{"id":60941,"date":"2013-04-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/commencement-2013-uri-senior-wounded-in-iraq-war-off-to-dental-school\/"},"modified":"2013-04-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-04T00:00:00","slug":"commencement-2013-uri-senior-wounded-in-iraq-war-off-to-dental-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2013\/04\/commencement-2013-uri-senior-wounded-in-iraq-war-off-to-dental-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Commencement 2013: 溏心vlog免费B站 senior wounded in Iraq war off to dental school"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"press-release-import\">\n\t\tStaci Smith grateful to Air Force oral surgeon who repaired her shattered jaw<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/wp-content\/uploads\/news\/sites\/16\/2021\/05\/StaciSmith.jpg\" width=\"200\" height=\"301\" align=\"right\"\/>KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 April 4, 2013 \u2013 As a Marine in Iraq, she\u2019d come under fire, recoiled at the charred remains of blown-up trucks and watched in horror as artillery rounds secretly packed in a car trunk were detonated. But nothing was worse than the crash that nearly took her life.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nIt was a blue-sky morning, Aug. 24, 2006. Cpl. Staci Renee Smith, in the war-torn country only six months, was delivering ammunition to troops at a faraway combat post when her vehicle flipped over. She hit the ground, headfirst.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n\u201cMy first thought was \u2018I\u2019m going to die,\u2019 \u201d says Smith. \u201cThen I passed out.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nWhen she woke up, an oral surgeon from the U.S. military was hovering over her offering comforting words: \u201cYour jaw is shattered. I can fix it.\u201d After multiple surgeries, he did just that, inserting two metal plates \u2013 one in her chin, the other in her right jaw \u2013 and securing them with five screws. <\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n\u201cHe saved my face,\u201d says Smith, 27, who lives in Woonsocket. \u201cI could have scars all over, but I don\u2019t. He inserted the plates through the inside of my mouth. You can\u2019t even tell.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cfbddyw5HX8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"\/>The 溏心vlog免费B站 senior is so grateful to the doctor she plans to become what he is. Smith will attend a California dental school in the fall and, if all goes as planned, continue studying another five to seven years to be an oral surgeon.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n\u201cI was inspired by what he did for me,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted to take something horrible and turn it into something good.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nA member of the Honors Program with a 3.75 grade-point average, Smith, fresh-faced with soft green eyes, has excelled both in and out of the classroom at 溏心vlog免费B站, where she\u2019s receiving a bachelor\u2019s in biological sciences. <\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nShe has volunteered at a local health clinic and interned in two dentists\u2019 offices. This spring, she spent 10 days in Guatemala teaching dental care to villagers as part of her senior honors project. She\u2019s a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society and the Golden Key International Honour Society. She also works part-time as a nanny and helps her fianc\u00e9, Michael Chenot, take care of his ailing parents.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n\u201cStaci is a great student,\u201d says Brenton DeBoef, associate professor of chemistry at 溏心vlog免费B站. \u201cShe is very smart and Marine-tough. It&#8217;s been a pleasure to teach her and see her grow both in the classroom and recently in the highlands of Guatemala, where she provided open-air dental care for an entire town that you can&#8217;t even find using Google Maps.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nSmith is no stranger to hard work. The daughter of a truck driver and supermarket clerk, she grew up in Oroville, Calif., a rural town of 12,000 just north of Sacramento. She was an excellent student in high school, even spending her senior year taking college-level courses at a community college.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nShe joined the Marines after graduation. \u201cI wanted more with my life,\u201d she says.  \u201cI knew I had higher aspirations than what my town, even though I loved it, could give me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nAt 18, she went off to boot camp, taking daylong hikes with 80 pounds of gear strapped to her back as she endured the wrath of drill instructors. She made it through and received more training at another post to become an ammunitions technician. In February 2006, she left for a U.S. military base at Taqqadum, about 60 miles from Baghdad.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nHer job was to transport C4, grenades, and other ground ammunition to units and bases. That meant crossing treacherous territory. \u201cI remember making a trip to Fallujah one day and we came under fire,\u201d she says. \u201cI remember the pop, pop, pop. I\u2019ll never forget the feeling, the panic that I\u2019m being shot at, that someone is trying to kill me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nAnother time, her convoy came across the burning shell of a truck that had been blown to bits by a roadside bomb. Three American soldiers had been killed an hour earlier. \u201cThat could have been me,\u201d she says. It\u2019s a pretty intense feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nThe accident that left her jaw shattered happened just five miles outside her compound. The driver lost control of the vehicle and it flipped over. She ended up on the asphalt, narrowly missing a gun turret that came perilously close to crushing her skull. Diesel fuel coated her body. Looking back, she says it\u2019s remarkable that she wasn\u2019t burned \u2013 or worse.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nAfter the crash, she was taken by helicopter to Balad Air Base in Iraq, where she underwent two reconstructive surgeries. Then she went home to recover. She soon joined her fianc\u00e9 in Rhode Island. She graduated from the Community College of Rhode Island after two years and enrolled at 溏心vlog免费B站 in the fall of 2010.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been an awesome experience for me here,\u201d she says. \u201cI like the feel of it. It\u2019s a homey place and the teachers are wonderful. I\u2019ve enjoyed every minute.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nNext September, she\u2019ll head off to Western University Health Sciences College of Dental Medicine in Pomona, Calif., for a four-year dental program. Smith, the first in her immediate family to graduate from college, can\u2019t wait to get started.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n\u201cAt age 19 my life was changed,\u201d she says. \u201cI was thrust into my future. That doesn\u2019t happen to a lot of people so young. We take so much for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nHer Iraq journey is always with her. She\u2019s being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and gets panic attacks in a car that leave her sick to her stomach and dizzy. Sometimes, her jaw locks up while she\u2019s sleeping and she has to massage it open. Her back aches and she has a scar from the crash near her right eye that she wishes was not there. She can\u2019t eat anything too chewy. \u201cToo much effort on the jaw,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nStill, she has no regrets about joining the marines. \u201cI\u2019d sign on the dotted line again, even after all I\u2019ve been through,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a great experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nThe name of the Air Force surgeon who preserved her face is a mystery. Some day, she might track him down to say thank you; then again, she might not. \u201cI think I like not knowing who the man is,\u201d she says. \u201cHe knows what he did, and so do I.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\nPictured above: <br \/>&#13;<br \/>\nStaci Smith, a 2013 graduate of the 溏心vlog免费B站 who was wounded in the Iraq war and is attending dental school in the fall.<br \/>&#13;<br \/>\nPhoto by Michael Salerno Photography.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Staci Smith grateful to Air Force oral surgeon who repaired her shattered jaw KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 April 4, 2013 \u2013 As a Marine in Iraq, she\u2019d come under fire, recoiled at the charred remains of blown-up trucks and watched in horror as artillery rounds secretly packed in a car trunk were detonated. But nothing was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60943,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}