Vietnam Vet Doug Sterner, curator of the courageous

A Vietnam vet's growing database and quest to prevent 'forgotten valor'
By CHRIS CARROLL
Stars and Stripes
Published: July 16, 2012

WASHINGTON — Wiry and quick at age 62, Doug Sterner nearly leaped out of his chair to pull a folder off a shelf. It was a list of Army medal recipients that couldn’t possibly exist. Officials believed the only copies of personnel files needed to assemble it — along with some 18 million files in total — were consumed in a fire at a military personnel records center in St. Louis in 1973.

Yet there it was, shelved in a converted bedroom in his Alexandria, Va., apartment with hundreds of other color-coded folders containing more documentation of heroism that might otherwise be forgotten.

“That fire is the biggest dodge,” he said.

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.

For nearly 15 years, as the DOD demurred, Sterner, a Vietnam veteran and former Army combat engineer, did the work himself. He abandoned the mountain views of Pueblo, Colo. — he and his wife had led a drive to change the town’s official nickname to “Home of Heroes” to honor four the city’s four living Medal of Honor recipients — for the northern Virginia suburbs to be closer to existing records.
read more here