Notice Nearby

Decorations register · Notice Nearby

No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the decoration and the writing, not an invented face.

Young-Oak Kim

1919–2005

Colonel (retired; wartime ranks include First Lieutenant / Major)

WWII: Company B / Headquarters, 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate), later 442d Regimental Combat Team; Korea: 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division (battalion command)

Documented decorations

Young-Oak Kim’s Purple Hearts, Bronze Star Medals, and Silver Stars are named in public institutional accounts — not in a museum gift-shop summary. The National Museum of the U.S. Army biography places a first Silver Star and Purple Heart with injuries outside Santa Maria Oliveto in Italy, and a second Purple Heart with wounds at Biffontaine in France. A Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration feature on the 442d’s Go For Broke Day states two Silver Star Medals, two Bronze Star Medals, and three Purple Hearts among his decorations. This decorations page records those three types from those sources. It will not invent a fourth Purple Heart or a device count the VA list does not carry.

A Distinguished Service Cross also appears in the Hall of Valor for the Cisterna prisoner-snatch of May 16, 1944. Service crosses are not a badge type on this register’s medal row. This page will not re-badge that Cross as if it were a Silver Star, and it will not invent a Medal of Honor Kim was not awarded.

He is not yet on a war-roll essay. Korean American leadership of a Japanese American battalion, and later the first Asian American to command a combat battalion in Korea, are public history. They are not printed here as medals.

This name is not yet on a war-roll essay. The decorations above are the documented public record this register will stand on until that essay is written.

A publisher register — not a verification

This decorations register is publisher-curated from public records — Medal of Honor Society citations, published general orders, and official Army, Navy, and Marine Corps biographies. It is not a verified-veteran product. Notice Nearby does not certify service and does not issue badges.

A paid or unpaid memorial does not enroll anyone here. Checkout, VET50, and a family’s mention of service on an obituary are not applications to this list. We add a name only when a public official source names the decoration.

Claiming a decoration that was not awarded is stolen valor. It is a disrespect to those who earned the medal and, in some cases, a federal crime. This register will not invent an award to fill a page.

These pages are a historical register. They are not Legal Publication, not a newspaper notice, and not proof that a statute was satisfied.