“He was always so proud to serve,” Dixon resident Carla Hill said of her son, Ryan.

A veteran of the U.S. Army, Ryan, who was a combat medic master sergreant, died in August 2024 after a long battle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ryan Hill first made the commitment to join the military when he was 16, his dad, Roger Hill, told Shaw Local.

It was 2001, and Ryan was a junior attending Newman Central Catholic High School in Sterling.

“He immediately knew that he was going to join the military as soon as he could” after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened that year, Carla said.

So he did. One day, Ryan came home and told his parents that he’d signed up and took his oath, she said.

Carla recalled Ryan telling her, “We’re going to go back tomorrow, and you can hear me take the oath, but I had to do this myself.”

Although Ryan liked learning – particularly enjoying history – he didn’t love school. He liked learning the military way, Carla said.

Ryan joined the Dixon American Legion “like, the day after he joined the military,” and would go on to join the local Legion chapter wherever he was residing, Carla said.

“He liked that camaraderie with the older guys and learning from them,” Carla said.

About two years after enlisting, Ryan was stationed at Fort Hood, an Army base in Texas. His first deployment, which would last 15 months, was a combat tour in Iraq during the Iraq War.

After almost a year in Iraq, Carla recalled, Ryan got a break, and the family “took him away for a week … to rest and give him a change of scenery."

“It was hard. I just remember it was hard on him, what he saw,” Carla said.

During that first deployment, Ryan’s best friend in the military died, and “[Ryan] always said, ‘If I would have been there, I could have saved him,’” Roger said.

Ryan got a bracelet engraved with his friend’s name. He wore it so often that he had to order a second one because “he could hardly read it anymore,” Roger said.

Not long after the first 15-month deployment, Ryan was again sent to Iraq.

Within three years, he had been gone two years and three months, Carla said.

“He felt at times like he was helping,” and the part he enjoyed the most was the school missions. His unit would bring them supplies and spend time with the children, Carla said.

As a combat medic, his unit would treat injured, elderly and sick civilians “to prepare them enough to helicopter them out” and “back to a hospital,” she said.

“It was just a war-torn country [and lacked] what we think is pretty basic care,” Carla said. “[People would come to them] in a wheelbarrow. They’d leave your station in a proper wheelchair.

“I can remember one of the first times we asked him, ‘What do you want? We want to send you something – cookies, whatever.’ And he said, ‘I need some tampons,’” Carla said.

Ryan told his family that it was the best way to stop a bleeding wound in the field.

Since his unit would move around, the military would drop pamphlets at the new location ahead of time so that those needing treatment would know where to go.

“Ryan was always nervous about it,” Carla said. “He said, ‘This is so stupid because … once the Iraqis would get a hold of it,’ they’d plan an attack."

At each location, the unit would park in a circle “so that they could have a defense,” she said.

“That weapon part of his job was always one that I think led to his PTSD, because he did have to shoot somebody – at least one that we know of,” Carla said.

That led to hundreds of nightmares for Ryan.

“I think he quit counting after 500 nights in a row of the same nightmare,” Roger said.

“It just goes against your brain to have to do something like that,” Carla added. “We’re brought up that we never kill someone. He just had to fire his weapon, and I just think he never could get over it.”

After his deployment in Afghanistan, Ryan moved to a medical recruiting role at an Army post in Minnesota, speaking at colleges and high schools about his career.

“He really enjoyed talking to all the young people,” Carla said.

Next, he moved to Fort Campbell on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, where he worked in a medical clinic.

“That’s where he started to really succumb to trying to drown the loss of that friend and all those things,” Rogers said.

After that, he left the full-time Army and went to the full-time U.S. Army Reserve in Fort Sheridan north of Chicago. He was a combat medic ranked first sergeant and specialized in operations planning for the 330th Medical Brigade, Headquarters and Headquarters Company.

There, Ryan and some other full-time reservists organized two missions that brought a team of medical professionals in all kinds of specialties, including veterinarians, to Kodiak Island in Alaska.

“Kodiak was so expensive for people to fly to Anchorage to get medical care,” Carla said. “We were so excited because we actually were helping our own people.”

Each mission lasted 30 days, and they would see maybe 3,000 patients.

“It was crazy the amount of people they would see,” Carla said.

They also treated all the dogs, giving thousands of rabies shots.

On one of those missions, Roger recalled a story about how one of the medics who was driving “hit a pothole and blew a tire out.”

“[They] said, ‘Oh, man, who do I call?’ And [he] goes, ‘I gotta call Sgt. Hill. … He’ll take care of me,’” Roger said.

Ryan likely answered the call and said his famous words: “Too easy!”

That was always Ryan’s response anytime someone asked for his help, Roger said.

“It always seemed to be more about other people than himself,” Roger said.

Another story Roger recalled happened right before Ryan’s death, when he was going to a treatment center.

“Ryan told me he had bought two packs of cigarettes. They were in his truck, and he needed to get them to this guy,” Roger said.

After he died, the family met a group of people from the center.

“They all said, ‘Oh, Ryan did so much for me,’” Roger said. “There was one guy that was standing in the back, and I said, ‘I think I know a story about you.’ I just guessed.”

It turned out that he guessed right.

Roger told the man, “Ryan, in his death, he still has two packs of Camel cigarettes for you in his truck, and I’ll make sure you get them.”

“Everybody who met Ryan loved him,” Carla said.

“He touched the lives of a lot of people,” Roger said. “The PTSD … he just couldn’t get rid of it."

“He was an alcoholic, but he had PTSD. So, was he an alcoholic and had PTSD? Or did his PTSD force him into the alcoholism? I never connected those dots until his death, really,” Carla said.

He “basically was in therapy and treatment the whole last year of his life. I mean, he’d get out, he’d be right back in. It just had a grip on him,” Carla said.

Roger said Ryan had a quote that he tried to live by: “Addiction is giving up everything for one thing. Recovery is giving up one thing for everything.”

He said Ryan got it on a sticker, but he never got to put it on anything.

“He just couldn’t shake it, and we couldn’t find the right place for him,” Roger said.

“As parents, you never get over this, but he did so much good in the world in his short life,” Carla said.

At the time of his death, Ryan was ranked first sergeant, and the Army posthumously promoted him to master sergeant.

In Ryan’s honor, the family has a flagpole in front of its house that Ryan always put up wherever he lived, Roger said.

Ryan is buried in Rock Island National Cemetery. Engraved on his headstone are his famous words: “Too easy!”