Who was General Mark Milley before he was ‘The Chairman’?
From blue collar Boston to the military's highest ranking officer, we took a look at the man behind the stars.
BY JAMES CLARK | PUBLISHED MAY 9, 2023 3:23 PM EDT
Army Gen. Mark Milley has been a lightning rod for scrutiny and controversy as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But, strangely, the nation he has served for more than 40 years doesn’t know much about the man who so often finds himself in the crossfire of a red-hot culture war.
Until now, few people knew Milley once ran across a minefield in Iraq to stop an M1 Abrams tank seconds before the vehicle rolled over an IED. Almost no one knew that one of his soldiers put Milley up for a valor award for his actions that day.
It was April 2, 2005, and the war in Iraq was in its second full year. Milley was a colonel charged with commanding the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team in Baghdad, Iraq. The brigade’s area of operations swelled in recent weeks, encompassing the town of Sabaa Al Bour along the Grand Canal, the Baghdad International Airport, Abu Ghraib prison, and all the space in-between and further out. In short, the unit found itself overseeing a large swath of ground in the capital city of a country enduring an active insurgency underway against the Iraqi government and U.S. troops.
https://taskandpurpose.com/history/mark-milley/
