Doug Sterner’s war against forgotten valor

Our buddy, Doug Sterner, is featured in Stars & Stripes along with his database of hundreds of thousands of records, many of which the Defense Department considers lost in the pretenders’ favorite dodge which has become the Pentagon’s favorite argument against working on their own database;

Thanks to the Army’s bureaucratic redundancy, most of what he needed to assemble this list was filed at National Archives in College Park, Md. Yet the fire was one of several reasons cited by the Department of Defense for not attempting to assemble a list of military valor medals.

“Anyone who says this can’t be done simply doesn’t have the will to do it,” Sterner said.

We all know how much much or an asset he’s been to this blog and the rest of us “valor vultures” as the phonies like to call us, Doug says that his battle isn’t with stolen valor criminals, but rather with “forgotten valor”;

His most powerful inspiration through the years of work, he said, was a close friend, Jaime Pacheco, killed in Vietnam in 1972. Pacheco, a Ranger, sacrificed himself to cover his reconnaissance team’s withdrawal from a bunker complex.

That sacrifice, and the Silver Star that resulted, should never be lost or forgotten, he said.

“I think even worse than when someone pretends to be a hero — stolen valor — is when the nation forgets generations of real heroes,” he said. “That’s forgotten valor. I can’t allow that to happen.”

Category: Stolen Valor Act