I heard an interesting family story from an older gentelman in Poland and I would like to verify how much of the story is true.
So an older gentleman who is a friend of my father told me a story about his step-grandpa (his grandmother's second husband).
The step-grandpa reportedly drunkenly signed up for the US Army and when he sobered up he tried to run away, but was caught 3 states away and sent to Europe.
In Europe he fought at Verdun (?) where his entire unit was decimated and only 14 people survived. Step-grandpa was awarded a silver star for his action in combat.
When they were relieved from their position and sent behind the front lines to rest. Behind the front line they see normal civilan life, people drinking in caffes and enjoying life. They reportedly took a military truck, loaded a machine gun on the truck, went to the city center and started shooting up the town square.
To avoid getting them court-martialed they were first placed in a psychiatric hospital than sent back to the US where after the war ended they were discharged from the Army.
Fast forward many years and step-grandpa somehow ended up in Poland ruled by communists. In the early 1950's step-grandpa and his family were living in abject poverty, so in an act of desperation he decides to visit the US embassy and ask for some kind of financial assistance. In the US embassy when they checked his ID everybody was very surprised, as he was considered a war hero in the US and he and the other 14 survivors were kind of famous and were being searched for. He got a veteran pension of 300 dollars, which was a lot of money in 1950's Poland and even when the communists took half of that monthly pension and gave it back to him in "dollar bonds" the pension still allowed him and his family to live very comfortably.
So how much of this story could be true?
That's a very tall tale, which seems rather unlikely. However, it would be helpful if you could provide some more information: names, dates or locations of any of the people or places involved (there were multiple battles fought at Verdun, but Americans were present at the end).
If you don't want to risk identifying yourself with too much information, you could also try searching for the award: https://valor.militarytimes.com/advanced-search
It's possible he received an award that was not converted to a Silver Star (the Silver Star didn't yet exist at the time, but the Citation Star did and many were later converted). If he started receiving a pension years later, the award must have been documented somewhere.