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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Tue Jun 3, 2014, 09:12 AM Jun 2014

Rogue Element

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/26/140526fa_fact_labi



How an anti-government militia grew on a U.S. Army base.

Rogue Element
by Nadya Labi May 26, 2014

n June of 2011, Isaac Aguigui and his wife, Deirdre, learned that they were going to have a boy. Aguigui, then twenty years old and a private in the Army, spoke excitedly with friends about becoming a parent. Deirdre, twenty-three and a sergeant, sent her father a text announcing, “It’s a boy,” repeating the final word eight times to punctuate her glee. They picked out a name, Kalvin James, and when Deirdre adopted an orange tabby they named it Hobbes, evoking the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”

The two had met in 2009, as cadet candidates at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School for West Point, at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Deirdre tutored Aguigui in math; he was gregarious and handsome, with black hair and angular features. “She was elated she’d found the right guy,” her father, Alma Wetzker, said. When Wetzker met Aguigui, he was charmed. “I sensed a kindred spirit who thought a lot like me,” he said. The relationship wasn’t against the school’s rules, but it was contrary to its spirit of discipline: barracks are gender-segregated, and cadets must be single. After Aguigui’s roommate accused him of sleeping with Deirdre in his bed, they quarrelled, and Aguigui was kicked out. Rather than give up on military life, he enlisted in the Army. Deirdre, who had enlisted a few years earlier, dropped out of school to marry him.

Aguigui went to basic training, and then to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, for advanced instruction in military intelligence; Deirdre deployed to Iraq. When she returned, in December of 2010, the couple moved into a two-bedroom apartment on base at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Distance had frayed their relationship, and proximity didn’t seem to help much, either. Still, their prospects had improved by the summer of 2011. Deirdre had been promoted to sergeant, four ranks above her husband. And Kalvin, conceived during a period of reconciliation, seemed to signal happier times. Deirdre turned their second bedroom into a nursery, buying a mahogany crib and a high chair. On July 4th, the couple went to a concert by the Zac Brown Band, a country group, and Deirdre called her husband’s childhood friend Matthew Asimakoupoulos. “She was telling me how good she and Isaac were doing,” he recalled. “They were getting back together. She sounded happy.”

In July, when Deirdre was five months pregnant, she complained on Facebook of terrible heartburn. “I feel like I swallowed a fire ball,” she wrote. A few days later, her parents got a phone call from Aguigui. “He said he went to lie down and Deirdre went to watch TV in the other room,” Wetzker recalled. “When Isaac got up, Deirdre was unresponsive. He tried to wake her up and rushed her to the E.R. They worked on her for about an hour and tried to save the baby, but it didn’t work.” Aguigui told another soldier that doctors believed a blood clot had killed Deirdre; she had suffered an embolism in Iraq. But, in an audio diary that he kept, he made an entry three months later in which he blamed himself. “I’m feeling lonely, sad, confused, angry, frustrated, pissed at the world, pissed at myself,” he said. “I keep thinking about the night she died and I get angry that I didn’t know C.P.R. What kind of fucking soldier doesn’t know C.P.R.?”
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