Late September 2007. Reminders flow from my lips and my keyboard: “Take time to adjust to our new battle rhythm. Fifteen months is a long time. I can’t hold my breath for fifteen months. Two back-to-schools, two Halloweens, two changes of autumn colors.”
So let us not talk falsely now,
The hour’s getting late.
—BOB DYLAN
THERE IS NOTHING more tedious than being held hostage during a presentation where the presenter reads slides to the audience, verbatim. If I doodle at just the right time on the PowerPoint printouts as they’re read to me from the Proxima screen that takes up the entire rear altar of the chapel, it might look like I am intently taking notes. Instead I work intently to perfect a curlicue, or maybe it’s a pumpkin. Halloween is right around the corner, and my pumpkins need practice. They look an awful lot like apples.
I find the timing of this half-day presentation on the organization called TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) to be poignant and almost laughable in a sick way. The first month of the fifteen-month deployment isn’t even under our belts, and every time I turn around, I’m being reminded to prepare for casualties. Not even my own husband’s death, but any of the men under him, or any of the thirty-five hundred in our brigade. Somehow Jack’s safety is barely on my radar anymore, eclipsed by the well-being of the men under him. As I doodle on my handouts, I can’t help but look around at my five sister battalion commanders’ wives and wonder who will be first. In a way the first KIA will be a sick trophy. Trophy is the wrong word. It becomes just another form of one-upping, comparing our tragic burdens against each other. We spent so much time preparing for this inevitability that it begins to feel like some sort of twisted contest. Who will be first to pull out the casualty SOP manual and put into practice what we’ve spent a year preparing for?
A heart-tugging video begins on the portable movie screen, and I stop doodling. Snapshots of folded flags, grief-stricken widows dressed in black, and children pulled close to their mothers passed on the screen. I will never be prepared for this, and I wish there was a way I could quietly escape. I don’t need this reminder so early in the game. Thus we’ve officially arrived at one of many moments when I zone out and start imagining the most wildly inappropriate things that could happen. Maybe the chaplain could lift his leg and fart with a loud grunt. Maybe Regina Sweeney could spontaneously scream the word fellatio! at the top of her lungs. Anything to not see the women around me quietly passing the box of tissues.
Then I hear it, a name I recognize. Major General Mark Graham and his wife, Carol? No, it can’t be the same family I remember from twenty-five years ago. A clear picture of the young couple from my childhood comes to mind. They lived downstairs in our building in Germany in the early 1980s, when my dad was stationed in Baumholder. I was twelve when Carol let me cut her bangs. She looked like an escapee from a concentration camp for weeks, but she didn’t care. Their son was a toddler and I loved babysitting for him, though I didn’t particularly enjoy babysitting at all. But I loved little Jeffrey. He had skinny, quick little legs and a belly that pooched over the top of his diaper. He was never not smiling or laughing. I played his parents’ Linda Ronstadt record album, and we danced and danced around their apartment. The only time he sat still was when I read to him. Then he sat on my lap, leaned into me as I read, and didn’t move a muscle. I was shocked at how vivid and sharp my memory was of Jeffrey, when neither he nor his family had crossed my mind for years.
I start paying attention and my stomach tightens and churns. Jeffrey had grown into a lieutenant, and as they flash pictures of him on the screen, I still recognize his wide, radiant smile. It covers his whole face, just like when he was a toddler. I feel sick, anticipating the direction this video is beginning to take.
Jeffrey had a younger brother who was a premed ROTC cadet, and the Grahams also had an even younger daughter, Melanie. As I watch the video, I learn that Jeffrey’s brother, who wasn’t yet born when I knew them, committed suicide as a cadet, still a college student. He’d stopped taking an antidepressant because Kevin worried the army system would perceive him as weak and pull his scholarship if they learned of it, and he was correct in his belief. Kevin convinced himself privately that he could “suck it up” and cope without the antidepressant. And then he was gone. Half a year later, Jeffrey was killed by an IED in Iraq. Within seven months, the Grahams were again down to an only child.
For the most part, tuning out the seminars and classes about coping skills comes easily to me. So much of it sounds like the same discourse after sitting through hours and weeks and months of lectures and training.
This moment is singularly different.
I glance down at the pumpkins I’ve doodled just minutes earlier and gather my things to leave the chapel in the middle of the presentation. I’m not sure where I’m going to go, but I feel hit right in the gut. I drive straight home without the stereo blaring my daily soundtrack of death metal. I’m halfway home before I notice I haven’t turned music on.
General Graham is the commander of a division at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, and without thinking it through, I look up his office number online and dial his secretary. I’m not sure what to say. This is not a well-thought-out plan. I’m only sure that I need to reach out to them. I wonder if they will even remember me after so many years. I can’t get the picture of Jeffrey’s wide smile and his little pooch out of my memory. We didn’t even call him Jeffrey then, only used his nickname: Weed. Because he grew like a little weed.
“Umm, hi, this is going to sound unusual, but I am an old friend of the Grahams’. I just heard them mentioned in a TAPS presentation. My name is Angie Hawkins. My husband is an infantry battalion commander in Iraq now at 10th Mountain. But I used to babysit for Jeffrey when he was just learning to walk. My maiden name is McCormick.”
“Please hold, ma’am. I will try to put you through.”
I don’t wait longer than two minutes when General Graham picks up. He remembers me immediately, and I fight the urge to cry at the memory of Jeffrey and the sheer coincidence of finding their family after all these years. I imagine Mark Graham sitting at his big desk and probably looking at photos of his boys on his desk. Gone. Both taken by the war, in their own way. One by combat, and the other in a non-combat-related casualty. The word suicide has a terrible stigma, especially in our warrior culture, and when a death isn’t explained to us, we know. We just know. If anyone could break down the stigma of suicide, it is definitely Carol Graham.
Mark Graham gives me his home number and asks me to call his wife, Carol, says she’ll be thrilled to hear from me. In the moment before I dial her number, I’m struck by what a lasting and shaping impression she left on me without even realizing it until this moment. When Carol answers, we both lapse into tears two sentences into the conversation. I’m not an easy crier, but I remember Carol so fondly and with incredible clarity. Carol was passionate and soulful, a free and kindred spirit who infinitely enthralled me with her brilliance and bravery to color outside the lines in a sea of young officers’ wives who colored only inside them. She was what I wanted to be when I grew up. Back then, she talked to me for hours about thirteen-year-old girl stuff, like the big sister I never had. She didn’t follow all the rules, but she followed the important ones and was smart enough to know the difference, and that taught me not to be afraid to march to the beat of my own drum. Within five minutes of our conversation, I realize she is just as amiable, generous, uninhibited, and emotionally raw as I remember her. We talk for hours that afternoon.
Suicide, KIAs, mental wellness, stress of deployment. My mind reels. I have an SOP manual for all of those things except suicide.
After I hang up, I walk around my house thinking about suicide and how it happens, the circumstances that drive someone to that point. Do warning signals pop up like in an after-school special? Is it a buildup of the downward spiral, or is it sometimes just one moment of desperation? Perhaps it’s closer to each of us than we are willing to acknowledge. Maybe everyone is just one horrible, hopeless day away from being there. Maybe it’s a perfect storm, the combination of that feeling with readily available means. A full prescription of lethal pills or a loaded gun in a drawer. I close my eyes and try to imagine how it happens, the decision to end your own life. Sometimes suicide isn’t a long-thought-out event, but is just a really shitty day with an escape route. Maybe that’s why I never want to lean over the edge of bridges. I am unconsciously worried the inner awful of my day might push me to the edge.
A week later, I will be forced again to contemplate what drives someone to end their own life.
Ben calls me with a “red message” on September 21, 2007. We’re still in our first of fifteen months. I remember the call. He reports in his deeper-than-usual business-like voice, “Hey, red message. Non-combat-related casualty. Brigade surgeon. All notifications are made; family has requested no contact from anyone in the unit.”
“The brigade surgeon? The new one, the new female you and Jack talked about? What happened?” I ask the question as I replay memories of Jack coming home last month and telling me how Petty had belittled her in front of the whole command group.
“She shot herself.” Ben pauses before continuing. “Yes, her. The one Petty treated like shit since she was assigned to the unit in July. She was spinning before she left. Message says non-combat-related casualty, so keep the suicide part close hold. I’m sure there’s an investigation.” Our brigade surgeon, a vivacious female captain and Smith College–educated doctor, loses her beautiful future and her life to what the army calls a non-combat-related casualty within a month of her deployment to Iraq. Captain Roselle Hoffmaster was one of Colonel Petty’s preferred targets of bullying, which the entire unit was well aware of, but helpless to change.
Roselle was a newlywed, had just bought her first house. She contracted into the army as a means of paying her way through medical school. I doubt she ever saw herself presiding for fifteen months as the lead surgeon over a hard-core infantry brigade at the tail end of the Iraq surge. The worst of the worst. I remember Jack telling me that she was struggling with little details like rank structure, and Petty rode her hard. His way of inspiring was to bully and berate. Jack told me he thought she would be okay, that she seemed to be toughening up. That he thought she would rise to the challenge and learn not to let Petty get to her.
In June of that year, our previous brigade surgeon, who was married with two children, approached Petty and professed that he was bisexual and thus nondeployable. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had yet to be repealed, and homosexuality was still a one-way ticket out of a deployment. At the commander’s discretion. Roselle was his eleventh-hour replacement; she’d been in the army a handful of months.
And so Roselle entered a perfect storm with her assignment to our brigade. She was lost and overwhelmed, but new and learning. But by all accounts, she seemed positive and motivated, adjusting to the challenge. Committed to the mission and working on her “war face.” The last thing she probably expected was that her biggest adversary would be her boss, not the typical enemies of war.
Jack told me later about Roselle’s last day. He’d sat in a meeting with her in Iraq. Like many times before, Colonel Petty yelled at her and humiliated her personally. She left the meeting embarrassed and in tears. Within two hours of the meeting, Roselle went into her bunk area and shot herself with a military-issued sidearm. A pistol. She didn’t leave a note. To this day, her parents are still unable to face the idea that their daughter took her own life. They’ve told themselves she was fumbling with her gun and it went off.
Everyone who was there knows it was self-inflicted.
Jack boarded a helicopter immediately after the meeting and flew back to his Forward Operating Base. When his helicopter landed a few hours later, he was met with a communication blackout order. He knew this meant there had been a casualty. His first reaction was that one of his own men had been killed in action. He made his way into his command center and was immediately briefed: “Captain Roselle Hoffmaster, NKIA. No further details.” Noncombat killed in action.
In the many times I’ve thought of Roselle since, I can’t help but close my eyes and put myself in her shoes on that last day. She had more than fourteen months ahead. Not to mention the austere chaos of a war zone, the blistering heat and smell of grit and desert, with the constant sounds created by helicopters and distant explosions. No solace in war. She wasn’t trained yet to tune those things out. That was her backdrop for the remaining fourteen months. And like us on the other side of the ocean, she was braced for the casualties that we knew were coming any day. While we on this side were braced to deal with the emotional carnage of war, she would be the one faced day after day with blown-up bodies. The direct carnage. It wasn’t if, but when. The devastating irony was that Roselle would be the first of those casualties.
Beyond those things, she had to endure this man every day, Petty, her boss. Instead of taking time to mentor her, he took each opportunity to publicly humiliate her in rooms full of our nation’s toughest leaders and warriors. And all she ever wanted to do was be a family practitioner. I’m sure she wondered, How in the hell did I end up here? What am I doing, and how will I make it through? No immediately available support system, no one to turn to. She didn’t have the girlfriends waiting outside with a glass of wine.
Though she’d confided many times to her husband and family about Petty’s bullying, Roselle didn’t want to burden her husband or family with her deepening distress. She probably faced each day thinking to herself, One day at a time. The night before she died, she left her husband an unremarkable, positive-sounding voicemail. She said that things were going fine and asked him to send routing numbers so she could set up an ATM account at the FOB (Forward Operating Base). She told her husband she would talk to him soon.
Sometimes there are escalating warning signals of a possible suicide. Roselle was not one of those cases. Roselle reached the end of a horrible day in a war zone, with over a year of the same, possibly worse days ahead. She lay in her bunk, felt a moment of hopelessness that coincided with a means. Her means was the pistol at her side. And in an instant, she was gone. No note, no good-byes.
Captain Hoffmaster’s death was very hush-hush in our brigade, but we knew what happened. Roselle’s widower stayed, or was kept, far from the wives. Instead of being relieved of command, Petty continued his toxic form of leadership for another fourteen months in Iraq. Jack had been Petty’s second-favorite target, and with Roselle’s death, Jack was promoted to the top spot.
The investigation into Roselle’s death was completed in 2009, and Petty was indirectly implicated in contributing to her suicide, yet continued to serve. According to the whispers in our community, Petty was eventually asked to retire quietly in 2011. I wonder if he thinks about Roselle; I wonder if he imagines phoning her family. Making some kind of peace. He sent her parents a form letter after her death. No one else from the unit reached out to her family in the years since Roselle’s death.
I also think of Roselle’s mother. She’d raised a doctor, what a proud accomplishment for a mother. Her daughter was swept away by the army and not killed in combat, but killed by a toxic system. If the mother hates the army, I can’t say that I blame her. Even if she tells herself that it was an accident, somewhere deep down she must understand to some extent. And she probably can’t bear to face how lost and terrified her daughter must have felt. In her shoes with one of my own children, I might have an identical reaction.
None of these details beyond Ben’s brief red-message email are available to me until much later. In the following weeks, my intuition tells me that something is wrong by the tone of Jack’s emails and the tense sound of his voice in our infrequent and short phone calls. Never do I think his tension is caused by his chain of command. We don’t have a scenario in a binder for how to handle that. We are prepared for mission and casualty stress, not toxic-leadership stress.
I’m busy trying to establish the new normal with the other wives and with my children. It’s easy for me to ignore the tone of Jack’s voice. My calendar is full of meetings, coffees, trainings, welcomes, farewells, mixers. Constant events designed to keep us wives busy and engaged. Plenty to keep us distracted. There isn’t a moment to sit idle and ponder what lies ahead.
The fall leaves turn, and I can’t absorb a painful truth. Even as next year’s leaves turn orange, yellow, and red again, Jack will not yet be home. And Roselle Hoffmaster will never come home.