The teenage soldier returned home early.
In March 2025, two months before Isabella Gonzales graduated from Hebron High School in Carrollton, she enlisted in the U.S. Army. On July 20, 2025, the charismatic extrovert who loved to dance left her North Texas hometown for boot camp.
Recently, 19-year-old Pvt. Gonzales, who worked with surface-to-air weapons systems, was putting her skills to work at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.
The distance, as the crow flies, between Carrollton and Muwaffaq Salti is 7,200 miles. Gonzales was scheduled to return home for a visit in September. Now, for Gonzales, the distance between 19 and 20 years of age is never.
She came home Wednesday in a flag-draped casket.
On Monday, the one-year-anniversary of her departure for boot camp, the Pentagon identified Gonzales as one of two service members killed in an Iranian missile attack in Jordan. The other soldier was 25-year-old Tyler James Feehan, who was born and raised in Utah but living in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, when he enlisted.
A third service member service member killed in that attack has been identified as Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of New York.
Another soldier, 30-year-old Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton of Fayetteville, N.C., was killed over the weekend in Iraq during what the U.S. military said was a controlled explosion to destroy an attack drone.
Eighteen American soldiers have been killed in an unpopular war with Iran initiated by President Donald Trump and executed by his administration with hubris and incompetence.
The deaths of soldiers at war are always tragic, but even more so when the reasons for their sacrifice are neither clear nor grounded in moral authority.
Iran is an authoritarian state that commits atrocious human rights abuses against its own people, but it posed no imminent threat to the United States. This war has not led to the overthrow of the Iranian regime or the spreading of democracy.
Trump launched this war on Feb. 28 without congressional approval or public support, and it has been mired by shifting and dubious objectives and poor planning.
The Trump administration would point to decapitation of Iranian leadership, but we have struggled to see anything good that has come from this. Americans are paying more for gas, the world appears to be a more dangerous place, our troops are at greater risk, and the Iranian regime continues.
Trump said the war would be over in four to six weeks, but it continues, even as Trump insists it is close to ending.
On Tuesday, in an appearance before Senate lawmakers, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth struggled with his many boasts about a “historic military victory over Iran” and his request for an additional $67.1 billion in supplemental spending for the war.
After U.S. airstrikes targeted Iran’s infrastructure in June 2025 — one month before Gonzales left for boot camp — Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear capability had been obliterated.
