Early Life and the Road to the Army

Paul Ray Smith was born on September 24, 1969, in El Paso, Texas. When he was nine, his family moved to South Tampa, Florida, where he grew up on public-school playgrounds and neighborhood streets—football, skateboards , bikes, and the kind of rough-and-ready tinkering that turns a kid into a problem-solver. He graduated high school in 1989 and enlisted that October, heading to Fort Leonard Wood for Basic and AIT to become a combat engineer—one of the Army’s sappers, the people who blow doors and build bridges so others can fight or get home.

His early assignments took him to Germany and then to the Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo. By 1999, he was with B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division. In 2002, he was promoted to Serge

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