Heroes 2011
'Probably wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done'
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The artillery weatherman, on the ground for his fourth deployment, asked to become an infantryman, but the Army turned him down.
Then his exploits as a platoon leader during a four-day battle in the Arghandab River Valley earned him the Silver Star.
As Sgt. 1st Class Kyle Lyon stood on the bridge where the bulk of the fighting went down, the top commander in Afghanistan pinned on his medal and said he’d heard Lyon wanted to be an 11 Bravo, the classification for enlisted infantry.
“Why don’t you give this another shot,” Gen. David Petraeus said, “with my signature on it this time.”
When Lyon joined the Army 10 years ago, he asked to drive a tank, but the recruiter offered paratroopers instead. Lyon thought that sounded good.
“I’m thinking WWII on D-Day, what I saw watching The History Channel,” Lyon said.
But paratrooper units are much more than just soldiers jumping from planes and Lyon ended up as a weatherman, tracking conditions to determine how they will affect artillery.
During one of his three deployments to Iraq, he served as a provisional infantryman, and he got the chance again to live the infantry life again during a deployment to Afghanistan with 1st Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, which had been tasked as infantry as part of the surge into Kandahar.
“As much as I love my real job, if I could keep doing the infantry thing I would be stoked,” Lyon said.
His battalion commander and sergeant major encouraged him to try to reclassify not long after they arrived in Kandahar. The Army, however, declined his application because it didn’t need any more infantrymen at his rank.
So when Petraeus visited in December to tour a village in Arghandab and pin commendation medals on 1-320th soldiers, their commander, Lt. Col. David Flynn, immediately went into a full-court press for Lyon.
Petraeus was sold.
“I have a lot more fun doing this,” Lyon said about infantry.
At the end of July, much of the lush territory was defined by the canals, with insurgents dominating the land south of the second canal. Lyon’s company was charged with seizing an area of the pomegranate orchard past that canal where troops had only gone a few times.
The soldiers blew up a few roadside bombs on the main stretch of road, and then almost immediately they started taking coordinated, accurate fire — “getting us into a pretty good gunfight,” Lyon said.
He ran from cover through enemy fire to reposition a grenade launcher so it could be used to mark enemy positions for airstrikes. Lyon spent the day coordinating his platoon’s fire to fend off the insurgents, who used walls for cover as they tried to move into the buildings that were “a little too close for comfort to us,” he said.
The fight, in pomegranate and grape fields surrounding a few mud buildings, died down as night fell.
“They’d wait until dawn,” Lyon said. “Everything happened under light.”
Over the course of the next few days, the battle maintained that rhythm.
“It would shut down at night for a little while, we’d get some sleep and then go back to it in the morning,” Lyon said.
On the second day, the enemy lobbed grenades at Lyon’s men. The Americans couldn’t determine where the fire was coming from, and frustration mounted as they took casualties. The captain asked if anyone could do crater analysis. Lyon volunteered and ran out into the fire to study the points of impact, hoping to determine where the enemy’s weapon was located.
“Probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” Lyon said.
On the third day, Lyon’s mission was to provide security while an explosive ordinance disposal unit cleared the buildings that had been rigged to blow. Lyon’s platoon started taking small-arms fire from 50 meters away.
Lyon charged toward the fire to a position with no cover and took out the enemy. On the fourth and final day, Lyon coordinated multiple accurate air strikes with Apaches and A-10s.
The fierceness of the battle convinced the Army this was significant territory. They decided to stay and set up a combat outpost.
Petraeus remarked that historians would mark the battle as an important step for success of the surge, saying “extraordinary courage was ordinary” those days.
As for Lyon, the soon-to-be 11 Bravo, he describes it like this: “It was really a big fight. We were running around shooting and having a good time.”
mccloskeym@stripes.osd.mil Twitter: @MegMcCloskey
