Jerry Jaax

Jerry Jaax’s defining crisis is both intimate and operational: as he struggles with the unsolved murder of his brother, he is appointed to lead an Army response to Ebola Reston in a Virginia monkey facility. A veterinarian experienced with animals but not with combat or field biological suits, he becomes responsible for a young, untested team working in a building where a monkey escape or a breach in procedure could expose people beyond its walls.

Identity and Background

Jaax is a colonel and chief of the veterinary division at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. His expertise is practical and specific: he understands monkeys and knows that trained animal-care workers will be essential in a dangerous operation. Yet he has never worn a Racal suit and has never been in combat. The mismatch between his authority and his experience is central to his role at Reston: he must command people through a hazard whose human consequences are not yet clear, while learning the conditions of the work as he goes.

He and his younger brother, John Jaax, had grown up on a Kansas farm and attended Kansas State. Both were tall, prematurely gray, sharp-eyed men with similar features and voices; John’s mustache was the most visible difference. John had built a life in Kansas City as a banker and manufacturing-company partner. The closeness between the brothers makes his violent death more than a family tragedy in the narrative: it becomes an unresolved wound that follows Jerry into the crisis at work.

Grief and Family Life

On October 4, 1989, John’s wife found him murdered in his office at the factory. The investigator considered John’s business partner, John Weaver, but Weaver had an alibi, physical evidence was scarce, and the case remained unsolved. Jerry’s response was a paralysis of grief. He called the Kansas City investigator nearly every day through October and November, without learning who had killed his brother or why.

The murder also brought Jerry close to taking revenge himself. He considered getting a gun and going to Kansas City to kill John’s partner, then checked that impulse against the possibility that Weaver was innocent and against the consequences for his own children. The thought reveals how grief narrowed his choices without determining them: he could imagine violence, but he could also recognize that it might compound the loss with another irreversible harm.

Nancy Jaax, his wife and fellow colonel, saw how deeply the murder had affected him. He had described his life as irreparably changed and could not reconcile the killing with his belief that John had no enemy. When Nancy returned from work with confidential news that Ebola virus had appeared in a Virginia monkey colony, she found Jerry staring out at darkness and thinking about his brother. On the drive home she told him she would probably visit the monkey facility the next day to examine tissue for signs of Ebola. The new emergency did not replace his grief; it entered a household already strained by it. At home, the couple changed out of uniform, warmed Nancy’s homemade stew, and managed the ordinary care of their children, Jason and Jaime, before discussing the monkey house. Jerry was surprised by the turn in Nancy’s work and impressed by her, though the account does not show him voicing his worry.

Appointment and Preparation

C. J. Peters chose Jerry to lead the military mission into the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. The immediate plan was to deal with one room of monkeys first and assess how the operation went and whether the virus appeared to be spreading. Jerry and Gene Johnson began organizing the effort around the stated first priority: protecting the human population. Peters asked Jerry to assemble soldiers and civilian employees, with space suits ready to deploy within twenty-four hours.

The transfer of the monkey house to the Army required a decision before the legal details were fully settled. Dan Dalgard sought written assurance that the Army would accept responsibility for liabilities arising after the handover; Peters rejected that proposal as an obstacle to speed. Dalgard agreed to send a simple transfer letter, which Peters and General Philip Russell reviewed, signed, and returned. With the building in Army hands, Jerry faced a much larger operation and a force whose members had not been tested in such conditions.

He commanded the 91-Tangos, the Army’s animal-care technicians, many of them young privates with little or no experience in space suits. The civilian specialists brought different experience, including daily work in heavy Level 4 suits. Jerry gathered the soldiers and civilians, explained that they might handle large quantities of blood and sharp instruments, and asked for volunteers rather than pretending the assignment could be compelled. When no one withdrew, he selected the team. He excluded a pregnant sergeant because of the particular danger the disease posed to pregnant women. This was command expressed not only through assignment but through attention to who should not be sent into the hazard.

Inside the Monkey House

Before the operation, Gene Johnson wrote a detailed procedure script, imagining the movement of hands, instruments, and samples around an infected animal. Jerry left home at four in the morning, met Johnson at the loading dock, and memorized the plan. He organized personnel into buddy pairs and fixed the sequence in which they would enter. The convoy traveled south among ordinary commuter traffic, with a white ambulance, a refrigerator truck, vans, and civilian vehicles. At the building, the team entered through a rear door and dressed inside, a decision intended to keep television crews from filming the suits.

Jerry went in first with Sergeant Thomas Amen. In the animal rooms, the disorder showed how abruptly the workers had left: monkey biscuits and papers lay scattered, chairs were overturned, and the cages had not been cleaned. In one room, roughly seventy monkeys fixed their attention on the two suited men. Jerry and Amen fed the animals and watched for signs of illness. The work required him to hold two responsibilities together: the monkeys were part of a dangerous outbreak, but they were also hungry animals facing death. He did not want them to suffer unnecessarily while the team prepared to euthanize them.

As the larger response proceeded, Jerry directed repeated suit checks and rest breaks, warning that fatigue could make people careless. He divided the operation into teams for bleeding, euthanasia, and necropsy, and established a work area beside the offices, where the shower drain could be used to wash away blood and objects could be rinsed with bleach. The process became an assembly line: animals were anesthetized, sampled, euthanized, examined, and placed in biohazard bags. The procedure was hazardous not only because of the virus but because it depended on many people passing animals and equipment through a confined space without losing control of their movements.

That control was tested when a monkey escaped from its cage in Room C. The recollections differ on whether it got out of the room; what is clear is that the animal ran loose, the other monkeys became agitated, and it began bleeding, leaving blood across the room. Jerry rejected shooting it because a bullet could strike a cage or wall and ricochet. At the end of the operation, he spent two or three hours pursuing the animal with a net. It eventually became trapped behind a cage, where Amen administered anesthetic to its exposed tail. The monkey was then handled with the others. The episode distills the pressure of Jerry’s role: a single frightened animal could turn a controlled procedure into a new exposure risk, and the solution had to protect the team without escalating that risk.

Completion and Narrative Role

At four o’clock on December 7, the last monkey was killed and bagged, and the team began decontamination. A final search uncovered frozen monkeys in a chest freezer, including animals from Room F, the outbreak’s original hot spot. The discovery extended the work beyond the scheduled sequence: the frozen bodies and sedative vials also had to be treated as potentially contaminated material. The team ultimately collected 3,500 clinical samples. The operation ended not with a clean sense of victory but with exhausted workers leaving the building after days of fear and repetitive, exacting labor.

The response continued through decontamination. The team scrubbed the interior with bleach, sealed doors, windows, and vents, and used thirty-nine electric frying pans to release formaldehyde gas inside the airtight building. After three days, the decontamination team collected samples and found that the test organism had been killed. The account describes the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit as, for a short time, the only building in the world where nothing lived. This outcome gives material form to the purpose Jerry had been assigned: not to solve the virus’s origin or settle every uncertainty about its danger, but to bring a potentially spreading emergency to a controlled end.

Jerry’s trajectory is shaped by two kinds of uncertainty that cannot be resolved on the same terms. John’s killer remains unknown, leaving grief without an answer; at Reston, the team must act before it knows whether the virus can infect people through the air. When he learns that an ill animal caretaker had not been bitten or cut, the possibility of airborne transmission intensifies the danger for him and his team. His contribution is not certainty but disciplined action under uncertainty: selecting personnel, enforcing procedure, weighing risk, and staying with the work through the escape, the last animal, and the cleanup. His private bereavement does not disappear, but the crisis gives him an immediate responsibility that his grief cannot suspend.