1457th earned its stripes
Lee Benson
The 1457th Engineer Battalion wasn't perfect.
But it was close enough for this man's army in this man's war.
Lt. Col. Jeff Burton sits at his home in Payson, only days since his return from Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he commanded the 1457th, a Utah Army National Guard unit made up of 443 part-time soldiers from eight Utah communities and the Navajo Nation. Like everyone in the battalion, he's now happily staring into the freedom of a month's leave. But he isn't going anywhere. He's staying home in case any of his guys want to talk about the transition to peace. "We're a little nervous," he says. "We hear a noise and jump."
The colonel is proud of the service his men rendered in helping clean up after a war that lasted barely a month but carried more after-effects than jalape–o peppers. In liberated Iraq, the engineers of the 1457th spent a year destroying thousands of munitions Saddam Hussein had buried across the country. They built new bridges across the Tigris River in Baghdad and repaired others. They were Johnny-on-the-spot when the U.N. building and Red Cross headquarters were bombed by rebels. Living in tents at the Baghdad Airport, they were on call "24-7." They worked as snipers fired at them and in temperatures that reached as high as 148 degrees, when they could only manage 10-minute shifts every hour.
One of their units, Charlie Company, was named top National Guard engineering company in the Army. Their chaplain was honored for having the highest percentage of church attendees. Members of the 1457th were awarded two Army commendation medals and 28 bronze stars.
One battlefield decoration they were light on, however, were purple hearts. Only three members of the 1457th were wounded during their year surrounded by danger. And most remarkably, not a single member of the battalion was killed.
The other troops in Iraq started calling the Utah outfit, with about 80 percent LDS soldiers, the "Mormon Miracles."
The 1457th almost didn't come home on time. After they'd finished the year they'd signed on for and packed up their equipment, they were told they would have to stay longer. Psychologically, Colonel Burton knew his men, who had done all that was asked of them, were whipped. "If you weren't a manic-depressive," he says, "this was the kind of place that would make you one — incredible highs interspersed with equally incredible lows."
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