Staff Sgt. Scott Mathewson, right, stands alongside Lt. Chad Dearborn in a remote area of Afghanistan.

By Carolyn Cole/Staff Writer

When about 30 Iraqi insurgents ambushed Staff Sgt. Scott Mathewson’s patrol, he took off running — toward the attackers.

The Mustang High School graduate and six other soldiers covered a kilometer and cleared three insurgent “strong points” used in the ambush to shoot rocket-propelled grenades and small arms rounds at the patrol and two vehicles.

For Mathewson, the April attack was just another day on the job as a platoon leader, capturing insurgents and searching for bombs. But the Army called his actions “selfless” and awarded him with a Bronze Star with Valor in October. He also was awarded the Purple Heart and Army Commendation Medal of Valor while serving in Iraq from June 2005 to June 2006.

While these medals are only awarded America’s bravest, Mathewson said he doesn’t consider himself courageous — he’s just another soldier trying to complete a mission.

“It’s scary when it’s over,” he said. “When it’s going on, generally, you don’t have the time to think, or at least not about that.”

Mostly, Mathewson said it’s a matter of getting each soldier in his platoon through the battle alive. The 35-year-old became a close mentor for his 32 men, all 10 years his junior, including college sophomores and juniors from a Vermont military academy.

“The whole job is teaching these kids how to stay alive,” Mathewson said, adding he lost several of his crew. “You are responsible for them, for everything they do or don’t do.”

He taught his soldiers to memorize scenery and be alert to any changes in a neighborhood or on the street.

“If it looks out of place, it’s probably a bomb,” Mathewson said.

His team found 93 improvised explosive devices hidden in garbage, potholes and roadkill. Eighteen IEDs exploded near his crew, with most of the shock absorbed by armored vehicles. But Mathewson said even with armor, his soldiers were still injured, including sustaining several concussions himself.

Mathewson and his platoon’s other mission was stopping those who paid for, made and placed the devices. He said the effort was aimed at eliminating terrorist networks. Mathewson said his men would conduct a preliminary investigation, gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses. Mathewson and his men didn’t tally the number they detained, but hoped they could make the streets quieter and safer.

“I never worried about how many we detained, but that it takes forever to do the paperwork,” he said.

His soldiers also continued to find caches containing thousands of artillery rounds, Mathewson said, possibly hidden by former dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime. Finding those caches four years into the war has led the soldier to question if the regime didn’t already have weapons of mass destruction, as first thought by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war. He likened searching for WMD, as small as a fire extinguisher or dumpster buried in the desert, to finding a needle in a haystack.

Mathewson said he believes the American public wants to discard the possibility of finding weapons of mass destruction because of the society’s short attention span and need for instant gratification.

“We want everything to be that convenient including our wars, and it’s not,” he said.

The public is also losing sight of Afghanistan, where Mathewson said soldiers are teaching the Afghani army to think differently. Before his Iraq deployment, he helped train Afghani soldiers, instructing military strategy.

The hardest learn lesson for Afghanistan’s army is to fight in waves of soldiers, instead of the entire force charging an enemy at once.

“They don’t want to lose honor … it makes it a challenge to look at things from a ‘get the job done’ aspect to ‘how the job gets done’,” he said.

Since joining the Army fresh out of high school in 1987, military service has taken Mathewson across the world, including one of his first assignments in Western Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. He also served with other soldiers guarding the Egyptian-Israeli border in a peacekeeping mission. He switched to the National Guard in 1991.

Besides receiving the three medals, Mathewson recently finished a bachelors’ degree in political science from the University of Oklahoma and is in line to receive a promotion to lieutenant.

Now, Mathewson is working as a materials non-commissioned officer for Vermont’s Army National Guard Office. He said he expects to serve at least two more deployments in Iraq or Afghanistan.

He is the son of Bob and Connie Mathewson of Mustang.