A Purple Heart medal is seen during a Purple Heart ceremony June 9, 2015 at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia as the U.S. Army held a celebration for its 240th birthday. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Just in time for Memorial Day, Congress is considering a bill to right a historic (though probably inadvertent) wrong.
American service members who receive the Purple Heart, the medal for those wounded or killed in the line of duty, are entitled to pass on their educational benefits under the G.I. Bill to their children.
But a quirk in current law limits that right to service members who receive the Purple Heart while they are still on active duty. People who receive the medal after they have left the service, which sometimes happens because of delays in the Pentagon review process, lose that right.
This came to the attention of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, when one of her constituents let her know that he had tried to apply the benefit on behalf of his teenager, who was enrolling in Central Washington University, our D.C. Bureau reports.
“My thought was, ‘I doubt that legislators would have done that intentionally.’ I just thought, you know, people probably just didn’t think about how that happens — that some people are going to get retroactive Purple Hearts, or for whatever reason in evaluating them, they’re delayed. So it’s not like an unusual thing,” said the man, who asked only to be identified as Pat, in an exclusive interview with States Newsroom.
Pat was medically discharged from the Army after being wounded in a 2020 missile strike by Iranian proxies in Iraq, retaliation for the American killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike. He was one of 39 service members awarded the Purple Heart in that incident, but the Pentagon’s action came after he had left the service.
Murray went into action and teamed up with North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis to introduce the Purple Heart Veterans Education Act, which would permit retroactive award recipients who served on or after Sept. 11, 2001 to transfer their education benefits to one or more dependents, the D.C. Bureau writes. They unveiled the bill late last week, timed to coincide with Memorial Day.
“As the daughter of a Purple Heart recipient, I’ve seen firsthand the enormous sacrifices Purple Heart veterans make to defend our freedoms, and I feel strongly that we should be doing absolutely everything we can to help all veterans and their families thrive,” Murray said in a statement Thursday.
“It doesn’t make any sense that service members who are awarded a Purple Heart after their service can’t transfer their GI benefits to their dependents, while those who receive it during their service can — and I am grateful to Pat, my constituent in Washington state who brought this gap in the law to my attention,” continued Murray, a senior member of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs.
The bill also would permit dependents to access unused benefits even if their veteran family member has died.
“Purple Heart recipients are heroes who honorably served our country at great costs, and this oversight that prevents servicemembers who received this distinguished award after their service from transferring their GI bill benefits to their dependents needs to be corrected immediately,” Tillis said in a statement Thursday.
“I am proud to co-introduce this commonsense legislation with Senator Murray to close this loophole and ensure every Purple Heart recipient and dependents are able to further their education,” continued Tillis, who also sits on the Senate’s Veterans’ Affairs Committee.
It’s not clear how many people this would affect. The non-partisan Government Accounting Office estimated that the cost is modest, about $500,000 over 10 years, but the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have greatly increased the number of wounded veterans. There is no clear record of how many have received their Purple Hearts retroactively, and an unknown number might do so in the future as the Pentagon adds to its list of recognized injuries, including traumatic brain injury.
We do know that about 1.8 million Purple Hearts have been issued since 1932, according to military historians, around 30,000 of those since 2001.
The new bill was praised by veterans groups, including the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“Unfortunately, not every veteran’s service and sacrifice on behalf of the United States of America is fully recognized while they’re still in uniform,” IAVA CEO and Iraq War veteran Allison Jaslow said in a statement Thursday.
“The Purple Heart Veterans Education Act ensures that those veterans who’ve endured bodily harm on behalf of our nation, but weren’t recognized for it until their service concluded, are able to turn that recognition into an investment in the education of their loved ones.”
