The Nightfighters · the 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry

Headquartered in Fort Wayne since 1947

The standing battalion: Fort Wayne's Army National Guard battalion is the 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry Regiment — the "Nightfighters," motto "Follow Us" — today a battalion of the 76th Mobile Brigade Combat Team (the "Nighthawk Brigade"), 38th Infantry Division, Indiana Army National Guard. The Military Department of Indiana carries the battalion as active from 1846 as the 1st Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, home station Fort Wayne, with a Philippine Presidential Unit Citation for 17 October 1944 to 4 July 1945 among its decorations, and its shield — blue and white for infantry, divided for four wars, a snake from the arms of Mexico for the first of them — is blazoned by the Army's Institute of Heraldry. The Army lineage and the county history do not tell the regiment's first war the same way: the lineage tradition associates the 1846 regiment with Taylor's army at Buena Vista, while the contemporary county history records the two Fort Wayne companies on Rio Grande guard duty with no fighting. Both accounts stand in the Wars record; this chapter does not merge them.

As a standing organization the modern dates are these. In 1947 the unit took the designation 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry, headquartered in Fort Wayne, where its headquarters has remained. Its present organization, as the Military Department of Indiana lists it, puts Headquarters and Headquarters Company and Company B in Fort Wayne, Company A in Hartford City, Company C in Angola and Company D (Weapons) in Bluffton, with a Fort Wayne detachment of the 1-163rd Field Artillery's headquarters battery and Company H, 113th Support Battalion, in support in the same city. The battalion drills at the Fort Wayne armory on Cook Road (see the armories, below). Its federal activations and deployments — Bosnia, Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, Iraq again in 2008 — are rostered in the Wars record and are not retold here; what is institutional is the standing fact that for nearly eighty years a Fort Wayne-headquartered infantry battalion has been the city's permanent Army presence, training at Camp Atterbury and the state's other camps and answering state call-ups for flood and storm duty in between.

Sources:

1. Military Department of Indiana, "76th Mobile Brigade Combat Team" (in.gov) — the battalion under the 76th, "Active: 1846 as the 1st Regiment, Indiana Volunteers," home station Fort Wayne, Nightfighters nickname, "Follow Us" motto, the Philippine Presidential Unit Citation, the Institute of Heraldry shield, and the present company stations.
2. Transfer-of-authority ceremony narration, Task Force 1-293 (2008) — the 1947 redesignation as 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry headquartered in Fort Wayne, and the battalion's own statement of its 1846 lineage (the Buena Vista conflict is carried in Wars, Unrest & Disasters).
3. Waynedale News, 29 October 2003 — the battalion "stationed at the Cook Road Armory in Fort Wayne" on its return from the Middle East.