Medal of Honor

President Obama is set to award one to Staff Sergeant Jared C. Monti who died in Afghanistan defending one of his comrades. My friend and colleage at National Journal Sydney Freedberg, Jr. wrote an astonishing story in 2007 about the process by which medals are awarded and the ways in which they had become stratified by rank and service. At the time Sydney wrote the piece, only two soldiers had earned the Medal of Honor for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check it out.