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Military.com reports:
HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. -- The commander of Air Force Special Operations Command presented the Silver Star medal to a combat controller and more than 30 other medals to special tactics Airmen during a ceremony at Hurlburt Field, Fla., Jan. 18.
According to the citation, [TSgt Clint] Campbell directed 22 air strikes, including multiple danger close employments, resulting in 13 enemy fighters killed. Without regard for his own safety, he ran 300 meters through a gauntlet of enemy fire and then again exposed himself to enemy fire to mark insurgent positions with a 40 mm smoke grenade. Campbell directed an F-16 Fighting Falcon strafing run to neutralize the threat and enable evacuation of the wounded.
Without detracting from the personal valor of TSgt Campbell, The Air Force should improve its air strike to enemy KIA ratio, or find a better way of killing insurgents, like putting poison darts in paper airplanes or something.
4 comments:
Didn't we spend a billion dollars on laser designators so Air force guys wouldn't have to do this sort of thing?
Who gave that zoomie a grenade launcher?
I am guessing the 6 army guys who were with him got commemorative unit coins.
I should also point out that it has been the policy of the US military since Desert Storm to specifically not use body counts as a metric for success or to publish them in any context.
Yeah, I wondered about the whole smoke grenade thing too.
I can't speak to Army coining standards, but my understanding is that Combat Control is the most selective of the SpecOps programs. "Zoomie" is hardly appropriate.
I wasn't aware of the body count policy, but clearly it wasn't followed here.
Airforce = zoomie
navy = squid
Doesn't matter what job they do, only what it says across from the name tag.
When I was a team chief, I bought a bag of coins to hand out (100). Some people liked them. Iraqis looked at us like we were nuts. They wondered what their cash value was. When we told them it was just for fun, they thought we were either trying to swindle them, or we had lost our minds.
The policy for giving away coins totally depends on who owns the coins. The coins I had belonged to me because I bought them with my own money, so I could give them to whoever I wanted. We gave them out liberally to anyone who showed a little effort to help us out. Or if they had a nice rack. Standards vary.
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