo que, en contraste con la escalada represiva del período, el éxito de las Fuerzas Armadas en la construcción de una masculinidad hegemónica distaba mucho de ser una realidad en las décadas de 1960 y 1970. Lejos de un discurso o dispositivo bien articulado, los saberes producidos en los juicios militares no llegaban a constituirse en un conocimiento autoritativo (Jordan, 1991) sobre la sexualidad masculina. En términos metodológicos, me hago eco de Guinzburg (1991) quien sostiene que los “archivos de la represión” pueden servir tanto para realizar una historia de la represión como un estudio de la agencia subjetiva.

James (Jim) Georgoulakis (1948-2017).

Presents an obituary for James (Jim) Georgoulakis (1948-2017). Georgoulakis was a psychologist, soldier, and scholar. An international consultant, leader, and well-respected advocate, he fought behind the scenes for decades, particularly on issues related to psychology and Medicare. He held several leadership positions with the U.S. Army, including director of the largest outpatient mental health program in the Department of Defense and Director of ambulatory care research for six military facilities. Jim's most substantial contribution to the profession of psychology was representing the American Psychological Association (APA) on the AMA's Relative Update Committee (RUC) for 20 years. Among his many awards, Jim was inducted into the MBA National Business Honor Society and named a distinguished scholar in law school. In 2005, he was honored with an APA Presidential Citation for contributions to psychology. He was laid to rest with full military honors at Fort Sam Houston. (PsycINFO Database Record

“Imãos de armas”: o CEP no cinema de propaganda da Primeira Guerra Mundial

We address the shipment of Portuguese troops, undertaking of military exercises, and the visits of Bernardino Machado to the Western Front (Verdun) and to the United Kingdom during the World War One. The cinematic portrait of the “brave Portuguese soldiers” is examined. An alternative view is that of the German amateur film, Afundamento do Augusto Castilho (The Sinking of the Augusto Castilho), which documents how the brutality of the First World War coexisted with a code of military honor and the bravery required from Portuguese fighting men to make up for their lack of modern weaponry.

Dr. Warren Sherman “Sherm” Mathey

Warren Sherman Mathey (LTC USA, Retired), 72, died on Friday, October 28, 2016, in San Antonio, TX. He was buried with full military honors at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. Because of his long involvement and support of the mounted cavalry, even the caisson horses and their riders who knew and respected him participated in the final honors for this remarkable man. The international reach of our profession and his life was evident on the day of the funeral when we received calls from around the globe offering condolences to the family. This was a great surprise and comfort to his grown sons. To his friends and colleagues, he was “Sherm” or “Doc Mathey,” a great veterinarian and leader as well as a truly selfless, gracious, generous, and caring person. After marrying the love of his life, Mary DaLee Ramsey of Orrville, OH in 1967, Sherm graduated from Spring Hill College, Mobile, AL, with a BS in Economics and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. Many of us cannot think of Sherm without first acknowledging his devotion to the US Marine Corps, but instead of just remembering the motto “Semper fidelis,” we think of him as always and faithful. Sherm was always the teacher, facilitator, and encourager—willing to serve in whatever manner was necessary. During his military career, he was both a Marine and a Soldier. His military colleagues have a deep respect for his war service as a young marine officer in the hellish Battle of Hue City and for his lifetime of faithfulness to the ideals of caring the most for the youngest Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines that he encountered. He was always willing to give of himself to promote their success in their military careers, but more importantly, to make them successful in their lives and, through them, in the lives of their spouses and children. Sherm also volunteered his time in numerous Christian and charitable organizations including the Wounded Warrior Project and the Center for the Intrepid, Fort Sam Houston, TX. In 1976, he received his doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from The Ohio State University and joined the US Army Veterinary Corps. The Military Working Dog Program had a great need for a full-time, qualified radiologist and in 1986, he earned an MS in Radiology and Alternate Imaging from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. This training gave an already talented veterinarian the tools to make his greatest professional impact. His devotion to the Military Working Dog Program is unsurpassed, ultimately serving a total of 24 years both in uniform and as a civilian in the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Veterinary Service at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, TX. During breaks in his military career, Sherm also worked for Corometrics Ultrasound, as a mixed-animal private practitioner, and as a contract veterinarian for Sea World of Ohio and Sea World of Texas. Sherm is survived by his wife, Mary DaLee Mathey; his three sons, Darren (Braden), Kevin (Julie), and Ian; three grandchildren, Luke, Evan, and Cybil; his brother, Stanley Andrew “Drew” Mathey; his sister, Maureen “Sue” Bard (Martin); brothers-in-law, George and Jerry Ramsey (Laura); three nieces; and one nephew. You could travel to the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery should you ever want to visit his gravesite and reflect on his lifetime of service to his country and others, but he is not there. He is at home with his Lord and he remains close by in the loving memories of all who were privileged to know him in this life. We encourage you to remember him where you are, in your own way, by building into a friend or colleague's life as Sherm did for each of us and countless others. Choose today to come alongside someone to share their burden and elevate them in a special way.

The Better Part of Stolen Valour

Shakespeare uses the classical comic archetype of the miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) to probe social and ethical issues regarding military honour. These issues are still with us. This article takes as its point of departure the US Supreme Court’s 2012 decision finding the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 unconstitutional on free speech grounds. This high-profile case, centring upon a latter-day avatar of Falstaff or Pistol, suggests both continuity and change in how militarist societies address the challenge of distinguishing true and counterfeit valour. Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays and Henry V, like the Supreme Court opinions, stage a contest between classical epic ideologies of honour and comic recuperations of the coward or braggart. These literary and legal discourses are further contextualized through historical anecdote and Aristotle’s account of courage and cowardice. The Aristotelian figure of the alazōn (impostor) creates a complex interplay between ethics and poetics which plays out in theatre and courtroom alike.

Przesłanki odpowiedzialności dyscyplinarnej sędziów sądów wojskowych

In the Republic of Poland, military courts exercise judicial power and their judges are independent and subject only to the Constitution of Poland and legal acts. The judge of a military court is obliged to serve their country faithfully, uphold the law, perform entrusted duties conscientiously, decide impartially on the basis of legal regulations and be guided by the principles of dignity and integrity. Apart from technical competences, the judge should possess the appropriate traits of the character allowing for the dignified representation in the office. One of the responsibilities (being independent from the others) that is imposed on any judge of a military court is disciplinary liability. The prerequisite for such liability is committing an offense or a disciplinary misdemeanour. That is why, the disciplinary tort includes, among other things, the breach of judicial duties, the breach of dignity of the office, the violation of military discipline, and the breach of the principles of military honour and dignity. This may even result in discharging from the office along depriving the judge of their office rank.

“Moral Execution of a General”

Four-Star-General Günter Kießling (1925–2009) was the highest-ranking West German general in nato and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe. His dismissal due to false accusations that he was homosexual came in late summer 1983, at the height of the conflict over the deployment of new intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Eventually, the Military Counterintelligence Service was ordered to conduct investigations in the Cologne gay scene. The Minister of Defence ordered to suspend the general from active duty without military honours in December 1983. Kießling decided not to retire quietly but to fight for his honour. Since nothing that “incriminated” Kießling was found, the minister altered course completely. The major issue raised by the Kießling scandal later centred around the question of who was to “blame” for it. And finally, an East German agent at the top of the West German Military Counterintelligence Service, who had been compromised in 1990, was another person to blame, as he had an almost ideal role of the evil.

Give them a medal

Drone pilots deserve military honours despite the lack of physical risk, says David Hambling

More than Meets the Eye: Incongruity and Observation in Josephus’s Account of the Triumph of Vespasian and Titus

More than Meets the Eye: Incongruity and Observation in Josephus’s Account of the Triumph of Vespasian and Titus

Beowulf’s Weaknesses

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Archeological Confirmation of the Site of the Battle of Medina: A Research Note

Archeological Confirmation of the Site of the Battle of Medina: A Research Note Robert P. Marshall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Frontispiece: Map showing August, 1813 locations of republican and royalist in the encinal de Medina and vicinity of Bexar and Atascosa Counties, Texas. [End Page 56] The August 18, 1813, Battle of Medina was initiated by a failed ambush attempt by the Republican Army of the North, which was followed by a pursuit of retreating Spanish royalist cavalry through four miles of the very sandy encinal de Medina (oak forest of Medina). Then, the republicans were surprised to come upon a line of temporary defensive breastworks protecting six hundred soldiers of a royalist infantry battalion only recently arrived from Spain, who stood their ground like seasoned veterans. The royalists were well fortified and prepared for battle with nine cannons, including some twelve-pounders. About one thousand republican infantry were caught in a partial enfilade by oblique royalist cannon fire from both flanks. A standing republican infantryman was killed about every six seconds during more than an hour of very close range combat in front of the royalist breastworks. The killing field during the Battle of Medina was there, and stretched from that spot along the road toward San Antonio de Béxar in the rout that followed. (Frontispiece) The earliest recorded archeological evidence corroborating the location of the Medina battleground was in the 1815 diary of Juan Pedro Walker.2 During his travel from Béxar to Laredo, Walker observed skeletal remains of rebel dead from the “Campo de la Batalla de Medina” along the camino que cortaba route of a San Antonio de Béxar to Laredo Road, located west of Gallinas Creek, for a distance of about a league (about [End Page 57] 2 ½ miles) beginning a short distance north of the present-day Bexar/Atascosa County line. The southern terminus of the observed skeletal remains marked the location of the Medina battleground. The other observations of skeletal remains were mostly from those walking wounded who were killed by royalist cavalry as republicans attempted to flee along the road toward San Antonio de Béxar. Analyses of available archival records and maps have documented the site of the August 18, 1813, Battle of Medina to be twenty-two miles south of San Antonio astride Old Pleasanton Road, the successor to the camino que cortaba route of the Béxar to Laredo Road, between present-day Bruce Road and the railroad overpass in northern Atascosa County.3 (Figure 1) The purpose of this research note is to document the archeological evidence confirming that Medina battle site. The absolute archeological requirement for any location claimed to be the site of the Battle of Medina is evidence on the site of the mass burial in 1822 by Mexican Texas Governor José Félix Trespalacios of the skeletal remains of the hundreds of republican dead that had been left unburied on the battleground for nine years. The skeletal remains were buried with military honors near a large oak tree on the battleground, but the skulls were taken to a spot near the Medina River and buried under a pecan tree.4 José Antonio Navarro, a signer of the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico, distinctly remembered seeing a wooden sign on an oak tree on the Medina battleground marking the site of burial of the republican dead. Almost certainly, the site of the mass burial in 1822 would have been very central to the location on the battleground of the skeletal remains. Historian John Henry Brown said that even as late as 1843 he had observed fragments of bones still lying about on the Medina battleground.5 Expert archeological opinion is that human bones buried in the battleground’s very sandy subsoil would not have survived intact for two centuries.6 Over that period of time the lightly acidic and oxygenated ground-water moving through the burial would have caused the bones to be completely dissolved. During dryer weather periods the calcium-enriched water within the burial would have moved toward the surface by capillary [End Page 58] attraction as water evaporated...

The culture of sacrifice in conscript and volunteer militaries: The U.S. Medal of Honor from the Civil War to Iraq, 1861–2014

This article traces the history of one genre of commemoration, the U.S. Medal of Honor, from its inception in 1861, early in the Civil War, to the present. We begin by locating the Medal of Honor historically in relation to other genres that memorialize wartime military service and in so doing construct narratives that address wartime trauma. The central sections of this article identify the main elements of the Medal of Honor as a genre that works to define ideals of military honor and bravery. We present our methodology for analyzing the citations. We code the criteria for awarding the Medal and find a decisive change during the Vietnam War when Medals of Honor increasingly were awarded for defensive heroism, actions that saved the lives of fellow soldiers or retrieved the bodies of fallen comrades, rather than for offensive heroism, efforts to kill enemy soldiers, and thereby further battlefield success. We explain how that change allowed the military to construct a progressive narrative from defeat in Vietnam that also spoke to broader cultural changes in the 1960s. We relate that shift to the transition to an all-volunteer military. We conclude by analyzing on how post-Vietnam narratives of honor affect the ways in which the United States has sought to elicit support from soldiers and civilians for subsequent wars.

The January 25th 2011 "Revolution", 5 years later – a Balance

The struggle between the rebelling masses and the old regime is the fate of every revolution in history. This rebellion has mobilized mainly the forces of the counter- revolution, both the brutal violent force, as well as the delicate strategic thinking soft power, which I refer to as the class brain. In the case of Egypt 2011, this struggle was very clear from the first day. TheSupreme Council of Armed Forces” (SCAF) had sacrificed Mubarak to protect or evensave the whole regime from further radicalization by the popular movement. The military leadership has indeed theatrically saluted with military honors the martyrs of the great Revolution, but at the same time they have severely resisted any claims of this movement. Every achievement was only made possible thanks to massive combat missions. Two demonstrations with more than a Million demonstrators in March 2011 were necessary to overthrow the nominee of Mubarak's cabinet. Two more followed to arrest Mubarak’s sons and his clique and bring them to tribunal in April. And for that alone to happen, this revolutionary wave had to continue with undiminished momentum until July 2011. The maxim of the SCAF was therefore; make minimal concessions towards the revolutionary forces and retain maximum of old power structures. In order for this tactic to work, the SCAF has entered into an alliance with the political power, the only force in the class, which did in fact dispute the Mubarak regime about its share of the power, the Muslim-Brotherhood and all the other groups of political Islam.

Una lettura delle Lettere storiche di Alvise Da Porto

This article aims to reconstruct the figure of Alvise da Porto based on the Lettere storiche (unfortunately, the only source available). What emerges is that in addition to being a writer of great talent, he was also an ambitious young man with a keen ability to interpret political and military events. He was severe in his judgement of all those who entered combat and always seemed better informed and more knowledgeable, both politically and militarily. There are many passages that would indicate him to be a confirmed pacifist who hated any form of military intervention. Yet at the same time he greatly admired swordsmanship (the so-called arte delle armi), given its close ties to the knightly code present in epic poetry; indeed, for him it was in hand-to-hand combat that one acquired military honour. While he does not openly denounce firearms and artillery in his letters, he claims them to be deleterious even before hostilities arise, for when cities are fortified, works of art and farmland are destroyed or greatly damaged. He shows incredibly painstaking precision in his descriptions of the multiple sieges carried out by the troops of the League of Cambrai on cities like Vicenza, his family’s city, which was loyal to Venice.

Martial and Moral Courage in Teleoperated Warfare: A Commentary on Kirkpatrick

ABSTRACTJesse Kirkpatrick's ‘Drones and the Martial Virtue Courage’ constitutes the most thorough attempt to date to show that the operators of remotely piloted aircraft can display martial courage and therefore that it may sometimes be appropriate to award them military honours. I argue that while Kirkpatrick's account usefully draws our attention to the risks faced by drone operators and to the possibility that courage may be required to face these risks, he is much less successful in establishing that operators are capable of cultivating and displaying martial courage. The risks that drone operators face are also faced by members of other professions who are very far from being ‘warriors’.

Gărzile civice şi societățile de tir din Banat între anii 1717 – 1919 / Civic Guards and Shooting Societies in Banat between the Years 1717 and 1919

Gărzile civice şi societățile de tir din Banat între anii 1717 – 1919 / Civic Guards and Shooting Societies in Banat between the Years 1717 and 1919

Habsburg Government and Intermediary Authority under Joseph II (1780–90): The Estates of Lower Austria in Comparative Perspective

On October 18, 1783, a cortege of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Count Johann Anton Pergen and that included a dozen representatives of the four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen) that composed the diet. The group ascended into the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the Imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor's appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government's annual tax demand. As his mother the Empress Maria Theresa had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of Estates' attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadastre that underlay the system of direct taxation. This prefigured one of the reign's celebrated initiatives that culminated in the great tax and peasant labor reform of 1789. Joseph's participation in a court function that dated back to the middle years of the previous reign and that was rooted in a much older ritual in which the Lower Austrian Estates had in corpore received the tax request out of the monarch's own hands largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year, his absence from Vienna prevented its occurrence, and in 1785 he did away with it altogether.