Four members of the 4th Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team were awarded Purple Heart medals Thursday for their Iraq war wounds and heard a cautiously upbeat report from their commander at the front.

Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, spoke by video link from Baghdad to the medal ceremony, held on Fort Carson.

“The amount of violence is at an all-time low,” he said, reporting that his troops are hard at work on reconstruction projects, training Iraqi security forces and helping move 50,000 Baghdad families to their home neighborhoods after being displaced during five years of violence.

“It’s remarkable to see this thing getting better,” Hammond said. “The glass is half-full. We’re moving in the right direction. But I’ll tell you quite honestly: As I look through the tunnel, I see a light, but I’m not quite ready to say that’s the light at the end of the tunnel. It still might be the train headed this direction.”

Purple Hearts were presented to 1st Lt. Dale Donaldson, 26, an Oklahoman wounded by a roadside bomb in Baghdad in May; Sgt. Daryl Williams, 29, of Massapequa, N.Y., hit by a bomb in Baghdad in July; Sgt. Jeffrey Kinney, 23, a native Canadian who suffered a bullet wound in Mosul in January; and Cpl. Steven Defino, 28, of Plano, Texas, for whom this was a second Purple Heart award. He was wounded in an ambush in Baghdad in April.

Since World War II, Purple Hearts have been awarded to all American service members wounded in combat. Nearly 2 million medals have been issued.

In his remarks at the ceremony, Col. David Thompson, who is in charge of 4th Infantry Division units at Fort Carson, took note of the date.

“Today is the 11th of September, 2008,” he said. “Seven years ago, our country was attacked. I don’t think I need to remind anybody in this audience of those heinous events of that day. In the seven years since, there have been many days of reckoning for the enemy, that reckoning made possible by our American soldiers, soldiers like the ones in front of you here today who have paid the price.”

Thompson’s remarks touched on a still-smoldering controversy surrounding the American response to the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by the terrorist group al-Qaida. Contrary to repeated assertions by Bush administration officials, no substantial link between the 9/11 plotters and the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, which was the target of the American-led invasion in 2003, has been documented.

The official American rationale for war, that Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, also turned out to be false.

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Contact the writer: 476-1654 or dean.toda@gazettedev.gazette.com

Phil Duhon stands on the back porch at Oscar’s on Tejon Street Tuesday, June 20, 2006. Photo by The Gazette File

HUNTER MCRAE