UNBREAKABLE

Colby Smith

U.S. Army Iraq

Even though neighbor Colby Smith graduated from the Riverside Military Academy in Georgia, he had no intention of enlisting in the military after high school. He had a scholarship to Baylor, where he was going to study pre-med.

He was a senior in high school on Sept. 11, 2001, and in its wake, many young Americans were inspired to join the “War on Terror,” as President George W. Bush dubbed it. Smith was one of them.

“Nine-eleven happened and I got really angry,” he says. “My goal was to join, help out and get out. It was never going to be a career.”

In 2003, he joined the Army and scored exceptionally high on the aptitude test, so the recruiter told him he could do basically whatever he wanted in the military.

“I said, ‘Great. I want a job where no one tells me what to do,’” Smith recalls. “[The recruiter] said, ‘You understand you’re joining the Army, right?’”

But after years in the military academy, that’s what Smith wanted. The recruiter told him, “You know who no one messes with? Their medic.” So that’s exactly what Smith did.

He went to basic training in Fort Knox before heading to the San Antonio at the Fort Sam Houston Military Medical Training Center. He was stationed at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in the pulmonary unit and burn unit. As the Iraq War gained momentum, Smith worked, trained and studied hard.

In 2005 he deployed to Iraq and immediately stationed at the Forward Operating Base, Saint Michael’s, in the “Triangle of Death,” a Sunni Muslimdominated region south of Baghdad that saw heavy combat. It was night when

“The next morning that prayer comes on. I went outside and leaned against the barrier and thought, ‘This is so beautiful.’ Right when it ends, tracer fire and explosions everywhere. I ran under my cot and thought, ‘Where in the hell are we?’ It was just insanity. They put us right into the hell.”

Smith arrived on base, which prevented him from surveying the landscape until the sun came up.

“The next morning, that prayer comes on,” Smith remembers. “I went outside and leaned against the barrier and thought, ‘This is so beautiful.’ Right when it ends, tracer fire and explosions everywhere. I ran under my cot and thought, ‘Where in the hell are we?’ It was just insanity. They put us right into the hell.”

For his action in combat, he was awarded a Commendation with a “V” Device (for valor), a medal just under the Bronze Star.

He was on a scouting mission in a Humvee and dozed off in the back during the drive. Suddenly he woke up to a massive explosion behind them that was so powerful, it pushed the vehicle forward.

“That never happens,” Smith explains. “The vehicle doesn’t just lift off the ground like that. I was like, ‘What the…?’ but I’d been asleep.”

The Humvee behind them was hit hard and rolled.

“My job is to be a medic,” he says. “So I wasn’t thinking, I just grabbed my bag and jumped out, and the Humvee was still driving. I’d just woken up, and so I rolled a little bit and got up and started running. I was kind of zigzagging because I had just fallen out of a moving vehicle.”

When he got to the overturned Humvee, he saw the gunner’s arm had been cut off when the vehicle rolled. Their commander was thrown from the vehicle and landed on his face and chest, and the driver had broken both of his arms.

Smith began by making a tourniquet for the man who lost his arm. Then he saw the commander’s face was crushed in, which was making it hard for him to breathe, so Smith adjusted the broken pieces of the man’s face to open up his airways. Suddenly Smith felt a hand on the back of his head, and it pushed him down. It was the lieutenant.

“He asked me, ‘What are you doing?’” Smith recalls. “I was like, ‘Um, my job?’ And he said, ‘You’ve been getting shot at this whole time.’ I had no idea. I don’t remember being shot at.”

Despite the severe trauma, all three men lived, and Smith remains friends with them today. It was his first taste of war.

A few months into his deployment, the United States leadership shifted its mentality.

“It really started to click with Washington,” Smith explains. “They started to figure out that it was much better to bring pain on those who were trying to hurt us, but to also bring a lot of aid to those who weren’t trying to hurt us, and that was a new mission plan.”

He’ll never forget when he helped oversee the first democratic election in Iraq, he says.

“We wanted this election to go off, but we also knew Al-Qaeda wanted a moral victory, so they would slaughter anyone who went to go vote,” Smith explains. “So we shut down traffic, and 83 percent of the country voted.”

Not long after the election, he earned his second award for valor when he aided a nearby mosque after it was bombed.

He and a buddy showed up at the gruesome and chaotic scene after they saw smoke from miles away. There were no doctors or emergency personnel there to assist the men, women and children who were badly injured. Smith was the only medic on scene, and people rushed to him for aid. He franticly made bandages out of whatever he could find, including his own clothes. “These people were so desperate for something,” he remembers. “Every time I looked up, I saw a wound.”

It was the moment Smith changed the way he viewed his service in Iraq, he says. “My work at the mosque taught me these people were normal and scared and just trying to deal with life as much as we were,” he says.

When Smith and his unit moved south to Scania, Iraq, they opened a burn unit.

“In Iraq they didn’t have central heating or cooling, so they’d build these massive fires in their living rooms,” Smith says. He learned that falling into such fires was a leading cause of death for children in Iraq, so the clinic filled a critical need. Although they didn’t have all the supplies they needed, including morphine, they made an impact.

“I wanted to try my best to make their lives easier,” he says.

Inez Sookma U.S. Air Force Afghanistan

Col. Inez Sookma was born and reared in Lakewood, a graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School, but her parents came here from Thailand.

“As we grew up, our parents told us, ‘You’re going to be all-American children. You can learn to speak Thai later. You can eat Thai later,’” Sookma explains. “So we grew up eating hotdogs and hamburgers. They even wanted us to have an American religion. To this day they’re still Bud- dhists, but we went to church with our sponsors at Lakewood Baptist Church. They were just proud to be here.”

Her parents were caught off guard when Sookma joined ROTC as a freshman at Texas A&M, but they weren’t hard to convince.

“I think it was a calling,” she says. “From there I was motivated to pursue a contract with the Air Force, and I thought four years, that was it. Just four years.”

Fast-forward to today and Sookma tears up when she reflects on her 27 years of service in the United States Air Force. She retired in 2014 as a colonel after an adventure that took her everywhere from the states to Europe to the Middle East.

“I just kept getting these amazing opportunities,” she explains. “I can never really say I have one particular tour or assignment that was my favorite. I learned from each one.”

Her early years were spent learning in the classroom and the field, where she established herself as an expert in transportation.

Sookma lived in the Philippines running a passenger terminal at Fort Clark Air Base. Later, she moved to the WrightPatterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, so she could earn a master’s degree.