Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, of Nashville, Tennessee, went from shoe salesperson to national hero, and today, she has the award to prove it.
Hester first enlisted in the United States Army just before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and was assigned to the National Guard’s Kentucky-based 617th Military Police Company in Baghdad in 2004. She was not afraid of the potential for combat.
But protocol is one thing, and reality is another; Hester, since joining the military, had already grown used to combat.
When the supply convoy that Hester and her team were charged with supervising was ambushed by gunfire and grenades on the morning of March 20, 2005, the young sergeant had to think on her feet. This routine patrol turned into ground combat in a matter of seconds; 45 minutes of intense combat ensued.
The lead supply vehicle bore the brunt of the shots; it caught fire, trapping the vehicles behind it. But Hester remained unshaken, directing her team away from the enemy’s fire, and in doing so, they exposed the ditches the enemy were using as a “safe zone.”
Hester directed her team’s gunner to return fire. Shooting downrange, the gunner targeted over a dozen enemy soldiers who were concealing themselves in a nearby ditch. Then Hester herself dismounted her vehicle and threw grenades into the ditch by hand.
“It’s not like you see in the movies,” Hester explained. “They don’t, like, get shot and get blown back five feet. They just take a round, and they collapse.”
Three members of Hester’s unit had been injured in the gunfire, but all had survived.
Hester was awarded the coveted Silver Star, the third-highest decoration in the U.S. military for valor. The young sergeant is the first female in the U.S. Army to receive the award since World War II and the first female to receive the Silver Star for courage in combat.
That same year, Hester fulfilled a childhood dream by becoming a police officer back home in Nashville. However, nine years later, she rejoined the National Guard and spent 18 months in Afghanistan. She then joined the humanitarian effort in the Virgin Islands in the wake of 2017’s Hurricane Maria.
“I have family that always want to tell the story, and I get put in a position where I need to shake hands,” the decorated sergeant reflected. “I don’t know, it’s something I haven’t gotten used to.
“You know, it’s just something that happened one day, and I was trained to do what I did, and I did it,” she added with humility. “We all lived through that battle.”
Since Hester’s remarkable achievement, then-18-year-old Pvt. First Class Monica Lin Brown earned the same honor for ignoring enemy fire and rushing to the aid of her wounded comrades in April 2007 in Afghanistan.
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