62 Time October 21–28, 2019
elected to the city council here in 2009, and
became mayor in 2013. He won re-election in
- Neighbors in the largely Mormon commu-
nity bring the family dinner every Tuesday and
help with the children when they can.
The only time Jennie has to herself is at
night. That’s when she slips out of the house
to be alone with Brent. It is nearly midnight
when Jennie turns to leave the cemetery,
the moon hanging between two peaks in the
nearby Wasatch Range. Her alarm clock will go
off in six hours, but one of the kids will nudge
her awake first.
Jennie wasn’t home on the cloudy Novem-
ber morning when two uniformed soldiers
walked up her driveway toward their brown
brick home. It was a Saturday and she was vis-
iting college friends from Brigham Young Uni-
versity in Provo. Her mother Kristin was watch-
ing the children, so when the soldiers appeared
in the doorway, she called Jennie’s cell phone.
But the soldiers couldn’t tell her anything. Pro-
tocol demanded they speak to Jennie in person.
She would have to travel 30 miles north to Utah
National Guard headquarters in Draper to find
out the news.
Jennie tried to handle the situation. Maybe
he was injured. Maybe he was paralyzed. Maybe
he was handicapped. She couldn’t breathe,
let alone drive. Her former roommate offered
to take her, and as the landscape rushed by at
70 m.p.h., Jennie tried to focus her thoughts by
scribbling them down in orange pen: “If he is
dead, I have to process this.” She wrote directly
under it: “I don’t have a choice. I can’t fall apart.
My kids matter most.”
When she got to the long single-story head-
quarters building, two soldiers were holding
the glass doors open for her. As she stepped in-
side and her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she
saw another soldier standing stiffly at the next
door. When she walked further inside, she re-
alized that each door in the narrow hallway—
perhaps a dozen or more—had a soldier posted
in front of it. “And none of them would look at
me,” Jennie recalls, tears welling up in her blue
eyes. “That’s when I knew for sure he was dead.”
She sat inside a cramped cream-colored
conference room. The two officers told her
Nation
Jennie hurried home to
tell her children before
the news reached them