Sergeant Kendra Coleman, 173rd Airborne Brigade, Two Purple Hearts, Combat Action Badge(Afghanistan), with her service dog, Smokey James. Kendra grew up in Jackson, GA, she graduated from Luella High School. She was raised in the country and enjoyed playing soccer, basketball, track, and martial arts. When she was 19, she wasn’t sure where life was taking her, so she joined the Army as a Paratrooper. She graduated Airborne School in 2005 and was stationed with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Bamberg, Germany. She deployed to Charkh, Afghanistan in 2009, and her job was to train Afghan police, and keep the local village of Charkh safe from insurgent attacks. Her Combat Outpost, which they had to build, was on the Pakistan border. She was 1 of 4 females out there. They would go months without showers, taking “bird baths” when they could. They received one hot meal a day. She shared the same bunker with 18 males(who smelled very bad) and 3 other females. They were attacked every day by enemy insurgents. It got so bad; she would just sleep in her gear. She was wounded on several occasions, and was lucky to walk away; except on May 11, 2010, a day that will never be forgotten. As she and 10 other guys stood by in full battle gear ready for a walking patrol, they could hear the distant sounds of gunfire, and IEDs exploding. She had been on many dismounted patrols, but there was something different about this one. As they were clearing the village, she recalled, “I was hugging a wall near a corner, and after I cleared the corner I looked down. That’s when I saw a randomly placed pile of tires. I could feel the evil in the air.” An improvised explosive device (IED) immediately exploded and she was knocked to the ground. “I knew I was hit,” she said. “I reached down to my left leg pocket to grab my tourniquet. My pocket wasn’t there, just the remaining pieces of what was my left leg.” She can still remember laying there in Afghanistan in the middle of the day, with the sun beating down on her, and dirt flying everywhere from all of the explosions. She thanks her fellow paratroopers for saving her life.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 14:18:41 +0000
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