Women at War
11
FIRSTS:
SERGEANT HESTER’S
SILVER STAR
In 2005 twenty-three-year-old Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester (
below
) became the
first US woman to earn a Silver Star for engaging in direct combat with the
enemy. This was ten years before the US military officially allowed women to
serve in ground combat units. Hester, a member of the Kentucky Army National
Guard, had been deployed to Iraq to protect American truck convoys. “Basically,
we would go out in our Humvees
and we would clear the route [of
improvised explosive devices] or
insurgents before the convoys would
start coming through,” Hester said.
Hester was a military police
officer, not a member of a unit where
close combat happens frequently. Yet
in March 2005, insurgents ambushed
the thirty-truck supply convoy that
she and her unit were protecting.
It was up to Hester and the other
members of her unit to protect
the American drivers. As rocket-
propelled grenades and heavy gunfire
rained down on the convoy, Hester
and her squad leader ran toward three attackers hiding in a trench. At the end of a
forty-five-minute firefight, Hester had killed three insurgents. In all, her unit had
killed or wounded more than thirty insurgents. Only one American was injured.
Hester’s citation reads, “She then cleared two trenches with her squad leader . . .
and eliminated three [insurgents] with her M4 rifle. Her actions saved the lives of
numerous convoy members.”
