99 year old 82nd Airborne vet finally receives medals from WWII

Sergeant First Class Marvin Cornett

This story about Marvin Cornett receiving his earned awards decades after bureaucratic incompetence was sent in by Jeff LPH 3. Reminds me an awful lot about my grandfather, who’d be 101 now. He too was wounded in Italy and never received a Purple Heart for it. Like Sergeant First Class Cornett, he also believed that the medals were for the men who didn’t make it back.

Shaky but sturdy, retired Sgt. 1st Class Marvin Cornett stood tall in a uniform he hadn’t worn in more than half a century to receive an overlooked award he’d been due since 1944.

Donning his “Eisenhower jacket,” a green, waist-length jacket worn by the famous general in the later stages of World War II, a garrison cap and matching trousers, Cornett was the center of attention at American Legion Post 84, in Auburn, California, Monday for an outdoor ceremony in which he finally received his Purple Heart and Bronze Star Medal.

Cornett, 99, came in not an inch shorter or a pound heavier than in his fighting shape of three-quarters of a century past, when he stood 5-foot-2-inches tall and carried 110 pounds on his frame.

More than 77 years ago, after having helped capture Sicily, completing a nighttime combat jump in the rain and seeing heavy combat during the Allied invasion of Italy, Cornett was wounded during a combat assault at Anzio on Jan. 31, 1944, which pulled him from the front lines.

His wounds, severe enough to send him home, were listed in unit paperwork. But in the blur of wartime bureaucracy, they were lost.

…

After his injury, Cornett was sent back to Fort Benning, Ga., to serve as an instructor at the Army’s Airborne School. It was there he met and fell in love with a new kind of soldier, Eloyce Miller of the Women’s Army Corps, who’d come to the base to work as a rigger, packing parachutes for the airborne training school.

He had recently bought a surplus Army Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“My mother saw him on that and that was it,” Cornett’s daughter, Jan Mendoza, told Army Times.

After three months courting they married, and shortly after the war ended he left the Army. But not for long. Cornett returned to uniform in 1947, serving mostly in motor transport and later recruiting while raising a family before retiring in 1968.

He’d joined the Army in early 1941, before the Pearl Harbor attacks, leaving his coal mining, eastern Kentucky home to see the world, live in Europe and eventually settle in California, where he went on to a second career with the California Highway Patrol after the Army.

Mendoza said her father did 100 pushups and ran six miles a day before sunrise for most of his adult life. He proudly flew an 82nd Airborne Division flag in front of their home, wore a hat and planted a fresh division bumper sticker on his car to honor his storied unit.

More at the source, including some great pictures. Source; Army Times

Category: Army, Bronze Star, Guest Link, Purple Heart, Real Soldiers, War Stories, We Remember