Our Best: Beauty Queen Edition
Captain Jeannie Deakyne
KCEN-TV
On the day that NBC 6 visited Army Captain Jeannie Deakyne was overseeing the promotion of 2 of the soldiers under her command, when we surprised her with an award of her own.
“I couldn’t believe that somebody would have picked my name out of a pile and to think I would be deserving of one of the 6 volunteers in Central Texas,” said Jeannie.
Always humble, Deaknye was deployed to Iraq in February of 2004 to command the company that operated the Baghdad International Airport.
After returning from Iraq, she was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. She also worked tirelessly to assist in the mobilization of approximately 2000 soldiers from Ft. Hood who were deployed to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.
UTA Magazine
When Jeannie Panton Deakyne gets up in the morning, she doesn’t have to decide whether to wear a dress, a pantsuit or jeans to work.
Instead, she dons the uniform of the United States Army.
Stationed in Iraq, Deakyne (pronounced Dee-kine) is a captain in the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.
The former Student Congress president earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from UTA in 1998. In December of that year, she received her commission as an Army second lieutenant. Her active duty commitment ended in June 2004, but she extended it to “voluntary indefinite” so she could serve in Iraq.
She arrived in the Middle East in March, spent two weeks in Kuwait, then moved north to Iraq’s Camp Cooke, approximately 20 miles northwest of Baghdad in the town of Taji. Camp Cooke, named after a sergeant major who was killed in action in Iraq, is bordered to the east by the Tigris River.
“The landscape just west of the Tigris is straight out of a children’s picture Bible,” she said. “Palm trees and rushes follow the river inland about 100 feet. The remainder of the camp, however, is barren, with rocks, sand and gravel as far as the eye can see.”
The camp was formerly the Al Taji Airfield, used as a base for the elite Iraqi Republican Guard as well as a munitions storage facility.
Deakyne’s section of two officers, six noncommissioned officers and seven soldiers spends each day providing administrative support, conducting records management and processing awards and evaluations. But additional combat duties, including guard duty and tracking operations, are really what keep the Brigade S1 section busy.
“We also have the mission to process casualties and notify their families. To date, we have had 11 casualties, including two killed in action as two Apache pilots were shot down on Easter Sunday. We held a memorial service the following Tuesday, and I witnessed emotion I never thought I would see in the Army.”
Subscribe
Comments