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Awards
Here's another article regarding the recent announcement of two additional Silver Stars being awarded to 3/2 SBCT soldiers.
MIKE GILBERT; The News Tribune
The deep buried bomb hit the Stryker so hard it blew off the back ramp and sent Staff Sgt. Jon Hilliard flying out of his hatch, shot like a cork from a bottle.
“You’d think that something like that would’ve hurt,” the 26-year-old infantryman recalled Wednesday. “But actually it was almost serene.
“I remember feeling weightless, and then there was a bright yellow light at the bottom of my feet and I was flying through the air,” he said. “The next thing I know I’m looking up at the sky and ... it’s on fire.”
Hilliard recounted the March 24 blast after a ceremony Wednesday at Fort Lewis, where he and another soldier, Staff Sgt. Ismael Iban, were awarded the Silver Star medal for their heroism under fire.
The awards make it 10 soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division to receive the nation’s third-highest decoration for combat valor during its 2006-07 deployment. The brigade returned home to Fort Lewis in September after 15 months in Iraq. Hilliard landed hard on the ammo boxes and other gear stashed atop the 20-ton steel Stryker. He didn’t break anything, but the impact racked his left leg from the hip to the ankle.
Insurgents followed the bombing with gunfire and grenades. Despite the pain, Hilliard climbed up and cut down a machine gun that was tangled in the anti-sniper netting strung across the top of the vehicle, according to the brigade’s account of the fight. Nobody else knew where the shooting was coming from, but Hilliard saw the enemy and fired back, enabling others to begin to get wounded men out of the crippled Stryker. He later used a grenade launcher to put nine high-explosive rounds on the enemy position.
All seven wounded men in Hilliard’s truck would survive, though two lost a leg. Hilliard kept fighting until he could no longer walk, due to the pain in his ankle.
The attack took place in Baqouba, where Hilliard’s 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment was the first of the brigade’s units to fight in what al Qaida in Iraq had claimed as the capital of their new Islamic republic. It would be another three months before more of the brigade moved north from Baghdad to battle the insurgents who’d dug into the town.
[...]