Silver Star – and I believe an excellent candidate for the MOH. He promised his friend that he’d look after his family, and he is. A bittersweet part of the story.

Albuquerque Tribune

During a patrol May 25, 2005, Hunter’s squad was ambushed from a house. His squad leader, Sgt. David Wimberg, was mortally wounded during an initial attempt to quell the ambush.

Hunter, also a sergeant, charged into the house and pulled Wimberg to safety, according to the military. Acting as squad leader, Hunter reorganized his Marines and led them into the house a third time, finally taking it.

Two months later – on July 28 – Hunter’s squad was on patrol near Cykla, when an adjacent squad came under small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire, according to the military. Hunter pushed his squad forward to help. He shot two enemy troops and made two unsuccessful assaults against enemy fire to retrieve a wounded Marine.

He then ran across a fire-swept street to link up with an American tank and guided its fire, allowing the extraction of a mortally wounded Marine, the military says.

Christopher Lyons was killed that day. An ad rep at an Ohio newspaper, he’d left home three months before his daughter, Ella, was born. He’d seen her only in e-mails.

A few weeks later, Hunter got an e-mail from Lyons’ wife, Bethany. She’d found his address among Christopher’s things, she said.

They stayed in touch and eventually, Hunter says, they fell in love. They got married, and their son, Atticus, was born four months ago.

But if he hadn’t fallen in love with Bethany, Hunter says, he’d probably be back in Iraq now. Back in the place he and his buddies called the “Wild West.”

“We’d hear gunfire coming from a village, and we’d find out it was two tribes fighting each other to see who got to fight us,” he says.

“There were a lot of scumbags there; a lot of people who had no problem hurting people, beheading people, torturing people,” he says. “But there were a lot of people who were just poor people stuck in a rotten situation. We were there to help them. I’m proud of what we did.”

Hunter, a member of the Mormon Church who did a two-year mission to Ukraine before joining the Marines, now hopes to be a high school history teacher. He is a junior at the University of New Mexico.

Military.com

Crouched and flattened against a waist-high wall, Marine Sgt. Jeff Hunter could see the muzzle flashes of the enemy AK-47 as it took out chunks of the wall by his head. In the middle of a shoot-out with a fortified insurgent in western Iraq, Hunter never could have known he’d later be hailed a hero.

But two years after that May 2005 firefight – and a year after he finished his Reserve contract – Hunter, 28, received the Silver Star on June 18 at City Hall in Albuquerque, N.M., for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” in Iraq during the summer of 2005 – including two fire fights in which he pulled a fellow Marine out of enemy fire.

Originally an administrative clerk at Albuquerque-based Delta Company, 4th Reconnaissance Battalion, Hunter deployed to Iraq as an infantry fire team leader with Columbus, Ohio-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, in March 2005.

In the early hours of May 25, then-Cpl. Hunter set out on foot with Lima Company toward Haditha’s market district in the opening days of Operation New Market.

According to Hunter, the company planned to arrive at the market by sunrise in order to catch insurgents by surprise. He said the trip seemed like any other, until a Marine shot a stray dog that had charged him. About ten seconds later, “all hell broke loose,” Hunter said.

The award citation released by the Corps and interviews with Hunter and his fellow Marines reveal the platoon was ambushed by small arms fire that seriously wounded an officer on the patrol. Sgt. David Wimberg, Hunter’s squad leader, ordered the squad to take a house to their left, where they were receiving fire.

Wimberg hopped the fence and opened the gate for Hunter’s fire team, then kicked in the door and ran inside with Hunter on his heels.

“Sgt. Wimberg barely took a second step into the room before a muzzle to an AK-47 was presented [at his chest] and fired several times,” Hunter said in a recap of the events he wrote after the firefight.

When Wimberg fell to the ground, “I instinctively reached down and grabbed him, pulling him back out of the house,” Hunter wrote. “I dragged him to the right of the door under a window and lay on top of him while I heard him wheeze for us to frag the room.”

Hunter called for two of his squad mates to take Wimberg to their corpsman while he pushed forward with the attack on the house.

“In the back of my mind, I knew that I was now in charge of the squad and I had to get control of the situation,” he wrote.

“Acting as squad leader, [Hunter] reorganized his Marines and led them into the insurgent position…ultimately securing the house with close-range small arms fire and hand grenades,” according to the Corps release. Wimberg later died as a result of his wounds, but Hunter’s actions during the firefight “enabled his company to regain its momentum,” the release said.

Two months later, Hunter’s platoon was tasked with sweeping a couple small towns west of Baghdad the morning of July 28. According to Hunter, the patrol had been uneventful until Cpl. Andre Williams started to knock on the door of a house in Cykla.

“Right as he went to knock, a heavy-machine gun shot him through the door,” Hunter said. That kicked off a four-hour firefight between nine insurgents bottled inside the house and Hunter’s platoon.

When some of the insurgents fled to another nearby house, Hunter maneuvered his squad closer, using their own cover fire to move to a rooftop overlooking the second house.

A couple hours into the firefight, the other two squads were still engaged in the at the first house, but rounds were no longer coming from the second house. When Hunter’s squad cleared the house, they found an empty rocket-propelled grenade launcher, but no shooter.

They moved to the back yard where livestock were frantically running around following the hours of shooting going on around them. In the midst of the chaos, two of Hunter’s Marines broke off to search two small cinder block buildings for enemy fighters.

As Lance Cpl. Christopher Lyons – Hunter’s closest friend in the platoon – crossed the threshold of one of the buildings, he was shot by an insurgent fortified inside.

Hunter and his Marines took cover in a room of the building, which was still under construction. The wall was about three feet high, with huge portions missing for windows, Hunter said.

Crouched against his portion of the wall, about 15 feet from the insurgent’s position, “I could see the muzzle flashes from the doorway [from] the guy shooting…while the AK-47 was just taking chunks out of the wall,” Hunter said.

“It got pretty scary there for a minute.”

During that fight, Hunter “shot two enemies and made two unsuccessful attempts in the face of enemy fire to retrieve a wounded Marine,” the Corps release said.

Hunter “then ran across a fire-swept street to link up with a M1A1 tank, guided it’s fire and directed it to breach the building,” the release added. “This action neutralized one insurgent and allowed the extraction” of Lyons, who had been mortally wounded.