Man of Steel

Our soldiers qualify for various awards here that were never available before, because we are in combat. Combat Infantryman, Combat Medic, Purple Heart, bronze star, etc. Well, we all want these awards to mean something.

The word around the campfire is that a previous unit awarded a combat badge to every person on the FOB when a rocket landed in the FOB. Folks asleep and miles from the impact, folks completely unaware of the attack, and folks within sight of the crater, all got the combat award. Which doesn’t seem right. Seems to cheapen it.

So, our parent unit apparently has decided to tighten the screws. I think part of this is that we are National Guard, so we want to make sure that we really earn the award. The old inferiority complex kicking in.

So now we have absurd results. A combat unit commander said the other day, “Awards are the most difficult thing we do in theatre.” A senior staff officer replied, with feeling, “More difficult than planning an air assault.”

Our soldiers and their leaders have had to do and redo the applications 3 and 4 times, and sometimes more. In some cases, the application got kicked back for insufficient justification, to be redone. Well, the war hasn’t doesn’t wait, so while Nero fiddles, the soldiers have continued to do missions, and have continued to get shot at and IED’d. We’ve got soldiers who have been under fire 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7 times, but still fighting for the first award.

I met with a group of these soldiers the other day. In group of 20, per show of hands, the least number of IEDs one of them had endured was 2, and the most was 4. Numerous direct fire attacks added to the total. I rode out and back in their convoy and before leaving looked at their HUMMVs. Bullet holes through the steel bumpers, bullet strikes - gray and black comets stitched across the doors – spidered bullet impacts in the glass, rubber molding blasted off, all testified to the action they’d seen.

I have made this particular trip many times, and usually feel pretty complacent. However, this time I was escorted by the guys who’d raised their hands; they weren’t complacent. In fact, they were dang skittish. They made me nervous. The driver was incredibly intense; an Indy 500 driver could not have concentrated more on the road nor gripped the steering wheel harder than the kid who was driving us. His boss scanned the road, every vehicle, every clump of grass, every dead dog carcass, every plastic bag, everything within explosion range, ordering the driver to swerve one way or ther other. He was so tense I expect that a bullet would have bounced off of him.

Still, not good enough for the REMF sitting in Division HQ to approve the combat award.