Jackson Free Press

Beth Smith will puncture holes in any preconceived notion you might have about women who serve in the Mississippi Army National Guard. Pretty, petite, bursting with energy, a non-stop smile on her face, she's also a major who just returned from nearly a year serving in Afghanistan.

A Clinton native, Smith, 36, graduated from Mississippi State with a bachelor's degree in agriculture in 1997, and received her Master's in education in 2007 from Troy University in Alabama. She taught school in the Madison Alternative School and at Murrah High School in Jackson for several years.

"I loved animals and thought that I would go into animal science or vet school, or something," she says. "Then I got to college and realized you have to work real hard to go to school for that. So that was out of the question."

Smith's demeanor indicates her tongue is firmly planted in her cheek, but, she says, she "grew up in college," learning how to take care of herself.

Inspired by her Guardsman uncle, who carried his helmet and MREs (meals ready to eat) in the trunk of his car, she says, Smith enlisted in the Guard in 1993, a year out of high school. At that time, the National Guard was the "safe" branch of the military. No one thought then that Guardsmen would be deployed overseas fighting hot wars.

Commissioned as a lieutenant when she graduated from college, Smith went on to Army Flight School at Ft. Rucker, Ala., where she was certified to fly Blackhawk attack helicopters. After four years, she transferred into military intelligence, where she serves today. While in Mississippi she served to coordinate domestic operations in the state, including from Hurricane Katrina recovery in 2005.

"In the first few hours and days after Katrina, there wasn't anybody else who had the manpower, the equipment and maneuverability to get down there and start clearing roads and fallen buildings," she says. "That was a crazy place."

"I went on my own. They needed an intel officer," she says. "I had not deployed, yet, and it's sort of just a matter of time."

She had the choice to go to Afghanistan to do what she was trained to do, or to join her fiance, Jim Sisson, in Iraq. In what she says was a 10-minute phone conversation, Smith told Sisson about her decision and that if he was thinking about marrying her, he might want to do something about it quickly. His reaction? "Roger," he responded. The proposal came a few months later.

Her tour in Afghanistan, from December 2008 through November 2009, was as an intelligence officer for an engineering brigade and a route-clearing battalion that searched for and cleared mines and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) from roadways.

"My role as an intel officer was basically to keep abreast of all the threat tactics," she says, giving the engineers information on where to find explosives. "They can build a bomb out of anything," she adds.

"Incredible soldiers do that job—and every day, every single day," she says of the men and women who cleared the roads, adding that combatants often attacked them subsequent to the soldiers clearing bombs.

Smith worked mainly from the safety of a base where she got to experience the culture, people and even learned the language, Pashto. "It's really quite beautiful," she says.

What she didn't see, though, were Afghan women. She didn't have problems dealing with the men, who she says have a history of dealing with female American soldiers. Still, "men were sort of enamored," she says, with women who could hold their own. The area where she served, the Paktika province in the southeastern part of the country—roughly 50 miles from Pakistan—is fairly rural, and women just aren't out and about.

"I can't think of one time I interacted with a woman," she says. "I never even saw women."

What's next for Smith now that she's back on Mississippi soil? Smith and her two rescue dogs are taking it day by day. Gretta, a 70-pound Burmese mountain dog mix, and Gracie, a border collie mix, "sort of rule the roost," she says. Her fiance will be coming home from Iraq in March. They haven't seen each other since April of last year, and they haven't set a date, yet.

"Sometime after March," she says with a laugh.