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Cloquet man gets ‘overdue’ medal

David Danielson and his family are used to military service and long journeys. Recent generations of men in his family have almost universally served in the armed forces. Going back further, his great-great-great-grandfather was among those who t...

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U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan lets Dapper Danielson of Cloquet pin a long-overdue service medal on his brother, David Danielson, during a ceremony Friday morning in the congressman’s office in Duluth. Danielson served as a Marine in an American offensive in Cambodia and has waited 41 years to receive his due. Bob King/Forum News Service

David Danielson and his family are used to military service and long journeys.

Recent generations of men in his family have almost universally served in the armed forces. Going back further, his great-great-great-grandfather was among those who traveled alongside Chief Buffalo through the Great Lakes in birchbark canoes to sign the Treaty of 1854 in Washington, D.C.

It stopped the removal of Lake Superior Chippewa from their homelands and established reservations in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.

“I’m just so proud of that history,” said the 61-year-old Danielson, who made a roomful of friends and family proud of him on Friday, when he was pinned by U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan, DFL-Crosby, with an Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal among a pair of medals he received on the day.

The medals were presented in the congressman’s office on East Superior Street. The Expeditionary Medal is given to soldiers for military campaigns for which no other medals exist.

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For Cloquet’s Danielson, it was a long journey from service to being honored and credited for it. The pinning ceremony came 41 years after it was due and brought with it military benefits that had eluded Danielson all those years due to clerical omissions on his discharge paperwork.

“My life was on hold,” said Danielson, sporting a stylish camouflage shirt trimmed in the colors of the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa. “I thought I was the only man in the military not able to get his medals.”

Danielson served with the U.S. Marines in Cambodia, taking on the Khmer Rouge, which had allied itself with the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War era. Danielson was an “81-(millimeter) mortar man,” he said, noting he only fired 60-mm rounds throughout the Cambodian offensive.

After his service, he spent years of futility writing the Department of Defense in an attempt to rectify the errors on his paperwork. He finally turned to Congressman Nolan’s office with a letter “as a last resort,” roughly two years ago, Danielson said. When the medals arrived from out of nowhere in the mail, Danielson said he cried for an hour upon opening them.

“It’s long overdue,” said Kevin Dupuis, a longtime friend of Danielson’s and a tribal council member on the Fond du Lac band’s Reservation Business Committee. “It’s also an all-too-common oversight. Native Americans have some of the best per capita service records in the military, but look at what the Code Talkers went through (to get their just recognition).”

The code-talking program wasn’t declassified for 25 years, producing silence that denied participants recognition for the role they played in World War II.

Future generations of soldiers need to see examples of an America that takes care of its own, Nolan said.

“We have a profound moral obligation to protect them,” Nolan said of military veterans, before also pinning medals on Michael Hartse of Bovey, who served in the Army during Vietnam and had been denied a host of medals for similar record-keeping oversights.

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“He’s so typical of veterans,” Nolan said of Hartse. “He just did what he had to do.”

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