Duststorms in the Rearview
Teflon Don, Badger Six made it out. On their way home after a long drive to Kuwait:
It could have been a bad night, but it turned out pretty well. One of the few tense moments for me was when our driver suddenly took the Humvee through a long chain of potholes. The conversation went like this:
“Hey, stay out of those!”
“Why, what’s the big deal, man?”
“Those aren’t potholes, those are blast holes!”
“They are?”
“Yeah, and the thing about this screwed up country is that they like to put new bombs where the old bombs were. If I get blown up one more time, I’m gonna have to kill someone, and the bombers are awfully hard to find.”
Not all the Badgers made it. Badger Six with the numbers:
To summarize in numbers Team Badger accomplished the following
- Missions Performed - 647
- Improvised Explosive Devices Reduced - 458
- Kilometers Traveled - 51135
The Soldiers of Team Badger were nominated for or received the following awards
- Bronze Star Medal with V Device for Valor - 1
- Bronze Star Medal for Service - 25
- Purple Heart - 35
- Army Commendation Medal with V Device for Valor - 3
- Army Commendation Medal for Service - 69
- Army Achievement Medal - 7
- Combat Action Badge - 97 (includes 7 awards from previous deployments; the Soldier was thus ineligible to recive the award again, but would have qualified had he not had the award.)
- Combat Field Medical Badge - 3
There were 35 Soldiers Wounded In Action - 16 required evacuation.
Three of our Comrades were Killed in Action.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Teflon Don and Badger Six gave us a window into one unit at war, an Idaho National Guard combat engineer company. A remarkable team, together the best combat writers operating Iraq in their time there. Some of their stories of the living and the dead, what they did and what they died for, here:
Little Saddam (guest-blogged at this site).
The Road to Hell (Devil’s Windchime).
Gordon, aka TD, out his way out memorializes someone else who didn’t make it. Someone who made some of the history Gordon took part in.
TD and B6 picked up where an earlier grunt blog, A Day in Iraq, left off. Go there and click on “A Brief Uncertainty” in archives.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:19 am on Monday, September 17, 2007
2 Responses to “Duststorms in the Rearview”
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September 17th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Welcome home, and thank you.
September 18th, 2007 at 12:11 am
You are right about them being the best writers in theater. Some of their work is bloody brilliant and deserves to be read by a much wider audience.
Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for more than I can express.