“Your training kicks in and the soldier kicks in…It’s your life or theirs…you’ve got a job to do—protecting yourself and your fellow comrades.”
Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester was awarded the Silver Star for valor at a ceremony at Camp Liberty, Iraq in June of 2005 for actions while in combat. Not since World War II when a handful of Army nurses were awarded Silver Stars back in World War II for evacuating a hospital under enemy fire has a woman received this award.
Not only was Sgt. Hester the first woman to be awarded the Silver Star since World War II, but she was the first woman to get the Silver Star for engaging in direct combat with the enemy. The convoy her squad was escorting was ambushed near the town of Salman Pak, Iraq on March 20, 2005.
Sgt. Hester’s military police squad, Raven-42, which consisted of eight men and two women in three Humvees were shadowing a 30-truck supply convoy. During the escort mission, approximately 50 insurgent fighters ambushed the convoy. Sgt. Hester along with other members of her squad were in for the fight of their lives.
The official Silver Star Citation can be read here, however, Sgt. Hester’s own account of what happened that day from a 2012 interview with Unsungheroeseducation.com follows below:
It was early morning; we’d went out and cleared the route. There was going to be several convoys coming through that day, we’d went out as a squad and cleared our AO of any roadside bombs, we didn’t find any, and we didn’t see any insurgents or anything like that. Then the convoys started coming through a few hours later, and we just happened to turn around on the right convoy, if you will, and then went through.
They went down the road a little way, and we were following right behind them, and we just started hearing loud and close gunfire, and rapid gunfire, AK-47s and machine gun fire and explosions. So, from the sounds of it, it was pretty serious. Then you saw the smoke and then the trucks, the semi stopped, and we saw that you know, they were in trouble and they needed help.
So we maneuvered our gun trucks in between the semi-trucks and were rolling down through there, and I looked over to the right where all of the insurgents were, where we’d heard all the insurgents, and I looked over there, and I saw about ten shooting from a berm. We turned a corner, we were going to go down a little side road to the right through previous reconnaissance we’d found taken security halts there before. And we were going to go down that road to fight them.
“We would roll around in Humvees with a lot of firepower and a lot of ammunition, and basically if there were bad guys out there, we’d go out and find them.”
My squad leader was in the truck in front of me, and he made that decision, and as they turned the corner, their Humvee took a direct hit with an RPG, knocking the gunner unconscious, down out of the turret. So, they turned down the road, and they stopped about a hundred meters. Maybe a little less than a hundred meters down the road there were several cars parked on the side of that road with their trunks open and just thousands of rounds of ammo and extra weapons.
By the time we got to that stopping point, I’d looked out, and you could see the field more clearly, and there were at least 50 insurgents out there in the field, firing at the convoy, and they were just starting to shift their attention towards us. In a split second, we decided that the best course of action would be to dismount because it would provide more firepower, more than just three gunners, well, two at that point because the first one had been knocked unconscious.
So we got out of our trucks and 4 went to a berm where we could get a clear view of the field, and, like I said, there were several insurgents out there and we just immediately began returning fire. I remember getting out of my truck and hearing the bullets, hearing the bullets whiz by, and pinging off of the concrete and puffs of dust, you know, around my feet, and somehow, I came out unscathed.
In the end, our gun trucks were riddled with bullets; three of our Soldiers were severely wounded. But all in all, I mean, it was a successful firefight for us. I believe we killed something like 39 insurgents, and there was a handful that escaped, we don’t know exact numbers, but we found other firing positions after it was all said and done with.
In a 2005 interview, Sgt. Hester said, “There’s no difference in gender here in the MP Corps—we’re all doing each other’s jobs, the same jobs, there’s no difference. We have female squad leaders, female team leaders, female gunners, female drivers—it’s all the same job. We’re all soldiers in the United States Army.”
Sgt. Hester later served in the Tennessee Army National Guard from 2012 to 2014. There, she was placed in the position of instructor at the 117th Regional Training Institute Military Police School. In 2014, she once again deployed. This time it was to Afghanistan for 18 months as a Cultural Support Team member.
Hester has since been promoted to the rank of Sergeant First Class. In 2017, Hester deployed to Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands as part of the response to Hurricane Maria. SFC Hester’s military police company provided law enforcement support to the US Virgin Islands Police.
SFC Hester continues to serve our country. She says, “I’ll keep doing this until they throw me out!”
I think there is little chance of that.
