COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Casualties
Distant War May Have Claimed Md. Soldier
Megan Greenwell, Washington Post
December 29, 2006
James E. Dean's first Christmas as a married man was supposed to be a joyous affair.
The man everyone called Jamie had received a diagnosis of depression,
but things were looking up. He frequently told Muriel, his wife of four
months, that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He
had plans to celebrate his 29th birthday two days before the holiday.
His parents and grandmother, to whom he was extremely close, lived just
a few miles away in the same St. Mary's County town -- perfect for
sharing Christmas dinner and opening presents together.
But everything good in Dean's life had been overshadowed by a letter he
received three weeks earlier. The letter, from U.S. Army headquarters,
instructed him to report to Fort Benning, Ga., on Jan. 14. From there,
he was likely to be sent to Iraq.
Dean had already fought in one war, serving 12 months as a sergeant,
leading a small infantry unit on the front lines in Afghanistan. Army
records show that he was an excellent soldier, and he had a fistful of
awards to prove it: for service in defense of the nation, good conduct
and outstanding marksmanship with rifles and grenades. He was such a
good soldier, in fact, an Army spokesman said, that the military needed
him back just three weeks after his first Christmas with his wife.
He couldn't stomach the thought. His post-traumatic stress disorder,
which was diagnosed shortly after he returned from Afghanistan, became
worse immediately after he received the letter -- and so did his
drinking and his rages, family members said. He would break down in
front of his wife, telling her over and over that nobody knew what it
had been like.
"The next time you see me, it's going to be in a body bag," she said he
told her as he walked out of their house for the last time.
On Christmas night, Dean drove to his childhood home on the farm where
his parents still live. He took up one of his hunting guns and called
his family; he said he was going to kill himself. Fourteen agonizing
hours later, he was dead -- not by his own bullet but by that of a
Maryland state trooper.
Tim Cameron, the St. Mary's County sheriff, said the 17-year veteran of
the state police, who was not identified, had no choice but to shoot
Dean. Dean had fired at three police vehicles and was pointing a gun at
an officer. Once-promising negotiations with the man barricaded inside
the house had stalled, and Dean was making threats to shoot everybody
in sight. Besides, they couldn't take any chances with a soldier who
had won a medal for shooting Afghan insurgents.
"I am satisfied that throughout the night and the next day personnel
did their job as policy, procedure and law dictates," Cameron said.
Dean's family disagrees. If the officers' priority was to get Dean out
safely, the family wanted to know, why were the people he trusted not
allowed to talk to him? Why was his cellphone service cut off when he
was trying to call his grandmother' s house? Why were they pushing him
closer to the edge by pumping noxious gas into the house and breaking
the windows?
"We told them, 'We're his family; we know how to calm him down,' " said
Dean's grandmother, Mary, who for her safety was removed from her house
adjacent to the one where her grandson held dozens of officers at bay.
"I'm telling them if he just hears my voice he'll come down from it,
and they're telling me to keep quiet or they'll lock me up for
obstruction of justice."
Cameron said the officers couldn't establish a line of communication
long enough to consider having anybody talk to Dean, which is why they
resorted to gas to get him to leave the house. When the young man
opened the door with his gun raised, Cameron said, the trooper believed
his colleague's life to be in imminent danger -- giving him the cue he
needed to shoot to kill.
The sheriff's office and state police are both conducting
investigations of what happened that night, as is standard procedure
when an officer kills someone. Muriel Dean said she is speaking to a
lawyer about the possibility of filing a formal complaint.
"It's just all protocol to them," she said. "This isn't protocol to us; it's a person."
The one thing Dean's family and the police agree upon is that his death
is a tragic illustration of the effect that the war has had on some of
the people who fight it.
As a young man, Dean fished, hunted and played baseball and football.
He was always quiet and polite, rarely upset and never in trouble. He
had volunteered for the Army in 2001, had been honorably discharged
from active duty after his service in Afghanistan and was serving the
final five years of his commitment as part of the reserve.
Tommy Bowes, who owns TN Bowes Heating and Air Conditioning, where Dean
worked as an installer and service mechanic, said: "Every job we put
him on we got rave reviews. Nobody can say a bad thing about him."
Yet Dean's time in Afghanistan changed him profoundly, his family and
friends say -- dimming his love for life in general, leaving him
dependent on antidepressant medication, therapy and alcohol. His
condition worsened after he stopped seeing his psychologist, his wife
said, but her calls to the VA Medical Center begging doctors to contact
her husband went unreturned. She asked for him to be put on disability
leave because of his post-traumatic stress disorder, but that only led
to more papers to be filled out.
Then Dean received his deployment letter, and his depression began to
spiral out of control. He was drinking all the time and flying into
rages, Muriel Dean said. He told her he felt that he was going crazy
but refused to return to the VA center. His love for her, however,
remained constant. He still called her his "tater tot," she said, and
still sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" to her over the phone.
And then, just 17 months after she introduced herself to that handsome man in a bar in St. Mary's County, he was gone forever.
"Our lives had just begun," she said. "He just couldn't go back to that war."
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