{"id":15436,"date":"2009-11-04T10:46:31","date_gmt":"2009-11-04T15:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=15436"},"modified":"2009-11-04T10:46:31","modified_gmt":"2009-11-04T15:46:31","slug":"the-injustice-of-the-cib","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=15436","title":{"rendered":"The injustice of the CIB"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, (formerly LT) Nixon<\/a> sent me a link to a campaign website for a Republican candidate<\/a> for North Carolina’s 4th District named George Hutchins. We giggled about how busy the website looked and I joked that it sort of looked like Homer Simpson’s webpage<\/a>. The multi-colored text, the irrelevant pictures of Teddy Roosevelt, John Wayne, the Alamo, not to mention the tourism pictures of Ol’ George at Windsor Castle and some odd relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh and Raleigh, NC in his district. Somehow his visit to Windsor Castle qualified him to be Congressman.<\/p>\n

Then I went to read his bio – lo and behold, he was claiming that he was in the same unit as COB6 and I in Desert Storm. The Second Armored Division (Forward) of Garlstedt, Germany.<\/p>\n

\"hutchins-bio\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hutchins made a big deal about his SWAT medal and it’s THREE BRONZE STARS (which only means that he was in the theater before Jan 15th and after Feb. 28th, 1991) and his TWO Kuwait Liberation Medals (actually, ONE Kuwait Liberation Medal and ONE Saudi Arabia Defense Medal). But then he wrote some drivel about how the Army treated him unjustly and didn’t award him a Combat Infantry Badge (CIB) – because he was a 12B Engineer. So he joined the Marine Corps and convinced them to award him a Combat Action Ribbon (CAR) for his service in the Army.<\/p>\n

I checked the Navy regs and they will award the CAR for people who earned the CIB or Combat Medics Badge (CMB) – but Hutchins had neither. So I emailed him and told me that he’d told the Marines that his combat engineers had been assigned as “mechanized infantry” in our portion of Desert Storm – that his job had been to ride behind the Bradleys and protect them from Iraqi infantry. As if our coax machine guns and 25mm main guns couldn’t.<\/p>\n

Well, because of my questions, Hutchins put his DD214s on his website last night, and he did indeed get the Marines to award him a CAR. That’s y’all Marines’ problem. The guy degraded your CAR and our CIB’s reputation remains intact. If the Marines want to roll over for a legal specialist’s claims to combat service, that ain’t my problem. For the six months that I spent with that unit after Desert Storm, I had to listen to all kinds of complaints from tankers and clerks and cooks who thought they deserved a CIB, too.<\/p>\n

If you folks want a CIB, join the infantry. The only time anyone wants to be an infantryman is when the awards are being handed out. George also took down some language last night that he had used about the Marines correcting the “injustice” of the Army’s failure to award him a CIB.<\/p>\n

Here’s my engineer story from Desert Storm; our squad of engineers rode behind us with our company trains. About a thousand meters into Iraq after crossing the berm, our engineers had to go back to Saudi Arabia because one of their 12Bs had forgotten his M203. I asked Ol’ George if that had been him, but he didn’t answer. <\/p>\n

I wouldn’t have mentioned this whole if George hadn’t been such a dick in his emails and on the phone when I called him. And I was curious as to why he made such a big deal out of;<\/p>\n

The Main Attack Launched against SADDAM HUSSEIN’S elite Republican Guard Armored Forces in Southern IRAQ and KUWAIT, {February 24 – 28, 1991}, was spear-headed on the second day of the ground battle, by GEORGE HUTCHINS’ unit, which became known as OPERATION DESERT STORM.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That narrative doesn’t include the fact that “GEORGE HUTCHINS’ unit” went into Iraq more than a week before the ground war and fought a three day counter-reconnaissance armor\/artillery battle in Iraq. So I still wonder if George was in 2AD (FWD). He got pretty defensive with me and finally hung up on me, so I have my doubts.<\/p>\n

You can be proud of your service without embellishing and being a dick about it. If I lived in NC’s 4th District, I think I’d vote for someone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, (formerly LT) Nixon sent me a link to a campaign website for a Republican candidate … The injustice of the CIB<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phony-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}