When Matthew Smith graduated from Herrin High School in 2021, he'd already spent his entire educational career in the Herrin school system. Just months later, he would trade the familiar Midwest landscape for vast oceans, international waters, and eventually, the shores of Hawaii as a member of the United States Coast Guard.

"I took the summer off, and then I enlisted that following September," Smith explains. Like many recent graduates, he wasn't certain which career path to pursue, but the Coast Guard offered a unique opportunity to explore options while serving his country.

Smith's Herrin roots run deep. His father, Mike Smith, is a Herrin alumnus, and his mother, Alicia Smith, serves as the nurse at Herrin Middle School. Both of his brothers, Noah and Luke, also attended Herrin schools, with his younger brother following his footsteps into the Coast Guard.

"I was actually very lucky," Smith reflects on his educational experience. "Middle school was pretty important for me. I fell in love with school and really enjoyed it." He credits several teachers with fostering his enthusiasm for learning, particularly Mr. Baskin and Mr. Hall in middle school, who taught math and science—subjects Smith particularly enjoyed.

His high school years were equally formative. Smith was an active member of the tennis team throughout high school, an experience he values for teaching him discipline and teamwork. "Coach McManaway and Coach Snell were really helpful with that," he says. "Even though I was not the most athletic guy out there, they still supported me and encouraged me to keep playing hard."

Outside of school, the First Church of God in Herrin provided spiritual grounding and community connections. Smith mentions Danielle and Jacob Emling as particularly influential mentors who "helped guide me in not only my faith, but also just how to be an adult."

After enlisting, Smith was initially stationed on a 420-foot Coast Guard cutter based in Hawaii with a crew of about 110 personnel. During his year aboard the vessel, he participated in missions that took him from the equatorial waters of South America to the ice fields of the Arctic Circle.

The work was occasionally dangerous. In the Pacific, his ship intercepted drug smugglers, requiring helicopter support and resulting in a medevac situation. Near Alaska, they navigated treacherous ice fields after receiving inaccurate ice drift reports. Perhaps most tense was an encounter with a joint Russian-Chinese fleet of warships near Alaskan waters.

"We were tasked as the Coast Guard vessel to shadow about seven warships, and it was just us," Smith recalls. "There was a lot of tension in the air at that point because there was not a lot that we could do to actually combat this fleet in an actual combative situation."

After his year at sea, Smith decided to specialize in intelligence work. He attended a three-month training program in Yorktown, Virginia, described as "a classified space, not knowing anything, just trying to do a quick crash course on how to be an intelligence professional."

Today, Smith serves as an Intelligence Specialist, Second Class, working for the Coast Guard in a National Security Agency (NSA) billet in Hawaii. While much of his work remains classified, he performs signals analysis at a restricted site on an annex of Pearl Harbor Naval Base.

Having extended his service contract through 2027, Smith has settled into island life. He lives in a condo with a roommate he met during his time on the cutter, stays active in a local church community, and enjoys surfing in his free time.

Despite the 4,000-mile distance, Smith maintains strong connections to Herrin. He is engaged to his high school sweetheart, whom he met at church in Herrin while she was from nearby Anna. She currently attends Southern Illinois University while he serves in Hawaii.

From classroom lessons to tennis court discipline, Smith's Herrin education prepared him for a career that few might have predicted. His story demonstrates how the foundations built in a small Illinois town can support extraordinary journeys across the world's oceans and into the specialized field of national intelligence.