Bulletin E-Edition:
Army Cpl. Jessica Ann Ellis and her father, Steve
Submitted photo
‘She gave the largest sacrifice’
By Jayson Jacoby / WesCom News Service
Published: May 16. 2008 4:00AM PSTBAKER CITY — Steve Ellis remembers a little girl who had curly hair, a sunny disposition and a smile — always that smile.
She was his little girl. His Jessica.
Jessica Ellis, who attended college in Bend for two years and was killed Sunday in Iraq.
He used to hold her steady as she stepped into a wobbly canoe, and they would float together down the placid South Fork of the Shenandoah River.
This was when Steve worked in Washington, D.C., and the whole family would, as he puts it, “escape” on the weekends — Steve and his wife, Linda, and Jessica and her brother Cameron, three years older, and her sister Mandy, two years younger.
They would fish for smallmouth bass, and at night they would paddle to shore and drag the canoe out of the water, and roast marshmallows over a small, bright campfire.
“Jessica loved that,” Steve says.
When he worked in Twin Falls, Idaho, he would sometimes take her to a frozen lake, and they would cut a hole in the ice and hook a few trout.
She loved those days, too.
One summer, Steve was sent to work on a wildfire at Glacier National Park in Montana, and while he was walking through the fire camp, he saw from a distance a face he thought he recognized, and when he got closer, he glimpsed that curly hair, that hair which no one could tame, and he knew it was his Jessica.
“She was all dirty and grungy,” Steve says.
But then, of course, she smiled and she was beautiful, and her dad just relished this happy coincidence that brought them together, the fire boss and his smoke-eating daughter, hundreds of miles from their home in Lakeview.
“We had some quality time together that day,” he says.
A dangerous job
A few years later, Jessica was an Army medic in Baghdad.
She would call her parents, who had moved to a place near Baker City, and always she would ask about the animals, how were the dogs and the cats doing, how were the horses getting along, the horses the family had owned since they lived in Virginia.
“I think that was her umbilical cord to home,” Steve says. “I think it brought her peace knowing everything was OK here.”
Jessica’s parents knew that where their daughter was, everything was most certainly not OK.
Baghdad’s a dangerous place, of course. But Jessica’s job, a medic working with combat engineers from the 101st Airborne Division, is a particularly perilous one.
The engineers, Steve says, search for and defuse the roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of American soldiers since the Iraq war started in March 2003.
“Her job, she told us once, was to stop their bleeding,” Steve says on Wednesday morning. “I just wonder how many of her fellow soldiers she helped, or saved.
“She loved her buddies. She told us that.”
After Steve says this, he gets up from his chair, and he walks across the office to his desk, here on the top floor of the David J. Wheeler Federal Building in Baker City.
He isn’t working, of course. He simply chose this place for an interview.
Steve is supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, which has its headquarters in this building. You can see the Elkhorns from up here, and the Wallowas, and a goodly chunk of the 2.3 million acres of public land for which Steve is responsible.
He is right now looking for something quite smaller than that. He finds it and brings it back to the table, setting it next to his mug of tea. It’s a metal ornament, maybe an inch across.
This is the combat medical badge Jessica earned during her first tour in Iraq, a one-year stint that started in the fall of 2005.
“She gave this to me while I was visiting her at Fort Campbell,” Steve says. Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, is the home of the 101st Airborne Division.
During Jessica’s first deployment to Iraq, two times a bomb exploded near the vehicle she was riding in. Both episodes happened in March 2006. Jessica was not hurt in either case. She returned to Fort Campbell in the fall of 2006.
Jessica’s second tour in Iraq started in October 2007. It was supposed to last 15 months.
‘What a brave thing’
About three weeks ago, in late April, Jessica called her parents.
She had gone on a night mission with five other soldiers. They were riding in a Buffalo, a heavily armored vehicle that’s much safer than a Humvee.
A bomb detonated.
Two soldiers inside the Buffalo suffered severe concussions. Jessica sustained cuts and bruises.
Steve, who in telling this story is recounting one of his last conversations with his daughter, pauses.
He closes his eyes and sighs audibly.
“She went right back out there,” Steve says. “What a brave thing.”
He says that last line again, slowly, as if he is tasting the words, and their flavor is soothing.
“She knew the risks, but she felt that if she didn’t go, she was letting her buddies down. She felt a commitment to be there for them, and they for her, I’m sure.”
On Sunday evening, less than a month after that phone call, soldiers came to the Ellis home.
The soldiers told Steve and Linda that another bomb had detonated. They told the couple that their daughter, Jessica Ann Ellis, had died. She was 24 years old.
“Always in the back of my mind I knew the danger she was in,” Steve says. “But nothing can prepare you for that knock on the door.”
The curls
About the only thing that seemed to annoy Jessica was her hair. Steve chuckles softly as he remembers that unruly mop of curls.
“It was always out of control — much to her disgust, I guess, but to everyone else’s humor.”
Yet those stubborn locks in no way diminished the pure joy for life that Steve noticed in his daughter even before she took her first toddling steps.
“One of Jessica’s special gifts is her sunny and easygoing disposition,” he said, glancing at a sheet of handwritten notes that he and Linda compiled. “She always saw the bright side of things, was always the cheerful one.”
Although Steve’s career with the BLM and, later, the Forest Service required the family to move more than half a dozen times during Jessica’s childhood, the frequent changes never clouded that bright personality of hers.
“Jessica always adapted immediately and made new friends,” Steve says.
And no matter where the family lived, Jessica had two constant friends: her siblings.
“Jessica absolutely worshipped her brother, and she and Mandy were basically inseparable,” Steve says.
After she graduated from Lakeview High School in 2002, Jessica enrolled at Central Oregon Community College in Bend.
She enlisted in the Army in September 2004.
“I think she was looking for an adventure,” Steve says.
He said Jessica thrived on the rigorous training at medic school.
“We were very proud of her when she graduated from medic training,” Steve says. “It’s what she wanted to do, to help people.
“Unfortunately, that meant going to war.”
Small comforts
Steve and Linda moved to Baker City just 3½ years ago, but as they endure the ultimate tragedy this week, they feel almost as if this has always been their home.
“Linda and I want to thank the community, the Forest Service, Eastern Oregon Medical Associates (where Linda works as a nurse practitioner), the Army, for their outpouring of support,” Steve says. “It’s been a comfort to us.”
The family has received phone calls of condolence from Congressman Greg Walden, Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, and Gov. Ted Kulongoski.
“The governor called me this morning,” Steve says, just before noon Wednesday. “We had a very nice chat.”
He says Kulongoski, a former Marine, asked how it was that Jessica ended up in the elite 101st, one of the Army’s two airborne divisions (the 82nd is the other).
Steve says he appreciated that question because he and Linda had once asked it themselves.
“We asked Jessica about it, and she told us she had a very high fitness score, the second highest in her company,” Steve says.
But then Jessica had long been an athlete. She competed in cross country, track and swimming. “She really loved to run,” Steve says. “She went out for track, but she especially liked cross country.”
Jessica’s death leaves her parents to ponder all the questions they never got around to asking their daughter.
Jessica’s four-year enlistment with the Army was scheduled to end this September.
“Lin and I wondered if she would re-enlist,” Steve says. “We never asked her that, though. She liked the Army, liked being a medic. I think she felt comfortable. We wondered if she would follow in her mother’s footsteps.”
It would not have mattered, of course, what Jessica did or where she went.
What mattered is that she would always be their daughter, their curly-haired little girl, forever with that smile.
“We supported her decision,” Steve says. “You have to support your kids when you’re a parent.”
And so Steve and Linda supported Jessica when she returned to the streets where the bombs lay in their disguised malevolence, when she insisted on going back before her gashes had healed.
They knew that their daughter could not have done otherwise.
“Once she started something, she always saw it through to the end,” Steve says.
“She gave the largest sacrifice a person could, selflessly, like she did everything else in her life.”
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