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Badge honors
noninfantry combat

Enlisted soldiers in the fields of armor, cavalry, combat engineering and field artillery will finally get equal recognition as infantry soldiers with the Army's proposal to award them the Close Combat Badge recognizing ground combat conflicts since 2001.

The Army says officers must have a branch or specialty recognized in Army regulations as "having a high probability to routinely engage in direct combat." For the past six decades soldiers other than those in the field of infantry have been seeking recognition similar to the Army's Combat Infantry Badge, which was created in 1943. The badge, which is a rifle surrounded by a wreath, is reserved for infantry and Special Forces soldiers only. The Combat Infantry Badge and Combat Medical Badge -- which is reserved for Army, Navy and Air Force medics -- were the only two Army badges that indicate that the soldiers had been in combat.

The new Army badge is recognition of the type of insurgent warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan where more noninfantry soldiers are involved in close combat battles. The new badge should be available this fall through unit supply and also for purchase in military clothing sales stores.

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Retired Army Col. Young O. Kim, a highly decorated World War II and Korean War veteran, was presented the National Order of the Legion of Honor award on Feb. 4, the highest bestowed by the French government on citizens. More than 113,000 people are members of the Legion of Honor, with more than 100 American World War II veterans alone receiving the distinction in 2004.

Kim served in the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team in France from September 1944 to February 1945 and participated in several battles, including the battle of Bruyeres and Biffontaine. Kim is best known for a daylight mission in Anzio, Italy, where he volunteered to capture German soldiers for intelligence information. He and another soldier crawled more than 600 yards directly under German observation posts with no cover. They captured two prisoners and obtained information that significantly contributed to the fall of Rome. For his actions, Kim received the Distinguished Service Cross. Kim is credited as being the first Asian American to command a regular U.S. combat battalion in a war when he led the 1st Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Division, during the Korean War. After 30 years of active duty, Kim retired from the Army in 1972.

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Soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division's 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, teamed up with aviators of the division's 2nd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment, and their CH-47 Chinook transport helicopters to deliver humanitarian aid packages earlier this month after a series of snowstorms in Afghanistan dumped several feet of snow that blocked roads, left travelers stranded without shelter and trapped families in their homes without adequate food supplies in Zabol Province.

Heavy rains made matters worse, making even roads that were cleared of snow so muddy that no vehicle could pass over them, an Army news release said.

The aid packages were supplied by the Afghan national government, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.N. World Food Program and other organizations. The infantry battalion's soldiers have been in Zabol Province since April 2004. During that time they have conducted combat operations against anti-coalition fighters. The Army believes this type of humanitarian relief operation, however, may be more effective than combat to achieve victory over remnants of the former Taliban regime and al-Qaida fighters.

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Shigeya Kihara, 90, the last surviving instructor of the Army's first language school, died Jan. 16 in Castro Valley in northern California. A memorial service will be held at Feb. 28 at the First Covenant Church in Oakland. The language school known as the 4th Army Intelligence School, which was created in 1941 to teach Japanese to American soldiers, was based at the Presidio in San Francisco and later became the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey.