[Vision2020] Women in Authority and Leadership!

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (July 11, 2007) Anchorage Daily News at:

http://tinyurl.com/yrb4gv

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Fresh start goes awry
Army was turning woman's unlucky life around when shell ended everything

By JULIA O'MALLEY
jomalley at adn.com

http://tinyurl.com/286smo
Spc. Michelle Ring, seen with her two boys, Marc Stearns, 7, and Brandon
Cole, 5, was killed July 5 by mortar fire in Baghdad. Ring, of the 92nd
Military Police Battalion, grew up in Chugiak. (Photo courtesy KAREN
HARBUCK)

http://tinyurl.com/yocbbv
Spc. Michelle R. Ring, 26, joined the military for a new start and found
purpose, confidence, structure and her place in the world, her family said.
(Photo from Michelle Ring's MySpace page)

For most of her short life, Michelle Ring was chasing a fresh start. 

After seeing her boyfriend killed in an Anchorage parking-lot fight, she
moved to Tennessee. Five years later, with a crumbled marriage and two young
boys, her job in a sweltering small-town factory could barely keep the
lights on. 

On her lunch break two years ago, she looked up and saw a highway sign: The
Army. 

Ring was a single parent and the country was at war, but she needed to start
again. She enlisted and went to boot camp. Late last year, she shipped out
from Fort Benning, Ga., to Baghdad. 

Her family said she'd finally found her place in the world. The Army brought
structure and purpose, but in recent months she told her family that the
violence around her seemed to be getting worse. She said she worried she
wouldn't make it back to her children. 

Then last week two soldiers drove up the rocky driveway of her sister's
house in Wasilla. Ring, 26, had been killed July 5 by mortar fire while
taking a break from a patrol, they said. Spc. Ring was the second female
soldier with Alaska ties killed in a week's time. Fort Richardson Sgt.
Trista L. Moretti, 27, of South Plainfield, N.J., died June 28 when she was
hit by a mortar shell while sleeping in a trailer. 

Ring grew up in Chugiak, the youngest of three sisters. She met her best
friend, Chrystle Lyon, at Gruening Middle School.

"We got along well. Even when we didn't get along, we made up," said Lyon,
who lives in Peters Creek. "We could read each other's minds."

The girls liked to play rough -- four-wheeling, driving cars off-road,
camping. Studying wasn't their thing. Lyon ended up in military school. Ring
dropped out. At 17, she quickly fell for Marc Hopfenspirger, a 21-year-old
soldier from Fort Richardson. 

On a June night in 1999, the girls were out with Hopfenspirger when he got
tangled in a late-night parking-lot fight outside Carrs in the Sears mall.
Someone threw a beer bottle, a shard broke, it bounced off his Jeep and
sliced his throat. 

"We had gone to go get a soda," Lyon said. "We came back around, and he was
lying on the ground bleeding to death." 

Hopfenspirger died at the scene. It wasn't until last summer that police
arrested Esau Fualema for throwing the bottle. He was charged with
second-degree murder. 

After Hopfenspirger's death, depression overtook Ring. She began putting on
weight and wearing baggy clothes. 

That fall, as Ring was trying on a dress for her sister's wedding, her
mother discovered that underneath her sweatshirts, Ring was eight months
pregnant with Hopfenspirger's son. She hadn't told anyone, even Lyon.

"When it all came out that we all knew, she was happy, but I think she was
really confused in the beginning. She didn't know what to do," said her
sister in Wasilla, Karen Harbuck. 

After the baby, Marc, was born, Ring got her GED and moved to Tennessee,
where her parents lived. She took a job at a Tyson chicken processing plant.
Things started to settle down. She met the father of her second son,
Brandon. They married briefly, but it didn't work out. She had another
relationship, but it ended before a year's time.

"She was always looking for Marc, the one that she lost, and she never found
him," Lyon said. 

FEELING LOST AND UNHEALTHY

Being a soldier changed Ring, her family said. It gave her confidence and
direction she never had, they said. 

"Finally, she was someone and she was doing something," said Harbuck.

"She wanted her boys taken care of, was her major thing."

She loved boot camp, the tanks, the guns, the exercise, and the people, her
mother said. She didn't like Baghdad. Shelling woke her at night, and
everything seemed to be deteriorating. She couldn't tell that they were
making a difference.

"She said the air just stinks and it's healthier to smoke a cigarette than
to breathe," Harbuck said. 

Her family communicated with her in brief phone calls, e-mails and on
MySpace.com. Her profile page is bathed in purple and decorated with
pictures of her sons, her tattoos, and herself, in uniform, leaning on a
tank. 

In one blog entry, in March, she wrote: "I feel so lost. I don't know what
I'm doing anymore. Every day it's the same thing and the same people tell me
what I need to do. It has just put me here in this place where I am lost. No
way out."

Another sister, Marilyn Haybeck, responded:

"Shell, it will be alright, just give them a piece of your mind like you do
to everyone else. You don't have to much longer."

Since her death, tribute messages from friends and family have filled the
page.

When she came to her parents' house on leave for the last time at the end of
April, she didn't want to go back.

"She was scared, she didn't think she was going to make it -- it was just
getting too bad over there," Harbuck said.

Her feelings were mixed and complicated. She didn't want to start over,
outside of the military. She recently told her sister she'd re-enlisted. 

On July 5, back in Baghdad, some friends brought Ring dinner while she was
on a patrol at Camp Liberty, her sister said. She had been training to
become a military police officer. 

Rockets screamed into their compound and exploded. A piece of metal hit Ring
in the chest. She died almost immediately. No one else was hurt.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Ring was born in Oregon. Her parents, John and Shirley Stearns, and her
sister Haybeck live in McMinnville outside of Portland. Marc's been with
them since she deployed. Brandon, 5, lives with his father in Tennessee. 

Haybeck helped give Marc the news. He's only 7, but he knows a lot about war
from watching television, she said.

"Was it a homemade bomb?" he asked her.

"Did the Chinese do it?"

She doesn't know how to answer his questions, she said. She wonders how all
of this will change him, whether he can make sense of the way his parents
died. 

The Stearnses plan to raise him. 

"We're the only ones he knows, really," Shirley said. "If something ever
happened, she'd have wanted us to have him." 

Harbuck heads to Oregon today, where all the family will meet Ring's casket
when it comes in at the airport. 

A funeral service will be held on Saturday in Portland. An Alaska memorial
hasn't yet been planned.

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Question for No-Clue:  What have you done for our country?  

Maybe you and "Hat Rack" Iverson can co-author an article for the Daily News
as a response to that question.  Use large print.  It'll make the article
look bigger.

Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho