PPRuNe Forums - Women in Combat

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We are blessed to have Women such as Moreno serving alongside us.

Hand Salute, Ma'am! See you at Fiddler's!

Heroic Nurse 'Ran Into Hell' in Afghan Bomb Plot | Military.com

A brave woman indeed, however, I do have slightly mixed feelings. Had she obeyed the direct order she would have saved 3 other soldiers from having been wounded.

Jumping Jack

You don't know that, and I think second guessing dead people is a bit off online.

Quote:

The 11th bomb wounded three soldiers trying to recover her body.

......comment based on the report.....

It did, jack but that doesn't mean she did the wrong thing

.....and I don't believe I said she did do the wrong thing. I said I had mixed feelings about her actions putting others at risk through disobeying a direct order. I also acknowledged that she was indeed a brave woman; even to volunteer for her role would have taken a great deal of courage.

You said you thought she was a brave woman, implying her actions were 'good', but went on to say you had "mixed-feelings", which surely suggests you thought her subsequent actions were 'bad'. No?

'Sigh'....I just love this about PPrune......a huge amount of dead horse flogging.....:ugh:

'Mixed feelings' means exactly that. She was brave to do what she did, but if she had obeyed an order 3 soldiers wouldn't have been wounded! Is that so difficult to understand? Why are you determined to try to make me say she was plain wrong? Is that so you can then attack me for not supporting a brave, but dead young woman? :rolleyes:

Just trying to clarify exactly what it was you actually meant is all.

Quote:

but if she had obeyed an order 3 soldiers wouldn't have been wounded

I take your wider points, but not sure that your quote above can be necessarily correct. The attack was pre-planned with several co-ordinated bomb blasts going off throughout the city. The bomb that wounded the 3 servicemen would have gone off regardless of whether she rushed forward or not, and who knows - maybe by rushing forward she changed a course of events that might otherwise have resulted in a whole lot more being wounded or killed (you know, the 'butterfly flapping its wings in China' effect). Just a thought.

Jumping Jack

Let's say she had obeyed the "don't move order" - the team subsequently moved to a different position and BOOM ... every one dead. The fact is, no one knows what would have happened if she'd obeyed.. Because she didn't... for what ever reason.
Brave lady.

My point exactly lj101.

I can understand what people are saying about her being ordered to stay put and the fact that others may have survived if she did, but in another war, in a similar situation, a different result occurred and lives were saved. I was surprised she never got a higher award.

Quote:

Medal of Honor Winner Mike Clausen Dies

Mike Clausen Jr., 56, who died in a Dallas hospital May 30 of liver failure, received the Medal of Honor, the highest military award for valor, for rescuing a platoon of Marines trapped in a minefield during the Vietnam War.

In the Marine Corps, Pfc. Clausen liked to disobey authority; he had repeatedly been demoted after every promotion.

"I will come home a live private before coming home as a dead sergeant," he had said.

On Jan. 31, 1970, he seemed to have forgotten his credo.

That day, he was serving with Medium Helicopter Squadron 263. He was part of a mission to extract members of a Marine platoon near Da Nang that had wandered into a minefield while attacking the enemy. They were under heavy fire and frozen in their places, fearing that they would trip a mine.

Mr. Clausen was crew chief of his CH-46 helicopter and guided the pilot to a safe landing in a spot that had been cleared by a mine explosion.

The pilot told him not to leave, but Pfc. Clausen ignored him -- six times, as he repeatedly left the safety of the helicopter to help carry back one dead and 11 wounded Marines to the aircraft.

He then tried to lead the eight remaining Marines to the copter.

On one trip, while he carried a wounded man, a mine went off, killing a corpsman and wounding three other Marines.

"Only when he was certain that all Marines were safely aboard did he signal the pilot to lift the helicopter," read his Medal of Honor citation.

His other decorations included the Purple Heart and the Air Medal.

He once told an interviewer that the Americans pinned down in the minefield mistakenly thought he knew where he was going.

"I ran over there [and] picked up the guys that couldn't walk," Mr. Clausen said. "The ones that could walk were under the assumption I knew where the mines were, obviously, and they followed every footstep I made back to the helicopter."

Medal of Honor Winner Mike Clausen Dies (washingtonpost.com)