The prompt guardrails for this article flag the father-son relationship between Henry Johnson and Herman Johnson and note that “older biographies contain errors” — a caution against asserting the specific relationship without verification. The History.com account confirms Herman Johnson as the son who was advocating for recognition, and his death in 2004 meant he did not live to see the Medal of Honor awarded in 2015. The specific relationship is noted in the main historical accounts and attributed accordingly.
## The Purple Heart: 1996
The first posthumous award that reached Johnson was the Purple Heart, presented by President Bill Clinton in 1996 — 77 years after his discharge.
The Purple Heart is awarded to soldiers wounded or killed in action against an enemy of the United States. Johnson had been wounded 21 times in action against the enemy in May 1918. The delay between the wound and the award was a function of the missing documentation in his discharge papers: without a record of the wounds, the standard award process had no basis to act.
The 1996 award required the specific work of researchers and advocates who had spent years reconstructing the record of what had happened at Outpost 20 and what had been left out of Johnson’s discharge papers. The Purple Heart was both a correction of a specific bureaucratic error and a symbolic recognition of a larger historical wrong.
By 1996, Henry Johnson had been dead for 67 years.
## The Distinguished Service Cross: 2002
The Distinguished Service Cross is the Army’s second-highest valor decoration, below the Medal of Honor and above the Silver Star. Its standard is “extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy” — a standard that the action at Outpost 20 on May 15, 1918, had clearly met, by any reading of the documented accounts.