Receipt of POW Medals delayed for 32 years - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Receipt of POW Medals delayed for 32 years

They’ve been waiting 32 years for this and it wasn’t easy.

It took advocates, Congress, the secretary of the Air Force, an Army major and military historian, and a determined civilian employee at the Air Force Personnel Center to get Prisoner of War Medals to six airmen who were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.

Lt. Col. David Roeder, Lt. Col. Thomas Schaefer, Capt. Paul Needham and Staff Sgt. James Hughes spent 444 days in captivity, and Capt. Neal “Terry” Robinson and Master Sgt. Joseph Vincent were released after 16 days.

In a Nov. 14 letter from Maj. Gen. Al Stewart, the AFPC chief, the former hostages were at last awarded the medal they had been congressionally authorized to receive more than 20 years ago.

The airmen should have received the medal but, according to a statement from the personnel center, an administrative error caused the paperwork to be lost for eight years.

Then-Air Force Secretary James Roche authorized the hostages to receive the medal in a letter dated Oct. 14, 2003.

It wasn’t until AFPC personnel realized the medals had never been awarded that the wheels started turning to get the airmen their awards.

William Brown, chief of the Air Force Evaluation and Recognition Branch at AFPC, took up the cause and, for a year, hunted down the missing authorization document that turned up in Washington, D.C.

“Thanks to Mr. Brown’s efforts, the Air Force was able to correct this oversight and ensure that these brave Airmen received the honor and recognition of a grateful nation,” the statement from AFPC reads.

Brown was not available to be interviewed and none of the former hostages could be reached for comment by press time.

Fifty-two Americans were taken hostage that day. The imprisoned described beatings, theft and humiliation at the hands of their captors during the crisis, which ended on Jan. 20, 1981, just hours after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president.

Lost in red tape

The story of how it took from 1985 to 2011 to get the airmen their medals is complicated, according to military historian and doctoral student Army Maj. Dwight Mears, who has spent years researching the law regarding the POW Medal.

Mears told Air Force Times that none of the hostages was eligible to receive the medal under the 1985 law that created it because the U.S. was not in a formal armed conflict with Iran. But that didn’t sit well with many hostages and families of detainees who had been held in captivity in conflicts that had not officially been declared war.

To rectify this, Congress amended language regarding the POW Medal in the 1989 National Defense Authorization Act. The language said medal recipients would include those held “by foreign armed forces that are hostile to the United States, under circumstances which the Secretary concerned finds to have been comparable to those under which persons have generally been held captive by enemy armed forces during periods of armed conflict.”

This meant that the determination as to who would get the medal fell to the service secretaries. But the language of the 1989 authorization never made it into the Defense Department’s policy manual. To this day, it contains language that would prohibit the Iran hostages from receiving the medal, Mears said.

“All the military services knew in the early ’90s that the amendment existed, and they simply assumed that it would eventually make it into policy, but it didn’t,” Mears said. “And when they lost the historical knowledge of the amendment, they then started rejecting everyone because the policy said they couldn’t get it.”

Mears said that at least one Iran hostage has been denied a requested POW Medal because of the policy.

In 2001, the State Department nominated Marines who had been held hostage for the POW Medal and secured the award after a Navy judge advocate analysis showed that the Marines were eligible. The other services followed suit shortly thereafter, but the paperwork was never processed. Finally, Brown tracked down Roche’s authorization.

The Army also is awarding its former hostages with the medals.

But to Mears, it’s time for the policy itself, the DoD Manual, to be rewritten.

“I would say it’s high time this regulation was fixed,” he said. “Versions of incorrect law have floated around in this regulation for years — it’s been on the books now for 22 years. … This language comes from when they didn’t even know the [authorization] amendment existed. So it goes without question that it couldn’t possibly be legal if they wrote without knowing the amendment had occurred.”