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| Jacqueline Rosario of Westminster, a veteran who served in Afghanistan and a recovering heroin addict, holds a photograph of her brother Adam Morse, a veteran who served in Iraq. He died of an overdose in May. T&G Staff/Christine Peterson |
By Brad Petrishen
Telegram & Gazette Staff
Posted Jul. 5, 2015 at 6:00 AM
Updated Jul 6, 2015 at 9:24 PM
WESTMINSTER – Jacqueline Rosario can disarm a man with more than just her smile.
“You’re too pretty to be in the Army,” men in bars would tell the slender, blue-eyed brunette.
“You don’t look like a soldier,” she’d hear at church, in the supermarket or the salon.
In 2003, while girls her age back home sauntered into dorm showers armed with shampoo, Ms. Rosario hung her M16 inside her shower in Kabul, Afghanistan, in case enemies attacked.
While friends posted rants against war to Facebook before choosing a movie, Ms. Rosario pushed her doorless Humvee on mountain roads, hoping her convoy wouldn’t come upon a sniper or roadside bomb.
Her younger brother Adam E. Morse spent many of his days retrieving the burned-out vehicles such bombs wrought, a gruesome task that haunted him until the day he died.
That was nine weeks ago, on the other end of a needle, after a lengthy battle with substance abuse. And while the grief is still fresh, his death is something Ms. Rosario feels compelled to discuss.
Because if you look at her face and think she’s lucky to have avoided the addiction that consumed her brother and so many other veterans, you certainly wouldn’t be alone.
But you’d also be wrong.
'Inseparable'
Just about the only time the Westminster woman breaks eye contact is when she talks about her brother.
“Anything he touched, he would break,” the 34-year-old remembered, staring into space, a smile stealing over her face. “He was a complete troublemaker, but in a funny way."
Ms. Rosario laughed at the image of her brother scrambling up a light post in Salt Lake City in 2002 after a couple of late-night drinks.
The two were providing security with the Army National Guard for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and dressed in their fatigues on what Mr. Morse dubbed a “secret squirrel” mission.
“He climbed up the flagpole and sto — acquired — the Olympic flag,” she said, correcting herself in midsentence with a grin.
“I think that’s my favorite memory,” she said, recalling the sight of him cresting the pole, his hood pulled tightly around his head, his hard breaths causing plumes of white air to rise into the cold night.
"You’re gonna catch me, right?” he said as his big sister stood below.
The two grew up with their father, an electric motor technician, in East Templeton. The pair were separated by two years of age, but not much else.
“We did everything together,” she said, from hunting for rocks for hours along with their sister Jenn to taking rides on his motorcycle.
“We were inseparable.”
Call to service
The siblings adored their grandfather, Bayard L. Morse Jr., a Harley-Davidson repairman who served in the Army during World War II.
His grandfather’s service was one of the reasons Mr. Morse joined the service. That, and his sister.
An accomplished runner who’d been offered multiple running scholarships, Ms. Rosario opted instead to join the Guard while at Narragansett Regional High School.
Asked why, Ms. Rosario said she liked what the recruiters had to say, and what the work would be.
“I knew that I wanted to go (overseas),” she said. “I just really respected what people do for freedom.”
As luck would have it, the two ended up serving in the same unit at Devens.
Eager to more actively assist in the war effort, Ms. Rosario ended up volunteering to deploy with the 747 Military Police Company to Afghanistan in 2003.
Three weeks later, her brother got orders to deploy to Iraq. She tried to switch back, but it was too late.
Each taking one of the other’s dog tags, the two, age 23 and 21, set off for the Middle East several months apart.
While in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, Mr. Morse spent time recovering damaged equipment.
His sister didn’t have to face the grisly scenes he often encountered, but had struggles of her own.
Ms. Rosario acted as a supply sergeant for a Special Forces base in Kabul and would make hour long trips to Bagram in convoys that sometimes had to stop for bombs.
As nerve-wracking as such trips could be, what happened inside the base took a deeper toll.
“I experienced a lot of harassment,” she said, noting that her base had about 500 men and a handful of women.
Ms. Rosario could not bring herself to speak much further on the topic.
“It was a lot of sexual harassment to deal with,” she said. “That’s putting it nicely.
“Some bad things happened, but it is what it is,” she said, noting superior officers weren’t much help, as some were part of the problem.
“Camels tend to look good (to a man) over there,” she said.
An addiction born
In May 2003, while driving a Humvee in a convoy at about 50 mph, Ms. Rosario struck the back of another Humvee she said stopped suddenly.
While she was able to walk out of the vehicle, she suffered a back injury that caused intense pain. Inside a medical tent, she was given an innocuous-looking pill — Percocet.
“That’s where it started,” she said of the addiction that would eventually rob her of many of her most treasured relationships.
For Ms. Rosario, the descent to addiction was gradual. She was sent home in August and found herself sitting around reliving unpleasant memories.
She soon discovered her pills helped her with more than pain. Like her brother would later do, she began abusing them to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I was like, ‘This feels good. I don’t want to feel anything,’ ” she recalled.
Ms. Rosario, who said she was never a drinker or drug user, began to feel euphoria off the medication that was hard to resist.
“I took way more than I needed,” she said. “I didn’t really ever admit, ‘Oh, I have a problem.’ ”
Over the next five years, Ms. Rosario took more and more Percocet. Although she wishes the Veterans Administration had applied more scrutiny to her prescription requests, she doesn’t blame anyone for her addiction.
She admitted to playing VA doctors a bit and seeking out additional pills on the street. She hid the extent of her addiction from friends and family, including her husband, a military man she married in 2005 and with whom she bore a child.
Ms. Rosario went full-time with the Army National Guard in 2004, keeping track of equipment at Devens.
Over time, as her addiction increased, so did marital problems. She and her husband divorced, and she had another child with a new boyfriend in 2010.
In September 2010, several months after she’d finished her commitment to the Army, she went to rehab for the first time.
Her youngest child's father tried to get custody, but Ms. Rosario got sober and won the case. But she relapsed after 18 months and said temporary custody of her children was granted to their fathers in 2012.
Over the next two years, Ms. Rosario sunk deeper into drugs, sniffing heroin for the first time at a New Year’s Eve party in December 2013.
Hooked on the intense high, Ms. Rosario began shooting heroin six months later with her then-boyfriend.
“Literally all we did was go to Fitchburg to get crack and heroin,” she said, which they would both use and sell to support their habits.
On Aug. 22, 2014, the pair was arrested in Gardner for possession with intent to distribute. For the once-straitlaced, clumsy high school runner, seeing her name in the paper was a wake-up call.
“It was literally the lowest point I’ve ever been my entire life," she said. “Those cops that day saved my life just by arresting me.”
Ms. Rosario’s case was continued without a finding. She was placed on unsupervised probation for six months with random drug tests, while her ex-boyfriend went to prison as a repeat offender.
“In the paper, me and (him) don’t look like the best people,” she said. “But (he’s) not a bad person, and I’m not a bad person, we were just not doing good things.”
Losing a brother
Ms. Rosario stayed clean after her arrest, but her brother continued a downward slide that began shortly after he returned from Iraq in 2004.
There was cause for optimism earlier this year, though, when he checked himself into a VA substance-abuse program in Jamaica Plain after a weeklong detoxification.
“Even my dad was like, ‘I finally have my son again,’ ” Ms. Rosario said.
But in late April, after a group session in which he relived some difficult memories, Mr. Morse took off.
His family would later learn he’d gone and shot up at the house of a drug dealer before coming back to the Jamaica Plain VA to get his things.
“They begged him to stay,” Ms. Rosario said of the facility’s workers.
The next day, Mr. Morse’s sister Jenn tried desperately to reach him on his cellphone. But it was the dealer who answered, telling her that her brother had overdosed and that paramedics were attempting to revive him.
Ms. Rosario was driving when she got the call.
“My first initial instinct was driving into a tree,” she said. “I was screaming.”
Road to redemption
Shortly after her brother’s April 29 death, Ms. Rosario’s father pleaded with his remaining children to never put another drug in their bodies.
“You and your sister are all I have, and I can never lose another child,” Ms. Rosario recalled him saying.
In the past few months, Ms. Rosario has changed her circle of friends, joined more support groups and attempted to use her sadness as motivation to better not only herself but also others.
“I want to help get rid of the stigma (of heroin abuse),” she said. “Everyone thinks heroin addicts are like homeless bums sleeping under a bridge.
“It does not discriminate,” Ms. Rosario said. “Nobody wanted to get better more than my brother did.”
Ms. Rosario said people shouldn’t feel marginalized for having an addiction but should hold themselves accountable for overcoming it.
Tuesday night, at the Nu Café in Gardner, Ms. Rosario met with young adults — some of whom have struggled with drugs — for a new prayer group she is helping her stepbrother run.
Ms. Rosario said her faith has been the No. 1 thing keeping her going since her brother’s death. It’s also turned around the life of her half-brother, Corey Bowser.
“I’m not smoking crack and living in a tent. I’ve got two vehicles. Hallelujah,” Mr. Bowser, 26, said Tuesday to a crowd that packed the coffee joint.
Donning a backwards Red Sox cap, the large, affable, black-bearded man read Scripture in a relatable way to the youngish crowd.
The group, called The Family Unit, meets at the café each Tuesday and hopes, Mr. Bowser said, to affect a generation of young people.
“The goal really is to have a community of people intentional on growing horizontally with each other, and vertically with God,” he said.
“When I made (God) Lord, he changed my life,” said Mr. Bowser, a former heroin addict who has a criminal history in Gardner that made coming back difficult.
“I did not want to come (here),” he told he group. “I’ve robbed stores out here. Life was not good for me out here.”
But Mr. Bowser, who has been clean for years, believes helping others get closer to God is a calling he must answer.
Ms. Rosario said she’s happy to say all five of her mother’s remaining children have attended each prayer session so far.
“Even though we have some differences, we all came together after Adam died,” said Ms. Rosario, who wants to use her experiences within the group to “help the broken.”
“I’m proud of her,” Mr. Bowser said. “I’m excited for who she is and who she’s going to be.”
Hope for the future
Asked what she believes her story boils down to, Ms. Rosario replied, “Hope.”
Though her heart still hurts, she sees signs of her brother — including his favorite number, 22 — many places she goes. She visits him often in the veterans cemetery in Winchendon, where he lies not far from his grandfather. And she treasures old memories, thinking back to the normal days in life that often go unnoticed – those dull, rainy Saturdays of childhood.
“He would just ask my dad questions like, ‘Would you jump off the roof for five hundred dollars? What about a thousand?' ” she said with a wistful smile, her mind lost in a moment buried in time.
“My brother didn’t die in vain,” she said. “I want to help people in his honor.”
Because of her past, Ms. Rosario is allowed to see her 9- and 5-year-old children for three hours per week under the supervision of their fathers.
“I told my kids I had to go away to learn how to a better mom,” she said. “(My daughter) said, ‘But Mom, you’re the best mom ever.’ ”
Words like that that keep her focused on the task at hand. The future she envisions is one many take for granted.
“I want to be that soccer mom that’s carting my kids from gymnastics to football to hockey,” she said. “That’s my dream.”
Brad Petrishen can be reached at brad.petrishen@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @BPetrishenTG.
Drug abuse comes in so many faces, it does not matter if you are rich or poor. It is a tough battle to fight, especially if you feel alone. How did this happen in such a loving family ? That does not matter either. The most important thing is that this young woman does have the support of a loving family, and with time my hope is that she finds peace and the strength to go on. Her children need a healthy mother. I pray she can find the sunshine in her life, so the darkness will go away. Bev.
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