Army Staff Sgt. Jason M. Evey, 29, Stockton; Killed by Roadside Bomb

In his youth, Jason M. Evey spent hours in the woods behind his parents’ house in Oregon tracking deer, not to kill them, but to discover where they slept.

The solitary missions served him well when he became an Army cavalry scout and commanded a team charged with going ahead of the troops to conduct reconnaissance and report back on enemy activity, terrain and other conditions.

“He once taught me a technique he himself developed to walk across dried leaves and twigs without making a sound,” Darren Barnes, who trained with Evey at Ft. Hood, Texas, wrote in a recent e-mail to Evey’s father. “He was a constant inspiration to me and every other soldier in the troop.”

A staff sergeant, Evey was on patrol in Baghdad on July 16 when a roadside bomb exploded near his Bradley fighting vehicle, killing him and his gunner.

Evey, 29, was assigned to the 1st Squadron, 10th Calvary Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team at Ft. Hood.

In addition to his parents, John and Beate Evey of San Diego, he is survived by his ex-wife and a 9-year-old stepson.

His parents held a ceremony for him at the spring-fed source of Oregon’s Clear Lake in the Cascade Mountains on July 30 and asked loved ones to place a program featuring his picture and a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye in a place of natural beauty in his memory. A second ceremony will be held later this month at Ft. Hood.

Evey was reared in Corvallis, Ore., and moved to Stockton in 1996 after his father took a position at the University of the Pacific and lived there until he enlisted in 2000.

“Jason was one who was very active; he was always finding things, searching for things and doing things,” said his father, now the assistant director for development at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “He didn’t really stand still.”

With his penchant for reciting lines from movies, Evey’s laid-back, inclusive style appealed to his classmates and bound him and four other boys into a close-knit group that spent much of its junior high and high school years together.

On the weekends, they could often be found cruising Corvallis in Evey’s 1984 Volvo station wagon. Just before he graduated from Corvallis High School in 1995, Evey got an apartment in town and spent the summer entertaining friends at parties where some met their future spouses.

“There’s a whole clique of people in Corvallis now that all I would have to say is ‘the apartment,’ and they would know what I was talking about,” said John Ferguson, who met Evey when he was 11. “It was the best summer of my life.”

As he got older, Evey spent time taking photographs, designing artwork on his computer and writing. “Come with me into the wild,” begins a poem titled “The Wild” that he composed in 1999 while living in Stockton. “Away from this damn city that pains us so much. At night, far from this place of artificial light, screams, sirens and shots.”

Evey drew tattoos, took pictures of soldiers and uploaded them into design software, and sent home haunting images from Iraq, including one of two boys leaning on a bicycle, smiling broadly, with a U.S. soldier in the background.

Evey, whose grandfathers both served in World War II, talked about joining the Army while he was in high school. He was drawn by the excitement, action and pride, fellow soldiers said.

He often befriended new recruits, his enthusiasm for the Army overcoming their reticence about becoming a scout, a position in which soldiers “went looking for trouble, as opposed to stumbling on it,” said Barnes, his friend who retired from the military last year.

Instead of being sent to Iraq with his men in 2003, Evey was deployed to Korea. When he returned to the U.S., he left the Army for six months to live in Canada, but then signed up in early 2005 for another tour.

He left for Iraq in November and was stationed at Hilla, south of Baghdad, where his unit trained Iraqi soldiers. In March, his unit was transferred to Baghdad, from which he sent missives saying the camp often took mortar fire.

His parents always left their computer on, hoping to hear him “knocking” by e-mail in the early morning or evening. They would chat by instant messaging, or using a webcam, sometimes for up to an hour.

“My wife had a wonderful experience two or three days before he died. He and his driver were sitting next to each other in an Internet cafe with their cameras attached,” his father said. “They were chatting with us and their friends and popping Doritos in their mouths and laughing with one another.”

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War casualties

Total U.S. deaths* as of Friday:

In and around Iraq: 2,585

* In and around Afghanistan: 263

* Other locations: 56

Source: Department of Defense* Includes military and Department of Defense-employed civilian personnel killed in action and in nonhostile circumstances