Brigade Seeks Top Honor for a Fallen Hero
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page A01
I have been waiting for stories like this one to surface.
BAGHDAD -- The battle erupted suddenly and without warning. One minute, Bravo Company of the 11th Engineer Battalion was trying to build a holding pen for war prisoners. The next, the unit was under fire from as many as 200 Special Republican Guard soldiers defending Saddam International Airport.
After helping evacuate wounded U.S. soldiers, Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith jumped into an M-113 armored personnel carrier, maneuvered it into the center of a walled courtyard and climbed into the commander's hatch to man its .50-caliber machine gun. Under fire from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, his flak jacket shredded by incoming rounds, Smith held off a counterattack until he was killed by a bullet to the throat.
Smith, 33, of Tampa, was credited with saving dozens of his fellow soldiers' lives in that April 4 battle. Among the most vulnerable were medics at a forward aid station and the staff of a command, both lightly armed units that were accompanying Smith's company of 3rd Infantry Division engineers. The division's 1st Brigade, to which the engineer battalion belongs, now seeks to honor Smith by putting him forward posthumously for the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor.
"His actions clearly warrant it," said Col. William F. Grimsley, the 1st Brigade commander.
For the past couple of weeks, U.S. commanders have been putting together recommendations for valor awards, compiling witness accounts and sorting out the often painful details of battlefield actions and casualties. More than 400 soldiers from the division's 1st and 2nd brigades are under consideration for such awards. But Smith is believed to be the only one being nominated for the Medal of Honor.
Whether he receives it will be determined in Washington after a lengthy process. But here in Baghdad, three weeks after the government of Saddam Hussein fell to U.S. troops, soldiers of the 1st Brigade are still talking about Smith's exploits.
"If it had not been for him staying on that weapon, there's no doubt in anybody's mind our casualties would have been much, much higher," said Command Sgt. Maj. Gary Coker, the engineer battalion's senior noncommissioned officer. "And yet, he was the type of guy you'd expect . . . to have done that. I don't think there was a single person in our unit who was surprised that, of all people to do that, it was Sergeant Smith."
Officers and enlisted men remember Smith, a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, as a perfectionist and disciplinarian.
"He was one of hardest platoon sergeants in the battalion," Coker said. Yet he also acquired a reputation for protecting his soldiers and looking out for their interests.
In a notoriously unsafe occupation -- engineers are the ones who breach obstacles such as minefields and specialize in blowing things up -- "he would err on the safe side for his soldiers every time," said Capt. Michael Bliss, his company commander.
Smith left behind a wife, Birgit, whom he met while stationed in Germany, and two children. Besides fighting in the Gulf War 12 years ago, also as a combat engineer, he was deployed to Kosovo for six months in 2001.
As the brigade attacked the airport on April 4, Smith's Bravo Company was ordered to create a holding area for prisoners taken by a task force of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment. On the northern side of an intersection just east of the airport, Smith used an armored bulldozer to knock a hole in the wall of a compound, overseen by a guard tower, that he intended to use to hold the prisoners.
An M-113 armored personnel carrier moved into the compound and knocked down a gate at the far side, only to come under heavy fire from Special Republican Guard forces. A mortar round landed on top of the M-113, wounding three of the four crew members. Seconds later, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the vehicle in the side. At the same time, Iraqis climbed into the guard tower and began firing down at the U.S. soldiers with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons.
"They had occupied the tower that we planned to use to guard the EPW [enemy prisoner of war] cage," said 1st Sgt. Timothy Campbell, 35, of Bethel, Ohio, the senior noncommissioned officer of Bravo Company. "So now they had us in the cage, basically. The only place out was the hole we put in the wall and the gate where they were firing from."
Smith and Campbell rushed to help evacuate the wounded, one of whom had to be carried on a stretcher. Another M-113 was then hit by a grenade, and Campbell helped evacuate its four crew members. As he was doing so, Smith got a hand grenade from a Scout vehicle, ran up to the wall by the gate and threw the grenade over the wall to help cover the evacuation.
Then Smith jumped into the M-113 and started to back it across the courtyard to a more central position where he could fire at the guard tower.
The M-113's machine gun was damaged, but Smith told Campbell he could make it work. Campbell sent two soldiers to help him, one to drive the M-113 and the other to feed Smith ammunition. Smith told them to stay down while he fired at the tower, the gate and a place along a wall where the Iraqis were trying to climb over.
"They were trying to gain control [of the courtyard] to kill engineers, who were the biggest threat to them," Campbell said. If successful, "they would be unimpeded. They had the terrain. They had the proper size and type of weapons to defeat all the targets around there. . . . So they would have . . . created chaos, and they could have done quite a bit of damage."
As Smith provided covering fire, Campbell and three soldiers set some brush on fire to create a smoke screen and maneuvered around one side of the guard tower. When Campbell's team was about 20 yards from the tower, Smith paused to reload. Moments after he had resumed firing, his machine gun suddenly fell silent.
By then, however, Campbell and his team were in position to shoot the Iraqis in the guard tower. At almost the same instant that Smith stopped firing, Campbell's team opened up on the tower and killed the Iraqis inside. At the M-113, they found Smith mortally wounded. He was carried on a stretcher to the aid station but never regained consciousness.
Within minutes, the Iraqi counterattack, which had been directed from the guard tower, subsided, and the shooting tapered off.
Smith "put himself in harm's way and wouldn't let anybody help him," Campbell said. "Had he let that position be overrun, [the Iraqis] could have killed all of our medical support. They probably would have killed our command and control. And they would have killed anything that was not suspecting that someone could come up behind them."
Out of the 600-member task force, "it's hard to tell how many they would have killed," Campbell said.
"He saved everybody out there," said Pvt. Michael Seaman, 21, of St. Clair, Mich., the soldier who fed Smith ammunition as he fired more than 300 rounds from the machine gun.
According to Campbell, a tape recorder that had been accidentally left running in his Humvee -- he planned to record a message for his wife -- captured the intensity of the fight, including the whoosh of at least 21 rocket-propelled grenades.
"You hear an RPG every few seconds on that tape," he said. "They were firing at everything they could find."
During the fight, bullets or shrapnel shattered the ceramic breast plate of Smith's flak jacket and shredded its shoulder piece.
"Sgt. 1st Class Smith inspired Bravo Company . . . to fight ferociously to repel the enemy attack," says a citation submitted to support the Medal of Honor nomination. "Sgt. 1st Class Smith's heroic actions directly ensured Task Force 2-7 Infantry's rear flank was not engaged."
It said the Bulldogs, as the Bravo Company engineers are known, killed or wounded as many as 50 Iraqis in the battle. On the U.S. side, Smith was the only one killed, and three soldiers were wounded.
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