The Medal

"Tianamen Candlelight Vigil 2015" by VeryBusyPeople is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

More than 33 years have passed since the Massacre in Tiananmen Square. But for Daniel Nardini, the memories are still fresh.

In a beautiful lacquer box, I have 50 beautifully made pins of former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong. They were made in China from 1966 to 1974 during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976).

I was given these pins as a "gift" by those wonderful people I knew in Shanghai when I visited there in 1989. What I did not realize at the time was that they gave them to me because they were pieces of bad memories for them. The Cultural Revolution was one of the many truly dark periods in China's tortuous history since the Communists took over in 1949. It only dawned on me later they gave me these pins to get rid of their bad memories — the things that tortured them for years and gave them truly horrible nightmares.

In another lacquer box is a piece that has served as a truly bad memory for me, a medal. This piece is a Chinese military decoration made specifically for the Tiananmen Square Massacre and given to those soldiers who had committed the massacre on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

There are actually two such military decorations; one for the enlisted men and one for officers. I have the one for the officers. It looks impressive. It is made of brass, polished to a fine sheen, with beautifully done enamels, a side bar, and encased in a pure silk red box. The one for enlisted men (which I do not have) is brass encased in a red-lined plastic box.

As I look at it, I always think to myself how can something so beautiful represent something so ugly, dark and horrible? I unfortunately was there in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and I can still remember the screams of the people who died ringing in my ears. I can still remember those ten days of terror as I frantically tried to get out of Beijing. I feared the next day might be my last.

No one is sure how many people were slaughtered during that day. I believe the number ranges from 3,000 to 10,000. The 3,000 comes from the Chinese Red Cross before it was forced to retract what it said. The 10,000 comes from secret cables from both British and American embassy personnel coming from a Chinese source in the Chinese government.

Even if I took the lower end of the number of people killed, it is still too horrendous to contemplate. That number is more than the number of U.S. war dead in 20 years in the Afghanistan War (2001 to 2021). If the number is 10,000, then it is higher than all of the U.S. war dead in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined (about 7,000).

Of course, the Chinese government denies such a massacre ever happened, and if anyone today disagrees with the Chinese government, they will find themselves in prison or "disappeared." In China, there can be no discussion of what happened June 3-4, 1989. There can be no discussion of how the Chinese military slaughtered unarmed old people, women and children, as well as college and high school students demonstrating for basic freedoms Americans take for granted.

There is only the government's version of events; that there was a counterrevolution and the government had to take all measures necessary to put down this "counterrevolutionary rebellion." The very military decoration given to the soldiers who committed the massacre is called "decoration for defenders of the capital." In the West, this military decoration is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre medal.

For me this piece of history is personal. It is an official military decoration based on a total lie. I know, I witnessed the truth. The Chinese government makes what happened on that day sound like an epic battle instead of a horrible massacre.

I showed this military decoration to a U.S. Army veteran whom I know. He was both fascinated and horrified at the same time. He could not contemplate soldiers willingly butchering their own unarmed people. He could not even fathom how I have survived such a horror.

He explained there are a whole set of rules of engagement with an "enemy." This included not killing unarmed civilians no matter what country American soldiers may find themselves in or what war they might be fighting. He told me American soldiers would be court-martialed for killing even one unarmed civilian. No U.S. military decoration he has ever known is anything like this.

I doubt there are any military decorations anywhere in the world like this one, and certainly nothing like it in the West. I can understand now why the people I knew in Shanghai wanted to get rid of all those bad memories. In my case, I shall keep this medal until I die because I do not want to forget. For the sake of all those innocent men, women and children butchered that day, I cannot forget.

Daniel Nardini spent 22 years as a newspaper correspondent for Lawndale News and The Fulton Journal. He has published six books, including his eyewitness account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, The Day China Cried. He is listed as an Illinois author in the Illinois Center for the Book.

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The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.

Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or its members.