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Chaney grad in Iraq triumphs in tests
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Balog receives his award for first place in the United States Division-South Noncommissioned Officer of the Quarter competition..
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Staff Sgt. James Balog, a Chaney High School graduate, crawls under barbed wire as part of a physical assessment course. Balog won the competition and is the U.S. Division-South Noncommissioned Officer of the Quarter..
Staff report
Youngstown
A Youngstown native and U.S. soldier in Iraq won a recent competition against his peers. Sgt. James Balog placed first in a test of physical endurance, weapons proficiency and military knowledge.
“It was difficult. Every second of it,” Balog said. “It was continuous physically. We went all day long from 3 a.m. until 4 p.m.”
In addition, temperatures hit 100 degrees on competition day, Balog said.
He is serving his third deployment in Iraq as a Black Hawk door gunner assigned to the Enhanced Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. He is now on leave in Kansas, where he now lives.
He attended Chaney High School in Youngstown and went to Youngstown State University for two years before being called up for active duty.
Balog said he took time to prepare for the competition.
“I kept a log for one month of how many miles I ran, and it totaled out to 93 miles,” Balog said. “For the mental part, I dug into Army study-guide note cards that had to be a thousand cards deep.”
Public Affairs Officer Efrem Gibson, who spoke from Taji, an hour north of Baghdad, said such competitions occur every three or four months.
“You typically have a qualification where you attempt to shoot so many targets within a certain amount of time,” Gibson said. “There’s an obstacle course, which is a variety of things and a three-mile run in full battle rattle, which is about an extra 20 pounds of stuff you have to wear.”
Balog said the competition involved target practice with several guns including an M9 pistol, an M4 carbine rifle, a shotgun, an M249 SAW and an AK-47.
As the winner of his unit, Balog will go on to compete against other unit winners in a similar competition.