Posted on Sep 22, 2021
What advice would you give soldiers on how to approach having their end of tour awards taken away?
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Our task force was split between 3 locations in our recent deployment to Afghanistan. Deployment went well besides your typical undermanned and overworked issues. Our time was coming to an end and submitted our end of tour awards, ARCOMS with C device. A month before leaving the BDE Commander wanted to do a "spur board" for people to earn their gold spurs. Most people who have deployed with a CAV unit before pointed out that it was a given to get gold spurs if you deployed with a CAV and that a "spur board" is for your silver spurs. Requirements were to life 100,000lbs collectively in teams of 4 and run 20 miles in a week. At the end of the week there was a virtual board to attend with the BDE Commander. A majority of the task force is not a CAV unit and were given a week to learn everything on top of working 14-16 hour days. The day of the virtual board someone took it upon themselves to post the Fiddlers Green above the webcam in the conference room. The rest of the group was not aware until entering the room that it was there. A soldier ended up getting caught reading it off the wall. The BDE Commander was made aware of the Fiddlers Green posted on the wall and continued with the "spur board". The commander of the troop was brought in afterwards and was told that no-one at our location would receive end of tour awards. Even people who didn't attend the spur board would have their award pulled. Does this seem like an extreme mass punishment? Most of the soldiers this was their first deployment and went above and beyond on expectations just to have their award taken away. Would it be wrong to bring this to IG or how would you handle the situation. The troop commander has since caved and stopped fighting for us to receive awards. The BDE commander has also changed out. Any advice on how to approach this would be helpful or do we just cut our losses?
Posted 3 y ago
Responses: 8
ARCOMs for everyone on a deployment is absurdly generous. I haven't seen that since the early years of the war when ARCOM was the lowest award you could grant in a combat zone. The award authority for an ARCOM is the Brigade Commander, and usually that means this Soldier had a direct effect on the whole Brigade. That's probably not true for everyone who had ARCOMs in.
You can go to IG but they will tell you that as SGM Bill Frazer stated, leave and awards are at the discretion of the approval authority. Resubmit your awards as AAMs where the SCO is the approval authority and save the ARCOM for one or two of your very best.
You can go to IG but they will tell you that as SGM Bill Frazer stated, leave and awards are at the discretion of the approval authority. Resubmit your awards as AAMs where the SCO is the approval authority and save the ARCOM for one or two of your very best.
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Awards and their approval or denial is in the hands of the command, short of blatantly denying an award for Valor, you are stuck. I know some units awarded MSM's upon PCS to damn near all their senior NCO's and some units never awarded an MSM to anybody under E7 for years.
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