For Gallantry in Action
By Taylor Baldwin Kiland
Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester didn’t see it coming. First, she heard gunshots and explosions in the distance.
Then a rocket-propelled grenade hit the vehicle directly in front of hers, wounding three members of
Hester’s squad.
It was March 2005, at the height of the war in Iraq. At the time, Pentagon policy forbade women
from serving in units whose primary mission was to engage in direct combat; Hester was assigned to
the National Guard’s 617th Military Police Company, tasked with protecting supply routes in and out
of Baghdad. “It was nothing for us to get shot at every other day or more,” she told NPR.
On a Sunday morning, about three miles east of the city, Hester and her team were surrounded and
fired on by dozens of insurgents. Exposed, she and her squad leader, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein, jumped
out of their truck and ran toward the insurgents, dropping behind a trench line. For 45 minutes, they
exchanged fire at close range; together, Hester and her fellow soldiers killed 27 insurgents, wounded
six more and took one captive. Every member of her unit survived.
For their actions, she and Nein were awarded the Silver Star – and as the first woman to receive the
medal since World War II and the only one to directly engage the enemy in combat, Hester became
an overnight hero.
The Silver Star is the third-highest award for valor, behind the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross (the Army equivalent
of the Navy Cross, the Air Force Cross and the Coast Guard Cross). Originally called the Citation Star, it was first established by Congress
in 1918 to recognize “gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.”