Patriotism and Efficiency!

I don't understand why this process makes Joe Moser feel proud. Let's review the events:

1) He was shot down on a routine bombing run and subjected to the physical horrors of Buchenwald and the mental horror that 2 Frenchmen had been shot on his account.

2) Despite the "Fog of War", he was able to discover those Frenchmen weren't killed after all, long before the US government even found his lost paperwork.

And this is France we're talking about, where when bureaucrats are given the motivational book "Who Moved My Cheese" (oh my god, there's a video ... with music ... shoot me like a Collaborateur!) immediately take off the next month trying to get to the bottom of the unsolved mystery. Not exactly the model of efficient civil bureaucracy, those French.

3) He wasn't awarded the medal that was rightfully his, one he'd earned by risking his life, until he co-wrote a book and gained some small amount of fame.

So the lesson is that you can make all but the ultimate sacrifice for your country in her time of greatest need, but if you're not even mildly newsworthy, the hell if the government will bother with you. I feel prouder already. Hell yeah, let freedom ring!

UPDATE: It's not just him either, apparently 50 years is something of a standard timeframe for the military to deal with such recognition. So does this mean that we'll find out who orchestrated the JFK assassination in 2013? I sure hope so!