SFC Scott Rothwell
U.S. Army - 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment
Illinois Army National Guard - 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team
Tundra Strategies - Civilian Security Contractor (2010-2014)
Fayzabad, Maiwand and Qalat, Afghanistan
Military Career: 1998-2001 and 2003-2024
U.S. Army - 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment
Illinois Army National Guard - 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team
Tundra Strategies - Civilian Security Contractor (2010-2014)
Fayzabad, Maiwand and Qalat, Afghanistan
Military Career: 1998-2001 and 2003-2024
“The military set you up for success...I learned early in the military that life isn’t as hard as it seems, because all you need are the right tools, and you can accomplish really, really tough things with the right tools.”
Scott Rothwell was born on November 15, 1979, at Goddard Hospital in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Scott’s parents were only 19 years old when they married, and Scott was born shortly thereafter. He recalled that his parents lacked the maturity and judgment to raise children, creating a tumultuous childhood for Scott and his two younger sisters. There were some good times and some bad times. “The younger years were pretty normal for us.”
The family lived in Brockton, Massachusetts, and Scott attended the local junior high school. A lack of parental attention meant Scott would arrive at school in dirty clothes that sometimes carried unpleasant odors, which did not go unnoticed by the other students. “I didn’t really have a lot of friends and kinda got picked on a lot.”
The family moved to Stoughton, where Scott finished junior high school. He went on to attend Stoughton High School, but Scott didn’t enjoy school. It is unclear whether he had any learning disabilities, but what was clear was that he wasn’t getting the support and encouragement from his parents that might have motivated him to do his homework and work hard to improve. “I struggled really bad with school.” Scott became one of those kids who slipped through the cracks and found his way into the wrong crowd. He started getting into trouble, and his mother told him to straighten himself out or get out of the house. So Scott left.
“I was 15 and moved out...and moved in with my uncle, who was only six years older than me. He lived in Louisville, Kentucky.” His mother’s youngest brother was only 21 years old, was a heavy drinker, and wasn’t able to be the father figure Scott desperately needed to help him get back on track. Scott attended high school in Louisville until his uncle and his wife decided to move to South Carolina. There, Scott attended his third high school. Although his uncle told him he had to earn his high school diploma, Scott was on his own to figure out how to do that. When his uncle moved back to Louisville, Scott decided he needed to leave that environment and returned to Stoughton.
By that time, his parents had separated, and his mother had moved into a small two-bedroom apartment with his two sisters. There was no bedroom for Scott, so he set up a bed in his mother’s large closet. Back at Stoughton High School, Scott tried to focus on school, but the die had been cast, and he could not get himself on track. Scott was at lunch in the school cafeteria one day when an Army recruiter approached him. He asked Scott what he wanted to do with his life, and Scott told him, “I wanna travel the world, and I wanna own my own business.” The recruiter told him he had just the thing for him and signed him to a contract to become a cook.
When it came time to graduate, the vice principal told Scott he didn’t have enough credits to graduate and would be held back so he could earn enough credits to receive his diploma. Scott told him that would be a problem because he had signed a contract to enlist in the Army after high school. The vice principal told Scott he would have to figure it out.
Scott met with his recruiter, explained his predicament, and received help renegotiating his contract. Scott had never wanted to be a cook. He wanted to be a Ranger. As luck would have it, the recruiter told him he had a slot for an airborne infantryman and that Scott could volunteer for the Ranger Regiment when he completed his training. It was not exactly what he was hoping for, but it was better than becoming a cook.
When the school year began, Scott applied himself to his schoolwork, knowing he was working toward a goal. He became involved with weightlifting through a Big Brothers program and found a job in construction. This helped him build his strength and confidence. At the end of the first semester, Scott received strong grades and went to the vice principal to plead his case for leaving early to join the Army. “He gave me my diploma, which he had in his locker behind his desk.”
On July 28, 1998, Scott reported to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Basic training “was more intense than anything I dealt with up to that point.” When Scott was growing up, quitting was always an option when things became too difficult. There was no one there to give him confidence and tell him to persevere. The military’s approach was to build confidence, resilience and a never-quit mindset. “The Army absolutely forces you to do shit that you didn’t expect you were gonna do. But they gave you all the tools to be successful, which for me was the confidence I didn’t have at a younger age.” He explained, “They break everything down to the simplest possible” task or procedure. The military also started soldiers at a degree of difficulty that everyone could handle, then increased the difficulty and added stress over time. Scott recalled road marches with a rucksack on his back. “They start you at real small intervals, and they build you to...a 12-mile march at the end of basic training.”
After eight weeks of basic training, three weeks of Advanced Individual Training for infantry, and Airborne School, where Scott completed five successful static-line jumps, he volunteered to try out for the Ranger Regiment and attended the Ranger Indoctrination Program. “The Ranger cadre showed up in a white box truck and said, ‘You’ve got 30 seconds to get all your green duffels on the truck.’” Scott and the others scrambled to comply with the orders. They were now part of the pipeline for the Ranger Regiment.
“So, the fun started right there. It got real intense, like more intense than anything I experienced in my life up to that point.” Scott entered holdover status for Christmas leave. When he returned, the candidates went through the Ranger Indoctrination Program. “They showed us everything we were going to be doing when we got back from Christmas break.” By January 1999, Scott had made it into the Ranger Regiment and was assigned to 1st Battalion in Savannah, Georgia. “There were roughly 130 who started, with 36 who graduated.”
Scott was selected to attend the prestigious Ranger School. Shortly after he arrived, the cadre discovered that Scott’s three-year Army contract would expire in July 2001. To enter Ranger School, a candidate had to have at least one year of service remaining after completing the 17-week program. Scott was offered an extension to his contract, but “my whole life changed” when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant. Although he desperately wanted to attend Ranger School, Scott chose to raise a family rather than continue that chapter of military life. On July 27, 2001, Scott was released from active duty.
His first daughter was born on June 6, 2001. On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. “I thought I made a big mistake. All of my friends were getting ready to deploy and do all of those things that we all trained to do, and I felt like I made a mistake.” Although he was disappointed, he did not feel regret. He built a family with three daughters, joined a local National Guard unit, found a job in construction and settled into suburban American life.
During his National Guard training, Scott learned there were full-time soldiers in the National Guard. In 2003, Scott had the opportunity to become a full-time recruiter for the National Guard, and he jumped at it. He attended the Primary Leadership Development Course and later took classes that helped him learn the sales aspects of military recruiting. Scott really enjoyed being a recruiter and was consistently a top performer. “I had a lot of fun doing it. I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy it until I did it.” During his five years as a recruiter, Scott was consistently among the top 10 percent of recruiters in the state. He recalled enlisting more than 100 recruits during his career. He started taking college courses, and he, his wife Becky and their three daughters were living a nice life.
But Scott was restless. He wanted to deploy like his friends and do what he had been trained to do. As much as he enjoyed recruiting, he couldn’t see himself remaining a recruiter for the next 20 years. He told his wife he wanted to deploy, and she was firmly against it. This created friction in their marriage that ultimately led to divorce.
After his divorce, Scott found himself living in a friend’s basement and still desperately hoping to deploy. Through conversations with the National Guard Bureau, he learned that the Illinois Army National Guard’s 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team was going to deploy to Afghanistan in September 2008 and had openings. Scott and three friends submitted paperwork to transfer to the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team. After some internal wrangling, the transfer was granted on August 30. Scott and his friends headed to Fort Riley, Kansas, to begin the 90-day workup for the deployment.
When it came time to deploy, the four friends were sent to different areas of Afghanistan. Scott found himself in Fayzabad, in the northeastern corner of the country. He recalled the area as very mountainous, with waterfalls coming off the mountains. “It was like the most beautiful place on earth.” Scott was in-country for nine months and, unlike his friends who encountered the enemy, does not recall being shot at. He was part of an 18-person Embedded Training Team. “It was a combat advisor role to help augment the Special Forces mission.” This included teaching local Afghans farming techniques. Scott was part of a logistics support team attached to a German Special Forces team. Scott was one of four Americans at an outpost with more than 400 Germans. The Germans operated as combat advisors, and the Americans provided support, primarily in the form of financial assistance. “It was a really cool experience to be immersed in their culture.”
At the end of his military deployment, Scott returned home and found that the local National Guard unit was unwilling to give him a recruiting position. He spent the next 10 months unemployed until he had the opportunity to return to Afghanistan as a civilian contractor. “I jumped at the opportunity.” Scott took his passport, packed some clothes and headed to FOB Wilson as an employee of Tundra Strategies. Scott’s primary responsibility was serving as a project manager for forward operating base security. “We would take Afghan farmers and train them on personal security, mobile security and FOB security. Then we would oversee them while they were doing it.” Scott was able to apply the skills he had learned in the military, including his recruiting skills, to execute his civilian role.
Scott spent a total of 36 months in-country as a civilian contractor, with breaks to return to the United States for vacation. His first assignment was at FOB Wilson, located along Highway 1 in Zhari District, Kandahar Province. The surrounding region was known as a birthplace of the Taliban. Scott recalled coming under rocket attack every day and the guard towers consistently taking harassing fire. It was 2010, and Scott recalled that the politics of the war at that time made it difficult to return fire or take prisoners. On one occasion, the FOB was taking rocket fire from the Taliban. The Americans were able to locate and identify the insurgent responsible for the attacks.
Scott led a patrol that found one of the shooters. “I grabbed him, brought him back to the base and handed him over to the Army, and because of the politics, the Army couldn’t really do anything about it.” The shooter was released.
Scott also spent time at COP Maiwand, approximately an hour west of FOB Wilson but still in Kandahar Province. “Maiwand was in the mountains. It was a little chillier. There was a little valley, mountaintops and a little pomegranate orchard” nearby. There were small combat outposts on two mountaintops separated by the valley. It was Scott’s job to check the security at each outpost. Scott would hike down one mountain, get a ride across the valley and then hike up the other mountain. Scott recalled that the outposts were five kilometers from the valley floor. By the end of his tour, Scott had lost 20 pounds from all the hiking.
Scott was hoping to “get to do really cool things,” but in the end, he found the experience more terrifying than cool. “I was very fortunate. A rocket hit an Alaska Barrier that was right up against my container. If the barrier wasn’t there, it would have been in my freakin’ bed. It was a lot of close calls like that.” Scott recalled coming under enemy fire from a .50-caliber DShK machine gun. “It sounded like Volkswagens whizzing by your head.”
Scott’s last civilian tour in Afghanistan took him to FOB Apache in Qalat, roughly 85 miles northeast of Kandahar. Once he arrived, he learned there had been a green-on-blue shooting involving coalition troops shot by an Afghan national. His job was to dismiss all of the Afghan security personnel and hire and train replacements. Soon, he was wondering why he had left his children. Scott realized that the command sergeant major at the FOB, as well as the battalion commander, were men under whom he had served in the Ranger Regiment. This was a serious situation, and they were willing to provide only a very short timeframe for Scott to reorganize the security force.
Scott jumped into the assignment. “It was a challenge for me and probably the pinnacle of my career.” Scott’s leadership abilities were tested daily as he rebuilt the group. Some replacements were trained Afghan nationals transferred from other bases, while others were new recruits “straight off the farms in the northern part of the country.” Scott recalled that the population in northern Afghanistan, unlike that of the Taliban-centric southern provinces, was not composed primarily of radicalized insurgents who hated Americans. “I had to train these guys really fast in a high-stress environment - lots of tension.” Scott developed a seven-day training program followed by continuing training. He kept spreadsheets with the names of the Afghan guards and the training each had completed. After the seven-day program, the recruits received weapons and escalation-of-force training. These security forces were responsible for protecting the interior of the base, patrolling its perimeter, detecting threats and maintaining an adequate buffer around the FOB.
Scott recalls that most of the Afghans he encountered were innocent, uneducated people trying to earn a living each day and provide for and protect their families. “My experience with these people who were Muslims was a good experience, except for the ones who were trying to blow us up. The guys I worked with, except for a few bad apples, were all decent people.” Of course, there were cultural differences. “Their culture is different than ours...weird stuff. Their cultural differences were skewed because of their living situations. Most lived in mud huts without running water or electricity. They probably had a lot more in common with folks in the USA who live in bad conditions. Their religion says one thing, but in practice, it’s completely different.” Poor personal hygiene was a problem because of the lack of running water, soap, shampoo and dental-care products.
“That was a rough three months.”
Scott returned to the United States, worked as a construction manager and remained active in the National Guard. It was 2015, Scott was divorced, and he had given up on dating. Through the National Guard, he met Sergeant Noyes, who was curious about why he wasn’t dating. The sergeant told Scott he might know someone interested in dating him. Scott didn’t give it a second thought until one day, when he received a call from a friend of Sergeant Noyes offering to introduce him to a woman he knew. Scott agreed and went to meet Lisa Addorisio, a graduate of Boston College and an ICU nurse.
“I met her...and I thought she was beautiful. She seemed like a great person, and the more I got to know her, the more it worked out.” In 2019, the couple tied the knot.
In 2014, Scott received a call from the Boston Fire Department offering him an opportunity to become a firefighter. Scott had spent 11 years trying to find his way into the department. He completed and passed the required training. The fire department schedule provided Scott with the flexibility to consider other opportunities, and he decided to start his own construction business.
Scott began building the business, but in 2024, he suffered a heart attack. This set his business back and meant he would no longer be able to safely run into burning buildings. Scott adapted and now works in the Fire Prevention Unit within the Boston Fire Department. This group visits construction sites to perform spot checks and ensure site operators follow all safety requirements.
In December 2024, Scott retired from the Army National Guard after 24 years of creditable military service.
Today, Scott is enjoying his family and rebuilding his business. He and Lisa have three children, with a fourth on the way.
Knowing what Scott knows now, would he still join the Army? His answer was an unequivocal yes. “The military was a catalyst.” It gave Scott the confidence and discipline he lacked while growing up. Those characteristics are essential to a long and successful life. Scott feels that he has learned something from every life experience and that those experiences have made him the man, husband, father, firefighter and business owner he is today. “I went to the school of hard knocks. It’s a funny joke, but there’s some truth to it.” He added, “I’m just happy to be here, and I’m happy that I have the opportunities that I have.”
Scott, the people of the United States thank you for the sacrifices you made and the hardships you endured in Afghanistan. You have maintained a positive attitude and an upbeat outlook on life. Like Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh said in the movie Bull Durham, “I’m just happy to be here and hope I can help the ball club. I just want to give it my best shot, and good Lord willing, things’ll work out.”
Scott Rothwell was born on November 15, 1979, at Goddard Hospital in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Scott’s parents were only 19 years old when they married, and Scott was born shortly thereafter. He recalled that his parents lacked the maturity and judgment to raise children, creating a tumultuous childhood for Scott and his two younger sisters. There were some good times and some bad times. “The younger years were pretty normal for us.”
The family lived in Brockton, Massachusetts, and Scott attended the local junior high school. A lack of parental attention meant Scott would arrive at school in dirty clothes that sometimes carried unpleasant odors, which did not go unnoticed by the other students. “I didn’t really have a lot of friends and kinda got picked on a lot.”
The family moved to Stoughton, where Scott finished junior high school. He went on to attend Stoughton High School, but Scott didn’t enjoy school. It is unclear whether he had any learning disabilities, but what was clear was that he wasn’t getting the support and encouragement from his parents that might have motivated him to do his homework and work hard to improve. “I struggled really bad with school.” Scott became one of those kids who slipped through the cracks and found his way into the wrong crowd. He started getting into trouble, and his mother told him to straighten himself out or get out of the house. So Scott left.
“I was 15 and moved out...and moved in with my uncle, who was only six years older than me. He lived in Louisville, Kentucky.” His mother’s youngest brother was only 21 years old, was a heavy drinker, and wasn’t able to be the father figure Scott desperately needed to help him get back on track. Scott attended high school in Louisville until his uncle and his wife decided to move to South Carolina. There, Scott attended his third high school. Although his uncle told him he had to earn his high school diploma, Scott was on his own to figure out how to do that. When his uncle moved back to Louisville, Scott decided he needed to leave that environment and returned to Stoughton.
By that time, his parents had separated, and his mother had moved into a small two-bedroom apartment with his two sisters. There was no bedroom for Scott, so he set up a bed in his mother’s large closet. Back at Stoughton High School, Scott tried to focus on school, but the die had been cast, and he could not get himself on track. Scott was at lunch in the school cafeteria one day when an Army recruiter approached him. He asked Scott what he wanted to do with his life, and Scott told him, “I wanna travel the world, and I wanna own my own business.” The recruiter told him he had just the thing for him and signed him to a contract to become a cook.
When it came time to graduate, the vice principal told Scott he didn’t have enough credits to graduate and would be held back so he could earn enough credits to receive his diploma. Scott told him that would be a problem because he had signed a contract to enlist in the Army after high school. The vice principal told Scott he would have to figure it out.
Scott met with his recruiter, explained his predicament, and received help renegotiating his contract. Scott had never wanted to be a cook. He wanted to be a Ranger. As luck would have it, the recruiter told him he had a slot for an airborne infantryman and that Scott could volunteer for the Ranger Regiment when he completed his training. It was not exactly what he was hoping for, but it was better than becoming a cook.
When the school year began, Scott applied himself to his schoolwork, knowing he was working toward a goal. He became involved with weightlifting through a Big Brothers program and found a job in construction. This helped him build his strength and confidence. At the end of the first semester, Scott received strong grades and went to the vice principal to plead his case for leaving early to join the Army. “He gave me my diploma, which he had in his locker behind his desk.”
On July 28, 1998, Scott reported to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Basic training “was more intense than anything I dealt with up to that point.” When Scott was growing up, quitting was always an option when things became too difficult. There was no one there to give him confidence and tell him to persevere. The military’s approach was to build confidence, resilience and a never-quit mindset. “The Army absolutely forces you to do shit that you didn’t expect you were gonna do. But they gave you all the tools to be successful, which for me was the confidence I didn’t have at a younger age.” He explained, “They break everything down to the simplest possible” task or procedure. The military also started soldiers at a degree of difficulty that everyone could handle, then increased the difficulty and added stress over time. Scott recalled road marches with a rucksack on his back. “They start you at real small intervals, and they build you to...a 12-mile march at the end of basic training.”
After eight weeks of basic training, three weeks of Advanced Individual Training for infantry, and Airborne School, where Scott completed five successful static-line jumps, he volunteered to try out for the Ranger Regiment and attended the Ranger Indoctrination Program. “The Ranger cadre showed up in a white box truck and said, ‘You’ve got 30 seconds to get all your green duffels on the truck.’” Scott and the others scrambled to comply with the orders. They were now part of the pipeline for the Ranger Regiment.
“So, the fun started right there. It got real intense, like more intense than anything I experienced in my life up to that point.” Scott entered holdover status for Christmas leave. When he returned, the candidates went through the Ranger Indoctrination Program. “They showed us everything we were going to be doing when we got back from Christmas break.” By January 1999, Scott had made it into the Ranger Regiment and was assigned to 1st Battalion in Savannah, Georgia. “There were roughly 130 who started, with 36 who graduated.”
Scott was selected to attend the prestigious Ranger School. Shortly after he arrived, the cadre discovered that Scott’s three-year Army contract would expire in July 2001. To enter Ranger School, a candidate had to have at least one year of service remaining after completing the 17-week program. Scott was offered an extension to his contract, but “my whole life changed” when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant. Although he desperately wanted to attend Ranger School, Scott chose to raise a family rather than continue that chapter of military life. On July 27, 2001, Scott was released from active duty.
His first daughter was born on June 6, 2001. On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. “I thought I made a big mistake. All of my friends were getting ready to deploy and do all of those things that we all trained to do, and I felt like I made a mistake.” Although he was disappointed, he did not feel regret. He built a family with three daughters, joined a local National Guard unit, found a job in construction and settled into suburban American life.
During his National Guard training, Scott learned there were full-time soldiers in the National Guard. In 2003, Scott had the opportunity to become a full-time recruiter for the National Guard, and he jumped at it. He attended the Primary Leadership Development Course and later took classes that helped him learn the sales aspects of military recruiting. Scott really enjoyed being a recruiter and was consistently a top performer. “I had a lot of fun doing it. I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy it until I did it.” During his five years as a recruiter, Scott was consistently among the top 10 percent of recruiters in the state. He recalled enlisting more than 100 recruits during his career. He started taking college courses, and he, his wife Becky and their three daughters were living a nice life.
But Scott was restless. He wanted to deploy like his friends and do what he had been trained to do. As much as he enjoyed recruiting, he couldn’t see himself remaining a recruiter for the next 20 years. He told his wife he wanted to deploy, and she was firmly against it. This created friction in their marriage that ultimately led to divorce.
After his divorce, Scott found himself living in a friend’s basement and still desperately hoping to deploy. Through conversations with the National Guard Bureau, he learned that the Illinois Army National Guard’s 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team was going to deploy to Afghanistan in September 2008 and had openings. Scott and three friends submitted paperwork to transfer to the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team. After some internal wrangling, the transfer was granted on August 30. Scott and his friends headed to Fort Riley, Kansas, to begin the 90-day workup for the deployment.
When it came time to deploy, the four friends were sent to different areas of Afghanistan. Scott found himself in Fayzabad, in the northeastern corner of the country. He recalled the area as very mountainous, with waterfalls coming off the mountains. “It was like the most beautiful place on earth.” Scott was in-country for nine months and, unlike his friends who encountered the enemy, does not recall being shot at. He was part of an 18-person Embedded Training Team. “It was a combat advisor role to help augment the Special Forces mission.” This included teaching local Afghans farming techniques. Scott was part of a logistics support team attached to a German Special Forces team. Scott was one of four Americans at an outpost with more than 400 Germans. The Germans operated as combat advisors, and the Americans provided support, primarily in the form of financial assistance. “It was a really cool experience to be immersed in their culture.”
At the end of his military deployment, Scott returned home and found that the local National Guard unit was unwilling to give him a recruiting position. He spent the next 10 months unemployed until he had the opportunity to return to Afghanistan as a civilian contractor. “I jumped at the opportunity.” Scott took his passport, packed some clothes and headed to FOB Wilson as an employee of Tundra Strategies. Scott’s primary responsibility was serving as a project manager for forward operating base security. “We would take Afghan farmers and train them on personal security, mobile security and FOB security. Then we would oversee them while they were doing it.” Scott was able to apply the skills he had learned in the military, including his recruiting skills, to execute his civilian role.
Scott spent a total of 36 months in-country as a civilian contractor, with breaks to return to the United States for vacation. His first assignment was at FOB Wilson, located along Highway 1 in Zhari District, Kandahar Province. The surrounding region was known as a birthplace of the Taliban. Scott recalled coming under rocket attack every day and the guard towers consistently taking harassing fire. It was 2010, and Scott recalled that the politics of the war at that time made it difficult to return fire or take prisoners. On one occasion, the FOB was taking rocket fire from the Taliban. The Americans were able to locate and identify the insurgent responsible for the attacks.
Scott led a patrol that found one of the shooters. “I grabbed him, brought him back to the base and handed him over to the Army, and because of the politics, the Army couldn’t really do anything about it.” The shooter was released.
Scott also spent time at COP Maiwand, approximately an hour west of FOB Wilson but still in Kandahar Province. “Maiwand was in the mountains. It was a little chillier. There was a little valley, mountaintops and a little pomegranate orchard” nearby. There were small combat outposts on two mountaintops separated by the valley. It was Scott’s job to check the security at each outpost. Scott would hike down one mountain, get a ride across the valley and then hike up the other mountain. Scott recalled that the outposts were five kilometers from the valley floor. By the end of his tour, Scott had lost 20 pounds from all the hiking.
Scott was hoping to “get to do really cool things,” but in the end, he found the experience more terrifying than cool. “I was very fortunate. A rocket hit an Alaska Barrier that was right up against my container. If the barrier wasn’t there, it would have been in my freakin’ bed. It was a lot of close calls like that.” Scott recalled coming under enemy fire from a .50-caliber DShK machine gun. “It sounded like Volkswagens whizzing by your head.”
Scott’s last civilian tour in Afghanistan took him to FOB Apache in Qalat, roughly 85 miles northeast of Kandahar. Once he arrived, he learned there had been a green-on-blue shooting involving coalition troops shot by an Afghan national. His job was to dismiss all of the Afghan security personnel and hire and train replacements. Soon, he was wondering why he had left his children. Scott realized that the command sergeant major at the FOB, as well as the battalion commander, were men under whom he had served in the Ranger Regiment. This was a serious situation, and they were willing to provide only a very short timeframe for Scott to reorganize the security force.
Scott jumped into the assignment. “It was a challenge for me and probably the pinnacle of my career.” Scott’s leadership abilities were tested daily as he rebuilt the group. Some replacements were trained Afghan nationals transferred from other bases, while others were new recruits “straight off the farms in the northern part of the country.” Scott recalled that the population in northern Afghanistan, unlike that of the Taliban-centric southern provinces, was not composed primarily of radicalized insurgents who hated Americans. “I had to train these guys really fast in a high-stress environment - lots of tension.” Scott developed a seven-day training program followed by continuing training. He kept spreadsheets with the names of the Afghan guards and the training each had completed. After the seven-day program, the recruits received weapons and escalation-of-force training. These security forces were responsible for protecting the interior of the base, patrolling its perimeter, detecting threats and maintaining an adequate buffer around the FOB.
Scott recalls that most of the Afghans he encountered were innocent, uneducated people trying to earn a living each day and provide for and protect their families. “My experience with these people who were Muslims was a good experience, except for the ones who were trying to blow us up. The guys I worked with, except for a few bad apples, were all decent people.” Of course, there were cultural differences. “Their culture is different than ours...weird stuff. Their cultural differences were skewed because of their living situations. Most lived in mud huts without running water or electricity. They probably had a lot more in common with folks in the USA who live in bad conditions. Their religion says one thing, but in practice, it’s completely different.” Poor personal hygiene was a problem because of the lack of running water, soap, shampoo and dental-care products.
“That was a rough three months.”
Scott returned to the United States, worked as a construction manager and remained active in the National Guard. It was 2015, Scott was divorced, and he had given up on dating. Through the National Guard, he met Sergeant Noyes, who was curious about why he wasn’t dating. The sergeant told Scott he might know someone interested in dating him. Scott didn’t give it a second thought until one day, when he received a call from a friend of Sergeant Noyes offering to introduce him to a woman he knew. Scott agreed and went to meet Lisa Addorisio, a graduate of Boston College and an ICU nurse.
“I met her...and I thought she was beautiful. She seemed like a great person, and the more I got to know her, the more it worked out.” In 2019, the couple tied the knot.
In 2014, Scott received a call from the Boston Fire Department offering him an opportunity to become a firefighter. Scott had spent 11 years trying to find his way into the department. He completed and passed the required training. The fire department schedule provided Scott with the flexibility to consider other opportunities, and he decided to start his own construction business.
Scott began building the business, but in 2024, he suffered a heart attack. This set his business back and meant he would no longer be able to safely run into burning buildings. Scott adapted and now works in the Fire Prevention Unit within the Boston Fire Department. This group visits construction sites to perform spot checks and ensure site operators follow all safety requirements.
In December 2024, Scott retired from the Army National Guard after 24 years of creditable military service.
Today, Scott is enjoying his family and rebuilding his business. He and Lisa have three children, with a fourth on the way.
Knowing what Scott knows now, would he still join the Army? His answer was an unequivocal yes. “The military was a catalyst.” It gave Scott the confidence and discipline he lacked while growing up. Those characteristics are essential to a long and successful life. Scott feels that he has learned something from every life experience and that those experiences have made him the man, husband, father, firefighter and business owner he is today. “I went to the school of hard knocks. It’s a funny joke, but there’s some truth to it.” He added, “I’m just happy to be here, and I’m happy that I have the opportunities that I have.”
Scott, the people of the United States thank you for the sacrifices you made and the hardships you endured in Afghanistan. You have maintained a positive attitude and an upbeat outlook on life. Like Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh said in the movie Bull Durham, “I’m just happy to be here and hope I can help the ball club. I just want to give it my best shot, and good Lord willing, things’ll work out.”