“Please don't go!” Jared's mother, Kathy Bowling, begged him. “This is why I don't want you to go!”
“This is why I have to go,” he told her.
Two months after he graduated, in May 2012, Jared packed his bags to join the Army. In his spare time during training, he recorded videos of himself in his camouflage uniform, singing pop songs and Christian hymns, which he uploaded to his YouTube channel. He was deployed to Afghanistan less than a year later, manning a .50-caliber gun atop a Buffalo, a moving-truck-sized armored vehicle.
Jared had wanted to see combat, but the reality of it hit him harder than he'd imagined. He was terrified one night when his base came under rocket fire. Two of his buddies were blown up in a truck. But that wasn't the worst of it. Jared told his brother about one particular firefight where he was blasting away with the .50-caliber gun. “I don't know for sure, but I might have killed a child,” he told Jacob. He didn't want to say much more about it.
After a patrol in Kandahar Province one day, Jared injured his back while getting off the Buffalo. He was flown to a hospital on a base in Germany. There, the doctors put him on painkillers and told him he couldn't go back into combat. After barely six months in the field, he was done as war-fighter.
Stuck on base, his ambitions crushed, Jared started coming unglued. He hit the bars every night, drinking heavily. He got a local woman pregnant. He was caught driving drunk and confined to barracks. He made a clumsy suicide attempt with pills, which got him placed in psychiatric care for a few days. By October 2015 he was discharge ..
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