How the city has honored them: the commemorations, tested

1883 – 2017

The test: This section's last subject is the honor the city itself has paid, tested like the decorations. The brief form of the question — are there streets, schools, or buildings in Mishawaka named for the decorated of record? — returns a negative at the record's strength: no street, school, or building named for a decorated Mishawaka serviceman or servicewoman was found in any source. The battle-named streets of Normain Heights, the veterans' housing subdivision, commemorate battles, not decorated men. What the city has done instead is of three other kinds, and each is documented.

A post named for the fallen: The honor Mishawaka pays in names, it pays to its dead rather than to its decorated. The Grand Army of the Republic's Houghton Post No. 128, chartered in 1883 and standing to 1936, bore the name of Captain James Houghton of Company I, 9th Indiana, killed at Shiloh on 7 April 1862 — a naming for a fallen captain, who holds no decoration of record; the post's course stands in the Veterans section and the captain's death in Wars. The same form returned in the present century: American Legion Post 161, founded in 1919, was rededicated as Ryan A. Balmer Post 161 on Veterans Day 2007, five months after Balmer's death at Kirkuk — the act recorded in the Congressional Record of 13 November 2007. The city's two Legion and G.A.R. namings both honor the fallen, and neither man is in this section's decoration record beyond Balmer's Purple Heart. The pattern is the finding: Mishawaka names its posts for the dead it brought home in coffins, and its markers for the decorated it brought home alive.

The marker and the march: For the decorated, the city's instruments are the historic-marker programme — which carries Richard Brenneman, its text quoted in his article above — and the welcome home of April 1973. One further commemoration belongs to Balmer, and it is kept not by the city but by his service: the Air Force Office of Special Investigations' detachment at Hill Air Force Base holds an annual memorial ruck march in his honor, documented in its ninth year in June 2016 and its tenth in 2017, the detachment stating that it "has carried on this tradition to honor Ryan and his family." Finally, the boundary of civic honor is stated from the Wars record, because a reader of this section will look for the later names on stone: the city's general memorials — the 1884 soldiers' monument and the 1928 plaque — name no names at all, and no memorial in Mishawaka names the dead of the wars after the First World War. The decorated of those wars stand in this section and in the marker programme, and nowhere in stone.

Sources:

1. Veterans section of this build (Houghton Post No. 128, 1883–1936; Post 161 founded 1919) and Wars section (Houghton's death at Shiloh; the 1884 monument and 1928 plaque naming no names).
2. Congressional Record, House, 13 November 2007 (the rededication of Post 161 as Ryan A. Balmer Post 161, Veterans Day 2007).
3. Hilltop Times (June 2016) and DVIDS (2017), on the AFOSI memorial ruck march at Hill AFB, ninth and tenth annual.
4. City of Mishawaka, historic markers programme (the Brenneman marker); the Normain Heights record, in the neighborhoods and architecture records of this build (battle-named streets).