The U.S. Army has granted a Maryland military veteran the Prisoner of War medal, bringing to an end a battle he has fought with the Army's bureaucracy for 18 years and opening the door for other ex-soldiers who have been denied the award under circumstances similar to his.
Ron Dolecki, 76, was part of a U.S. Army team carrying out a classified mapping mission in Ethiopia in 1965 when armed guerrillas ambushed him, his helicopter pilot and a local translator, forced them to march 155 miles across the Sahara desert, and held them captive under harsh conditions for two weeks.
He escaped from the assailants, members of an anti-Ethiopian rebel group known as the Eritrean Liberation Front, and walked 25 miles without arms, food or a map to the Sudanese-Ethiopian border, where he was rescued by friendly forces.
A retired CIA employee who lives in Calvert County, Dolecki first applied for the POW Medal in 2004. The medal is an Armed Forces honor for those who have been “taken prisoner and held captive while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States” and who meet other criteria.
The U.S. Army Awards and Decorations Branch, the agency that rules on such requests, rejected his application. They did so not because of a dispute over what he went through but over how his captors should be characterized.
Branch officials told Dolecki that the Eritrean Liberation Front, an armed and uniformed group they described as “bandits,”…
