64 troops hand-picked to attend Iraq War dinner - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

64 troops hand-picked to attend Iraq War dinner

Over the course of a few days this month, the Pentagon hand-picked 64 troops as stand-ins for the 1.5 million Americans who fought in Iraq to attend a formal White House dinner Feb. 29 officially honoring service and sacrifice in the nine-year war.

There were broad-stroke demands by the White House that left senior enlisted officers with each service scrambling on short notice to find just the right soldier, sailor, airman, Marine or Coast Guardsmen, according to interviews with military leaders Tuesday.

First and foremost, every state, territory and the District of Columbia had to be represented. Ethnic, racial and gender diversity was crucial, and every service and every rank had to be included.

“The whole kit and caboodle,” said Marine Sgt. Maj. Brian Battaglia, senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and highest ranking enlisted officer in the military.

“What we wanted inside that (East) Room is America,” Battaglia said of the White House location where the dinner will be held.

One group, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which represents 200,000 former servicemembers, has said that a more fitting tribute to Iraq veterans would be a ticker tape parade in New York City. But the Pentagon said that a New York parade should wait until after U.S. forces end combat in Afghanistan.

About 100 guests and their significant others are being invited to the White House. But after the service chiefs, families who lost a loved one in combat and other selected VIPs were accounted for, the Pentagon had 64 slots left for combat veterans.

Military databases quickly spit out lists of the thousands who fought in Iraq.

The hard part was pulling some from every geographic location, Battaglia said. “The hard-to-do states and territories were Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and North Dakota,” he says.

The Marines addressed the problem by selecting troops who live largely in the Washington, D.C., area but whose hometowns were from states that needed to be represented, said Gunnery Sgt. Chanin “Nun” Nuntavong, who with one other Marine contacted potential attendees.

The Air and Army National Guard, which exist in every location, were able to round out the toughest geographic requirements.

“We have a soldier traveling from Guam. We have a soldier traveling from the Virgin Islands,” said Chief Master Sgt. Denise Jelinski-Hall, with the National Guard Bureau.

In some cases, attendees were chosen because of someone knew someone. In other cases, it was pulling a name off of a list. “Some of it was just a judgment call,” Jelinski-Hall said.

Working against a deadline for an event that had yet to be announced, potential attendees were called and told only that they were being considered for an important event in the national capital region, Nuntavong said.

“We had a couple of unanswered phone calls, and we just moved on,” he said. A few even begged off for a host of reasons, he said.

The search, which had begun on Jan. 31, was wrapped up within the first week or so of February.

“We made something happen in short order,” Battaglia said.