Acknowledging a POW’s sacrifice, eligible for Purple Heart

Acknowledging a POW’s sacrifice
Decades after their deaths, they are eligible for Purple Heart
By Brian MacQuarrie
Globe Staff / August 2, 2009

EPPING, N.H. - The World War II mess kit still gleams when the sun strikes its aluminum, a treasured family keepsake that bears hundreds of tiny markings chiseled in secret in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

The etchings form a cross, the letters R.I.P., and the date, Dec. 28, 1942: the day when an Epping farmboy, Private Joseph Norman St. Laurent, died in the Philippines after surviving the Bataan Death March, the hell of a prison ship, and a scavenger’s diet of worms, grubs, cats, and monkeys.

If St. Laurent had died in combat, he would have been awarded a Purple Heart, a presidential honor to acknowledge the sacrifices of those killed or wounded while serving with the military. But because he perished in captivity, St. Laurent and 12,000 other US veterans who died in prison camps in World War II never received that recognition.

Now, more than six decades later, the Defense Department has expanded its criteria for the medal to include any POW who died in captivity after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. As a result, in the first ceremony of its kind in the nation, the next-of-kin of many of the 61 prisoners from New Hampshire who died during World War II and the Korean War will gather at the state veterans cemetery Aug. 8 to honor their long-deceased loved ones.
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Decades after their deaths, they are eligible for Purple Heart