Scott Smiley - Someone You Should Know

Thank you Jeremy.

This will bring a tear to everyones eyes. So turn up the sound prepare to meet a True American Hero.

This is truly inspiring!

Jeremy

http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/nba/pinnacle/usab_army_mh_final.asx


Capt. Scott Smiley wears prosthetic eyes after a suicide attack in Iraq blinded him. “What I have fought for, I am still involved in,” he says. RICH-JOSEPH FACUN / THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
FORT MONROE - Something told Tiffany Smiley not to sign the papers that would end her husband's Army career.

A week earlier, Scott Smiley had been a lieutenant in charge of a Stryker Brigade Combat Team platoon in Mosul, Iraq. He'd graduated from West Point, made it through Ranger school and hoped to serve in special operations.

Yet in April 2005, he was barely conscious - the victim of a suicide car bombing that sent shrapnel into his brain, leaving him temporarily paralyzed and permanently blind.
Within days of Smiley's arrival at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, a civilian social worker encouraged his wife to fill out forms to medically retire him.
"Instantly, this thing inside me was like 'No, this isn't right,'" Tiffany Smiley, now 25, recalled. "It was just this gut feeling."

Through weeks and months to come, as Scott Smiley's body healed, as he learned how to walk with a cane and read Braille, he and his wife were told by doctors and therapists in Washington; Tacoma, Wash., and Palo Alto, Calif.: Your Army career is over.
Smiley - earnest, outgoing, quick to poke fun at himself, devoutly religious - has proved them wrong.

Taking advantage of the Army's new willingness to consider allowing seriously injured soldiers to stay in uniform, and with the backing of superiors all the way up to a three-star general, Smiley has settled into a job at Fort Monroe's Training and Doctrine Command.
He has matter-of-factly accepted his fate.

"Being blind is no different than being sighted," he said. "You just live life a little differently."
The guy everyone calls Scotty jokes about colleagues having to straighten crooked patches on his uniform and laughs about being stopped on base and asked for directions, which he was able to provide.

Last Thursday, with friends, family and more than 50 of his colleagues looking on, Tiffany Smiley attached captain's bars to her 26 -year-old husband's camouflage uniform...