Stryker Brigade News

The climb was something the soldier from Pasco, Wash., has wanted to do since visiting the Army's Fort Lewis several years ago as a West Point cadet. He currently lives in Durham, N.C., with wife, Tiffany, and their 8-week-old son and is assigned to headquarters of the Army Accessions Command at Fort Monroe, Va.

"He loves it," Tiffany Smiley said during an earlier telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's just who he is."

She added that since being blinded, her husband has surfed off the coast of Hawaii, gone skydiving and skied Vail. He also previously climbed Mount Democrat, a 14,148-foot peak near Alma, Colo.

Smiley was injured in Iraq in April 2005 while serving with the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division - a Stryker combat team formerly based at Fort Lewis south of Tacoma.

He'd been in the country just six months when his unit came upon a suspicious man sitting in a vehicle. When Smiley fired off a couple warning shots, the man raised his hands and the car exploded.

"Everything went black," said Tiffany Smiley, recalling the attack as her husband had described it.

Shrapnel embedded in his eyes and brain, leaving him temporarily paralyzed and permanently blind. Doctors had to remove one eye and told him he'd never see again. He was eventually fitted with a prosthetic blue eye.

"It was hard," she said. "It took him awhile to realize what had happened."

But after receiving a Purple Heart just weeks after his injury, Smiley realized he could still do things he'd done before, including stay in the Army. He learned to walk with a cane, read Braille and traveled the country to speak to other soldiers.

"He is still the same person, he just does things in a different way now," his wife said.