Veteran, alum to speak at 34th commencement ceremony

Matt Mabe wanted to challenge himself intellectually and chose to attend LSMSA to maximize his full academic potential.

“Leaving my family in New Orleans was a difficult choice for me, but going to LSMSA turns out to be the best decision I ever made,” said Mabe, a member of the Class of 1998.

“My favorite memory of being a student at LSMSA was the moment I found out I had been accepted early admission to West Point, the only college I ever wanted to attend. My mom read the acceptance letter to me over a Prudhomme hallway payphone.”

Arriving at West Point, Mabe discovered that he was more than fully prepared for the math and engineering curriculum thanks to the advanced algebra, calculus and physics courses he took at LSMSA.

“The Louisiana School also prepared me well for success at a college that was well over a thousand miles from home and that demanded long periods of no communication with family,” he said. “My two years in Natchitoches taught me how important friends and support systems really are.”

He graduated from West Point in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers.

In his final year as a cadet, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington ushered in the greatest American war in a generation. Mabe and his classmates spent their final months in college preparing for a challenge that none of them could anticipate.

After four months at the Engineer Basic Course at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, Mabe joined his first unit, a mechanized combat engineer battalion in Bamberg, Germany. Bamberg would be his home for most of the next five years.

In February 2003, Mabe’s battalion deployed to Kuwait, where he was given command of his first platoon. On March 21, in support of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, Mabe led his platoon into Iraq on the first day of the invasion. He spent the next year in Iraq leading patrols, working with local leaders to rebuild civic services and leading a task force to dispose of volatile surface-to-air missiles in and around Baghdad. He returned home to Germany just before Christmas.

For the next two years, Mabe’s battalion continued to train to go back to war. During this time, Mabe was promoted to first lieutenant and then given command of a second platoon. On weekends, he took every opportunity to get to know Germany and to explore Europe. His travels took him to every corner of the continent, and before he left the Army in 2007, Mabe had visited some 40 countries in Europe and beyond.

In October 2005, Mabe’s unit deployed again to Iraq, this time to Ramadi, a dangerous city in Al Anbar province and a focal point of the country’s insurgency. By this point, Mabe was a captain and company executive officer in charge of managing logistics and supply for the battalion. Halfway through the deployment, Mabe was promoted to become the battalion’s adjutant, an Army personnel officer among whose solemn duties was handling casualty affairs. For his service during the deployment, Mabe was awarded the Bronze Star.

By then, Mabe decided he had seen enough. Before his tour was up in October 2006, Mabe applied to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. He had met several journalists during his second Iraq tour and was inspired to pursue work as a writer. He learned of his acceptance to Columbia shortly after getting home to Germany. He decided to use up the rest of his leave to travel to Russia, the Balkans and a host of other regions he had not yet seen.

Mabe left the Army in May 2007 and moved straight to New York City. During that year of grad school, Mabe learned to write on a deadline, to weave together a narrative, and above all, to listen – skills that have benefitted him to this day. While a student at Columbia, Mabe was selected along with two other veterans for a reporting internship at the New York Times.

Upon graduation, Mabe moved to Paris to take another internship at BusinessWeek Magazine. He was there in 2008 when the financial crisis sent shockwaves through the news business; hiring effectively froze. Finding a job was tough. When his internship was up, a friend in Moscow pulled some strings to get Mabe a gig as a copy editor for the Moscow Times, an English-language daily that is popular among expats in Russia.

Mabe moved back to New York in early 2009 to take a reporting job at the Newark Star-Ledger, where he covered crime, courts and the military. The job did not last long. That spring, the Army unexpectedly recalled Mabe to active duty, and by summer he was deployed again, this time with an infantry battalion in Gardez, Afghanistan, the country’s mountainous east. Although his official duty was to counter Taliban propaganda as the battalion’s information operations officer, Mabe also used this third combat tour as an opportunity to write about the experiences of serving. He received the Meritorious Service Medal for his time in Afghanistan and returned home in 2010.

From Afghanistan, Mabe had applied and was accepted to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. That summer Mabe moved to Boston and went back to school. He spent the next two years readjusting to life as a civilian – and a student – again. He relished the return to an academic setting and found a community of fellow military officers at Harvard whose companionship helped him overcome some of the challenges of reintegration. Mabe earned a master’s degree in public policy in 2012 and prepared to take a job as journalist again.

Then the week after he graduated, Mabe met Megan, the woman who would become his wife. The pair fell immediately and deeply in love, but the timing was terrible. Mabe had already accepted a position as a reporter for a prominent military newspaper in Afghanistan, and he was set to leave in a few weeks. He had no choice but to turn the offer down.

He instead remained in Boston, and stayed on at Harvard to write a series of case studies for Harvard Kennedy School and Business School about the multi-billion dollar merger of the military’s two largest hospital systems. They were published in 2014.

During that period, he and Megan got married and traveled the world. In 2015, they welcomed their first daughter, Madeleine, and decided they needed to be closer to family. They moved to Philadelphia, Megan’s hometown, where they bought their first home and have lived ever since. It was from Philadelphia that Mabe got involved in nonprofit work.

He took a job as Director of Operations for the veterans advocacy group Got Your 6 in Washington, D.C. Mabe’s work there focused on improving perceptions of veterans and reducing stigmas around the effects of their service so that they could more successfully reintegrate into society. He used his own background as a veteran and as a writer to build a storytelling program that used accomplished veterans as spokespeople for the campaign. His work at Got Your 6 also allowed him to consult closely with content creators and script writers in Hollywood and New York. He helped filmmakers portray veterans reasonably and accurately on screen. Mabe also collaborated closely with a Tony-award winning Broadway musical and a variety of television shows.

In April 2017, he and Megan welcomed their second daughter, Magnolia, and in August, he left Got Your 6 for TAPS, or the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, where he works today as Director of Operations for a new suicide prevention initiative. For 25 years, TAPS has provided emotional care, grief support, financial assistance and a range of other benefits to military families of the fallen. Mabe’s team is developing a range of trainings, retreats and consultations that leverage survivors’ lived experience and the power of their stories to change the way people view, confront, and talk about suicide, all in an effort to save lives.

Mabe will return to Natchitoches to serve as guest speaker during LSMSA’s 34th commencement ceremony set for 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 19, in Prather Coliseum on the campus of Northwestern State University.