Sammuel Jaggen

### Relatives

Amy Cruz (divorced wife); Caroline Jaggen (sister); Sammuel Jaggen Sr. (father); Michelle Jaggen (née Willis) (mother)

## Physical description

### Eye color

Brown

Sammuel Jaggen is a male survivor played by Dylan. He was accepted on (1/18/2017) and is currently **alive** and **active** on the server.

## Description

Sam's brown hair is cut in a short, conservative style, and is usually worn parted. His brown eyes often give the appearance of a distinct thousand-yard stare. His manner of dress is casual, typically a t-shirt sporting the logo of a variety of rock or punk bands, or a light jacket or hoodie. He never wears shorts publicly, always opting for jeans or sweatpants. He typically wears a black Nixon brand watch, and is never seen without a black bracelet, with several names and dates etched into it:

 KIA SANGIN, HELMAND 02/11/2009

The excess weight he carries is noticeable in his jowly features and slight paunch.

Though he wears prosthetic limbs beneath his clothing, Sammuel is bound to a wheelchair. His right leg has been completely amputated to the hip, his left from the knee down. The right side of his abdomen and torso are severely scarred.

He sports several tattoos. An Eagle, Globe and Anchor dominates the inside of his right bicep. A Ka-Bar is inked onto the outside of his left forearm, extending from the elbow to the wrist. Several lines of text adorn the right side of his ribs, though the script has been damaged beyond legibility by scarring.

## Personality

Though Sam is a shy and relatively soft spoken man, his attitude is typically laid back and easy going. He is easy to speak to, though maintains safe distance in conversation, particularly in regards to certain subjects regarding his disability or military service. His sense of humor, to those whom he allows it to show, is of a variety as dark as it comes.

Sammuel battles a myriad of mental illnesses, most of which are treated with prescription medications, although he spares few expenses in regards to self-medication through alcohol and marijuana. Though years of professional therapy and drug treatments have been mostly effective, he still suffers from intermittent nightmares and other manifestations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His depression and anxiety are relatively controlled, though they often bleed through into his day-to-day life.

He is comfortable with his disability and mental ailments to the point that he freely jokes about them among friends, but feels great shame and embarrassment in situations where he is hindered, and is reluctant to accept help of any kind.

## Biography

Born on a clear July day to firefighter and Vietnam war veteran Sammuel Jaggen Sr. and his wife Caroline, Sammuel Jaggen enjoyed a middle-class upbringing in Cherry Hills, a suburban neighborhood in western Roanoke, Virginia. His namesake father, a gruff but kind man, endowed a strong sense of patriotism and respect onto his young son from a very early age. An average student, Sam attended William Flemming high school and graduated with few plans for the future.

Content working a dead-end job at a landscaping company, to the disapproval of his father, Sam spent a few months of his first adult year doing little more than testing the limits of a fake I.D. and chasing the girls with similar aspirations. A close call nearly resulting in a DUI was the catalyst the young man needed to make a change. His own car a tangled mess of steel in a junkyard, his father drove him to the armed forces career center, just as the Jaggen patriarch would do two years later with Sam's sister, Caroline.

Sammuel Jaggen enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as an 0351 Infantry Assaultman in 2007. Later that year, following several months of training, he deployed to Iraq to meet his unit, who was halfway through a deployment. His time in Iraq went well, the Marines seeing little combat after the country stabilized from the year's surge of troops, in Fall. No Marines were injured or killed, most expressing boredom at the situation. The mortar attack warning sirens became no more alarming than the sunrise, him and his compatriots often joking. One Marine even went as far as to regularly run out of the concrete mortar bunkers wearing nothing but a catcher's mitt.

Sam returned to the United States in early Spring of 2008. He set to courting Amy Cruz, a high school interest with whom he'd been in contact while in Iraq. By the Fall of that year, as his unit geared up for a deployment to Afghanistan, they had rushed into marriage.

Within the first month of the 2009 deployment to Helmand province, a massive IED constructed from a mixture of discarded Soviet mortars and homemade explosives detonated underneath a MRAP traveling in convoy along an unimproved mountain road. The battered Marines whom they'd replaced had cautioned them to avoid using vehicles, advice that Lance Corporal Jaggen's leadership had disregarded. In fact, both him and his comrades entered the country with the same lighthearted complacency they'd nurtured in Iraq. The death of all four Marines aboard the armored vehicle served as a heavy handed reminder of the nature of their situation.

The remainder of his time in Afghanistan was rife with combat. Though no other Marines were killed, several were injured by gunfire and evacuated from the country. Combat was as regular as the mortar sirens, though no longer met with any jokes other than spat slurs and insults at the bodies of dead enemy combatants.

While on a routine foot-patrol, Sammuel Jaggan stepped on an anti-personnel mine known informally as a 'toe-popper'. The explosion, instantly incapacitating Sam, amputated both of his legs at the knee, leaving his right thigh a tattered, gory mess that would later be surgically removed to the hip. While his friends repelled of the ensuing ambush, a Navy Corpsman controlled the bleeding and signaled the Black Hawk helicopter that would transport Sam out of the line of fire.

He received lived-saving surgery in a U.S. Army Hospital in Germany, a teary-eyed Amy quitting her job and flying internationally to spend every moment by his side. After several months of recovery, and several more surgeries, he returned to Roanoke in 2010, released from service after being promoted post-injury to Corporal.

Sammuel Jaggen never returned from the war in spirit. Over time, his symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder worsened. Even as he attended therapy of the physical and psychological, more and more sleepless nights were spent staring absently out the window, standing guard against imaginary Mujahideen. His sleep was riddled with nightmares, one of which was so severe to trigger an intense psychotic episode that resulted in the battery of his wife in bed, believing her to be a Taliban fighter attempting to kidnap him from his cot. Though the charges were eventually dropped, his marriage was ruined. Amy, since readopting her maiden name, could not continue to emotionally support the broken man.

Several years passed, with Sammuel's symptoms bettering, but his behavior returning to the self-destructiveness of his youth. Suggesting a change of scenery, a sympathetic Sammuel Sr. suggested a move out of Roanoke. Jack Dorsey, an old Army buddy who was both a friend and mentor to Sammuel Sr. throughout his tours of duty, was the proprietor of a small-town gas station, and was willing to provide the disabled Sammuel Jr. with both a job, and a place to live.

Sammuel hesitantly accepted the offer, moving from Roanoke to West Point, Kentucky in the Summer of 2015. He fell in love with the slow pace of the rural city, and has resided there since, still employed at the same country store.