19-Year-Old Woman Earns Silver Star

In the realm of military awards, history was recently made when the military announced a 19-year-old soldier would become only the second woman since WWII to receive the Silver Star.  Monica Lin Brown, an Army medic who served in Afghanistan, will be recognized for her quick thinking when her convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb last April.  From the AP:

After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said.

“I did not really think about anything except for getting the guys to a safer location and getting them taken care of and getting them out of there,” Brown told The Associated Press on Saturday at a U.S. base in the eastern province of Khost.

“We stopped the convoy. I opened up my door and grabbed my aid bag,” Brown said.

She started running toward the burning vehicle as insurgents opened fire. All five wounded soldiers had scrambled out.

“So we dragged them for 100 or 200 meters, got them away from the Humvee a little bit,” she said. “I was in a kind of a robot-mode, did not think about much but getting the guys taken care of.”

For Brown, who knew all five wounded soldiers, it became a race to get them all to a safer location. Eventually, they moved the wounded some 500 yards away, treated them on site before putting them on a helicopter for evacuation.

According to the AP, Army nurses in WWI and WWII previously received the Silver Star, and female soldier in Iraq earned the award in 2005.  As for Brown, she has a little more than a month left to serve in Afghanistan, until she can once again see her family back in Texas.

And now, the 19-year-old can even read about herself on Wikipedia.