The simple ceremony took place on Bastille Day, July 14, 2000, in a suite of the Sofitel Hotel in Beverly Hills, not far from where I now live. The Medaille Militaire, created in 1852 by Napoleon III and once awarded to Winston Churchill, was presented to me by Monsieur Yves Yelda, the French Consul to Los Angeles, for my “exceptional courage” while on “special missions” in the Black Forest in April 1945. According to the citation, my small part in the war “facilitated in large measure the success of the last operations of the French Army.”
