According to the AP, Army nurses in WWI and WWII previously received the Silver Star, and female soldier in Iraq earned the award in 2005. As for Brown, she has a little more than a month left to serve in Afghanistan, until she can once again see her family back in Texas.
She started running toward the burning vehicle as insurgents opened fire. All five wounded soldiers had scrambled out.
“So we dragged them for 100 or 200 meters, got them away from the Humvee a little bit,” she said. “I was in a kind of a robot-mode, did not think about much but getting the guys taken care of.”
For Brown, who knew all five wounded soldiers, it became a race to get them all to a safer location. Eventually, they moved the wounded some 500 yards away, treated them on site before putting them on a helicopter for evacuation.
And now, the 19-year-old can even read about herself on Wikipedia.
