Ashley Joppa-Hagemann arrives at a coffeehouse outside the gates of Joint Base Lewis-McChord carrying a toddler. With red streaks in her dark hair, two piercings below her lip, and an outfit of jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, the 25-year-old looks impossibly young for the role she has recently assumed: widow.
AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
Ashley holds the memorial flyer from the funeral service for her husband Jared.
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Ashley is here for a late-September press conference about the "base on the brink," as the gathered activists call it. Eleven soldiers stationed at JBLM have died in presumed suicides since the beginning of the year—all evidence, they say, that the military, despite its professed desire to stop the stateside carnage that is afflicting its ranks, isn't serious about the problem.
There are veterans on the panel, including one with a moving story to tell about his post-battle mental-health problems. But on this September morning, Ashley's story holds the emotional center of the room.
On June 28, her husband, an Army Ranger named Jared Hagemann, was found lying in the bushes in a JBLM training area, a few feet away from his truck. Jared was dead, with a bullet wound to the head. And while the military hasn't ruled the death a suicide yet—two investigations are still underway—his wife says she is certain that he killed himself. She's also certain about who is to blame.
"The military did not take care of my husband," Ashley tells the assembled crowd, which includes reporters from KOMO-TV, KUOW, and the Los Angeles Times. Commanders "don't listen to the soldiers. They are not there for the soldiers. They are merely there to push these men to war."
As Ashley recounts, her husband said again and again that he was having problems, and couldn't face another deployment. By her reckoning, he had already served a staggering eight tours overseas, and was scheduled for another in August.
Yet, she says, "the military pretty much told him he couldn't leave." They didn't even allow him to get help. "That's just an excuse to get out of work," she says his commanders told him. If he wanted counseling, he'd have to do it on his own time.
"As a widow, it is my goal to make sure another family doesn't have to go through this," she continues before trailing off and starting again with a quiver in her voice. "Every day is a struggle now for me. But now I don't have my husband to help me."
The room goes quiet. One of the veterans on the panel seems to fight back tears. He goes on to cite Jared as a prime example of military neglect, and of its policy of returning traumatized soldiers to the battlefield, not once but repeatedly.
The assembled press, too, are quick to pick up on Jared's symbolic value at a time of spiraling soldier suicide rates, which have more than doubled nationally since 2001. Just this past July, the Army saw 32 suicides, a record.
"Widow: Ranger killed self to avoid another tour," read the Seattle Times headline that followed Jared's death. The story reached the UK via the Daily Mail, which ran it with a quote from Ashley about Jared's ostensible feelings of guilt for what he had done overseas: "There was no way that any God would forgive him."
I followed a similar story line for this paper in my initial reporting, quoting a national veterans'-rights group called March Forward! that said the Army refused to give Jared the help he sought over and over again. March Forward! subsequently started an online petition to demand that Jared's chain of command be held accountable for his death.
But as I continued to research the story over the next few months, I found that the picture that emerged from the coffeehouse press conference and media accounts was incomplete and inconsistent with some important facts. Among them: Jared wasn't stop-lossed or otherwise forced to stay in the Army. He actually re-enlisted twice, most recently in January when he was in Afghanistan—his sixth deployment, not his eighth, according to the Army—and signed up for six more years.
"Jared absolutely loved being an Army Ranger," says his sister Haley, declining to talk in detail until "more loose ends are tied." Jared's childhood friend Miranda Johnson, who talked by phone with the soldier frequently over the past year, agrees. She says he told her that he felt more at "home" with his fellow Rangers overseas than he did in his real home.
Yet that's not the full story either. A review of medical and police records, along with interviews with Ashley and those close to her and Jared, suggests that it's far too simplistic to blame his death entirely on military neglect and pressure. Jared was haunted both by his wartime experience and by the situation he found himself in when he came back, shaped by self-destructive behavior, family strife, and an equally troubled economy that had no ready place for a soldier looking to put combat behind him.
Jared's story is a case study in the many pressures that bear down upon soldiers in wartime. As if the trauma of war weren't enough, there's the necessity of fitting back into your pre-combat life, though you're not the person you were before. It's a situation tens of thousands of troops will soon face as the U.S. pulls out of Iraq by the end of this year.
