A gimlet is a rock-boring tool, and after the regiment was stationed in Honolulu in 1921, the 21 st so thoroughly bored through the competition in inter-regimental baseball, football and sports leagues, it gained the nickname. The regimental nickname, “Gimlet,” originated in the 1920s from peacetime athletic exploits. The regiment would use some of these same strategies more than a century later while serving in Iraq. There, in addition to fighting, they began to use counterinsurgency and pacification strategies, offering amnesty to insurgents while launching improvement projects, such as building roads and schools and improving sanitation and security. The following year, the regiment was ordered to the Philippines to help put down an insurrection. In the Spanish-American War, the 21 st participated in the assault on San Juan Heights in Santiago, Cuba, in 1898. In that campaign, the soldiers of the 21 st marched more than 1,600 miles in 75 days from July to October over some of the most difficult, desolate terrain in the West. In 1873, the 21st fought in the Modoc War in northern California, and four years later pursued Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce tribe through the Wyoming and Montana until their surrender in October. The regiment was sent to Arizona during the Indian Wars, battling with Apaches in frequent engagements from 1869 to 1872 during scouting expeditions and while defending settlers and mail carriers against Indian attacks and raids. In 1866, as part of an expansion of Regular Army, the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, which had served in 12 campaigns during the Civil War, was reorganized and re-designated what it is today – the 21st Infantry Regiment. The regiment went on to fight at Second Bull Run, Antietam, Mine Run, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna and Cold Harbor – all battlefields where the Civil War Trust has saved over 2,000 acres of land. Younker was wounded in the arm during his mission and was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. Younker, who volunteered to brave a storm of grape shot and canister to deliver a desperate message to Union artillerists to stop shelling their own men. The regiment’s fighting spirit was exemplified by Private John L. At Cedar Mountain today, the Civil War Trust has saved 498 acres of the land where the regiment’s soldiers first fought. Serving as lead skirmishers for a Union division, the regiment’s soldiers fought admirably and helped the advancing Union lines initially break through the Confederate defenses, only to be outnumbered and compelled to withdraw. The new, young soldiers of this new unit were dispatched to Harper’s Ferry before facing combat for the first time in the battle at Cedar Mountain on Aug. The 21 st Infantry Regiment was originally constituted in May 1861, as the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment and organized in May 1862 at Fort Hamilton, N.Y. But its distinctive insignia and coat of arms harken back to its earliest history, featuring a green cedar tree to commemorate its first trial by fire at Cedar Mountain in 1862, and a cluster of four arrows bound by a rattlesnake, a symbol for the regiment’s eight Indian Wars campaigns in the American West in the late 19 th century. Since its creation in 1861, the 21 st Infantry Regiment – the “Gimlet” regiment – has earned 56 wartime campaign streamers – a record matched by few Army units.
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