Posted on 03/29/2005 9:36:00 PM PST by RWR8189
ASHINGTON, March 29 - Sgt. First Class Paul R. Smith, killed nearly two years ago defending his vastly outnumbered Army unit in a fierce battle with elite Iraqi troops for control of Baghdad's airport, will receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award, administration officials said Tuesday.
No soldier who served in Afghanistan or Iraq after the Sept. 11 attacks has yet received the medal. The last conflict to produce a Medal of Honor recipient was in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993; two soldiers were awarded the medal posthumously for actions there, later depicted in the movie "Black Hawk Down."
Sergeant Smith led a defense of a compound next to the airport against a much larger force of Special Republican Guard troops, manning a heavy machine gun, repeatedly firing and reloading three times before he was mortally wounded. Fellow soldiers said his actions killed 20 to 50 Iraqis, allowed wounded American soldiers to be evacuated, and saved an aid station and perhaps 100 lives.
Sergeant Smith's "extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor without regard to his own life in order to save others are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service," a draft of the medal citation says.
President Bush will present the award to Sergeant Smith's widow and children at a White House ceremony on Monday, the second anniversary of the airport battle and the soldier's death.
The story of Paul Ray Smith is that of an ordinary recruit from Tampa, Fla., who fresh out of high school joined the Army not out of patriotism but for a steady paying job, and who 15 years later, as a battle-hardened platoon sergeant, was hurled into an extraordinary test, for which he paid the ultimate price.
More than one million military men and women have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since 2001. But Sergeant Smith is the only one whose actions earned an award nomination that has reached this point after wending its way through more than 12 levels of military and presidential reviews over the last two years.
Sergeant Smith's commanders submitted several eyewitness accounts, diagrams of the battle scene and other supporting documents to the Army. A year ago, an Army review board sent back the application, requesting more detailed information about the battle, Army officers said on Tuesday.
Military officials said several factors weighed in nominating Sergeant Smith for the medal, including the intensity of the 90-minute firefight on that scorching spring morning; the risk of the enemy attack to some 100 other American soldiers; the ultimate defeat of the Iraqi attack; and Sergeant Smith's death in battle.
Since the medal was created in the Civil War, there have been 3,440 recipients, but only 842 since World War II, when the requirements were tightened. There are 125 living recipients of the award, according to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in Mount Pleasant, S.C.
Most recipients have been unsung soldiers who acted valiantly in a moment of extraordinary pressure. More celebrated recipients include William F. Cody - Buffalo Bill - for gallantry as a scout; Theodore Roosevelt, for his charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War; and Second Lt. Audie Murphy, for heroics in World War II.
"The Medal of Honor has great symbolic value," said Richard H. Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina. "For the American public, it says, 'We want to thank you with this very highest award possible.' For the troops, it says, 'This guy represented the best of soldiering that we aspire to.' "
Sergeant Smith, 33, was a combat engineer in the Third Infantry Division that swept up from Kuwait on the march to Baghdad. His unit, B Company of the 11th Engineer Battalion, was attached to Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry, and had seized its part of the Baghdad airport on the evening of April 3, 2003.
The next morning, Sergeant Smith and about 15 other soldiers were building a holding pen for prisoners in a compound on the north side of the highway into the airport, on the battalion's flank, when the compound came under attack by some 100 Iraqi soldiers.
"He told me, 'We're in a world of hurt,' " Staff Sgt. Kevin W. Yetter said in an interview with The New York Times several weeks after the battle. "Yeah, I guess we were in a world of hurt."
According to a draft of the medal citation and the company's soldiers, Sergeant Smith organized the engineers' defense, calling in support from a Bradley fighting vehicle. Under a barrage of mortar fire, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire, he hurled a grenade over the compound's wall and blasted an antitank missile at a guard tower.
Still, Iraqi soldiers held the tower and kept firing into the compound.
"We were pinned down," First Sgt. Tim Campbell told The Providence Journal, which had a reporter traveling with troops at the airport. "They had this planned. They found the lightest defended area and attacked."
A mortar round hit an armored engineering vehicle known as an M-113. Sergeant Yetter was inside it. The blast momentarily blinded him. It also seriously wounded Sgt. Louis D. Berwald, the gunner on top, and another soldier. Sergeant Smith helped evacuate the three to an aid station, which was suddenly imperiled by the mounting attack.
Faced with pulling back to a safer position or holding fast, Sergeant Smith took over Sergeant Berwald's .50-caliber gun, firing and reloading before he was shot in the neck.
"If they'd gotten by, there probably would have been dozens of deaths," Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, the retired commander of the Second Battalion, said in a telephone interview.
Sergeant Smith grew up in Tampa, enlisted in the Army in 1989 and served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. As a sergeant, he was considered a taskmaster, insisting his troops keep their weapons spotless, Cpl. Daniel Medrano, who served with the sergeant in Bosnia in 2001, told The St. Petersburg Times. Sergeant Smith would push a Q-tip into rifle barrels, looking for dirt, Corporal Medrano said.
Reached at her home in Holiday, Fla., on Tuesday, Sergeant Smith's widow, Birgit, expressed gratitude. "I'm proud and honored that Paul would be recognized by his country in such a meaningful way," she said in a telephone interview. "He loved his country; he loved the Army; and he loved his soldiers."
A true American Hero
And unlike Kerry, he actually earned his medal.
bump and here's another person I'd nominate for the medal...
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2004/11/godspeed_sergea.html
CMOH BUMP!
Kerry, who's he? :-)
Indeed. We are blessed to have such men among us.
A minor correction, if I may - the image in the first post is the Navy version of the MOH. This is the medal posthumously awarded to Sgt. Smith:
March 29, 2005
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, March 29, 2005) -- When Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith’s family receives his Medal of Honor, they will receive a new item that will be given to all future recipients of the medal – a Medal of Honor flag.
The flag consists of a field of blue, with 13 stars arranged in the same formation that the stars appear on the Medal of Honor ribbon. It is fringed with gold.
The design was the brainchild of Sarah LeClerc of the U.S. Army Institute of Heraldry. A panel of eight members made of representatives from each Service (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard), one Office of Secretary Defense staff, one historian and one representative from the Medal of Honor Society was formed to review and evaluate all designs submitted and make a final recommendation to the Principal Deputy to the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.
“Several of us in the Creative Section worked on the design,” LeClerc said. “I wanted to the simplicity of the 13 stars on a blue field.”
LeClerc said her initial design also contained a canton, similar to the canton containing the stars on the U.S. national flag. On her original design, the canton of red and white stripes, contained the word “valor” as it appears on the Medal of Honor. The committee asked if the canton could be removed.
“They felt the design was better without the canton. We said that as it is an Army design, we can change it however you want, and so we removed it,” said Pam Madigan an industrial specialist with the Institute of Heraldry.
A law created in October 2002, called for the creation of the flag, and the institute solicited designs via an announcement in the Federal Registry, Madigan said.
“It didn’t take long for the committee to make a selection. The meeting only lasted four hours, and they asked me if we could remove the canton. They decided to go with Sarah’s ribbon design, with gold fringe,” Madigan said.
For more information on Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith and his Medal of Honor, see MOH for an image of the flag.
Thank God for this hero!
How about 2nd. Lt. Brian Chintosh...(I hope I spelled his name correctly)?
Yep... there are a lot of mighty men of valor.
Yes. A true hero. God bless and keep his family.
Yes, we salute you.
Florida could use a male hero about now.
"Sergeant Smith's "extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor without regard to his own life in order to save others are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service," a draft of the medal citation says."
Rest in God's arms..brave warrior..I am humbled by your service and valor.
My God, that such men tread this earth!
Birgit Smith sits with her children David, 10, and Jessica, 18, at her home in Holiday after learning her husband will receive the Medal of Honor.
Sgt. Paul Smith (right).
Where does strengths like these, exhibited from both the family and the serviceman, come from???
GOD BLESS OUR MILITARY AND SGT PAUL SMITH
That is a beautiful picture of a strong family I must say. God bless all of them.
Amen and amen!
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