Silver Stars

WaPo provides a lengthy and detailed account of the battle that led to Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester's Silver Star (and a number of other citations for her unit.)

The two soldiers crept along the trench line, bullets thumping into the dirt around them. One was a lanky family man, 36, with two young sons and a 15-year career at International Paper Co. The other was a petite, single woman, 23, the floor manager at a Nashville shoe store. Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester handed Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein a grenade. He had the better arm. Nein hurled it at the insurgents, who were crouched in the same trench, firing their AK-47 rifles at the Americans in the early afternoon. Hester and Nein inched forward, the two recalled, Hester firing her black M-4 assault rifle next to Nein's ear. By the time the soldiers climbed out of the trench, their lips were chapped from the heat, their faces smeared with dirt, and four insurgents lay dead or dying nearby. "I really don't know who killed who," said Hester, who stands 5-foot-4, speaks with a twang and walks with a swagger. "He could have got three, I could have got one, I don't know. I know for sure I got at least one." The U.S. military handed out combat citations last week for the March 20 battle, in which a military police squad of two women and eight men from the Kentucky Army National Guard killed 27 insurgents and wounded six in an orchard south of Baghdad. Hester won the Silver Star. She was the first female soldier to receive the award for exceptional valor since World War II and the first ever to be cited for close combat.

Cori Dauber blogged It's interesting that this comes out the same week as a suicide bomber hits a truck carrying mostly female Marines, resulting in the largest toll in a single incident (as we are told over and over and over) of female service members since World War II. But a number of outlets suggested, or just out and out asserted (as CBS's David Ensor did) that this one incident would be a blow to public support, as if the deaths of women would somehow hit the home front harder than the deaths of men, despite the fact that there's no evidence to support that claim. It's long been assumed in some quarters that Americans simply "were not prepared" to accept the deaths of her daughters in combat, yet since Desert Storm American women have been making the ultimate sacrifice and the sun has continued to rise on the Republic. Yet if public support is so finely pegged to what happens to women and women specifically, then Sgt. Hester's story should have raised support, no? Meanwhile, speaking of Sgt. Hester, everytime that engagement comes up, the networks all use the same B-roll (file footage) of the fighting, so shaky you can barely make anything out.

Bill @INDCJournal blogged An amazing story. Though it's somewhat frustrating that the only accounts of heroism that make it into the Washington Post require a secondary, politically correct or unusual narrative ...

I realize WaPo may have had their own reasons for running this story (they usually do), but I was pleased and proud to hear Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester's story