The Congressional Medal of Honor (CMH) is our nation’s highest award for valor under fire. The criteria are stiff: a deed of such exceptional bravery that failure to do it would draw no criticism; two eye-witnesses; and, above all, the risk of life. In our nation’s history, we have awarded only 3,427 such medals. Of those, 568 were awarded posthumously. In other words, if you have a CMH, you did something heroic and extraordinary to get it, and there is a one-in-seven chance that you died doing it. (If you were a Marine, the odds were one-in-four.)

Until now.

Congress has recently required the Army and the Navy to tap the World War II honor rolls of our nation’s second highest award for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC; in the sea services, the Navy Cross), for candidates for an upgrade to the CMH. One catch, however: potential upgradees must be of “Asian-American or Native American Pacific Islander” descent.

What started as a provision inserted by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI) into the National Defense Authorization Act of 1996, has become a full-blown research project—initiated last October—involving three full-time, professional historians working at the Presidio of Monterey.

It’s not easy to discover the justification for this latest experiment in affirmative action. Scott Welch, the project’s spokesman, was eager to discuss the team’s findings to date (55 Filipinos, 53 Japanese-Americans, one Korean-American, and one Chinese-American won the DSC in World War II), but he is either unwilling or not permitted to speculate as to the underlying reason for the project. In fact, his boss. Dr. James C. McNaughton, the project’s director, would not even let him reveal the amount of money that the taxpayers have coughed up for this project.

The Army’s public-affairs office was only slightly more forthcoming. They revealed the size of their budget—over a half-million dollars —but when asked why the project existed at all, a Lt. Colonelette Tallon replied, “It’s the law. Congress directed it.”

But why did Congress direct it? The Navy’s spokesman for their parallel project (also a woman) was more honest: “I have no idea. Who am I to second-guess the Congress of the United States? But sometimes I see these things and just shake my head.” The Navy, out of some 3,500 Navy Crosses awarded, found only one possible candidate for upgrade under the provision: a Hawaiian destroyer captain, one of many ships’ captains who got the Navy Cross in World War II. No upgrade was recommended.

John Tajami in Senator Akaka’s office admitted that the law originated in affirmative action: in essence, because we were at war with Japan, a climate of prejudice may have prevented Asian-American soldiers from receiving due recognition for battlefield heroism. Might not a similar climate have adversely affected proper recognition of German-American war heroes? Tajami thought that was possible, but, to his knowledge, no one raised that question during consideration of die law. (In fact, Tajami could not remember any debate at all.)

We probably shouldn’t look to Akaka to seek redress for under-recognized German-American (or Italian-American, for that matter) war heroes. As his spokesman pointed out (as did Welch), 15,000 German-Americans were not interned in camps during the war. (Nor, of course, did any German-Americans officially renounce their citizenship during the war, as some 5,000 Japanese-Americans did.)

What evidence is there that the Army discriminated against Asians in awarding the CMH? One test might be the number of Medal of Honor recommendations for Asians that were downgraded to a DSC. All servicemen know that zealous company-grade officers often recommend awards for their troops only to have them downgraded at the battalion or regimental level. But those hoping to prove discrimination in the case of Asian troops will find the data uncooperative: only six of the 53 DSC’s awarded to Japanese-American soldiers (the Asian group toward which we might expect to find the most hostility) were originally recommended as Medals of Honor.

This upgrade project has not received the kind of attention that other military affirmative action schemes have. After all, a half-million dollars is a drop in the bucket of untold billions that the Armed Forces have spent trying to make everyone equal: everything from refitting heads on aircraft carriers to entrusting multimillion dollar aircraft to the unqualified. No lives will be lost as a direct consequence of upgrading a few medals. But the bits of cloth, as Napoleon put it, for which men are willing to sacrifice so much may now be worth a bit less.