## Three Veterans, Three Medals
The three veterans who attended the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony in March 2024 had lived long enough to see a recognition that most of their colleagues had not.
Bernard Bluestein was 100 years old. He had grown up in Chicago, been drafted into the Army, and found himself in an outfit that was doing something completely unlike anything the Army had done before. He had spent decades back in civilian life before the story of the 23rd began to be told publicly.
John Christman, 99, of Leesburg, New Jersey, had similarly spent most of his life carrying a story that could not be shared. The specific nature of his service in the 23rd — what he had done, where he had been, what it had accomplished — was not something he could explain to most people he met.
Seymour Nussenbaum, 100, of Monroe Township, New Jersey, had served in the unit as a young man and built an entire civilian life on the other side of the classified wall. By the time of the ceremony, he was a century old, receiving a gold medal for work he had done in his twenties.
The ceremony was not just a recognition of three old men for their wartime service. It was an acknowledgment that the history of World War II, as the American public had understood it, had a gap in it — a significant gap, involving a unit whose work had contributed materially to the Allied victory, that had been invisible for three-quarters of a century. Closing that gap, formally and in the most prestigious congressional setting available, was what the ceremony represented.