BAGHDAD -- Capt. Steve Gventer is still picking shrapnel out of his right shoulder. It became lodged there last month when a rocket-propelled grenade sailed over his head and exploded against a wall, splattering him with hot metal.
That attack came two weeks after an insurgent in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum, shot Gventer through his left calf with a machine gun.
Army Capt. Steve Gventer, normally a tank company commander, was hit by a grenade in Iraq after being retrained as an infantry officer. Under current rules, he is ineligible for the prestigious Combat Infantryman Badge.
(Steve Fainaru -- The Washington Post)
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Gventer's street fighting would appear to qualify him for one of the U.S. Army's most prestigious awards, the Combat Infantryman Badge. The award recognizes soldiers whose daily mission is to pursue the enemy, primarily on foot, and engage in close combat.
But Gventer won't get the award -- at least not under current rules. Normally a tank company commander, Gventer was retrained as an infantry officer before he was deployed. He and his men have fought furious street battles in one of Iraq's most perilous corners. But because they are technically tankers, they are ineligible for an award that for six decades has distinguished those who fight at ground level, where war is most lethal.
The Army retrained thousands of soldiers -- tankers, engineers, artillerymen -- to perform as infantry in Iraq's urban hot spots. But part of the fallout is an intense internal debate over who qualifies for the Combat Infantryman Badge, or CIB, and, more broadly, what constitutes an infantryman in a rapidly changing Army.
The award is "a divisive tool now," said Capt. Chuck Slagle, an infantry company commander who favors expanding the award's recipients to include non-infantry units. He and Gventer "do exactly the same thing," he said. "But because of this, we're separated."
The commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, recently petitioned the Army for an "exception of policy" to allow non-infantry units to receive badges, according to division officers. The decision will be made by the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who "because of the changing nature of combat" has directed the Army staff to form a task force on the issue, according to Lt. Col. Michael J. Negard, his spokesman.
A spokesman for the 1st Cavalry, Maj. Philip J. Smith, neither confirmed nor denied that Chiarelli had made such a request. "It is our policy not to discuss pending policy decisions that will be made at levels above the division," he wrote in an e-mail.
But Schoomaker will be facing entrenched resistance to anything that appears to diminish the coveted award.
"I think they should get something, but not a CIB," said Sgt. Aaron Josey of the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment. "I'm an infantryman. They're not."
The debate revolves around a swatch of fabric that features a rifle and a wreath and is normally sewn above the soldier's breast pocket. The award was created on Oct. 27, 1943, in recognition that the infantry "continuously operated under the worst conditions" and sustained "the most casualties while receiving the least public recognition."
From World War II through Vietnam, four out of five combat deaths were sustained by infantrymen, according to retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., a historian. "Not soldiers and Marines, but infantrymen," Scales wrote in an e-mail. "That's 5 percent of the [U.S. military] manpower suffering 81 percent of those" killed in action.
The badge is recognition for engaging in and surviving intimate violence. The award's requirements state that the recipient "must be personally present and under hostile fire . . . in a unit actively engaged in ground combat with the enemy."
"There isn't anything that equals the Combat Infantryman's Badge," said retired Army Col. John M. Collins, a military historian. "That is the prize on top of the prize. It says, 'I did it. I was there and I came back.' " Only soldiers whose formal "occupational specialty" is infantry are eligible for the award "regardless of the circumstances," the requirements state.
