Bronze Star Medal

The Bronze Star Medal is both an official recognition of Willie Keith’s courage and, in his eyes, an award whose value is shadowed by the reprimand that accompanies it. Its meaning shifts again when he offers it to May Wynn, turning a Navy decoration into a personal token he would rather give away than keep as an uncomplicated honor.

Award and Citation

After returning to the ship, Willie Keith sorts through mail accumulated at Pearl Harbor, finding no letter from May Wynn. Among the official envelopes is a bulky brown one from the Bureau of Personnel. Inside are a letter and a small, flat maroon box containing a ribbon and the medal. The citation, signed by the Secretary of the Navy, praises Willie for putting out a fire after a suicide attack and calls his heroism above the call of duty an example of the Naval Service’s highest traditions.

The medal’s physical presentation is modest: a ribbon and medal enclosed in a little box. Yet the citation gives the object a formal institutional voice, assigning Willie’s action a standing that goes beyond routine performance. At first, however, the recognition reaches him amid the absence of the personal news he had hoped to find.

Recognition and Reprimand

Willie sits staring at the medal for many minutes before opening the rest of his official mail. A typed letter from the Chief of Naval Personnel brings a different judgment. The Navy’s review disapproves the acquittal of Steve Maryk, while stating that Maryk cannot be tried again and that the decision means the end of his naval career. The review also says that the medical board found no mental ailment in Captain Queeg and criticizes the judgment of both Maryk and Willie, describing Willie as having sided wholeheartedly with Maryk’s actions.

The resulting contrast is unusually sharp: the same official mail gives Willie a Bronze Star Medal for conspicuous heroism and a reprimand for his role as officer of the deck during the crisis surrounding Maryk’s action. He compresses the morning’s opposing verdicts into a dry private thought: “a medal and a reprimand. Nice morning’s haul.” The medal remains a genuine commendation, but it cannot stand alone as a simple measure of how the Navy judges his service.

The Medal Offered to May

When Willie later meets May, he takes the Bronze Star Medal from his pocket, opens its box, and shows it to her, introducing it as the reward for his “colossal heroism.” May looks at it with admiration. Willie then offers it to her, saying, “I want you to have it. That’s the only good I’ll ever get out of it—” May refuses, and Willie asks her again.

The offer changes the medal’s function. The Navy had presented it as a public acknowledgment of duty; Willie tries to make it a gift to May, who responds to it with admiration but initially will not accept it. His words connect the gesture to his mixed feelings about the award: he treats giving it away as the one good he might draw from a distinction entangled with official censure. The medal thus holds together two judgments of Willie’s conduct and, in the reunion scene, becomes a means of expressing what he wants to share with May.