re: #104 Decatur Deb

“During wartime” could include a lot of medical and accidental deaths to the services.
We fielded up to 3 million soldiers/sailors/airmen at a time for 10+ years, most of whom never went to Vietnam. Army accidental deaths ran into the thousands/yr in those days.

There is a little wiggle room in “lost their lives during wartime.”

That said, we don’t count people who died in Basic Training during the Iraq War as “lost their lives during wartime.”

It’s sort of the same thing referring to combat service in the Persian Gulf War. There were those like my (then) brother-in-law, who was actually in Saudi Arabia in the US Army while I was at Naval Station Rota.

Did I serve “during” the Persian Gulf War? Yes. I worked a fuquetonne of long damn hours fixing every frickin’ ILS and HF system in both the Air Force and Navy in the run-up to the war. Did I serve in combat? No. That’s why I got a National Defense Service Medal (awarded to everyone in the military during a time of war) but not a Southwest Asia Service Medal (because I was nowhere near Kuwait).