When the Distinguished Service Cross and Citation Star \u2014 forerunner of the Silver Star Medal \u2014 were authorized in 1918, Congress declared that those who earned one would see a boost in their monthly military pay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Awardees got $2 a month, per honor \u2014 even with a century\u2019s worth of inflation, that\u2019s still less than $30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many of those early recipients, like the nearly 150,000 who have followed, received their medals posthumously. Some earned them for acts of valor that came years<\/a>, even decades<\/a>, before their honors came to light, or cleared any number of paperwork hurdles. Some earned multiple awards from actions separated by hours on the same battlefield, or by years over multiple conflicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s impossible to tell every story from every honor, but Military Times\u2019 Hall of Valor Project<\/a> comes the closest. It houses data on 13,462 Distinguished Service Crosses<\/a>, according to project founder\/curator Doug Sterner, who pegged the DSC database as \u201c99.9 percent complete.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are awards of 87,188 Silver Stars identified in the searchable database, including a basic synopsis for some and the full-text citations for nearly 35,000. Sterner, a Vietnam veteran who has testified before Congress as an expert on valor awards and has published nearly 50 books of military history, estimates between 120,000 and 130,000 Silver and Citation Stars have been awarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some details you may not know about the awards, some of their more famous recipients, and their century\u2019s worth of history:<\/p>\n\n\n\t