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The flip side of our collecting


hawkdriver
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Occasionally, vets see them differently to us. Collectors revere them. To some vets they're just hunks of metal at the back of a drawer. Those with high value gallantry awards know that they can convert them into cash. Money in their pension fund is often worth more to them than unseen medals in a box.

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Occasionally, vets see them differently to us. Collectors revere them. To some vets they're just hunks of metal at the back of a drawer. Those with high value gallantry awards know that they can convert them into cash. Money in their pension fund is often worth more to them than unseen medals in a box.

 

Absolutely. I've been able to handle many groups of medals so far this year that literally have "sat in the drawer, untouched since 1945". Most of these guys rarely talked about what they did and for many of the families, they discovered the medals after the vet passed on and wondered what this odd-shaped medal with funny writing on it was... (No, I'm not kidding...I hear about that again and again...) I think if some of them knew how valuable their medals were, they would have sold them long ago (I have yet to encounter a family who sold the medals to a collector...they were either lost/stolen/tossed/donated/destroyed or they still have them...)

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Lady and gentleman...this is rapidly developing political overtones, as predicted in an earlier post....and we all know what that results in, don't we?! :o

It gets to be political when we try blame one political party or another, but the honest truth is either no one is to blame or everyone is to blame. The solution to such problems continues to elude society.

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True Dave, when my wife's step-dad died, my mother-in-law had me clean out the basement of all of his treasures(junk) and I found his ribbon bar from his uniform tossed into a box of junk in a work bench. Also in the workbench was a a Bronze Star coffin case with no medal in it. This was all he had left from his WWII experience beside some sweetheart jewelry and a few photo's. I had never known that he had received the BS. After some research, I found that he had received it because he had convinced some Japanese civilians and home guardsman in a cave on Okinawa to surrender. Wow!... and he just tossed it all in a junk drawer.

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It gets to be political when we try blame one political party or another, but the honest truth is either no one is to blame or everyone is to blame. The solution to such problems continues to elude society.q

 

 

When I lived in Russia in the early 90s, I saw plenty of veterans (including some retirees) begging on the streets, still wearing their medals, and in some cases, their uniforms. Very sad. No country has a "corner" on the market of making sure veterans are taken care of...it's a universal problem that's been with us since veterans have been around.

 

Also, there has been the universal problem of what to do with veterans, sometimes suffering from wounds and injuries sustained in combat, who have no marketable job or industrial skills. Throw back a couple hundred years and I would bet you'd find veterans who fought against Napoleon (and others) selling their medals just to get by...

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Put a veterans life into a time line. The time in service is a very small part of it. Your average enlistee/draftee was very young and if lucky lived a long life filled with many good or bad experiences that lasted longer than his military service. Did it affect all the same? No.

Some used it to excel, some as an excuse but most just picked up their lives and dealt with it the best they could.

No judgments are necessary.

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Here in the UK the public actively show their support for our vets through the charity "Help for Heroes". This was set up on the initiative of some private citizens in 2007 to raise additional funds for the rehabilitation of our wounded servicemen / women above and beyond what the government provides. It's been hugely successful and there's scarcely a week goes by without some fund-raising events being held somewhere in the country. It continues to go from strength to strength. See the link below.

 

http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/

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