Photo By Winifred Brown | Retired Maj. Gen. Heidi V. Brown, a native of El Paso who retired after 40 years in...... read more read more
By Wendy Brown
Fort Bliss Bugle Managing Editor
Retired Maj. Gen. Heidi V. Brown, an El Paso native who spent about nine years of her career at Fort Bliss, announced March 30, 2017, she plans to write a book entitled, “From Bliss to Baghdad,” about the ambush of elements of the 507th Maintenance Company in Iraq in 2003.
Brown, speaking on her last day of active duty service at the Women in Business Conference at the Wyndham El Paso Airport Hotel, said the moment she learned one of the 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade’s convoys had been ambushed in the town of Nasiriyah, Iraq, was the defining moment of her 40-year career. Brown was the brigade commander.
“Nine of our Soldiers were killed in that town,” Brown told the standing-room-only crowd. “Six were prisoners of war and five were wounded. I remember getting the information initially on a very unreliable iridium cell phone that would drop the call about every 30 seconds. I eventually got the entire message and felt numb.”
Brown said she and Lt. Col. Joe Fischetti, the company’s battalion commander, tried to console one another and wrote letters to all the fallen Soldiers’ parents and loved ones.
Brown paused and said, “Nothing is as real as conducting a memorial service on the battlefield.”
As a matter of principle, she and Fischetti embraced the battle buddies of their fallen comrades and then made them get back in the fight.
“I was asked, no I was directed, to redeploy the 507th Maintenance Company back for Fort Bliss, and I refused,” Brown said. “I moved some Soldiers from another one of my maintenance companies to the 507th to make them mission ready. They needed to stay in the fight, to complete their mission and to have the reassurance that their buddies had not died in vain. I paid for that decision, but I didn’t care. I would do the same today, no regrets.”
Brown said every day she thinks of the lives lost that day, March 23, 2003. “You never stop thinking about them,” she said.
When her mother tried to console her by telling her she didn’t think President Dwight Eisenhower, who served as supreme commander of Allied Forces in Western Europe during World War II, grieved over the thousands of Soldiers lost in WW II, Brown said she begged to differ.
“A commander is responsible for all things a unit does and fails to do,” Brown said. “It is what you do with that grief that matters. I would like to think that it made me a better leader and person. I hope that I did my parents proud over the last 40 years.”
On March 2, 2016, the 5th Battalion, 52nd Air Defense Artillery, “Fighting Deuce,” 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, unveiled a new memorial for the fallen Soldiers of the 507th Maint. Co. at 2919 Carrington Road here. The 507th was the battalion’s maintenance company during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was reflagged as Company E, 5th Bn., 52nd ADA, 11th ADA Bde. The 31st ADA Bde. is now at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Most recently, Brown held the position of director of global operations of U.S. Strategic Command, one of nine Department of Defense unified commands, at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
Brown, who became the first woman from El Paso to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1981 and has had a career full of firsts for women, said she plans to begin writing the book in earnest this summer.
“After all of that, I will figure out what’s really next,” she said.
Brown was one of three featured speakers at the daylong event, and she also told the room full of businesswomen (and some men) nine characteristics they must have to be successful. They included: motivation, creativity and persuasiveness, versatility, superb business skills, risk tolerance, drive, vision, flexibility and open mindedness and decisiveness.
Brown also included a few anecdotes from her military career, some of them humorous, and encouraged everyone in the room to succeed. The Women in Business Committee of the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce presented Brown with a plaque thanking her for her military service and her support to the community. Brown closed her speech by saying that “old Soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
“I completed the journey. I did my best,” she said. “It has been my honor to have served this great nation. I wish you all the very best with all your endeavors and your future. My name is Brown and I will always be a Soldier.”
| Date Taken: | 03.30.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 12.19.2017 13:35 |
| Story ID: | 259453 |
| Location: | TEXAS, US |
| Web Views: | 608 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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