Dishonorable Mentions
Steve Watkins
February 1, 2024
The Gaujot Brothers of West Virginia
They must have been hard up for heroes back in the day. How else to explain the Medals of Honor—America’s highest award for valor in combat–given 15 months apart in 1911 and 1912 to the Gaujot brothers of West Virginia, one of whom had once shot and killed an apparently unarmed fellow soldier and got away with it in military court, the other of whom had been court martialed for water-torturing Filipino prisoners and had to pay a whopping $150 fine?
