Carolyn Sue Smith

Carolyn Sue Smith, 69, of Raleigh, North Carolina, passed peacefully at home on Sunday, 14 June 2026, surrounded by her family, after a years-long fight with cancer that she met the way she met everything — head on, and on her own terms.

Carolyn was a soldier, mother, wife, leader, and role model to everyone who knew her, but the thread that ran through all of it was simpler than any title. She believed you should be allowed to do something if you can do it. She never asked for special treatment, only for an even break — a fair chance to offer her skills to the Nation and to the people around her — without being second-guessed because of her gender or her specialty. A child of the seventies and a product of the women’s rights movement of the sixties, she asked for nothing she had not earned, and earned everything she asked for.

That conviction was forged early. Born in Alton, Illinois, on 13 January 1958 to John and Cathy Smith, Carolyn grew up in Oregon and Arizona — curious about everything, exploring the world as a child who wanted to understand how it worked. When her mother and father could not, she stepped in to care for her three younger siblings, Lynn, John, and David. She was the stand-in: getting her brothers and sister off to school each morning and then heading to her own classes, carrying a sense of attachment and responsibility well beyond her years. Her cause, even then, was equal rights for all. No one owed her anything but a chance — and that was all she ever asked.

Carolyn was repeatedly chosen for hard, history-making assignments: the first woman to command an Infantry Brigade Headquarters, the Department’s lead briefer on Soviet Military Power, and the officer who led the effort to target war criminals in Bosnia. She was selected for each by forward-thinking leaders who looked for the best athlete, not the best man, for the job. And every time, she proved them right — outworking everyone in the room and showing her mettle under enormous pressure.

She attended Westwood High School and earned her commission through ROTC at Arizona State University, entering the Regular Army in 1980 as a military intelligence officer. After her officer basic course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, she reported to Fort Carson, Colorado, where she served in the Military Intelligence Battalion and the 2nd Brigade Headquarters and became the first woman officer to command an Infantry Brigade Headquarters. At the Pentagon, she served as Executive Officer to the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and as the primary briefer for President Reagan’s Soviet Military Power briefing, while earning a Master’s degree in International Relations from Georgetown University. She became a Foreign Area Officer for Eastern Europe, studied Serbian and Croatian, and again broke new ground as the first woman FAO assigned to Yugoslavia. Deployed repeatedly to the former Yugoslavia — Bosnia and Kosovo — she worked in several U.S. Embassies and ultimately led targeting operations for Persons Indicted for War Crimes under SFOR.

After Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she served as the 1st Infantry Division’s lead intelligence planner at Fort Riley and then as Operations Officer for the 101st Military Intelligence Battalion. She completed the Joint Services Staff College, earned her Joint Officer Qualification, and served in the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Washington, D.C., completing multiple short tours in Ukraine and Russia supervising the dismantling of former Soviet nuclear weapons. She commanded the Combined Arms Training School in Grafenwoehr and Vilseck, Germany, and closed her career at Fort Leavenworth as Deputy Director of the IDIV Task Force, which designed the operational and fielding concept for the Army’s Stryker Brigades and Battalions. Carolyn retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in September 2001, decorated with numerous awards over twenty-one years on active duty.

In her civilian career, Carolyn brought the same drive to the corporate world, serving as a product lead in General Electric’s insurance arm; as program manager and Director of Global Operations, Construction and Program Management at Nielsen Media; Senior Director of Global Real Estate at Change Healthcare; Senior Director at Sodexo; and finally as Vice President of Operations for the electric-charging company Oodles Energy.

For all she accomplished in uniform and out of it, Carolyn measured her life by the people in it. She was a selfless spouse and mother. Her son, JJ — John Joseph — was born just six months before she and her husband, Joe, transferred to Germany; she deployed to Bosnia for six months before JJ’s first birthday, and Joe left for Kosovo almost the moment she returned. It was during these years that she was first diagnosed with cancer, and she fought it off — never stopping, leading her Soldiers and raising her son at the same time. She taught JJ to shoot a basketball, got him into the water and taught him to swim, and kissed him goodnight every single night.

As a wife she was caring, understanding, and guiding — passionate, steady, and always there for Joe. She was the practical one, the one who held everything together. As JJ once put it to his father, “Dad, Mom organizes us!”

And as a person, Carolyn would stop to help anyone. One afternoon, driving in downtown Tampa, she watched a man accept food handed to him from the car ahead of her and immediately pass it to another man who had nothing. She pulled over and asked him — he went by “Big Mike” — why he had given his food away. “He needed it more than I do,” Big Mike answered. From that day on, whenever Carolyn saw Big Mike she stopped to drop off food or share a few dollars, because, she said, Big Mike was the kind of person we should all try to be.

Throughout her life, Carolyn mentored young women and men at every opportunity, spoke kindly of others, and told the truth even when it was hard. She never backed down from a challenge and never stopped putting others first. She fought to the very end and cared for those around her until her last breath — striving, as she always had, to leave the world better than she found it.

Carolyn is survived by her spouse of more than thirty years, William J. A. “Joe” Miller, COL, U.S. Army (Retired); her son, John Joseph; her sister, Lynn, of Tappahannock, Virginia; her brothers, John of Wichita, Kansas, and David of Martinsville, Indiana; and many nieces and nephews who adored her. She also leaves behind a lifetime of friends, colleagues, and fellow Soldiers across the country and around the world who respected, admired, and loved her, and whose lives were made better for having known her.

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