Paul R. Smith

Paul Ray Smith was killed on April 4, 2003, holding a piece of ground beside Baghdad International Airport that a company-sized Iraqi force meant to take. He was a sergeant first class of engineers — B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division — building a prisoner holding area when the attack came. The official Medal of Honor citation is the record this page will use. It does not need a novel.

He organized a hasty defense of two platoons, a Bradley, and three armored personnel carriers. He went forward with grenades and anti-tank weapons. He got three wounded men out of a carrier that had taken a rocket-propelled grenade and a mortar. When the line looked as if it would go, he climbed onto a damaged armored personnel carrier and manned its .50-caliber. He stayed in that exposed mount until he was mortally wounded. The citation says the attack was defeated, that as many as fifty of the enemy were killed, and that wounded Americans were gotten off the ground. Those are the army's words, not a civilian count invented here.

He was born in El Paso, Texas, on September 24, 1969, and raised in the Tampa country of Florida. The Medal of Honor was presented to his family on April 4, 2005, two years to the day. He was the first recipient of that medal for the Iraq War. He is buried at Arlington, Section MD, Site 67. That is a grave. This register will not relabel a combat death as missing in action.

The photograph is an official U.S. Army likeness. This page will not add dialogue he did not leave and will not borrow a private family's sentences. It will say an engineer NCO used a wrecked carrier as a fighting position so other men could leave, and that the citation is public because the army wrote it down.