Should Engineers have a Combat Engineer Badge?

SFC Gilley is right on. A very good friend of mine who's a mechanic was blown the hell up going to recover a vehicle. His Purple Heart may have grease on it but it was earned.

We did Route Clearance, and I'm pretty sure if we'd given him the chance either of our mechanics would have dismounted and cleared right next to any one of us.

So, we were constantly on missions outside the wire doing Engineer missions, in almost every case my gunner was a mechanic. When available the 1SG knew I wanted one of these three because they were as good or better than our Engineers. Soldiers will do whatever you ask of and train them to do well. by having a mechanic on the team it gave us a 20 level maintenance asset within the mission set and enabled us to resolve many issues on the spot.

However, unlike Infantry, the vast majority of Engineer MOSs do NOT do those hard combat tasks. The only reason my PLT did Bravo work is because they wanted the Bravos to do my job. Logic behind that: well they might do dismount missions. Apparently because I'm Horizontal I am nowhere near as capable as a Bravo at walking and shooting, maybe work a handheld detector. -.-

Many do not realize that there are two distinct types of Engineers. 1. Combat engineers, moderately equipped with equipment and whose job is all engineer task needed to keep the 11's moving forward laying mine fields and clearing minefields and other obstacles. Construction Engineers do all types of building things more permeant than the combat Engineers had time to build ie bridges roads buildings stuff like that usually in the "safe areas. They generaly do not lay minefields and that type thing."

I do not know what the Combat Engineers in the Army do to day but in vietnam we fought our ass off LT and by the way I broke in many LT's in my day it sounds like you must be a West Pointer that would explain everything.

You

You "processed"

Some other MOSs do go outside the wire but not for combat purposes.  That is why they aren't considered a combat mos.  But that isn't the purpose of this discussion.

SSG (Join to see)
A buddy of mine was a cook at Quan Loi when a rocket landed pretty much in the back door of his mess hall. If there was a CCB (Combat Cook Badge), he should have gotten one.

Many cooks were assigned to gun trucks in my unit because all of the messing was contracted out to civilians. There are a handful of cooks that had more windshield and trigger time than my scout platoon. As the COIN environment fades away and we get back to basics, this may revert back so that we can clearly see the lines between combat/CS/CSS MOS's.

SPC Jan Allbright, M.Sc., R.S. - 2003 in order to complete the pipeline on time we put every available Soldier on the line regardless of MOS. The cooks and Mechanics, and Clerks did fine and self secured their segments. 05-07 rotation we did the same for another high priority mission the Troops did well again and we used mechanics for convoy gunners. It put a 20 level maintenance asset embedded with each mission, and enabled our Soldiers to perform a bunch of on site maintenance/ reduced recovery vehicle exposure in addition to the standard contact truck teams . So the myth that certain MOSs never play a combat roll is incorrect. Soldiers will do whatever you task them and train them to do.