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The bronze medals pinned on the chests of National Guard members from Leesburg were bestowed during a ceremony filled with pomp and circumstance and were meant to honor them for guarding a key bridge in Bosnia.
When the guardsmen turned over their Virginia Commendation Medals at last year's ceremony, some were enraged by what they found on the back.
There was a white, oval sticker that said: "Made In China."
"I was furious. I was livid," said Sgt. Mark Seavey, one of the more than 100 members of Charlie Company of Leesburg's Stonewall Brigade who received the medals.
"It's an adversarial country. Then they give us a medal actually made by their country.... To this day it still makes me kind of hot just thinking about it," he said. |
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Seavey complained to a state delegate attending the ceremony - Richard H. Black ( R - Loudoun.)
And now Black, who received
a Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam, said Friday he has filed legislation in the General Assembly proposing that the Virginia medals
be made in the United States from
now on. |
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"The fact that there was something about our Virginia medals that our soldiers would find disturbing, I think is a real concern," Black said. "I'm all for foreign trade, and it doesn't bother me that some of our textiles used in uniforms may come from China, but there's something very special about medals and they ought to be made in the U.S.A."
Black said the medals are "something that is so symbolic, so important to the morale of a soldier." |
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National Guard Maj. Tom Wilkinson, a spokesman for the Virginia Dept.
of Military Affairs, said his agency thought that the medals had been made in the United States because they were ordered from a New York supplier.
"We had no knowledge that they were going to China to have them made," Wilkinson said. "We think our medals should be made in the U.S.A." |
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