Staff Sergeant Kenneth Thomas, Jr.
Silver Star
Dod
In 2007, Staff Sergeant Kenneth Thomas, Jr., of the 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment, was participating in a boat patrol on the Tigris River near Falahat, Iraq. The four boats in the patrol began to take fire from more than 70 fighters massed on both sides of the river. Sergeant Thomas returned fire with the machine gun mounted on his boat, disabling an enemy machine gun nest and killing one insurgent. The hail of enemy bullets was relentless and eventually forced Thomas’s boat ashore.
The position on the river bank left Sergeant Thomas and his team of five soldiers exposed to hostile fire, so he ran up the steep bank and used his wire cutters to make a hole in a fence that was separating him and his group from a safer position. However the fence carried 220-volt electric current, and each cut Sergeant Thomas made provided him with an excruciating shock. By the time Sergeant Thomas finished cutting the hole in the fence, his wire cutters were starting to melt and his gloves were burning.
Because of his uncommon valor, Sergeant Thomas’s team was able to crawl through the hole in the fence and reach the cover of a nearby house. There, they established a fighting position on the roof and killed three insurgents before the enemy broke contact. For his actions Staff Sergeant Kenneth Thomas was awarded the Silver Star, our military’s third-highest honor for heroism.
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Staff Sergeant Kenneth Thomas, Jr., of the 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment
This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Military, Heroes, War on Terror, Iraq, Military, War on Terror, WOT Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
