Yeah you're right about an Infantryman not getting a valor award without a CIB.
Correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC there was a point in the Army that if you were merely assigned to an Infantry company and were engaged in a firefight or sustained combat with that unit you got a CIB. They stopped the practice after the Vietnam war.
BTW,to give you a better idea of the importance of a CIB in SF,my camp commander was a LTC that didn't have a CIB. He was a young officer in the Korean War that was a tanker. Won a SS and a couple of other doodahs in the Korean war,and went on serving in the regular army until he was a field grade officer,and went to the SF officers course. Not having a CIB made him feel like an outsider that didn't belong there,so he got a recon team leader named Joe Walker to take him out on a recon mission into Laos with his team. Joe agreed,providing the LTC agree to carry the radio and obey any and all his commands while in the field. After all,no team can have more than one leader,and Joe probably had 30-40 recon missions into Laos and Cambodia by then,and he and his team knew each other to the point where everybody knew what to do,and when to do it without having to hold a briefing.
The LTC agreed,so off they went. It just so happened that it was my turn to pull radio watch duty at our remote radio relay in Laos,call name "Leghorn". There was a squad of yards and 2 SF recon team members up there at all times to relay messages back and forth between the teams on the ground and the camp/
I was on radio watch the day that LTC earned his CIB,and there can be no doubt he earned it because the mic was shot out of his hand as he was giving me the noon sitrep. Which means Joe's team was ambushed,under fire,and had lost radio contact . "Organized Panic" is probably the best description of what happened. Joe and his team were on the run for a couple of hours with sporadic contact until they could get to an LZ to use their emergency radio to call for an extraction.
BTW,in case you don't know,the emergency radios we had were only carried by the Americans,and they were USAF issue to pilots. One of our guys managed to procure a bunch of these,and we all carried them on missions. VERY short range,but when you pulled the antenna out it automatically broadcast an emergency signal to every US aircraft in range,and every pilot that heard it automatically assumed a airplane had been shot down and the survivors needed rescuing. In other words,the air would suddenly fill with airplanes,most of them carrying bombs,rockets,napalm,and/or cannons. HAPPY DAYS!
They couldn't rescue you,but they could damn sure provide you with cover fire and relay your messages to get helicopters in the air to come and pick you up. There were some happy people back at Kontum when they heard that,and a BUNCH of recon team leaders sitting around the radio shack waiting to hear if there were any volunteers needed to go in and get them out. Joe was VERY highly thought of,as was the LTC.
This was ONE senior officer that EARNED his CIB!
