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He Gave Us His Last Full Measure

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: November 2, 2008

As sergeants go, Paul Ray Smith was part Vince Lombardi, part Michael Phelps and part Gary Cooper. Which is to say, Paul Smith was, from his helmet to his boots, all-Army.

While plainly high praise within the ranks of the enlisted and their families, the honor tends to be lost on a war-weary civilian population, no matter how many support-the-troops bumper stickers dot our highways.

Not so Roger Sherman. No military man himself, the admiration filmmaker Sherman feels for Smith is unmistakable and infectious, as viewers of his documentary, "Medal of Honor," will discover when it debuts on PBS (WEDU, Channel 3) at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Sherman's film arrives as an antidote for spiritual cynicism, a bracing potion that serves not merely to treat our Election Day hangover, but to remind us why so many continue to believe in American exceptionalism.

Smith is from Tampa via Holiday. His singular heroics in the battle for the Baghdad airport on April 4, 2003, which saved the lives of 100 U.S. troops, form the centerpiece of Sherman's staggering, inspiring work, a 90-minute highlight reel and retrospective about America's highest combat medal, told in large part by assorted surviving recipients and witnesses.

Sgt. Smith "was demanding, a perfectionist," says Sgt. Harry DeLauter, who had been with Smith since the 1990s and Kosovo. "He'd keep you training until the late hours of the night on stuff you'd already perfected.

"But he knew we were about to be deployed."

Sgt. Dad, Reporting For Duty

While diplomats and politicians performed their drawn-out kabuki rituals at the United Nations, on Capitol Hill, in the White House and on the Sunday morning interview shows, all making the case against an unrepentant Saddam Hussein and his thugocracy, Iraq loomed with an increasing urgency in the places like Fort Stewart, Ga., where men who would do the fighting prepared for war.

Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith was 33 in spring 2003, a career military man whom those under his command regarded with awe and adoration. "The platoon sergeant," DeLauter says, "he's like your dad" - if your dad is a precision-obsessed taskmaster - "he's the one who looks after you."

But if he was imperious - Lombardi - and precise - Phelps - Smith's subordinates knew, also, that he would never issue an order he wouldn't willingly carry out himself, and that's every character Cooper ever played, up to and including the legendary World War I Medal of Honor winner, Sgt. Alvin York.

'I Am Prepared To Give All'

In that light, the letter he'd typed into his laptop for his parents, typed and stored without sending, may have been prescient, but it didn't report anything the men his platoon didn't already know.

"There are two ways to come home," Smith wrote, "stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane. It doesn't matter how I come home, because I am prepared to give all that I am to ensure that all my boys make it home."

This is much of how Smith came to be in command of the 50-calibre machine gun on top of an armored personnel carrier, taking the fight to about 100 flanking Iraqi Special Republican Guardsmen as they tried to pinch Smith's platoon of Army engineers in an airport courtyard.

The Medal Wins You

Then-Pfc. Michael Seaman commanded the wheel, maneuvering where Smith ordered and feeding him ammo. The firefight endured for at least 10 minutes and some 300 rounds when, suddenly, the rat-a-tat overhead went silent. For Seaman, a thought flashed - "He's out of bullets. I'm gonna be in trouble" - then Smith slumped into the cab, face and chest splashed in his own blood.

Fifty Iraqis lay dead; the rest beat a retreat. Soon, Smith, too, would be lost, an enemy round having slashed his throat. He left a wife, Birgit, and two children. Two years later, to the day, in a nation's capital bursting with cherry blossoms, President George W. Bush presented the nation's top military honor, framed and glassed, to 11-year-old David Smith.

"An incredible, dramatic, touching story," Sherman says. "It really grabbed us. We had to be able to tell it."

Rounding Up The Troops

It took some doing, rounding up soldiers who had been there that day and, even more challenging, catching them between deployments. DeLauter had been dispatched overseas since filming ended. Seaman returned just in time to be interviewed and patched into a film Sherman had thought was nearly complete.

With Seaman, it was. Tenderly and excruciatingly so.

"Medal of Honor" is an exceptional tribute to the fighting men (and one woman) who have won it. Here, though, a caveat: Unlike football players and Super Bowl rings, or politicians and elected office, the Medal of Honor is not something warriors set out to win. Indeed, through Sherman's progression of well-told tales, it grows increasingly obvious that troops don't "win" the medal so much as the medal wins them.

As Walter D. Ehlers, a World War II staff sergeant who distinguished himself over a couple of days in Normandy following D-Day, says, "You don't go out and try to win the Medal of Honor. If you do, you're in trouble."

Defenders Of An Idea

Along the way, Sherman backs into an overarching truth, one well worth noting in these final hours before Election Day polls close. Time and again, the medalists describe engagements with enemies - Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Viet Cong, Iraqis - whose shared quality is one of physical identity: Each represents a race or an ethnicity that dominates their national identity.

America's hodgepodge of most-decorated warriors, represented - among others - by an escaped slave, a Jewish-Hungarian Holocaust survivor, a first-generation Japanese-American, a backwoods pacifist, a dress-over-pants-wearing female surgeon and a chaplain, took up arms in defense of an idea, an ennobling, uplifting idea and the unparalleled ideals that flow from it. Liberty. Equality. Self-determination. Property. The pursuit of happiness.

Certainly, as Vietnam medalist Drew Dix, a hero of the egregiously reported Tet Offensive, says, "When you get ready to make that complete sacrifice, you're not doing it for the country, you're doing it for the one on your left and on your right." With pulses racing and survival foremost on the mind, the immediacy of battle muscles Greater Truth into the dark alleys of consciousness.

When the dust settles and reflection begins, the reasons for the heroism we honor gather context, as they must. Sgt. Paul Ray Smith would give his last full measure of devotion to see his boys home, but it was the call of duty, honor and country that lured him into that sacred, exalted uniform in the first place, and, in turn, impelled us to consecrate his memory.

We who survive in the liberty Smith defended ought never to forget. "Medal of Honor" helps to see that we don't.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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