Distinguished Flying Cross (Awarded: April 2003)

While the 3rd Infantry Division were storming to Baghdad in 2003, the Republican Guard was giving everything they had to resist the Marines' advance. To get the edge over the enemy, the 3rd called in air support.

Flying through a dust storm, then-Captain Kim "Killer Chick" Campbell pointed her A-10 Thunderbolt II directly at the enemy. In the face of RPG, anti-aircraft, and small arms fire, Campbell unleashed several rockets on the enemy position that had been threatening the advancing forces, scoring a direct hit and silencing the opposition.

Her mission accomplished, and the Marines free to advance, her entire jet was rocked by a sudden explosion. She'd taken a surface-to-air missile to the tail and had lost control. Her hydraulics and horizontal stabilizers totally blown, the A-10 started spiraling toward Baghdad in an unresponsive dive. Thinking quickly, Campbell cut the doomed hydraulics which would've surely caused her plane to crash into a city of 11 million people, and switched over to manual piloting mode.

She regained control of the crippled aircraft and flew out of the danger zone, the whole time taking sporadic AA fire from the Baghdad defenders. For eliminating an entrenched enemy position on a danger close mission in the face of a hellish barrage of defensive fire, and saving possibly hundreds of Marines, Campbell received the Distinguished Flying Cross.