“The Only Thing I Knew How to Do Was Kill People”: Inside the Rash of Unexplained Deaths at Fort Hood (2024)

PART ONE: THE MYSTERIES

The numbers are distressing. Last year, at least 39 Fort Hood soldiers died or went missing. Thirteen killed themselves. Five were murdered. Eleven of the deaths remain unresolved—some legally; others for the victims’ families. The 2020 numbers add to ongoing mysteries, including a 2016 case where a corpse’s hyoid, the U-shaped neck bone typically examined to determine whether strangulation has occurred, was missing. These figures eclipse American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq in the same year. The suicides, which reportedly jumped by as much as 20 percent across the military last year, work out to a rate of one soldier a month. And yet: The data is not really out of the ordinary for U.S. military bases. Last December, a Special Forces soldier and an Army veteran were found dead at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where another soldier disappeared in May and was later found murdered. In 2018, a soldier was allegedly shot and killed in her front yard by her husband at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, which also has one of the highest rates of suicide in the Army. In 1941, Private Felix Hall was lynched by fellow soldiers, at Fort Benning, Georgia. His killers were never looked for properly and thus never found. Fort Hood might not even stand out were it not for a particularly bad year among many. The stories are gruesome, then heartbreaking, then beyond belief.

Staff Sergeant Devin Schuette was found dead in his pickup truck, fitted with a hose running from the exhaust pipe to the cabin, in January 2016. The death was ruled a suicide despite the fact that the blanket stuffed around the window to hold the pipe in place had been doused in Schuette’s own blood, and Schuette was found with nine stab wounds across his body, including his forearm and his left hand. Schuette’s body was returned to his family “wrapped like a mummy.” Later that year, Private Dakota Lee Stump left his barracks to report for work less than a mile away but never arrived for formation. His body was found nearly a month later, two miles from the barracks. Fort Hood announced that Stump had crashed his car while driving under the influence, though a toxicology report proved inconclusive. Stump was going 82 mph in a 30-mph zone, the investigation report said, and had hit a tree on a mound. No skid marks were apparent, nor did anyone hear the crash. His body was mostly intact but for his hyoid, which was never found. (Marine Lance Corporal Riley Schultz’s death on March 15, 2019, at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, was also ruled a suicide, despite his hyoid being broken. When the family exhumed his body in November 2020 for want of a second opinion, the independent autopsy revealed that the bone had in fact gone missing.) Specialist Justen Ogden’s death in July 2017 was ruled a suicide, but the suicide note Fort Hood produced as evidence did not match his handwriting, according to his mother, Toni. On March 5, 2020, Destanie Sawyer’s five-year-old daughter found her father, Specialist Christopher Sawyer, 29, after he had shot himself dead in the bedroom of their Fort Hood housing. The base might have continued to devour its soldiers had it not been for a missing soldier’s family whose rage, love, and devotion would attract the attention of the media, celebrities, and later the White House, sparking congressional and military investigations.

Fort Hood is one of 800 United States military bases around the world, the third largest in the country. American military bases, once established, seldom shutter, and Fort Hood, which started operating during World War II, has remained open for business, its 218,000 acres spreading across two counties in central Texas near an otherwise unremarkable town called Killeen. From here, wars are launched. Military bases are the last piece of the homeland that soldiers see before they are deployed to fight and the first glimpse of home when they return.

Driving into Killeen last fall, what greeted me was a deer, roadkill, that had been severed in half. Next I passed Club Dreams, where Specialist Shelby Jones was shot, bled out, and died last March; then Guns Galore, where Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan purchased a semiautomatic pistol that he would use to kill 13 people in 2009. A soft October wind carried the first chill of the season. During the day, though, it was still hot enough that if you dropped a beer bottle, the contents appeared to dry on contact. The vast emptiness that is most of the state can make you feel inconsequential, as if you could disappear and no one would know you ever lived. Traveling in the time of plague, trying to build rapport with people from six feet away, was enervating. So much of reporting is opening yourself up to chance, and there I was, compulsively locking and relocking the rental car door. On most nights, I had nightmares.

My caution wasn’t entirely unfounded. Terrie Boley, whose daughter Candance became addicted to crack cocaine while serving at Fort Hood and was murdered in a motel room in 2011, told me not to drink the water. (The Boley case remains unsolved.) Thomas Berg, whose son Private Brandon Rosecrans’s Jeep was found burning in May, told me not to go out after dark. (His son’s alleged killer is in custody awaiting trial.) Linda Schweers, whose specialist son, Justin, died in a car crash in June while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, wanted me to “be careful of cartels,” which she said ran the area. Specialist Vanessa Guillen’s father, Rogelio, wondered if I shouldn’t carry a gun. Guillen’s youngest sister, Lupe, made me promise to stay at the Marriott, a hotel she considered safer than the rest. “I felt a bad vibe there,” Lupe says, referring to Fort Hood. One of the first times she stepped onto the base, a rosary she had been carrying in the palm of her hand tore apart, its beads scattering over the concrete ground.

At first blush, such violence at a base that calls itself “the Great Place” may seem extraordinary, inexplicable even. But then certain details start illuminating the mystery: that one out of three women soldiers have experienced sexual harassment, according to a recent survey. That gun safety is a distant concern in a community where the Second Amendment tops the Maslow charts. That psychological trauma among veterans vastly exceeds physical wounds. That most soldiers enlist when they are still teenagers, their yet-unformed minds taught to kill. That American imperialism is imploding, and the blast force radiates inward.

PART TWO: THE CRUEL SUMMER

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020, Guillen reported for duty at Fort Hood. The 20-year-old small arms specialist, then a private first class, was supposed to be off that day, so she showed up in civilian clothes—black tee, purple leggings, and a fanny pack. That morning, Guillen had left her third-floor barracks and headed downstairs to her work station at the motor pool, a vast garage for military vehicles. She filled out the paperwork that is the lifeblood of the Army before heading toward the arms room, a few paces away. Just before noon, Guillen left her keys, Army ID, and bank cards in one arms room and entered another adjacent arms room, separated by a hallway. There she encountered Specialist Aaron Robinson, also 20 years old but a rank above. Robinson gave Guillen the serial number for a .50 caliber machine gun that needed servicing. Later, Robinson would tell investigators that Guillen completed her task and exited the building. Robinson himself left soon thereafter, he would testify, to spend the night off post with his girlfriend.

Nearly 200 miles away in Houston, Rogelio Guillen was entering his fourth hour of work at a nickel-plating factory when he felt a sharp spasm in his chest. The wave of pain went away as suddenly as it had come on but returned again, and again, and again, over the next hour. He wondered if it was something he had eaten and carried on with his shift. He got home around 2 p.m. and told his wife, Gloria, about the unusual aches. Their minds both turned to Vanessa, whose hourly texts to family members had gone silent. She had also missed her standing noon call with her fiancé, Juan Cruz.

After 8 p.m., Guillen’s sister Mayra called the base. Guillen’s superior confirmed she was missing. At 9:30 p.m., Mayra, Cruz, Guillen’s other sister Yovana, and Yovana’s boyfriend set out for Fort Hood. Mayra wept during the journey, already fearing the worst. It rained that night, and the drive, which should have taken three hours, was slow going. The search party arrived at Fort Hood at 3 a.m. Guillen’s staff sergeant told the group to come back in the morning. They checked into a nearby hotel and returned at 8 a.m. the next day. A group of soldiers, including Robinson, greeted them. The soldiers said that Guillen’s belongings had been found in the arms room, but otherwise she had left no trace. The family began posting online about Guillen’s disappearance and distributing “Missing” fliers.

Back in Houston, Gloria recalled a conversation with her daughter not long before, when Guillen had been home for the weekend. Gloria had noticed her losing weight and pressed her for why. Guillen confessed that she was being harassed by another soldier. “Give me the name and I will report the bastard,” Gloria told her daughter, who refused to tell her mother more for fear of worrying her, and also, Gloria later suspected, for fear of reprisal. This memory now refreshed, Gloria began asking around for a name and soon learned it through Guillen’s friend: Aaron Robinson, the last person to have seen her daughter.

On May 19, military investigators went through Robinson’s phone and learned that he had called his girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar, multiple times on the night of April 22, as late as 3:30 a.m., from a town 20 miles east of Fort Hood—despite his claim he had been with Aguilar that night. Two witnesses had seen Robinson roll a black cargo box out of the arms room and through the parking lot, where he loaded it into his car and drove away, contradicting an earlier affidavit from three soldiers who falsely claimed they had seen Guillen departing the arms room earlier.

The day after Guillen disappeared, Private Gavin Chambers, 21, died on base. On April 29, it was Private Joshua Barnwell, 19. Sergeant Brad Reynolds, 37, killed himself on May 16. On May 18, Brandon Rosecrans’s burning Jeep was discovered in a hilly suburb east of Fort Hood. Rosecrans, shot four times, was found three miles from his vehicle. The coming months brought the suicides of Staff Sergeant Richard Harrington, 45, and then Specialist James Green, 23. And on June 19, skeletal remains were found in a field behind a cul-de-sac of a residential neighborhood in Killeen.

Those remains, it turned out, belonged to yet another soldier, Private Gregory Wedel-Morales, who had gone missing the previous summer. That September, Wedel-Morales, who was from rural Oklahoma, was due to be honorably discharged from the military. The plan, Wedel-Morales told anyone who would listen, was to use the G.I. Bill to attend technical school in Houston to work on wind turbines or oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. On the night of August 19, Wedel-Morales went out to Club Fuego, located in a desolate strip mall about 10 miles east of Fort Hood. The next day, Wedel-Morales failed to show up for duty, and the day after that, he was classified as absent without leave, making him one of the thousand or so soldiers who go AWOL in any given year.

Since being stationed at Fort Hood in November 2016, Wedel-Morales had frequented the Dollhouse, a strip club not far from where his remains would eventually be found. At the Dollhouse, he got to know Penny Morales, a dancer and mother of two. They married in May 2017, and he took her name with hyphenation. (Penny says they met online.) Wedel-Morales was thrilled to become a father. The new family, like more than 70 percent of all Fort Hood service members, lived off post, but after two dead bodies were found on their street, they moved into base housing.

By then Wedel-Morales had grown distant from his family in Oklahoma, who had not been told of the marriage. His mother, Kim, only heard from her son when he needed money. By then, the Army, it seemed, had stopped providing Wedel-Morales with a sense of purpose, and he had turned to alternate sources of meaning, namely car and motorcycle clubs, and life beyond the base. Most of the groups were aboveboard, even as they were ruled by certain strictures for meeting attendance, dress code, and how to appropriately signal respect. Failure to comply could incur fines of hundreds of dollars or other, more severe social censure. A small minority, which bikers call “one percent” groups, and which the Department of Justice calls by the regrettable acronym OMG, or outlaw motorcycle gangs, were the people Wedel-Morales had been hanging around with.

When Kim called Fort Hood inquiring after her son, she was told the case was the remit of the Killeen Police Department as Wedel-Morales had gone missing off base. But when Kim called the police, they dismissed her, telling Kim that her son probably just “took off.” (Killeen Police stated they have no knowledge of anyone declining to investigate.) So when, the following spring, Fort Hood offered a $15,000 reward for information about Guillen, then raised it to $25,000 in June, Kim called to demand the same. Fort Hood hurriedly put up a $25,000 reward for Wedel-Morales as well. Four days later, an anonymous tip directed investigators to an urban prairie at the end of a residential street where Penny Morales used to live. There, Wedel-Morales’s remains had been found, long ago decomposed in the Texas heat. (The person who called in with the tip declined to collect the reward.)

Wedel-Morales’s death was not the first from the base that may have involved bike gangs. Two days after Staff Sergeant Anthony Lovell, 40, disappeared in 2017, his body was found, eyes pecked clean, face split in half, in a creek off Killeen’s seedy main corridor called Rancier, the same street where Specialist Freddy Delacruz, 23, was shot and killed last March. The Lovell case was ruled an accident despite the fact that a rival club’s biker vest, or kutte, was found hanging neatly from a tree near the crash site, while his motorcycle—mirror, taillights—was found intact. (According to Killeen police, no such vests were found at the scene of the crash.)

On July 3, a fortnight after Wedel-Morales’s body was found, Specialist Miguel Yazzie, 33, died at Fort Hood after his repeated requests to see a doctor were denied, according to Carma Johnson, whose brother died at Fort Hood. On August 13, Staff Sergeant Bradley Moore died during a land navigation exercise on the base. His wife, Christal, was denied her husband’s mobile phone, the final investigation report, and even his corpse, until Texas Congressman Ron Wright stepped in on that front. (Fort Hood does not count Moore in its official casualty list, as he was a member of the National Guard.)

On August 17, Sergeant Elder Fernandes, 23, disappeared. Fernandes had just been stationed at Fort Hood in January. He had been happy enough there that in February he reenlisted for an additional four years. On May 11, however, Fernandes reported to Fort Hood “abusive sexual contact” from a staff sergeant, whom he alleged groped him in a supply room, according to the redacted military investigation report. Fernandes transferred to another unit where he was called a snitch and worse. On August 11, a higher-up called Fernandes’s mother, Ailina, to tell her that her son had not shown up for work for two days. Frantic, she called around, to no avail. Eventually Fernandes rang from the Army hospital. Fernandes wouldn’t share much, nothing about what had caused him to be hospitalized, and said that he was using an insecure base hospital line. A few days later, they spoke again, for the last time. “As soon as I get out of the hospital, I will call you. I will tell you everything.” Fernandes was dropped off at his friend’s house the next day, August 17, never to be seen again.

When Ailina contacted the military police at Fort Hood, they told her that Fernandes was an adult, and that if he was missing, he likely didn’t want to be found. If she wanted to pursue things further, they advised, she would have to file a missing persons report with the local police. The police too told Ailina that Fernandes was an adult and that they would not report him as missing. (The police opened an investigation on August 19.) When Ailina offered the Fort Hood authorities the contents of her son’s car, including a laptop, iPad, and external hard drive, they declined to investigate further. “I am astounded nobody is interested,” the Fernandes family lawyer Lenny Kesten told me. “Is it possible Elder was murdered? Is it possible Elder killed himself? It’s possible. Don’t they care as to what happened to Elder Fernandes? If he killed himself, don’t they want to know why?”

The very next day, a Fort Hood investigation concluded that Fernandes’s charges of sexual assault were unsubstantiated. Fort Hood also stated that it had completed an exhaustive search for Fernandes, and that it had interviewed all relevant parties, including the family. Fernandes’s family told me they have never been interviewed.

Barely a week later, Private Corlton Chee, 25, died during training. Chee, like Yazzie, was a member of the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation community, and was new to the base. Within days of arriving at Fort Hood, Chee’s clothes were stolen. He told his sister there were three white soldiers who “did not like him.” On August 28, Chee was called into a training run. He had messaged his sister beforehand to tell her something felt off. During the run, Chee, who had no preexisting health conditions, collapsed. When his parents rushed to the hospital, they saw that Chee, lying unconscious, had bruises and scrapes on his chin and on both sides of his face. There was a deep cut above his left eye, and cuts all over his legs. Basic details of the incident kept changing. First it was a five-mile run, then it was a two-mile run. There had been a few people, then it was a group run of 11. Chee had joined the military in part to support the young family he was starting with his high school sweetheart turned fiancée. He also wanted an education, and “joining the Army he knew he could take care of all of that,” his sister Carma Johnson says. He died the evening of September 2. Fort Hood concluded Chee had died in training.

PART THREE: KILLEEN, TEXAS

Fort Hood was founded in January 1942 as a training ground for tank destroyers, selected for its varied terrain. The area, east of Killeen, was built on 109,000 acres of high bluffs, ridges, sharp slopes, and mesa-like hills covered with mesquite and chaparral. It was also an ancient Comanche Native American burial ground, discovered when construction workers unearthed more than 2,200 grave sites in 1998. The tributaries that run through Fort Hood flow into the Leon River, where Guillen’s remains were later found.

Before Fort Hood was built, the land was used for grazing by some 3,000 farmers and ranchers, according to Gerald D. Skidmore, a Killeen historian. Hazel Buck Blackwell, whose family lost their farm, homestead, barns, orchards, and adjoining land when the base took over, said the “closest thing might be the unexpected death of someone you loved very much.” It was a “heartrending, searing experience,” central Texas historian Gra’Delle Duncan said, “leaving lifetime marks on all, and actually killing some” from the psychic devastation that followed. More than 2,200 trials over land rights commenced.

The base was named after John Bell Hood, a Confederate general from a family that enslaved people in Kentucky, who made his name by breaking a Union line at Eltham’s Landing in Virginia and who, by today’s standards, likely suffered from PTSD. Hood was an unsuccessful battle commander; 400 men of his Texas Brigade died in a single fight, some would argue through incautious direction. In other battles, having lost the use of his arm and later a leg, Hood had to be strapped to a horse for combat. He died in 1879, leaving a troubled legacy that is only now beginning to be questioned.

The small Texas frontier town was also a “hotbed of Klan activity,” according to Texas historian Gene Preuss of the University of Houston, so much so that when trains stopped in Killeen, Black passengers—relegated to “colored cars”—knew to pull down their window shades to avoid a pelting with rocks by locals. There were no Black residents in town until the early 1950s.

Atop these sedimentary layers of desecration, displacement, and disorientation, the War Department set out to build a base that would go on to serve as a footnote to nearly every war in modern memory—Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also Grenada, Panama, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It installed 35 firing ranges, 18 chapels, three bowling alleys, and 1,384 barracks that would house, at its peak, 95,000 soldiers, the most densely populated military base, at a cost of $35 million.

Killeen itself sits on an especially brutal stretch of central Texas, along the Balcones Fault, which separates the high plains of the Hill Country to the west from the grand prairies and limestone plains of the east, and along which runs Interstate 35. Killeen was named after another disappointing man: Frank Killeen, an assistant general manager to the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway. It is unclear if Killeen even bothered to visit his namesake town, which, by the early 1880s, comprised 40 people living across 360 acres, mostly working in the two cotton gins, two gristmills, and two saloons—it had the most saloons, gamblers, and shootings per capita in Bell County, according to historian Martha Bowmer.

The pursuit of happiness, or simply stability, will invariably lure people to the American military, which may be why the undocumented, the indigent, or those with a criminal record are overrepresented in its ranks. (Among 1.29 million members of the U.S. military, 65,000 are immigrants, according to The Washington Post.) This was true of many I met at Fort Hood, including press officer Major Gabriela Thompson, my tour guide on base, who told me she joined to pay off her student loans: “It was my ticket out,” she said, echoing other soldiers’ sentiments about how the military had rescued them from hardscrabble existences.

The military is necessarily an institution of state-sanctioned violence, where we teach our young to kill on our behalf in the name of ideologies such as patriotism or democracy. Because what the military asks of its men and women is so antisocial, it must co-opt the rhetoric of the family. The purported motto of the Army was “family first, mission second,” Gary Shafer, a noncommissioned officer who served at Fort Hood from 2012 to 2018 and who knew Wedel-Morales through the car-club scene, told me. But at Fort Hood, it sometimes seemed like “mission first, equipment second,” he said, highlighting the paradox of the military that in word puts the well-being of soldiers first but in deed must, by design, favor combat readiness over all else. And being mission-ready, the perpetual vigilance it requires, ensures a kind of endless possibility of war, which in turn justifies the $740 billion annual defense budget.

All this has been true since the founding of the American military, but a sense of disorientation has increased in recent years, as wars that were never good to begin with began to lose moral shine. It was unclear, in 2020, what American soldiers were fighting for. Without any sense of purpose, the suffering at Fort Hood had started to lose its meaning. Dominic Criqui, who served in Vanessa Guillen’s unit, says that the training had come to feel “stupid” and “pointless.” “What on earth are you training for?” he asks, then answers. “For nothing.”

Reformers would say that the military had failed its men and women. But with each encounter, it was becoming clear that the military had not failed its soldiers at all. Far from it—the military was operating as it had been intended. The sense of dehumanizing alienation soldiers complained about was not a symptom of a malfunctioning system, it was its original design.

PART FOUR: FAULT LINES

Amid all those other deaths, on June 21, 2020, a search party found the charred lid of a cargo box along the Leon River 20 miles east of Fort Hood. On June 30, a construction crew found shallow graves containing human remains that belonged to Guillen.

Later the same day, at 8:30 p.m., Aaron Robinson’s girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar, changed her story and told Army investigators that Robinson had confessed to her that he killed Guillen in the arms room, beating her to death with a hammer. He had then driven the body to the Leon River and had come back to pick Aguilar up from the gas station where she worked on Veterans Memorial Boulevard, five miles east of Fort Hood. At first, Aguilar told investigators, they cut her up using a machete. Then they tried burning the body. They returned several days later to pour concrete over the remains.

Yet instead of being taken into custody, Robinson was placed in a conference room on base, initially, it was said, for committing adultery, which is against the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Later Fort Hood confirmed it was for violating quarantine. A few hours later, Robinson, who had mostly been playing video games, escaped Fort Hood by car. After a chase along Rancier Avenue, the same street near which Lovell was found dead, Robinson shot himself and died. (On July 14, 2020, a federal grand injury indicted Aguilar on one count of conspiracy and two counts of tampering with evidence. She pleaded not guilty. On April 30, 2021, Fort Hood found that Guillen had indeed been sexually harassed by a soldier, but not Robinson.)

Despite 10,000 hours of investigation and 300 interviews, much about Guillen’s death remained a mystery. Who were the soldiers who had testified to seeing Guillen leave the arms room the day she disappeared? Had one of them stood in for Guillen during roll call? If not, what explained the false accounting? Had anyone helped Robinson clean up Guillen’s murder in those 40 minutes? Why had it taken forensics 72 days to conduct a search of the arms room? Why hadn’t the arms room been treated like the crime scene it was? Why was Robinson not put under watch? How had he managed to escape—and where had he gotten his gun? “You can find Osama bin Laden, but you can’t find a soldier that went missing on your own base?” Guillen’s youngest sister, Lupe, says.

The first week I spent in Texas that October, 22-year-old Lucas Hicks-Mack went missing on base. (He was found a day later.) A few days later, so did 21-year-old Specialist Trey Ring. Ever since returning from a deployment to Iraq in February 2019—shipped off two months after basic training for a nine-month tour—Ring had become withdrawn, developed a drinking problem, and had been arrested for drunk driving. He had also gotten married without telling his family, been evicted from his apartment, and stopped showing up to work. And so his disappearance was no surprise, his father told me. “From the age of 18, the only thing I knew how to do was kill people,” Ring wrote on the website of his father’s veterans’ rights organization. “And how well will that look on your résumé?”

“I’m 21 now, and let me tell you. I’ve lost so much since I’ve been in. I’ve lost brothers and sisters in arms, a marriage, I’ve lost family, I’ve lost friendships that were supposed to be forever. I’ve even lost myself.” (Ring returned to base of his own accord later that day.)

In the same week, Private Edward Casteel, who had been missing from Fort Hood since October 6, was found in a parish jail in Louisiana, arrested after a high-speed chase. Casteel had been stationed at Fort Hood since the end of June, where he’d been bullied for a spinal injury that consigned him to desk duties.

Fort Hood had refused to list him as missing, and it was only after his then fiancée, Paradise Rodriguez, posted a video on Facebook that an officer at the parish jail saw it and got into contact. Even then, it was she who had to scare up the $3,500 in bail money, and after Fort Hood sent two officers to pick up Casteel, officials refused to share information with Rodriguez. Casteel had told Rodriguez “he was getting away from the abuse.”

Curiously, a few hours after the officers picked up Casteel, he went silent online. Rodriguez sensed something was off. “He seemed weird,” Rodriguez said. He refused to send a selfie or get on a video chat and began using a strange and unfamiliar speech pattern. “None of the messages added up, nor were they how he usually speaks to me,” Rodriguez told me.

After he returned to Fort Hood, Rodriguez managed to get Casteel on a video call. “I asked him directly if he wasn’t willing to speak because of position and he signaled yes, and he said, ‘I’d rather tell you in person.’ ”

Several days later, Rodriguez learned that Casteel had been committed to a hospital on base. Fort Hood informed Rodriguez that he had asked for this. Rodriguez disputes this claim. “That is the opposite of what he’s been consistently saying.”

In fact, Casteel had been convinced that CIA agents were attacking him since last June. The military, Rodriguez said, had known about this but had refused to treat him.

“I guess my point is,” Rodriguez told me, “if everything was ‘fine,’ the way Fort Hood officials would lead us to believe, then why would this soldier, out of character, leave base without permission, and [why] did he not feel comfortable enough to call his captain or anyone on that base once he was arrested for speeding? What happened on that base and in the Army to cause this person who is normally very [kind] and responsive to all of a sudden leave and shut down?”

When I asked soldiers at Fort Hood what they thought was the matter on base, they mentioned “toxic leadership,” a catholic term that seemed to encompass all: lack of care, general command climate, and so-called toxic masculinity. (There was also literal toxicity on base in that some of the mold-infested barracks where soldiers lived were “technically condemned,” according to Maureen Elliott, a military spouse and a housing advocate.)

Toxic leadership is nothing new. The ancient Greeks wrote epic poems on the subject, the most famous of which is the Iliad. Agamemnon demonstrates disrespect, vanity, and other lapses in judgment, the result of which is what clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay describes as “moral injury”—a “(i) betrayal of what’s right, (ii) by someone who holds legitimate authority, (iii) in a high stakes situation.” Such moral injury deteriorates social trust, which is then “replaced by the settled expectancy of harm, exploitation, and humiliation from others,” resulting in despair and violence to self and to others.

After the public remonstrations began, Fort Hood launched something it called Operation Phantom Action, a weeklong retreat of sorts that was meant to rebuild trust between soldiers and the leadership. A sergeant from Guillen’s division called it “mandatory fun days.” The additional scrutiny—the congressional delegation visit, press tours—meant that soldiers had to work harder. Many complained specifically of being made to cut grass to ready for such official visits. The Army’s own investigation found “major flaws” at Fort Hood, leading to the firing or suspending of 14 officials. (Fort Hood refused all official interview requests for this story, citing ongoing investigations. As publication approached, it stopped responding to emails pertaining to both specific questions about individual cases as well as broader queries about the base.)

As distressing as the remains in shallow graves or the missing hyoid bone is the fatalism from soldiers and locals alike. None of the grunts I spoke to was surprised by the number of casualties. Beyond the base, gas station attendants and restaurant servers, many of whom were veterans or had ties to the military, all seemed resigned to certain fates. They pointed glumly to past cases, some of which there were public records for and others I could find no traces of in the official files.

Women, who make up 17 percent of active-duty military, were doubly bereft, and the case files were awash with stories of the dead. Last December, an internal investigation found that Fort Hood’s culture, environment, and leadership resulted in women feeling “vulnerable and preyed upon,” with no reliable recourse for their very real sense of duress.

Before Guillen, there had been Private LaVena Lynn Johnson, who was found dead in a tent in 2005 in Iraq. It was ruled a suicide until her father noticed her broken nose, black eye, loose teeth, and burns on her genitals.

In 2007, also in Iraq, Specialist Kamisha Block’s death was ruled an accident by a single shot of friendly fire before the family received the body and saw that she had five gunshot wounds, including one to the head. Also that year, Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach was raped by her superior, which she reported. He ultimately murdered her when she was eight months pregnant, then set her on fire before fleeing to Mexico.

Around the Guillen murals in Killeen and in Houston, I met people who had lost loved ones to the military, who felt harm done, who saw in Guillen a savior. “She doesn’t belong to the Army anymore,” AnaLuisa Tapia, a local organizer, told me. “She is now for the movement.”

In death, Guillen has become a kind of patron saint for all those who feel wronged by the U.S. military. In death, she is no longer a daughter or a sister or a partner. She has become that complicated, indelible thing: a hero.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With Leslie Wexner
— Trump’s Deranged Replacement Theory Might’ve Lost Him the Election
— Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Want to Burn Their Cash in Space
— Three Texans Bust Myths About the Alamo’s Famous “Last Stand”
— The Guy Who Could Send Trump to Prison May Soon Cooperate With the Feds
— Bill and Melinda Gates’s Epic Divorce Saga Enters Its Next Phase
— Juneteenth, Critical Race Theory, and the Winding Road Toward Reckoning
— Trump Is Now Urging People Not to Vaccinate Their Kids Against COVID
— From the Archive: Microsoft’s Odd Couple, in the Words of Paul Allen
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.