Air Force Media Heading Home After 7th Deployment

After 7 overseas deployments, Air Force medic looks forward to going home
Herald-Times (Tribune News Service)
By Laura Lane
Published: September 27, 2015

He also served on humanitarian missions twice, to help fight wildfires in California in 2007 and to help victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Matt Scott's world is defined by 15-foot-high cement walls, steel doors, guards with assault rifles, armored Humvees, suicide bombers and vehicle-borne explosives.

It's a short distance to work every day, but he gets transported in a helicopter. It's safer than driving on sabotaged roads in the deserts of Afghanistan, where a thin layer of gray, silt-like dust covers everything in sight and danger lurks always.

When winter cold sets in, air quality deteriorates. "It gets wet and humid and dreary and snowy," the U.S. Air Force master sergeant from Ellettsville, Ind., said. "The people here burn literally everything to stay warm, and the pollution gets very bad."

Six thousand feet above sea level and 7,673 miles from home, the 38-year-old Monroe County native and flight medic is serving out the end of a two-decade military career during which he has been deployed overseas seven times.
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