Not quite. A pal of mine in the Army used to wear a gold medal, with the face of a different great man on either side. One I knew: Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish Count and engineer officer who came to this country when it was fighting the British to become a new nation where there would be no more Counts or Noblemen; he designed the fortifications at West Point and eventually rose to the position of Naczelnik (commander-in-chief) of poland's forces...but returned to America upon his retirement. Why the medal with the Polish General, I asked. *Because without him and what he did, there would have been no America, and I am an American,* he explained.
The guy on the other side I didn't know. I found out that John III Sobieski was from 1674 until his death King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, and that when the Turks besieged the Austro-Hungarian capital of Vienna and were about to move in for the kill, the forces organized and commanded by the Polish King Jan Sobieski came to the rescue like the cavalry in an old Western movie with savages surrounding a wagon train.
So you wear the medal with Poland's two greatest heroes on it because you're Polish, I asked?
Oh no, he replied, I'm an American. I wear it because my grandparents and great-grandparents were Austrian, he said.
King Jan Sobieski died in 1696. Eighty years later, the American colonists began their revolution, with the help of Brigadier General Kościuszko and the Marquis de Lafayette, and the cursing German Baron called von Steuben. One of these days, I'll have to find myself one of those medals to wear on my dogtag chain. BTW: the date of the Battle of Vienna that prevented the muslum army from overrunning Europe and crashed their dream of imperial domination was in 1683, on a date they can never forget: September 11th, more generally thought of in this country as 9/11.
