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thedrifter
01-24-06, 08:48 AM
January 30, 2006
Awards under fire
Combat Action Ribbons went to Kearsarge and Ashland crews. But some Iraq-savvy Seabees and corpsmen say they rate it, too

By Andrew Scutro
Times staff writer


While in Iraq in 2004, Seabee Lt. Cmdr. Matt Stephens asked his commanding officer if their unit, Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 23, rated a Combat Action Ribbon.

The reply was blunt.

“I was told to stick it … that [a combat award] wasn’t going to happen,” Stephens said.

He and fellow Seabee reservists from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio formed a task force with Marine engineers in Ramadi, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in Iraq.

They took regular small-arms, rocket and mortar fire inside and outside the wire. They suffered casualties.

Stephens, a dental officer who works for the Department of Veterans Affairs as a civilian, drove a cargo truck between Al Asad Air Base and Ramadi at a time when drivers were more important than teeth and gums.

On one mission with a Seabee Engineer Reconnaissance Team in Fallujah in December 2004, he returned fire.

“An insurgent popped up in a window and I pulled the trigger,” he said.

But, according to what have become controversial regulations for the CAR, what Stephens and hundreds of fellow Seabees, corpsmen and other sailors have done in Iraq is not enough to rate one of the most highly regarded Navy Department awards for personal conduct under fire. And in Iraq, the definition of what constitutes combat for sailors is convoluted and inconsistent. Battle-scarred sailors like Stephens believe they rate the coveted award.

“To me, the Navy is giving us the cold shoulder,” he said.

Differing definitions

The term “Navy Department” is key to the debate.

Seabees and corpsmen serving in Iraq are generally assigned to Marine Corps commands, and Marines take a historically strict view on what defines combat.

The relevant Marine Corps command must recommend and approve awards such as the CAR for sailors serving under their operational authority. But the Corps’ reputation for stinginess in handing out combat awards isn’t the toughest problem sailors have to overcome.

The fundamental criterion for the CAR under the Navy secretary award instruction is participation in a “bona fide ground or surface combat firefight or action during which he/she was under enemy fire and his/her performance while under fire was satisfactory.” There are further amplifications for specific types of traditional combat.

But the war in Iraq is anything but traditional combat.

Sgt. Maj. Gary Harris, the senior enlisted Marine for II Marine Expeditionary Force, is in Fallujah. He told Marine Corps Times that because of the awards manual language, common forms of enemy contact in Iraq do not fit the definition of combat. A combat patrol ambushed by a command-detonated mine, for example, does not necessarily rate.

Regardless, such life-threatening events happen every day.

“The minute you go outside the FOB [forward operating base], you’re in combat,” Harris said.

Who rates a CAR and who doesn’t in Iraq today is “a very touchy subject,” he said.

And if that tangled mess wasn’t enough, the Navy’s latest definition of “combat action” has made matters worse.

In December, Navy officials awarded the crews of the amphibious assault ship Keasarge and dock landing ship Ashland the CAR for an errant terrorist missile attack on their ships. The August incident occurred while both ships were tied to the pier in Jordan.

Initial news reports said three rockets were launched over the Aqaba harbor (the award citation now says seven were launched), and one arched past the bow of Ashland, hit a nearby warehouse and killed a Jordanian sentry.

No sailors were harmed or equipment damaged in the attack. The ships quickly sortied to safety at sea — per standard operating procedure — leaving their Marine contingent ashore.

But those actions were enough, in the Navy’s view, to warrant a combat action award. That’s because subset criteria in the awards manual includes the following justification: “Personnel aboard a ship are eligible when the safety of the ship and the crew were endangered by enemy attack, such as a ship hit by a mine or a ship engaged by shore, surface, air or subsurface elements.”

The award nomination approved by Naval Forces Central Command states that sailors and Marines “executed well-rehearsed pre-planned responses and watchstanders immediately reinforced security, manned remaining crew-served weapons and deployed additional security reaction forces.”

Among the justifications: “This engagement of the ship by shore attack endangered the crew as evidenced by one Jordanian killed in action and one Jordanian wounded in action at the joint Kearsarge Jordanian pier entry control point near the ship’s fantail.”

But while the Navy crews got the CAR for acting efficiently as a crew, the 1,300 Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit who were attached to both ships — some 600 to 800 were onboard during the attack — did not rate a CAR because the Corps defines combat differently.

A spokesman for the MEU told Marine Corps Times that Marine commanders did not submit for the award.

To the Navy, the sailors were in combat. The Marines — on the same ships at the same time — were not.

‘They didn’t do anything’

Some Seabees and corpsmen in Iraq, or recently returned, were livid that the amphib crews rated the CAR and they didn’t.

“When I found out they all got the CAR, it kind of surprised me,” said Stephens, the Seabee. “They didn’t do anything. They didn’t get hit.”

One letter writer to Marine Corps Times called the matter “disgraceful” and urged the Navy to review its policies.

Attempts to contact the crews of the Kearsarge and Ashland for comment were referred to higher command or went unanswered.

Though sailors and Marines critical of the Kearsarge/Ashland CARs are careful not to take anything away from those crews, the inequity still rubs them raw.

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Ed Keenan went into Iraq with 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, during the 2003 invasion. A reservist and a paramedic lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department, he responded to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and lost firefighter friends and family.

Keenan was awarded the CAR for action in Iraq with Marines.

“This is a really serious award for the Marine Corps,” he said. “For [the Navy] to arbitrarily give it to a whole crew … that’s a shot in the face to everyone who has died over there since 2003.”

CNO, commandant to talk

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen toured Iraq over the New Year’s holiday. In several all-hands calls, he was asked by sailors and Seabees why they don’t rate a CAR, especially in light of the Kearsarge/Ashland award.

Mullen told sailors he had not addressed the issue before getting to Iraq, but pledged to bring it up with Marine Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee when he got back to Washington.

“Clearly, if you’re getting blown up in an incident here, it sounds like combat to me,” he said. “If it makes sense to make a change, we’ll make a change.”

Marine Corps officials say they’re examining their CAR policies.

Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of I MEF, has spoken out on the need to re-examine the rules.

Sattler’s recommendations were submitted to Hagee, but as yet, nothing has changed.

“There are no changes at this time, but the study has been forwarded to the commandant for review,” said Capt. Teresa Ovalle, public affairs officer at Quantico, Va.

Some precedence

In the history of the Combat Action Ribbon, there’s some precedence for today’s institutional inequity.

For Marines, that ribbon is a badge of honor that says the recipient has been in an honest-to- goodness firefight.

But in the past, the Navy has awarded a CAR for incidents that don’t approach an exchange of fire.

While some of that is entirely understandable — combat with warships is indeed different than a ground-based firefight — other instances are, at best, perplexing.

The crew of the cruiser Vincennes, for example, was awarded a CAR after mistakenly shooting down an Iranian airliner on July 3, 1988, killing 290 civilians, including 66 children.

Other awards are more understandable.

During Operation Desert Storm, 37 ships were awarded the CAR. Some of those ships, including Tripoli and Princeton, struck mines.

Crews from the patrol boats Chinook and Firebolt; minesweepers Ardent, Cardinal, Dextrous and Raven; two ordnance clearing teams; boarding teams from Milius, Higgins and Valley Forge; and several Coast Guard boats were awarded the CAR for action from March 19-28, 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

According to nomination documents from 5th Fleet, the ships and teams rated the CAR for operating in mined waters, neutralizing 10 mines and discovering 96 others.

And the crew of the destroyer Cole, which fought for more than 72 hours in October 2000 to save its ship from sinking after a terrorist attack — was also awarded the CAR.

Seventeen Cole sailors died in the attack.

Rules may be toughened

The rules on which afloat forces rate a CAR may soon see some tightening, according to the Navy awards branch.

Capt. Anne-Marie Hartlaub is director of the management division for the office of the CNO, which oversees Navy awards.

Hartlaub said her office recognized as soon as the first roadside bomb went off in Iraq that the definition of combat had changed.

“We’ve never had to ask the question before because we’ve never had this number of sailors on land for this amount of time. So now is the time to look at this,” she said.

Under Navy rules, the CNO delegates authority to combatant commanders to authorize combat action awards such as the CAR, Purple Heart and Bronze Star to Navy personnel.

A commanding officer will recommend his crew or individual sailors for the award and submit that to the appropriate combatant commander. The matter does not go further up the chain because the authority already has been delegated down.

In the case of Kearsarge and Ashland, the recommendation went from the skippers to Naval Forces Central Command.

“They followed the standard procedure. They didn’t do anything wrong,” Hartlaub said.

Marines treat the CAR as more of an individual award, while a crew can be nominated under Navy tradition.

But for corpsmen and Seabees assigned to Marine commands, “The rule is, if you’re attached to a Marine command, the Marine Corps is the adjudicating authority,” she said.

Hartlaub said her office has been working on a clarification of the CNO guidance to combatant commanders on who rates a CAR. Eventually, it’s possible that the Navy secretary would be approached with a recommendation that the language be changed.

“Equal treatment is critical here, whether it’s a sailor on land or afloat,” she said.

Hartlaub said some individual CARs have been awarded to sailors in Iraq, but the majority of those awards have been to naval special-warfare forces.

For now, the question is one of fairness.

“Are we treating the people on land the same as people afloat?” Hartlaub said.

Testiness in the ranks

Until a change is made, feelings will stay hot.

During an all-hands call in Fallujah with enlisted corpsmen, Seabees and others, a religious program specialist who has been in enemy contact several times brought up the topic to the CNO.

“A lot of us have been in combat and have been hit, and we’re not being recognized,” said Religious Program Specialist 2nd Class Sarah Radel.

Afterward, Radel, 25, told Marine Corps Times of the numerous forms of enemy contact she and her fellow sailors and Marines have endured, only to be prevented from the CAR by what’s been described as a strict reading of the award requirements by the Marine Corps.

The frustration is that their war is not officially being recognized for what it is.

“Somewhere, the Navy forgot we’re part of the Navy,” Radel said.

Speaking for herself and others, Radel holds strong emotions on the subject.

She said that if anyone wants to know how to define combat, “Come talk to me, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Andrew Scutro covers the Navy.

Ellie

Osotogary
01-24-06, 09:11 AM
Good article. Thanks for bringing it up for viewing. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out...if there is a follow up.