Medals for His Valor, Ashes for His Wife
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
OLIDAY, Fla. — It was back on April 4 when Birgit Smith last wrote her husband, Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith. "Life without you here is just not the same," she wrote in a tight, neat cursive.
She printed out an envelope and stamped it. He was already dead.
Two men in uniform came to the door that night, another sergeant and a chaplain. Of course, she knew what the visit meant, but the timing seemed all wrong. It was too late: 11:30. They were never supposed to come after 10. And they asked for Jessica Smith, her 17-year-old daughter and Sergeant Smith's adopted stepdaughter.
"I said, `I'm Paul's wife,' " she said. More than five months later, it remains difficult for her to recall. Sergeant Smith's mother, Janice Pvirre, continued the story. "She kicked them out of the house," she said.
Sergeant Smith died outside the airport near Baghdad that still bore Saddam Hussein's name, the morning after the Army's Third Infantry Division pushed into it on the evening of April 3.
For a reporter traveling with the division's First Brigade at the time — and bound by Pentagon guidelines that prohibit immediately identifying casualties — the sergeant's death was another faceless fact of the war's grim toll, noted amid the thunderous blasts of a battle that was not yet over.
But the dead have faces — and families. The war's reverberations continue far away from Iraq. The ultimate price of the conflict is still being paid, long after the shot through the neck that killed Sergeant Smith.
"I'm living in a zone — like a zombie," Mrs. Smith said. "I'm hoping I'll wake up one day and it won't be true."
Sergeant Smith, 33, was one of 38 soldiers from the Third Infantry Division killed in the war or its aftermath, along with four others from other units who fought with the division.
In his case, the circumstances surrounding his death — a courageous lone stand against Iraqi foes — may earn him the nation's highest military award, the Medal of Honor. The division's medal application — which cites his "extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor" — is steadily making its way through the Army's bureaucracy. It would be the first awarded since two soldiers received it for actions in Somalia in 1993.
Whether this gives Mrs. Smith solace seems to depend on her emotional state, which fluctuates wildly day to day, even hour to hour, from grief and pride to a gnawing emptiness then a fierce determination to keep his memory alive.
"What is the Medal of Honor?" she asked angrily in the dining room of her new home here on the Gulf Coast north of Tampa, the home where his mother and stepfather lived, and where memories of him linger. She was crying now. "What is it to me? What is it to Paul? Maybe it's something to the kids, but it doesn't bring my husband back. It's nothing."
Then, at other times, it is something. She has built a shrine of sorts in her bedroom that includes the Purple Heart and Bronze Star he has already received, posthumously. She has left a place on the black felt for the Medal of Honor.
His cremated ashes rest in a bronze box on the nightstand. His personal belongings — clothes, a CD player, an American flag — are inside a wooden trunk. She lifted his desert cap to her face. "The hat still smells like him," she said. "You just know the smell of your husband."
Mrs. Smith did not even know he was near Baghdad that day. He was a squad leader in the First Brigade's 11th Engineer Battalion. A combat engineer was what he had always been and wanted to be. He called himself "Sapper 7." It is etched on the window of his old Jeep, which Jessica now drives. It is on Mrs. Smith's new Florida license plate.
Like most wives and girlfriends, mothers and fathers, siblings and friends left behind, she watched news of the war compulsively. But she assumed that his unit, Company B, was far from the airport when word of its capture dominated the news. "I always say to myself no news from you is good news," she wrote to him in the letter never sent.
Richard Perry/The New York Times
Sergeant Smith's personal belongings — clothes, a CD player, an American flag — are inside a wooden trunk in the couple's bedroom.
Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith. An American Hero
FORT STEWART, Ga. -- Birgit Smith knelt beside an engraved granite marker under a freshly planted redbud tree Wednesday, running her fingers over each letter of her husband's name. Then she bowed her head and wept.
Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith was one of 34 soldiers from Fort Stewart's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The division lost more troops than any other unit in the war.
Birgit Smith's late husband is a certified hero. He is a candidate for the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of fellow soldiers during a battle near the Baghdad airport on April 4.
Smith, 33, served with the 11th Engineer Battalion, Bravo Company. His unit was assigned to build a compound for Iraqi prisoners of war near the captured Baghdad airport.
His squad knocked down a gate to a Republican Guard complex, unaware that the Iraqi troops were entrenched inside.
The enemy troops swarmed out like hornets, firing from a tower, shooting rocket-propelled grenades from trees and sniping from the roof. About 100 Iraqi fighters charged through the smashed gate toward the Americans -- 15 or 20 medics, mortar operators and Army engineers.
Several U.S. soldiers were immediately wounded. After quickly seeing to his injured troops, Smith climbed back aboard a damaged light-armor vehicle and sprayed the advancing Iraqis with .50-caliber bullets, firing and reloading for an hour and a half until he ran out of ammunition.
After the battle, surviving soldiers found Smith shot in the head. He was the only U.S. soldier killed during the bloody skirmish. His comrades, who credit him with saving his unit, say he single-handedly killed 30 to 50 Iraqis.
Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, Smith's commanding officer, said he will recommend the sergeant for the Medal of Honor.
Soldiers like Smith who trained and fought in the drab deserts of Kuwait and Iraq missed the lush greenery of South Georgia so much they sometimes asked family members here to send them photographs of grass and trees.
To honor them, the Army planted an eastern redbud tree for each of them. The memorial of trees was dedicated during a service at Cottrell Field on this sprawling military post Wednesday afternoon.
Few of the 15,000 soldiers deployed from Fort Stewart have returned from their Middle East mission. But their families and friends turned out in force, along with military reservists and National Guard troops temporarily based here, to honor the fallen soldiers of the 3rd Infantry. At least 1,000 people attended the memorial service.
The families of the slain troops were seated in a section reserved for them and other special guests, including Gov. Sonny Perdue and his wife, Mary. Some came dressed in their Sunday best, some wore black and some were in shorts or jeans. Several carried bouquets of flowers.
Each of the 34 fallen soldiers was represented on the field by a pair of combat boots, an M-16 rifle, a helmet bearing his name and a set of dog tags, which chimed loudly against the metal of the rifle barrels throughout the ceremony.
Col. Gerald Poltorak, post commander, said the Fort Stewart soldiers who died in Iraq "have added a proud chapter" to the 3rd Infantry's long and successful combat record.
"They fought for freedom and showed compassion to the vanquished," he said.
The memorial of redbud trees, planted in a double row designated "Warrior's Walk" at the edge of Cottrell Field, will bloom every year at the beginning of April, "at about the same time the soldiers died," the commander noted.
Smith's sister, Lisa DeVane of Smyrna, Ga., said she isn't surprised that her kid brother turned out to be a hero.
"Even as a child, he was compassionate, always looking out for other children in our neighborhood who weren't as popular as he was," she said.
Her brother was a good listener and a great storyteller who always wanted to be a soldier, she recalled. He joined the Army the day after graduating from high school in Tampa.
Paul and Birgit Smith's children, Jessica, 16, and David, 9, did not attend the memorial service because they've missed so much school since their father's death and needed to make up classes, their mother said.
DeVane drove down Wednesday with her husband, Brad, for the service. She and her sister-in-law wore silver heart lockets containing some of the ashes from their loved one's cremation.
Birgit Smith said the children are having a hard time dealing with their dad's death.
But David is convinced his father has become the brightest star in heaven, she said. Before leaving for the Middle East, Smith told his family he'd look for the brightest star in the sky every night, from wherever he was, and he told them to do the same.
"He said that was how we'd feel close to him, because no matter where he was, we'd all be looking at the same star."
Jingle Davis writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A Soldiers blog can not fathom the enormity of emotions running through the family and friends of these brave soldiers. I can only hope when these horrifying times become history pages that it was all for something. That the world is a more peaceful place and these deaths praised for the heroism it was. To die in a strange land with hatred and viciousness makes this all the more daunting and hard to stay the course. If we break now though it will have been for naught. A Soldiers Blog reaches out to the loved ones of the slain and with hope and faith holds them in her heart forvever.A Soldiers Mom Please send a soldier a smile today.A Soldier's Blog
Posted by: Patti
B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, United States Army
Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously during a White House ceremony April 4, 2005
