December 10, 2025 • 35 mins
Matt Smith grew up on Long Island and joined Army ROTC at the University of Delaware in 1989. Four years later, he was commissioned as an officer. Smith was working in the private sector and serving in the Army National Guard when the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated by Al Qaeda in 2001. Over the next two decades, Smith would be leading soldiers into combat during the invasion of Iraq and on two deployments in Afghanistan.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Smith takes us through the rapid invasion in Iraq and how he first learned about improvised explosive devices. He also tells us about a bizarre and fascinating mission he and his men undertook in western Iraq.
Six years later, Smith served as a battalion commander in Afghanistan and saw the most intense combat of his career. He explains how the mission they trained for suddenly changed when they arrived, how he adjusted to the enemy strategically, and how he kept morale up despite deaths and serious injuries.
Finally, Smith tells us about the work he is doing now to prepare other veterans for a successful business career after they leave the military.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Smith takes us through the rapid invasion in Iraq and how he first learned about improvised explosive devices. He also tells us about a bizarre and fascinating mission he and his men undertook in western Iraq.
Six years later, Smith served as a battalion commander in Afghanistan and saw the most intense combat of his career. He explains how the mission they trained for suddenly changed when they arrived, how he adjusted to the enemy strategically, and how he kept morale up despite deaths and serious injuries.
Finally, Smith tells us about the work he is doing now to prepare other veterans for a successful business career after they leave the military.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Army Major General Matt Smith.
General Smith commanded troops at the company level during the
invasion of Iraq and at the battalion level in Afghanistan
several years later. Between active duty and National Guard service,
General Smith served thirty two years in uniform. Matt Smith
(00:33):
was born on Long Island, New York. He says he
had an idyllic childhood where his dad was a teacher
and his mother was a stay at home mom. As
he approached the end of high school in the late eighties,
Smith pursued ROTC training. When it came to which branch,
Smith says, it was an easy choice.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That was a very simple calculation. I applied to Army
and Navy ROTC. The Navy offered three years, the Army
offered force.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
So Army it was.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
The desire to serve as a more complicated and longer
term outcome. Had a very wholesome upbringing. You know, I
don't know how many of your listeners know what Leave
It to Beaver is, but it was similar to that
that started in the cub Scouts and then transitioned into
the Boy Scouts when the time came, and you know,
it was kind of active in my church, our church
(01:25):
growing up, and the army or military service more broadly
to my previous point, just seemed like a natural progression
of Hey, I like being in the woods with a
backpack on, sure, I'll go in the army.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Well.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Going through the ROTC program at the University of Delaware,
Smith and the other future officers were trained by decorated
soldiers from the Vietnam War. Smith says he did not
appreciate that gift enough at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
In nineteen eighty nine, I showed up as a freshman,
and at that time we had Vietnam veterans who were
members of the cadre of the ROTC unit. Now in retrospect,
to learn from those gentlemen, and of course back then
they were all men. What a blessing, you know, in
(02:14):
terms of becoming an infantryman to learn from multiple guys
who literally were word euros in arguably one of the
most challenging wars we've ever fought.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Smith was commissioned as an officer upon graduation in nineteen
ninety three. He then went through officers training at Quantico,
but he got his first real experience of this might
really be combat a year later when Saddam Hussein started
misbehaving in Iraq once again.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I've been a platooner for like two months and get
to the end of the week and it's the new
cycle it started, and the first sergeant says, hey, hey, man,
you know we're on a eight hour recall. We're the
division ready force to the other battalion across the ark,
and lone was number one, and you got to you know,
(03:03):
be able to get here within I can't remember what
it was X number of hours so that if something happens,
we can depart within eight hours. So, just to put
this in historical context, I spent Saturday looking for a
beeper because back then no one had cell phones. At
(03:23):
some point I was in the mall with my girlfriend
and I saw a payphone and I was like, oh,
I should check in with the unit. It's been a
little while. So I called the unit and the guy
who answered the phone was like, oh my gosh, Lieutenant Smith,
you got to get down. He who had been alerted
for deployment. So I like freak out, you know, take
her back to my place, drop her off, say hey,
(03:44):
figure it out, you know, I grab all my stuff
and head into work. I can't remember how long it was,
but it wasn't very long after that. Arriving there, you know,
the leadership left, the company commanders and all the platoon
leaders left on the leader's recon For this to this day,
I don't know whether it was real or not.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
It seemed very real at the time.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
And so we get over to Kuwait and the situation
was that Sodom Hussein had moved. The number I recall
was thirty thousand troops south of the kind of demarcation
line that we had put in place after Desert Storm.
So you know, the Kuwaitis were a little bit concerned
about that apparently, and called for help.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
So we show up there.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We get there at night and know we'd like end
a dog tired crashing on some palettes in this motor
pool of prepositioned military equipment. So the sun comes up
as the area, you know, illuminates, I see, just as
far as I could see palettes and palettes and palettes
(04:49):
of live ammunition of all calibers and sizes and types.
And I said to my buddy, who I'm still friends with,
to this day. I was like, I don't think I've
ever seen any of these in person before, right, we
had only used like blue tipped training rounds for your
listeners who have done that kind of thing about what
(05:10):
I'm talking about. And this was like the rainbow of colors,
you know, armor piercing, high explosive.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
And at that point, Greg I thought to myself, well,
this is a lot more serious than boy scouting. You know,
this is not just some advance form of boy scouted.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
This is very real right now.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And having without trying to brag about it, I sailed
through all the courses at Fort Bennet.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I did very well down there.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And even having trained so well in my initial entry training,
I literally had the thought at that moment of man,
I should have studied harder, because it all came home
right then. It's like, these thirty nine guys are now
depending on me and how we employ all these multi
decolored munitions for what, at the time was a force
(06:04):
that was ten times larger than the force were deploying.
It was a very similar to being trained by Vietnam
veteran infantrymen. It was a very formative experience that shaped
my perspective on readiness for the rest of my career.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Within a few years, Smith had left active duty. He
was in the Army reserves, drilling one weekend a month
and two weeks per year. He worked as a stockbroker
and earned a degree in marketing and started a job
at IBM a week before the nine to eleven attacks.
For the next several months, his time was spent in
the private sector, but his heart and mind were thinking
about service. When his National Guard unit was called up,
(06:42):
he says, it happened quickly, but they weren't headed to Afghanistan.
They were part of the invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
That went much faster than everybody anticipated. We're in what
was called the long Range Surveillance Unit, which was a
legacy kind of force structure of the long range reconnissance
patrols in the Vietnam era. The plan was to come
in from the north and you know, support the forces
coming in from the north. That didn't happen for reasons
(07:12):
that were unclear at the time. And then by the
time everybody I reoriented around to approaching northward out of
the south, the war was over.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
The powers that be.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I don't know at what level were like, Hey, what
are we going to do with this company of like
proverbial snake eater guys. And what was decided was we
would become the security force for a bunch of civilian
and military intelligence folks who were basically running around Iraq
(07:45):
picking up Sodom Hussein's old equipment, so that the coalition
partners in the United States especially, could you know, make
better stuff to defeat that equipment and or make our
stuff more able to defend against that equipment. So that
turned into a pretty interesting mission, and it was nationwide
(08:10):
and it was before the insurgency started. I can remember
the morning. It was literally the first morning I got
to sleep in in like months. I was sleeping on
my cot and the sun was already up. The operations
officer came in and woke me up and said, Hey,
we just had a catastrophic IED strike and gray I
(08:32):
literally said to him, what's an ied because nobody had
heard of such a thing back then. As luck would
have it, I coincidentally I had lunch with one of
the guys wounded in that attack today.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
But that's neither here nor there. A small world thing.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
We began to see the growth of the insurgency as
we're as we're running all over the place trying to
help these Intel guys pick up all this equipment, and
in retrospect, it was amazing in a bad way to
have a front row seat to that.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
There were also some unique missions in Iraq, like digging
Soviet era jets out of the sand.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So the most visceral kind of example of what we
had to deal with. Like again, we had this nationwide mission,
and it boiled down to we were operating off the
airfield that Baghdad at the International Airport, and we would
safely get the Intel people and the scientists from the
(09:36):
airport to wherever the equipment was that they wanted to
collect up or exploit or otherwise research, create a security
perimeter to allow them to do their thing, and then
we would get a mac safely. So as time went
on and the level of kinetic activity began to increase,
we became aware, Like it seems so simple to say
(10:01):
it now given the last twenty whatever years, but we
became aware of areas that had pockets of intense activity.
One of those, even in the earliest days, was Fallujah,
west of Baghdad, and this one particular mission trickled down
to us. Hey, go out west of Fallujah. There's been
(10:24):
a report that there are buried meg jets in the desert.
I don't know what model a Meg. That was irrelevant
of us at the time, but it turned out to
be true. So we did like a ricon out there,
and you could see the tails sticking up out of
the dirt like that. I mean, it was a heck
(10:44):
of an.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Excavation job to dig them out.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
But the Intel guys, as you can imagine, we're like, hey,
we got to have one of these things. You know,
this is a treasure trove, right, So we found this
mission out there.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
To go dig these things out, which involves like.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Bucket loaders and bulldozers and all sorts of heavy equipment
which gets moved very slowly on flatbed trailers. And then
we dig out a MiG and load it onto another
flatbed trailer and drive all that stuff back through Fallujah. There,
but for the grace of God went we and not
(11:23):
a shot was fired. But that was by far the
other than the actual combat interactions. That was by far
the most puckering time as the tensions were rising throughout
the country to have to go ten miles per hour
through Fallujah with a damn plane on a trailer.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
They don't train you for that.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
At Fort Benning, by the way, that's retired to US
Army Major General Matt Smith when we come back what
combat was like in Iraq and later the most intense
combat of his career in Afghanistan. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicle.
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Speaker 1 (13:01):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Army Major General Matt Smith,
who served in the invasion of Iraq and then two
tours in Afghanistan. By the time of the invasion of
Iraq in March two thousand and three, Smith was serving
as a company commander. It also marked his first time
in combat.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
You know, that particular engagement really made the point that
many have written about it at this point in our
history that insurgency is evolutionary. So the guys that set
that ied number one that I'm prepared very well given
our later experience. And then number two, after it went off,
(13:45):
they popped up out of their hiding place to see
what happened. That didn't go as well for them as
they had probably hoped. The problem with that is we eliminated,
you know, four bad bomb makers, and over time the
ied makers just got better and better and better because
they were the ones that survived the rate of ied attacks,
(14:09):
direct fire, sniping. I mean, at one point there were
people dropping hand grenades off of bridges as we drove
under him. I mean, it just kept getting worse and
worse and worse.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Of course, everybody knows.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
How that all culminated by two thousand and six, and
then obviously went on for several years after that.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Smith says everyone reacts to combat differently. He says he
was usually very nervous in anticipation of fighting, but then
got much calmer once combat began. Like so many other
officers who rose farther up the chain of command, Smith
says being a company commander is probably his favorite assignment
in his career.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
In a word, yes, I think the company or battery,
if you're a field artilleryman, or troop, if.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
You're in an.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Armor or calv it's small enough that you can literally
know everyone, like in a very intimate way, like the
way I described knowing someone in that context is in
the dark without night vision on. I know that's Greg
because I can tell how he walks where you hear
(15:18):
somebody cough and you go, oh, that's Matt, because I
know is cough, you know, and that level of intimacy.
I don't think it's possible for us as humans to
replicate it at the level of a battalion or squadron,
or certainly any higher. The intimacy of really knowing all
your at the time as all men is really something special.
(15:41):
And to be able to lead in a combat environment
in an intimate unit like that, it was really a highlight.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
In two thousand and nine, Smith was off to Afghanistan,
this time commanding a battalion. He explains how the mission
was defined at first and how events through him and
his men a major curve ball.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I was on active duty, but in the National Guard,
and by then in the Global War on Terrorism as
it was called, we were in like a normal rotation.
It was like every four years you knew as a
guardsman in the infantry, you knew you were going overseas.
So we were told, hey, you're going to do this
(16:25):
mentoring mission for the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police.
So that's what we trained for, and then we got
over to Afghanistan. Our battalion got attached to what was
then the fourth Brigade of the twenty fifth Infantry Division
led by a guy at the time, Colonel Mike Howard.
He retired as a lieutenant general. Just had coffee with
(16:47):
him a couple months ago actually, and at some point
the decision was made, Hey, we're going to surge.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
In Afghanistan too.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
The powers that be I think it was at the
time the eighty second Airborn Division was in charge in
eastern Afghanistan. They made the decision, Hey, we're gonna turn
this battalion of National Guard guys, they're doing the mentorship
mission for the Afghans. We're going to turn them into
what at the time was called a terrain owning unit.
(17:16):
We're gonna give them a province, just like we give
all the regular Army infantry battalions. So that is something
we had not trained for. And I could remember the
order coming down and I turned to my EXO.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
And I go, well, what are we going to do now?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
And we kind of chuckled at that and thought through
how we had to reorganize everybody and train for different
types of mission.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Sets vall being in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
And oh, by the way, moved the unit and that
was a very exciting time for the battalion staff and myself.
The kind of enemy. Aspect of that was that Colonel
Howard and his team made the decision and we're going
to put this rifle battalion into Paktia Province, which is
(18:07):
one of the provinces or you know states, if you
were to think about it in the United States context.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
In the eastern Afghanistan the.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Borders Pakistan, and that province is geographically small and for
years had had the Cavs Squadron of whatever breate combat
team was in the area. The cav squadron, which is
a smaller formation than a rifle battalion, had been assigned
to Pactia because it was small, and we tripled the
(18:38):
amount of soldiers in Pactia, and then I came to
describe that dynamic as kicking over an ant hill. Just
by virtue of probability. We had much more contact with
the Taliban than the preceding unit. Because we brought so
much more capability to bear in terms of numbers, we
(19:02):
could do more.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
That became a.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Very exciting time for our battalion. It was ultimately a
very good experience, but it was not easy.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
That's retired US Army Major General Matt Smith, a veteran
of Iraq and Afghanistan when we return, the fierce combat
in Afghanistan and how he dealt with that as a leader.
I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is
Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition
(19:34):
is retired US Army Major General Matt Smith. He's a
veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. A moment ago. General
Smith explained the sudden change in mission in Afghanistan in
two thousand and nine. The new assignment meant his battalion
would see considerable combat, and for Smith it was the
most intense combat of his career.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
That mission change happened in October and we left the
country in April. So for the subsequent six months after
the mission change, somebody in the battalion was in combat
every day, and that was usually direct fire or a
(20:18):
combination of direct fire and indirect fire, either attax on
bases or attax on patrols. We did frequent, deliberately planned
operations to try and get after any whatever level of
human targets that the intelligence apparatus kind of produced enough
(20:41):
information on that we could action it. The periodic Fortunately
for US only periodic idea attacks. I'm not sure why
that was in our particular area. Other adjacent province has
had a much bigger problem with that type of thing. Fortunately,
you know, by two thousand and nine twenty ten, the
(21:04):
technology associated with those devices that advanced significantly. Almost every
one of those resulted in either significant numbers of wounded,
people were dead because the technology was so advanced by
that point. So it was a little bit of everything
and made for very long days, as I'm sure you
(21:27):
can appreciate, but ultimately like good. It sounds strange to
say it ultimately good experience, as hard as it was,
and despite the wounded and killed, it was good for
that unit because it wasn't that unit's last deployment. As
(21:48):
a consummate optimist to try to take all the good
that I can from any situation, and you know, for
a National Guard unit, it was the first use of
a National Guard unit in that way.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
And you know, COURL.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Howard paid us a very nice compliment as he was
leaving theater shortly before we did, and it was an
honor to do it.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Intense combat can and did lead to serious injuries and
death within the battalion. Smith explains how he rallied his
troops after the loss of soldiers some of these guys
had been drilling with for many years.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Certainly arguably one of the hardest parts of the job,
especially contacting family members. Being a National Guard unit, the
unit was very tight or close. You know, certainly a
company level and below that has advantages, and that also
(22:42):
has disadvantages. And when somebody gets gravely wounded or killed,
it is a tremendous disadvantage in the sense that the
psychological impact on those that survive whatever the situation was,
is magnified because everybody knows each other so well in
(23:02):
many cases for years. The flip side of that, and
I again trying to put as optimistic a view on
the death of a soldier as possible, the level of care, embrace,
literal and figurative, and family in the broadest sense support
(23:25):
to the surviving family members was significant, much more so
than I've seen on active duty because everybody knows each
other so well. So it really cut both ways in
my experience, as I think is borne out through history,
if I remember my reading correctly or readings, is what
(23:46):
we had leaders that whatever level killed or wounded, at
a higher rate because they're out there leading. My example,
one particular incident, we had a first sergeant get killed,
and that person was somebody. He was an E eight
first sergeant, and I had known him since he was
(24:08):
an E five. I didn't serve with him consecutively for
that entire time, but we had known each other for
a long time. That dynamic of losing people that you've
known for that long, who are that senior and central
to everyone else as well being is very hard. That
first sergeant's company commander at as we were embracing after
(24:32):
the memorial ceremony said effectively not a direct quote, but
he was like, it's always the good guys that get
killed or grievously injured. It's never the bad guys. And
that's not to put anybody in a bad light, but
it just seemed that way. Is like, the best leaders
(24:54):
were the ones that were always out front, and they
were the ones that bore a dis portionate cost for
being good leaders.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Those fights also meant tactical changes were sometimes needed. Smith
shares how he adjusted strategy after engagements with the enemy.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
One of the things that I learned in Iraq and
three was put to good use in Inpacty of those
six seven years later, and that was that after action
reviews aren't just for training, and we really became very
methodical about trying to learn all that we could from
(25:33):
every enemy engagement in order to mitigate the risk involved
in future engagements. There's obviously there's no way to eliminate
the risk. For years, I've talked with more junior leaders
in terms of coaching them about this business is inherently
dangerous by design. But we got to we have a
duty to do all that we can to minimize the
(25:55):
risk to our soldiers and service members more broadly, and
shame on us if we don't capitalize on every one
of those.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Opportunities to do so.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
That kind of downside or weakness was the way because
of the terrain of Factia, as is the case in
much of the country and certainly in the east in
the mountains, there aren't a whole lot of alternate ways
to go somewhere via ground transportation. You can see people
coming from a long way away. That resulted in a
(26:23):
lot of opportunity, i'll say, for the enemy and really
increased the level of anxiety amongst soldiers because they know
as soon as they leave the wire they know someone's watching.
Other than nighttime raids, which I mentioned earlier, you know,
the time and place of the interaction was the enemy's choosing,
(26:46):
which is unpleasant.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
After that deployment to Afghanistan, Smith and his men were
deployed to Central America for security and training in the
middle part of last decade. He cautions Americans to think
very carefully about traveling to Central America due to security concerns.
By twenty nineteen, he was back in Afghanistan. He had
risen again in the chain of command and was not
(27:08):
far from where he had been deployed a decade earlier.
At this point, the American presence was much smaller. Smith
also remembers talking directly with Taliban figures and tribal leaders
at that time, which he found pretty surreal.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Yes, the question.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
We had kind of limited back channel discussions with Taliban
leaders from time to time, certainly tribal leaders, although the
party line, if you will, was to put the Afghan
military or police in the driver's seat, which is what
we're trying to do for years. Obviously that sometimes proved
(27:47):
harder to do than we thought. I always found it
very interesting to say to one of our interpreters, Hey,
you know, call Mulla so and so, and our interpreters
had those guys all on speed literally on speed dial
on their phones.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Just two years later, the US backed Afghan government fell
and the Taliban was back in charge. Smith says that
was very difficult to watch.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Unpleasant would be a way to describe that, and extraordinarily frustrating.
We have a young country coming, you know, just coming
up on two point fifty. So I tried to, you know,
as a relatively senior leader, try to maintain some sense
of history, like world history, if you will, versus just
(28:37):
our nation. I had the opportunity, for reasons that aren't
worth going into to visit Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
Several years ago.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
At the time, I had two Vietnam Vats. They were
civilians at the time, but they had served in Vietnam
and then completed their uniform service and came back as civilians.
And they these two guys worked for me at the
time when I came back from this trip to Vietnam.
Then one was drafted to infantryman who had a hillacious
(29:09):
year in Vietnam, and the other was a rotary wing
aviator helicopter pilot who had such a great time. He
stayed for three and a half years. I said to
both of them, having had such different experiences, I said,
you guys won the war. We just did it in
a way we didn't anticipate. It was economic power that won,
not military power, because to visit Vietnam in the late
(29:31):
two thousands and see capitalism burgeoning everywhere, and you know,
if we think about current events and how close we've
become with the leadership of Vietnam as a counter to China,
it's a I'm sure an imprecise analogy, but it's all
I have to hang my hat on that our service
(29:53):
in Afghanistan wasn't in vain, and that is quite a leap,
But that's all I got. The flip side is in
a more positive way, which will ring hollow with anybody
who lost a family member or is caring for a
grievously wounded family member, is that our military, the current
(30:15):
generation of our military, has been tested in combat and
performed quite well. Back to your caveat for political reasons
that neither you nor I are privy to. You know,
certain decisions were made. We don't necessarily have to like them.
As service members. We go where we're told to go.
We do it.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
We're told to do so.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Hopefully some good all that to say, I'm rambling on,
but all that to say, hopefully some good will come
of it, maybe in the long run.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Retiring in March of twenty twenty five, Smith now has
a new mission providing business guidance to other veterans as
they exit the military and start a very different chapter
in life.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
I run a master's degree in business for veterans at
the Gouzweta Business School at Emory University here in Atlanta.
It's the seventeenth ranked business school in the nation this year.
We're obviously very.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Proud of that. It's one of two schools.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
University of Southern California in la is the only other
one with a program like ours. What our program does
is we it's aimed at, or targeted at, or built
for senior leaders, both officer and enlisted noncommissioned officers who
are getting out of the military after twenty whatever years
and transitioning into the civilian world for a second chapter.
(31:35):
And what we do is we harness all that goodness
of the leadership and management experience from their military service.
We give them a world class foundational business education and
then we kind of shoot them out the other end
of the of the program and into the civilian workplace.
And it seems to be very well received thus far.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
And it.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Is a privilege and truly an honor to be able
to do that for veterans of all flavors, to literally
see lives transformed through higher education at a world class
place like Emory University is really something very special. And
(32:20):
to your point about me, Grey, I went through an
MBA program coincidentally ates went to business school before nine
to eleven, where I was a veteran in a room
full of other students. That is a very different classroom
environment than being a classroom full of veterans. So it
(32:42):
is really a neat dynamic to be in that classroom
with the students, and it's it's really transformative for many
of them, especially the senior NCOs who you know, many
of whom didn't necessarily come from places where going to
a school like Emery was even in the discussion, you know.
(33:05):
And I equate it to the transformative effects of the
GI Bill when it was put in place in nineteen
forty four. Obviously, we're not talking about ten million vets
coming back from World War Two. But to be able
to do something for some is really very satisfying.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
After thirty two years, Smith struggled to pinpoint what he
is most proud of at first, but he then pointed
to something a former soldier told him years after they
were on the battlefield together.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
That is a tough question, So that kind of to
your point about loving the time as a company leader.
That kind of answer changes over time.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I could go back and say during that nine to
ten deployment impact he had a soldier tell me many
years later they were in some particularly heavy direct fire
firefight and I was on the radio, of course, trying
to coordinate resources and assets. This particular soldier it was
(34:08):
his first time in a direct action firefight, and years
later he said, hey, sir, we bumped into each other
and he said, hey, sir, you remember that day And
I said, oh, yeah, I remember. He said, you know
when we heard your voice over the radio, we knew
it was going to be okay.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
And that.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
It's hard for me to think of higher praise from
a junior enlisted soldier. And I will take that memory
with me to the grave as something that I'm very
proud of that, I was able to, not knowing it
at the time, instill a level of confidence and our
soldiers when they were in a tough spot. So that
(34:51):
was very satisfying.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
That's retired to US Army Major General Matt Smith. He's
a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as
well as deployments to Latin America. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and
(35:17):
thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the
American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter
dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center
on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe
to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral
(35:39):
histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe to
the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks
again for listening, and please join us next time for
Veterans Chronicles
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Army Major General Matt Smith.
General Smith commanded troops at the company level during the
invasion of Iraq and at the battalion level in Afghanistan
several years later. Between active duty and National Guard service,
General Smith served thirty two years in uniform. Matt Smith
(00:33):
was born on Long Island, New York. He says he
had an idyllic childhood where his dad was a teacher
and his mother was a stay at home mom. As
he approached the end of high school in the late eighties,
Smith pursued ROTC training. When it came to which branch,
Smith says, it was an easy choice.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That was a very simple calculation. I applied to Army
and Navy ROTC. The Navy offered three years, the Army
offered force.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
So Army it was.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
The desire to serve as a more complicated and longer
term outcome. Had a very wholesome upbringing. You know, I
don't know how many of your listeners know what Leave
It to Beaver is, but it was similar to that
that started in the cub Scouts and then transitioned into
the Boy Scouts when the time came, and you know,
it was kind of active in my church, our church
(01:25):
growing up, and the army or military service more broadly
to my previous point, just seemed like a natural progression
of Hey, I like being in the woods with a
backpack on, sure, I'll go in the army.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Well.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Going through the ROTC program at the University of Delaware,
Smith and the other future officers were trained by decorated
soldiers from the Vietnam War. Smith says he did not
appreciate that gift enough at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
In nineteen eighty nine, I showed up as a freshman,
and at that time we had Vietnam veterans who were
members of the cadre of the ROTC unit. Now in retrospect,
to learn from those gentlemen, and of course back then
they were all men. What a blessing, you know, in
(02:14):
terms of becoming an infantryman to learn from multiple guys
who literally were word euros in arguably one of the
most challenging wars we've ever fought.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Smith was commissioned as an officer upon graduation in nineteen
ninety three. He then went through officers training at Quantico,
but he got his first real experience of this might
really be combat a year later when Saddam Hussein started
misbehaving in Iraq once again.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I've been a platooner for like two months and get
to the end of the week and it's the new
cycle it started, and the first sergeant says, hey, hey, man,
you know we're on a eight hour recall. We're the
division ready force to the other battalion across the ark,
and lone was number one, and you got to you know,
(03:03):
be able to get here within I can't remember what
it was X number of hours so that if something happens,
we can depart within eight hours. So, just to put
this in historical context, I spent Saturday looking for a
beeper because back then no one had cell phones. At
(03:23):
some point I was in the mall with my girlfriend
and I saw a payphone and I was like, oh,
I should check in with the unit. It's been a
little while. So I called the unit and the guy
who answered the phone was like, oh my gosh, Lieutenant Smith,
you got to get down. He who had been alerted
for deployment. So I like freak out, you know, take
her back to my place, drop her off, say hey,
(03:44):
figure it out, you know, I grab all my stuff
and head into work. I can't remember how long it was,
but it wasn't very long after that. Arriving there, you know,
the leadership left, the company commanders and all the platoon
leaders left on the leader's recon For this to this day,
I don't know whether it was real or not.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
It seemed very real at the time.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
And so we get over to Kuwait and the situation
was that Sodom Hussein had moved. The number I recall
was thirty thousand troops south of the kind of demarcation
line that we had put in place after Desert Storm.
So you know, the Kuwaitis were a little bit concerned
about that apparently, and called for help.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
So we show up there.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We get there at night and know we'd like end
a dog tired crashing on some palettes in this motor
pool of prepositioned military equipment. So the sun comes up
as the area, you know, illuminates, I see, just as
far as I could see palettes and palettes and palettes
(04:49):
of live ammunition of all calibers and sizes and types.
And I said to my buddy, who I'm still friends with,
to this day. I was like, I don't think I've
ever seen any of these in person before, right, we
had only used like blue tipped training rounds for your
listeners who have done that kind of thing about what
(05:10):
I'm talking about. And this was like the rainbow of colors,
you know, armor piercing, high explosive.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
And at that point, Greg I thought to myself, well,
this is a lot more serious than boy scouting. You know,
this is not just some advance form of boy scouted.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
This is very real right now.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And having without trying to brag about it, I sailed
through all the courses at Fort Bennet.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I did very well down there.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And even having trained so well in my initial entry training,
I literally had the thought at that moment of man,
I should have studied harder, because it all came home
right then. It's like, these thirty nine guys are now
depending on me and how we employ all these multi
decolored munitions for what, at the time was a force
(06:04):
that was ten times larger than the force were deploying.
It was a very similar to being trained by Vietnam
veteran infantrymen. It was a very formative experience that shaped
my perspective on readiness for the rest of my career.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Within a few years, Smith had left active duty. He
was in the Army reserves, drilling one weekend a month
and two weeks per year. He worked as a stockbroker
and earned a degree in marketing and started a job
at IBM a week before the nine to eleven attacks.
For the next several months, his time was spent in
the private sector, but his heart and mind were thinking
about service. When his National Guard unit was called up,
(06:42):
he says, it happened quickly, but they weren't headed to Afghanistan.
They were part of the invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
That went much faster than everybody anticipated. We're in what
was called the long Range Surveillance Unit, which was a
legacy kind of force structure of the long range reconnissance
patrols in the Vietnam era. The plan was to come
in from the north and you know, support the forces
coming in from the north. That didn't happen for reasons
(07:12):
that were unclear at the time. And then by the
time everybody I reoriented around to approaching northward out of
the south, the war was over.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
The powers that be.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I don't know at what level were like, Hey, what
are we going to do with this company of like
proverbial snake eater guys. And what was decided was we
would become the security force for a bunch of civilian
and military intelligence folks who were basically running around Iraq
(07:45):
picking up Sodom Hussein's old equipment, so that the coalition
partners in the United States especially, could you know, make
better stuff to defeat that equipment and or make our
stuff more able to defend against that equipment. So that
turned into a pretty interesting mission, and it was nationwide
(08:10):
and it was before the insurgency started. I can remember
the morning. It was literally the first morning I got
to sleep in in like months. I was sleeping on
my cot and the sun was already up. The operations
officer came in and woke me up and said, Hey,
we just had a catastrophic IED strike and gray I
(08:32):
literally said to him, what's an ied because nobody had
heard of such a thing back then. As luck would
have it, I coincidentally I had lunch with one of
the guys wounded in that attack today.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
But that's neither here nor there. A small world thing.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
We began to see the growth of the insurgency as
we're as we're running all over the place trying to
help these Intel guys pick up all this equipment, and
in retrospect, it was amazing in a bad way to
have a front row seat to that.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
There were also some unique missions in Iraq, like digging
Soviet era jets out of the sand.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So the most visceral kind of example of what we
had to deal with. Like again, we had this nationwide mission,
and it boiled down to we were operating off the
airfield that Baghdad at the International Airport, and we would
safely get the Intel people and the scientists from the
(09:36):
airport to wherever the equipment was that they wanted to
collect up or exploit or otherwise research, create a security
perimeter to allow them to do their thing, and then
we would get a mac safely. So as time went
on and the level of kinetic activity began to increase,
we became aware, Like it seems so simple to say
(10:01):
it now given the last twenty whatever years, but we
became aware of areas that had pockets of intense activity.
One of those, even in the earliest days, was Fallujah,
west of Baghdad, and this one particular mission trickled down
to us. Hey, go out west of Fallujah. There's been
(10:24):
a report that there are buried meg jets in the desert.
I don't know what model a Meg. That was irrelevant
of us at the time, but it turned out to
be true. So we did like a ricon out there,
and you could see the tails sticking up out of
the dirt like that. I mean, it was a heck
(10:44):
of an.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Excavation job to dig them out.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
But the Intel guys, as you can imagine, we're like, hey,
we got to have one of these things. You know,
this is a treasure trove, right, So we found this
mission out there.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
To go dig these things out, which involves like.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Bucket loaders and bulldozers and all sorts of heavy equipment
which gets moved very slowly on flatbed trailers. And then
we dig out a MiG and load it onto another
flatbed trailer and drive all that stuff back through Fallujah. There,
but for the grace of God went we and not
(11:23):
a shot was fired. But that was by far the
other than the actual combat interactions. That was by far
the most puckering time as the tensions were rising throughout
the country to have to go ten miles per hour
through Fallujah with a damn plane on a trailer.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
They don't train you for that.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
At Fort Benning, by the way, that's retired to US
Army Major General Matt Smith when we come back what
combat was like in Iraq and later the most intense
combat of his career in Afghanistan. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicle.
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Speaker 1 (13:01):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Army Major General Matt Smith,
who served in the invasion of Iraq and then two
tours in Afghanistan. By the time of the invasion of
Iraq in March two thousand and three, Smith was serving
as a company commander. It also marked his first time
in combat.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
You know, that particular engagement really made the point that
many have written about it at this point in our
history that insurgency is evolutionary. So the guys that set
that ied number one that I'm prepared very well given
our later experience. And then number two, after it went off,
(13:45):
they popped up out of their hiding place to see
what happened. That didn't go as well for them as
they had probably hoped. The problem with that is we eliminated,
you know, four bad bomb makers, and over time the
ied makers just got better and better and better because
they were the ones that survived the rate of ied attacks,
(14:09):
direct fire, sniping. I mean, at one point there were
people dropping hand grenades off of bridges as we drove
under him. I mean, it just kept getting worse and
worse and worse.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Of course, everybody knows.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
How that all culminated by two thousand and six, and
then obviously went on for several years after that.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Smith says everyone reacts to combat differently. He says he
was usually very nervous in anticipation of fighting, but then
got much calmer once combat began. Like so many other
officers who rose farther up the chain of command, Smith
says being a company commander is probably his favorite assignment
in his career.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
In a word, yes, I think the company or battery,
if you're a field artilleryman, or troop, if.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
You're in an.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Armor or calv it's small enough that you can literally
know everyone, like in a very intimate way, like the
way I described knowing someone in that context is in
the dark without night vision on. I know that's Greg
because I can tell how he walks where you hear
(15:18):
somebody cough and you go, oh, that's Matt, because I
know is cough, you know, and that level of intimacy.
I don't think it's possible for us as humans to
replicate it at the level of a battalion or squadron,
or certainly any higher. The intimacy of really knowing all
your at the time as all men is really something special.
(15:41):
And to be able to lead in a combat environment
in an intimate unit like that, it was really a highlight.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
In two thousand and nine, Smith was off to Afghanistan,
this time commanding a battalion. He explains how the mission
was defined at first and how events through him and
his men a major curve ball.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I was on active duty, but in the National Guard,
and by then in the Global War on Terrorism as
it was called, we were in like a normal rotation.
It was like every four years you knew as a
guardsman in the infantry, you knew you were going overseas.
So we were told, hey, you're going to do this
(16:25):
mentoring mission for the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police.
So that's what we trained for, and then we got
over to Afghanistan. Our battalion got attached to what was
then the fourth Brigade of the twenty fifth Infantry Division
led by a guy at the time, Colonel Mike Howard.
He retired as a lieutenant general. Just had coffee with
(16:47):
him a couple months ago actually, and at some point
the decision was made, Hey, we're going to surge.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
In Afghanistan too.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
The powers that be I think it was at the
time the eighty second Airborn Division was in charge in
eastern Afghanistan. They made the decision, Hey, we're gonna turn
this battalion of National Guard guys, they're doing the mentorship
mission for the Afghans. We're going to turn them into
what at the time was called a terrain owning unit.
(17:16):
We're gonna give them a province, just like we give
all the regular Army infantry battalions. So that is something
we had not trained for. And I could remember the
order coming down and I turned to my EXO.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
And I go, well, what are we going to do now?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
And we kind of chuckled at that and thought through
how we had to reorganize everybody and train for different
types of mission.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Sets vall being in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
And oh, by the way, moved the unit and that
was a very exciting time for the battalion staff and myself.
The kind of enemy. Aspect of that was that Colonel
Howard and his team made the decision and we're going
to put this rifle battalion into Paktia Province, which is
(18:07):
one of the provinces or you know states, if you
were to think about it in the United States context.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
In the eastern Afghanistan the.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Borders Pakistan, and that province is geographically small and for
years had had the Cavs Squadron of whatever breate combat
team was in the area. The cav squadron, which is
a smaller formation than a rifle battalion, had been assigned
to Pactia because it was small, and we tripled the
(18:38):
amount of soldiers in Pactia, and then I came to
describe that dynamic as kicking over an ant hill. Just
by virtue of probability. We had much more contact with
the Taliban than the preceding unit. Because we brought so
much more capability to bear in terms of numbers, we
(19:02):
could do more.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
That became a.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Very exciting time for our battalion. It was ultimately a
very good experience, but it was not easy.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
That's retired US Army Major General Matt Smith, a veteran
of Iraq and Afghanistan when we return, the fierce combat
in Afghanistan and how he dealt with that as a leader.
I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is
Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition
(19:34):
is retired US Army Major General Matt Smith. He's a
veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. A moment ago. General
Smith explained the sudden change in mission in Afghanistan in
two thousand and nine. The new assignment meant his battalion
would see considerable combat, and for Smith it was the
most intense combat of his career.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
That mission change happened in October and we left the
country in April. So for the subsequent six months after
the mission change, somebody in the battalion was in combat
every day, and that was usually direct fire or a
(20:18):
combination of direct fire and indirect fire, either attax on
bases or attax on patrols. We did frequent, deliberately planned
operations to try and get after any whatever level of
human targets that the intelligence apparatus kind of produced enough
(20:41):
information on that we could action it. The periodic Fortunately
for US only periodic idea attacks. I'm not sure why
that was in our particular area. Other adjacent province has
had a much bigger problem with that type of thing. Fortunately,
you know, by two thousand and nine twenty ten, the
(21:04):
technology associated with those devices that advanced significantly. Almost every
one of those resulted in either significant numbers of wounded,
people were dead because the technology was so advanced by
that point. So it was a little bit of everything
and made for very long days, as I'm sure you
(21:27):
can appreciate, but ultimately like good. It sounds strange to
say it ultimately good experience, as hard as it was,
and despite the wounded and killed, it was good for
that unit because it wasn't that unit's last deployment. As
(21:48):
a consummate optimist to try to take all the good
that I can from any situation, and you know, for
a National Guard unit, it was the first use of
a National Guard unit in that way.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
And you know, COURL.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Howard paid us a very nice compliment as he was
leaving theater shortly before we did, and it was an
honor to do it.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Intense combat can and did lead to serious injuries and
death within the battalion. Smith explains how he rallied his
troops after the loss of soldiers some of these guys
had been drilling with for many years.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Certainly arguably one of the hardest parts of the job,
especially contacting family members. Being a National Guard unit, the
unit was very tight or close. You know, certainly a
company level and below that has advantages, and that also
(22:42):
has disadvantages. And when somebody gets gravely wounded or killed,
it is a tremendous disadvantage in the sense that the
psychological impact on those that survive whatever the situation was,
is magnified because everybody knows each other so well in
(23:02):
many cases for years. The flip side of that, and
I again trying to put as optimistic a view on
the death of a soldier as possible, the level of care, embrace,
literal and figurative, and family in the broadest sense support
(23:25):
to the surviving family members was significant, much more so
than I've seen on active duty because everybody knows each
other so well. So it really cut both ways in
my experience, as I think is borne out through history,
if I remember my reading correctly or readings, is what
(23:46):
we had leaders that whatever level killed or wounded, at
a higher rate because they're out there leading. My example,
one particular incident, we had a first sergeant get killed,
and that person was somebody. He was an E eight
first sergeant, and I had known him since he was
(24:08):
an E five. I didn't serve with him consecutively for
that entire time, but we had known each other for
a long time. That dynamic of losing people that you've
known for that long, who are that senior and central
to everyone else as well being is very hard. That
first sergeant's company commander at as we were embracing after
(24:32):
the memorial ceremony said effectively not a direct quote, but
he was like, it's always the good guys that get
killed or grievously injured. It's never the bad guys. And
that's not to put anybody in a bad light, but
it just seemed that way. Is like, the best leaders
(24:54):
were the ones that were always out front, and they
were the ones that bore a dis portionate cost for
being good leaders.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Those fights also meant tactical changes were sometimes needed. Smith
shares how he adjusted strategy after engagements with the enemy.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
One of the things that I learned in Iraq and
three was put to good use in Inpacty of those
six seven years later, and that was that after action
reviews aren't just for training, and we really became very
methodical about trying to learn all that we could from
(25:33):
every enemy engagement in order to mitigate the risk involved
in future engagements. There's obviously there's no way to eliminate
the risk. For years, I've talked with more junior leaders
in terms of coaching them about this business is inherently
dangerous by design. But we got to we have a
duty to do all that we can to minimize the
(25:55):
risk to our soldiers and service members more broadly, and
shame on us if we don't capitalize on every one
of those.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Opportunities to do so.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
That kind of downside or weakness was the way because
of the terrain of Factia, as is the case in
much of the country and certainly in the east in
the mountains, there aren't a whole lot of alternate ways
to go somewhere via ground transportation. You can see people
coming from a long way away. That resulted in a
(26:23):
lot of opportunity, i'll say, for the enemy and really
increased the level of anxiety amongst soldiers because they know
as soon as they leave the wire they know someone's watching.
Other than nighttime raids, which I mentioned earlier, you know,
the time and place of the interaction was the enemy's choosing,
(26:46):
which is unpleasant.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
After that deployment to Afghanistan, Smith and his men were
deployed to Central America for security and training in the
middle part of last decade. He cautions Americans to think
very carefully about traveling to Central America due to security concerns.
By twenty nineteen, he was back in Afghanistan. He had
risen again in the chain of command and was not
(27:08):
far from where he had been deployed a decade earlier.
At this point, the American presence was much smaller. Smith
also remembers talking directly with Taliban figures and tribal leaders
at that time, which he found pretty surreal.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Yes, the question.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
We had kind of limited back channel discussions with Taliban
leaders from time to time, certainly tribal leaders, although the
party line, if you will, was to put the Afghan
military or police in the driver's seat, which is what
we're trying to do for years. Obviously that sometimes proved
(27:47):
harder to do than we thought. I always found it
very interesting to say to one of our interpreters, Hey,
you know, call Mulla so and so, and our interpreters
had those guys all on speed literally on speed dial
on their phones.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Just two years later, the US backed Afghan government fell
and the Taliban was back in charge. Smith says that
was very difficult to watch.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Unpleasant would be a way to describe that, and extraordinarily frustrating.
We have a young country coming, you know, just coming
up on two point fifty. So I tried to, you know,
as a relatively senior leader, try to maintain some sense
of history, like world history, if you will, versus just
(28:37):
our nation. I had the opportunity, for reasons that aren't
worth going into to visit Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
Several years ago.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
At the time, I had two Vietnam Vats. They were
civilians at the time, but they had served in Vietnam
and then completed their uniform service and came back as civilians.
And they these two guys worked for me at the
time when I came back from this trip to Vietnam.
Then one was drafted to infantryman who had a hillacious
(29:09):
year in Vietnam, and the other was a rotary wing
aviator helicopter pilot who had such a great time. He
stayed for three and a half years. I said to
both of them, having had such different experiences, I said,
you guys won the war. We just did it in
a way we didn't anticipate. It was economic power that won,
not military power, because to visit Vietnam in the late
(29:31):
two thousands and see capitalism burgeoning everywhere, and you know,
if we think about current events and how close we've
become with the leadership of Vietnam as a counter to China,
it's a I'm sure an imprecise analogy, but it's all
I have to hang my hat on that our service
(29:53):
in Afghanistan wasn't in vain, and that is quite a leap,
But that's all I got. The flip side is in
a more positive way, which will ring hollow with anybody
who lost a family member or is caring for a
grievously wounded family member, is that our military, the current
(30:15):
generation of our military, has been tested in combat and
performed quite well. Back to your caveat for political reasons
that neither you nor I are privy to. You know,
certain decisions were made. We don't necessarily have to like them.
As service members. We go where we're told to go.
We do it.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
We're told to do so.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Hopefully some good all that to say, I'm rambling on,
but all that to say, hopefully some good will come
of it, maybe in the long run.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Retiring in March of twenty twenty five, Smith now has
a new mission providing business guidance to other veterans as
they exit the military and start a very different chapter
in life.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
I run a master's degree in business for veterans at
the Gouzweta Business School at Emory University here in Atlanta.
It's the seventeenth ranked business school in the nation this year.
We're obviously very.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Proud of that. It's one of two schools.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
University of Southern California in la is the only other
one with a program like ours. What our program does
is we it's aimed at, or targeted at, or built
for senior leaders, both officer and enlisted noncommissioned officers who
are getting out of the military after twenty whatever years
and transitioning into the civilian world for a second chapter.
(31:35):
And what we do is we harness all that goodness
of the leadership and management experience from their military service.
We give them a world class foundational business education and
then we kind of shoot them out the other end
of the of the program and into the civilian workplace.
And it seems to be very well received thus far.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
And it.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Is a privilege and truly an honor to be able
to do that for veterans of all flavors, to literally
see lives transformed through higher education at a world class
place like Emory University is really something very special. And
(32:20):
to your point about me, Grey, I went through an
MBA program coincidentally ates went to business school before nine
to eleven, where I was a veteran in a room
full of other students. That is a very different classroom
environment than being a classroom full of veterans. So it
(32:42):
is really a neat dynamic to be in that classroom
with the students, and it's it's really transformative for many
of them, especially the senior NCOs who you know, many
of whom didn't necessarily come from places where going to
a school like Emery was even in the discussion, you know.
(33:05):
And I equate it to the transformative effects of the
GI Bill when it was put in place in nineteen
forty four. Obviously, we're not talking about ten million vets
coming back from World War Two. But to be able
to do something for some is really very satisfying.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
After thirty two years, Smith struggled to pinpoint what he
is most proud of at first, but he then pointed
to something a former soldier told him years after they
were on the battlefield together.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
That is a tough question, So that kind of to
your point about loving the time as a company leader.
That kind of answer changes over time.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I could go back and say during that nine to
ten deployment impact he had a soldier tell me many
years later they were in some particularly heavy direct fire
firefight and I was on the radio, of course, trying
to coordinate resources and assets. This particular soldier it was
(34:08):
his first time in a direct action firefight, and years
later he said, hey, sir, we bumped into each other
and he said, hey, sir, you remember that day And
I said, oh, yeah, I remember. He said, you know
when we heard your voice over the radio, we knew
it was going to be okay.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
And that.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
It's hard for me to think of higher praise from
a junior enlisted soldier. And I will take that memory
with me to the grave as something that I'm very
proud of that, I was able to, not knowing it
at the time, instill a level of confidence and our
soldiers when they were in a tough spot. So that
(34:51):
was very satisfying.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
That's retired to US Army Major General Matt Smith. He's
a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as
well as deployments to Latin America. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and
(35:17):
thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the
American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter
dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center
on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe
to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral
(35:39):
histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe to
the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks
again for listening, and please join us next time for
Veterans Chronicles
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