Two Brothers, Two Bronze Stars

  It was a Tuesday in mid-July about 9 pm. Dark outside and hot as blazes. Army 1st Sgt Shane E Summers of the 1st Battalion of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment was on his way to a meeting with his battalion commander in Afghanistan.
   The meeting before his was running a little late so Summers waited. Patiently. But he didn’t have to wait long. Suddenly there was a loud explosion some distance away but close to his compound, He moved quickly to check on the men under his command.
   He gave the order for everyone to get their gear on and they all went straight to night vision,” Summers said. And they were shooting.
   Then he heard another large explosion and discovered his lead man had been wounded. Another man, a lieutenant, was killed. Summers grabbed the wounded man and pulled him into the building.
   “The aid station was hit. I hurried over to the breach in the wall while shots were hitting all around me. When I got to the aid station I hooked up with another unit. It was chaos, total chaos,” Summers recalled.
   Four American soldiers were killed in the attack, Another 15 were wounded. When he wasn’t shooting at insurgents Summers was assisting with casualties.
   Another bomb went off near the aid station; Summers could feel the earth tremble beneath him. “You get so focused when you’re being shot at,” he said, “that you don’t always remember how many explosions there were. I was thinking three or four but later learned it was 10 or 11.”
   Shane is in the Army just back from his fourth tour in the Middle East Sean a 12-year Army veteran is an attorney with Barley & Snyder and is representing Albert Snyder (Snyder v Westboro Baptist Church) in a Supreme Court case.
   Among the insurgents that night he said were four suicide bombers. Three blew themselves up but the fourth was shot before the bomb went off.  Summers, 38, had no idea how long the shooting lasted — “when you’re in a fire fight like that you lose all track of time,” he said. But he continued to defend the headquarters building and the wounded men who were waiting there for medical care.
   “Eventually the Medivac helicopters arrived and we evacuated the most seriously wounded men as quickly as we could” he said. For his efforts during the assault on his battalion’s ANCOP (Afghan National Civil Order Police) headquarters and for “his leadership while under fire which helped save the lives of numerous paratroopers and enable the defeat of the enemy,” Summers a graduate of Dover Area High School in 1991 was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor on Friday Sept 17 at Fort Bragg, NC.

   The Bronze Star is the nation’s fourth-highest combat-related commendation.
   Major Gen Jim Huggins, the division commander, presented Summers his medal for battlefield heroism during a ceremony at the Hall of Heroes at Fort Bragg. “He helped repel the enemy attack and evacuate the critically wounded,” Huggins said.   Summers is the son of Tim Summers, Dillsburg and the late Kay Summers. He was home for four or five days last week reconnecting with his family before his next assignment as an ROTC instructor at Niagara University in New York. Summers is an 18-year veteran of the US Army including three tours of duty in Afghanistan — June to December in 2002, January 2007 to April 2008 and August 2009 to August 2010 — and one tour of duty in Iraq.  “In the last four years” he said “I’ve spent more time in Afghanistan than in America.
   A paratrooper, Summers has completed 101 jumps. In his last assignment he was in charge of three rifle company platoons and one headquarters platoon — about 130 soldiers.
   in all Summers is one in a long list of Summers family men who have seen action in the military. His grandfather Paul was in the Navy during World War II, his father and two uncles Danny and Mike, served during the Vietnam conflict and his brother Sean spent 12 years in the Army six, as a paratrooper and six as a JAG (Judge Advocate General) officer.
   Sean a graduate of Dover Area High School in 1988, joined the Army right out of high school and spent one six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan in the early ’90s. After six years he left the Army deciding to attend college (Regis University in Colorado) and law school (Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan). Then he returned to the Army as a JAG prosecutor for another six years.
   He is best known as the lawyer with the Barley & Snyder law firm, 100 E Market St. York, who represented Spring Garden Township resident Albert Snyder in a First Amendment case with military implications — Snyder vs. Phelps/Westboro Baptist Church — recently before the US Supreme Court.
   Sean also was awarded a Bronze Star for service in a combat zone.
   Asked if his own military career was a factor in his decision to represent Snyder, Sean admitted it was “I spent 12 years in the Army, my brother is in the Army, my whole family served in the military. So it was personal with me. There was no hesitation on my part. It was an easy decision to take the case. I’m glad I did it.”
   For his part, Tim Summers was a man of few words last week when asked about his two sons. “I’m really proud of them both,” he said.
   Then he repeated it again — “I’m just really proud.”
   And for good reason.

[The York Dispatch (York, PA, 18 Oct 2010, Mon, Page 4]