I took the middle ground on this one. I listed all individual awards and also awards where I was a direct contributing team member (Team awards where there were maybe 5-8 people involved), but not squadron awards. I did not list any of my general service awards that I felt any reasonable person could have received in my job by showing up to work. My thought was that I wanted each line to be hard hitting. I was afraid of overwhelming the admissions committee with too much stuff which would lessen the impact of the few hard-earned awards I had (military folks will understand.....there are lists and lists of things you could dump on a paper....we are all pros at writing awards packages).
As much as possible, I tried to spell out the awards and added some parentheses after the end if a few more words would "civilianize" the award. I can't remember if I ran out of characters on each entry but I think I did (as in I had to be a little creative with how I typed some things). In the end, I figured because it wasn't an official military record, I was OK to cut some of the names and do my best to capture what the award was. If anyone had questions, I had the full paperwork in my possession.
Also, I don't know if this will help you....I used 2 military references (one was writing as my "employer" and one wrote as an "instructor"). I specifically had each of them highlight 1-2 of my highest awards or rankings from my performance reports. This gave them a lot of stuff to talk about and provided a full interpretation of the awards for a civilian admissions committee (**I realize you are applying to Baylor so this would apply to any other schools on your list).
