"Get a Check!"

A WHILE BACK. Chrysler Corporation used to run a pleasantly melodious ad campaign, called "get a check." "Buy a Charger get a check," TV personality Joe Garagiola intoned cheerily. "Buy a Ram truck--get a check, buy an Omm get a check."

The thing was, getting a check was entirely unavoidable. You simply couldn't escape the fact that if you bought a car from your local Chrysler-Plymouth Dodge dealer, you would get a check for $300, $500 or even $800 if it was an expensive enough car. The fatalism was downright delightful.

Picking up on this attractive advertising gimmick, the U.S. Army has apparently introduced its own brand of "get a check," but this time, it's called "get a medal. You just had to have had something--anything to do with last October's Grenada invasion and you would get a medal.

The Associated Press reported in late March that the Army handed out 8612 medals to reward individual performance. This notwithstanding the fact that the Army only sent about 7000 officers and men on the three-week jaunt. To play "get a medal," the Army showered prizes on planners in the Pentagon, staff and support troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne Division, and Army Rangers at Fort Stewart in Georgia and Fort Lewis in Washington state. The brass at the Army's Forces Command in Atlanta also figured in for some silver "attaboys" and other treats.

All told, the Army awarded:

*About 275 decorations for valor, for combat deaths or wounds

*4581 commendation medals

*2495 achievement medals and

*681 Bronze Stars

The 82nd Airborne, the paratrooping regiment, snagged no less than 6708 individual awards, more awards than there were soldiers actually in on the invasion.

Far less profligate in assessing heroism were the Navy and Marine Corps, with award-to-soldier ratios of less than 1:7. The Marines sent ashore 1000 men and later granted 10 Purple Hearts for combat deaths and wounds, and the Navy handed out seven Purple Hearts to members of its 50-strong contingent.

PRESSED FOR an explanation, an Army spokesman defended that service's open-fisted approach to choosing awards by saying they are "a valuable and effective leadership tool to build unit morale and esprit."

It's hard not to feel a little disturbed by the spokesman's comment. Certainly you have to think about medal-inflation and wonder if a little Government Department levelheadedness about dispensing praise and awards might not be in order here.

Taken at face value, however, the medals might just indicate a different, more significant problem--that the Army actually needed 8612 acts of heroism to pull off a project about as difficult as invading Martha's Vine-yard. The implications for national security are profound and troubling indeed when 7000 tough guys with helicopters and machine guns--and no nagging world press at their heels--needed thousands of acts of valor to defeat a motley crew of Cuban "construction workers" and Third World revolutionaries.

American citizens need to be able to count on more than occasional fits of elan. Just like the rest of us, the Army has bad days--and while they were on a not streak in Grenada some day it might not all click. If it doesn't, we'll need more than buckets of trinkets to save the country.