Medals for His Valor, Ashes for His Wife

[Daless2]

When I read this I felt compelled to do something with it.

Sgt. Smith was a Jeeper, there is even a small reference to that in this article, but that is not the reason for the post.

The reason can only be found in how you are feeling after you read it.

God Bless all who serve, and all who are left behind.


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New York Times - International - September 23, 2003

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.

Sergeant Smith's company was in fact in its third straight day of fighting. Traveling with the division's Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment, the company had surged through the Karbala Gap, crossed the Euphrates and fought its way around the airport, blocking the main highway into Baghdad itself as remnants of Saddam Hussein's government still resisted.

On the morning of April 4, Sergeant Smith and others were constructing a holding pen for prisoners in a compound on the north side of the highway ? on the battalion's flank just behind the front lines ? when the compound came under attack by an estimated 100 Iraqi soldiers.

"He told me, `We're in a world of hurt,' " Staff Sgt. Kevin W. Yetter, who was there, said in an interview at Fort Stewart, Ga., the division's headquarters. "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 fusillade of fire from unseen positions, Sergeant Smith threw a grenade over the compound's wall. He fired an antitank missile at a guard tower.

A mortar round hit an armored engineering vehicle known as an M-113. Sergeant Yetter was inside at that point. The shrapnel temporarily blinded him. It also seriously wounded Sgt. Louis D. Berwald, the gunner on top, and one other soldier. Sergeant Smith helped evacuate the three of them to an aid station, which was suddenly threatened by the attack as well.

He then took over Sergeant Berwald's .50-caliber machine gun, firing repeatedly and reloading three times before he died. According to the citation, his actions killed 20 to 50 Iraqis, allowed the wounded to be evacuated and saved the aid station and possibly 100 lives.

"His was the final resistance," Lt. Col. Thomas P. Smith, commander of the 11th Engineer Battalion, said in June, when the division was still in Iraq and the medal application began its course. "After that the enemy was unable to attack again."

For Mrs. Smith, the war ended that day. She no longer followed the news ? that Sergeant Smith's replacement, Staff Sgt. Lincoln D. Hollinsaid, whose truck and boat were in her backyard, died three days later; that another soldier from the company, Pfc. Jason M. Meyer, was killed when an American tank mistook him for an Iraqi; that Baghdad fell and the war had been won.

"After Paul was gone there was no more news for me," she said. "There was no war."

The Family

His Letters Home

Were Like Diamonds

Mrs. Smith, 37, is German (her first name is pronounced BEAR-get). She met her husband in 1990 when he was stationed in Germany, a year after joining the Army fresh out of high school in Tampa. She already had her daughter, Jessica, from a broken relationship with another American soldier.

She and a friend spent a weekend in the south German town of Bamberg. They met him at a club called the Green Goose. By the end of the evening, he was kneeling on the street and crooning toward their hotel window. "You've lost that loving feeling," he sang, recreating in his own way a scene from one of his favorite movies, "Top Gun."

Soon he left for the first war against Iraq; he did not write, nor phone, and they broke up. His mother, Mrs. Pvirre, said she saw in him then what she saw in the soldiers from the Third Infantry Division when they began to return home to Fort Stewart after this war.

"When you're old like I am, they're just babies," she said. "You can see the horror in their eyes."

The couple got back together, and married in 1992. The new Mrs. Smith began her life as an Army wife. She followed him to Fort Riley, Kan., to Fort Benning, Ga., and finally to Fort Stewart as he rose through the enlisted ranks to sergeant first class.

They had a son, David. He is 9 now, tall and lanky like his father, with the same impish grin. When David was born, Sergeant Smith had refused to leave for a deployment ? at risk of a reprimand. After the birth, "he only held him for 20 minutes or so," she said. "Boy, was he mad."

In fact, Sergeant Smith spent so much time away from home on deployments, including a six-month stint as a peacekeeper in Kosovo in 2001, that the effect still lingers. "Some days it's like he's just deployed and I'm a wife waiting for her soldier to come home," she said.

She last heard from him in March before the war began. It was an abbreviated conversation. They had a routine when he called from a deployment. They always said "I love you" first in case the connection went dead and it was left unsaid.

"It makes me feel better that I know that my last words and his were that we loved each other," she said.

Sergeant Smith rarely wrote letters, but as leader of his squad, he made his soldiers write "last letters." The idea was for the soldiers to say what they had left unsaid, just in case. He wrote one to his parents, but never e-mailed it. They found it on his computer long after he was dead, with the misspellings of a quickly written e-mail.

Mrs. Smith said getting a letter from him was like a getting a diamond ring as a gift, even if a diamond has flaws.

"As I sit here getting ready to head into war once again I realize I have left some things unsed," he wrote in the letter to his parents. "I LOVE YOU and don't want you to worry. Even though I know you will until the day I am home again. There are two ways to come home, steping off the plain and being carried off the plain. It doesn't matter how I come home, because I am prepaired to give all that I am to ensure that all my boys make it home."

The Loss

Did He Suffer?

Did He Speak?

During the war, the wives of Company B formed a sort of support network. After Sergeant Smith's death, his wife felt she was no longer a part of it.

President Bush addressed the division at Fort Stewart on Sept. 12, and met with some of the families of those who had died. But no one invited her until the night before ? too late to make the drive north.

"Nobody seems to be 100 percent honest ? not telling me the whole story," she said. "I feel left out. I want to know if he suffered. I want to know if there were last words ? everything."

She has heard rumors about shortages of food during the war ? and ammunition.

"Did they send the guys in there without enough stuff?" she asked. "Did they know what they needed? It just makes me angry. They thought they had it easy. I think Bush thought it'd be easy ? in-and-out easy. He was wrong and he knows that now."

She began to cry. "I don't get it," she said, angrily, the doubts surfacing again. "There was so much shooting and Paul has to stand up and shoot by himself. Maybe if there were others shooting, he wouldn't have died."

Mrs. Pvirre touched her arm. "This is not our plan," she told her quietly.

"My plan wasn't to be 37 years old and alone ? to raise two children by myself!" Mrs. Smith replied. "Paul made a promise to me that he can't keep anymore."

Mrs. Smith, in tears, left the dining room and went outside. With her gone, Mrs. Pvirre, a committed Christian, said she wondered how her daughter-in-law endured without religious faith. "I don't know how anybody can get through this without God," she said.

Sergeant Smith's death has forged a bond between the two women ? his widow and his mother. They turn to each other for support on the days when their loss seems overwhelming.

A Tuesday early in September turned out to be a bad day because a card came offering condolences but only reviving the pain. She often gets letters from soldiers who once served under Sergeant Smith. On Wednesday, Mrs. Smith put on makeup for the first time. On Thursday, Mrs. Pvirre brought photographs from last Christmas at the house, the last time they were together as a family. She had only just developed them. Mrs. Smith put her head in her hand when she saw one of Sergeant Smith with his family.

They watched Mr. Bush's speech at Fort Stewart on television. Mrs. Smith's mood was better. "I'm glad he went out of his way to welcome the troops home," she said.

The two women disagree on the war. Mrs. Smith said Saddam Hussein's government should have been overthrown in 1991. Then, perhaps, her husband would still be alive.

Mrs. Pvirre said that as a Christian, she opposed war "though the Bible tells us there will be war until Kingdom come," but that she supported her son's devotion to his service.

"I'm so fearful that they're not going to finish this," she said. "I'm so fearful these people are not liberated. I worry that someone else is going to come along and pull the troops out. That would make my son's death not count, not mean anything."

The Memories

Ashes, a House

And His Presence

There were two memorial services ? one at Fort Stewart and another in Florida. Sergeant Smith wanted to be cremated, his remains spread in the gulf where he and his stepfather used to fish. Mrs. Smith kept some for the box on her nightstand, however. She had silver pendants made with more of the ashes. She wears one around her neck. Mrs. Pvirre refuses to wear hers. Mrs. Smith also tattooed her arm with a heart. It says, "You're still the 1" ? a sort of pledge they shared.

People who have lost a limb often still feel its presence, ghostlike. Mrs. Smith described a sensation like that. Some months ago, she dreamed that he told her to give $5,000 to his parents. Another time she felt his hand in hers. One night she smelled his favorite cologne in the bathroom.

These feelings, as hard as it might seem to believe in them, give her comfort. "I know he's with me every day," she said.

The Army, she said, has taken good care of her and her children, helping with funeral arrangements and the reams of paperwork that come with death.

With Sergeant Smith's insurance and pension, she can afford to live well. The state of Florida will pay for the children's college education. People have provided donations, large and small. Sergeant Smith's sister, Lisa DeVane, organized a raffle of his Harley.

Mrs. Smith bought the house here in Holiday from his parents. She did not want to stay in Hinesville, outside of Fort Stewart. Mrs. Pvirre said they had wanted to sell the house because she could not stand the thought of living with the memories of her son there; Mrs. Smith wanted it for that reason.

She declined the grief counseling the Army offered. She does take Prozac, though. She still has trouble sleeping some nights. She closes her eyes and sees the uniformed men at the door.

Her son, David, sees a counselor at his new school here. She worries about him. "I haven't seen the boy cry," she said, "I'm afraid sometimes he doesn't let it out." Sergeant Smith was like that. She remembered him crying only once. They were watching a documentary on the war in 1991. He never talked about it again.

Mrs. Smith still feels angry at times ? at the Army, at President Bush, at life's cruel twist. Then, suddenly, she feels the opposite.

"I can't get mad at Bush," she said. "I can't get mad at the Army. When they thanked me for my husband's service, I thanked them. He loved the Army. They made his dreams come true."