Database of Veterans’ Medals Cited as Alternative to ‘Stolen Valor’

Database of Veterans’ Medals Cited as Alternative to ‘Stolen Valor’
By JAMES DAO
June 28, 2012

In his opinion striking down the Stolen Valor Act on Thursday, United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy offered an alternative solution for defending the military’s award system against fakers, one he said would not infringe on First Amendment rights.

“The government could likely protect the integrity of the military awards system by creating a database of medal winners accessible and searchable on the Internet, as some private individuals have already done,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “Were a database accessible through the Internet, it would be easy to verify and expose false claims.”

“Some private individuals” might have been a reference to Doug Sterner, a Vietnam veteran who for more than a decade has been painstakingly logging military award citations into a public database, a task the Defense Department has declined to take on.

So far, Mr. Sterner said on Thursday, he has logged more than 104,000 award records, including every recipient of the top two tiers of military honors: the Medal of Honor, the highest military award, and the Air Force Cross, the Navy Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal. (The Congressional Medal of Honor Society also maintains a database of all Medal of Honor recipients.)

Mr. Sterner says he has done all that data entry himself, helped on the technical side by Militarytimes.com, which hosts the database, known as the Hall of Valor. He asserts that for a few million dollars, he could hire a team of data entry workers and, within three years, log every military valor award ever awarded by the United States military.

“I’ve done this much by myself,” he said. “Imagine what I could do if I had a team.”
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