## The Three Veterans at the Ceremony
When Bernard Bluestein, John Christman, and Seymour Nussenbaum attended the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on March 21, 2024, they were the embodiment of a gap in American historical memory that was finally being closed.
Bluestein was 100 years old. Christman was 99. Nussenbaum was 100. They had served in the unit as young men — in their twenties when they were deployed to Europe, when they were inflating rubber tanks in muddy German fields and playing recorded bridge-construction sounds into the night air. They had spent most of their lives unable to talk publicly about what they had done.
The ceremony acknowledged, formally and in the most prestigious venue available, that what they had done mattered. That the creativity and courage and technical skill that the unit brought to its missions had contributed materially to the Allied victory in Europe. That the deception operations they had mounted — and particularly the Rhine crossing deception at Viersen — had accomplished real military objectives at a cost in American lives far lower than it would otherwise have been.
The Congressional Gold Medal is not a military decoration; it is a congressional recognition, the highest honor that the legislative branch of the American government can award. Its presentation to the Ghost Army more than three-quarters of a century after the fact was a specific acknowledgment of a specific injustice: that men who had made real contributions had been required, by the nature of their classified work, to go unrecognized for most of their lives.