Newest Medal of Honor recipient

[CSM]

New York Times
March 30, 2005

Medal Of Honor To Be Awarded To Soldier Killed In Iraq, A First

Do not have a link to the NewYork Times but for those who can get on the DoD Early Bird website:

http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20050330360611.html

 

[Annie]

New York Times
March 30, 2005

Medal Of Honor To Be Awarded To Soldier Killed In Iraq, A First

Do not have a link to the NewYork Times but for those who can get on the DoD Early Bird website:

http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20050330360611.html

Here's the NYTimes Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/politics/30medal.html

WASHINGTON, 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."

 

[Annie]

Very cool Flash site on the battle that cost Smith his life and resulted in him being awarded the Medal of Honor:

http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/battlescape/index.html