Robert (Powl) Smith:  

Life My life has been 99% military since I left Memorial, so I have included my "military biography" under the military tab. (Here I have not gone into depth about that part of my life.) I attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1982, was commissioned a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army (Field Artillery) and have spent the past 25 years on active duty. After my first tour in Baumholder, Germany, I returned to Ft. Sill Oklahoma (southwest Oklahoma, near Lawton), and while returning to Tulsa met Liz Williams, a 1979 graduate of Edison. We dated for a year then got married in 1987 at St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church in Tulsa. My younger brother Hopper Smith was my best man, and Charles Clark and Mark Hanoch, both Memorial 1978 and my two best friends growing up, were groomsmen. All three -- Hopper, Chuck and Mark still live in Tulsa. I stayed at Fort Sill for three years, teaching at the Field Artillery school, then got a command assignment back in Germany, so we moved in January 1990 to Giessen in central West Germany. After thee years and a lot of touring of Germany and Europe, we got another assignment in Frankfurt, Germany and moved there, where my first daughter, Alexandra Nicole was born. We had a great tour for five total years, but it was time to move on in 1994, so we were assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and moved there where my second daughter, Caroline Margaret was born. After two years in Kansas, we returned to Fort Sill for another three year stint, visiting family and friends in Tulsa often. We left Fort Sill in February 1999 for a "dream" assignment at the NATO Defense College in Rome, Italy. Unfortunately, at the end of 6 months there and on receipt of new orders back to Germany, Liz and I decided that our marriage wasn't working anymore and we divorced in November 1999. I moved to Baumholder, Germany for a three year tour that included a peacekeeping tour in Kosovo. While on leave in Dallas in 2000 I met Jody Hobson, a graduate of Monte Cassino in Tulsa and we were married in June 2001. This time my youngest brother, Jason Maddox was my best man, but again Hopper, Mark and Chuck helped out. Jody and I moved to Stuttgart, Germany arrivnig just a month before September 11th. After September 11th life got very hectic, but we still had time to do a lot of weekend jaunts in Germany, Italy, France (yes, France) and Belgium and collected a lot of furniture. (I also spent a lot of time in less touristic spots -- North Africa, Turkey, Bosnia.) I became the Chief of Counter-Terrorism Plans for U.S. European Command, and became semi-famous for being quoted in the New York Times (front page, above the fold no less) about how we in U.S. European command we doing things diffrently that Centrla Command in the Middle East. Oh well. I left Stuttgart for an exciting year in Baghdad -- the year we were winning, with decisive victories at Najaf and Fallujah and the first elections in Iraqi history. I returned unscathed from Iraq in August 2005, and we moved to my final assignment in the Army, U.S. Northern Command at Colorado Springs, Colorado. 1 week after getting back I was off to New Orleans for a month to help out the broken S...Expand for more