The Louisiana National Guard awarded SSgt. James Lam, a joint terminal attack controller, a Bronze Star with Valor device for his actions under fire during a three-hour firefight in Afghanistan in 2012. Lam, then a member of the Louisiana Guard’s 122nd Air Support Operations Squadron, was attached to a the 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment tasked with locating high-value targets in Afghanistan when they came under direct rocket-propelled grenade and machine gun fire on Feb. 23, 2012, according to a Louisiana Guard release. During the firefight, Lam left cover to help soldiers get ammunition for a machine gun. “I did my job, nothing more, nothing less,” Lam said at a Dec. 6 ceremony. “If we do it right, what we do as a JTAC, it brings those infantry guys home—and for me, it’s about bringing home those infantry soldiers and combat arms soldiers.” Lam is now a member of the Oklahoma Air National Guard.
Special-ops aviators, a physicist from the intelligence community, and an enlisted Marine with decades of deployments: U.S. Space Command’s military and civilian leaders who spoke May 7 were as likely to come from strictly space backgrounds as not. These are some of the day’s insights from inside the command, which…