Stargate

James Fryatt

• Name: James Fryatt Gender: Male Age: 40 Species: Human (Tau'ri) Rank/Position: Technical Sergeant / Public Affairs Specialist (Photographer) Specialty: Survival in Desert Environments

• Biography

  James Fryatt was born in Barre, Vermont. As a child, he took a particular interest in wandering through the woods outside his house. He also developed a significant interest in both photography and paleontology. He went to high school at Spaulding High School and graduated from the Community College of Vermont with an Associate of Science major in Environmental Science. Despite an attempt to get a university-level education, neither he nor his sole surviving father could afford the expense, so he enlisted in the United States Air Force, expecting a temporary assignment to help him pay tuition.
  
  When the Gulf War broke out, he was sent to Iraq to help document the operation. Some of his photographs ended up used by various news networks nationwide, though he'd been limited in what he could supply. Several of his photographs were confiscated by the military due ostensibly to their "graphic content", though they documented the infamous Highway of Death incident which James witnessed the aftermath of from helicopter. Earlier, he'd also been the sole survivor of a helicopter crash near Basra, where a group of rebels provided medical care two days before the uprising. The photos he took didn't survive after Basra was retaken by the Republican Guard.
  
  James spent nearly a month in an Iraqi prison, where a Republican Guard named Sayid Jarrah tortured him for information on U.S. assistance to the rebels. Although U.S. forces stormed the camp, several prisoners, including James, were taken deeper into enemy lines by their captors. Eventually, he escaped and hid out in the desert for three weeks before finding his way back to a U.S. military camp. When he returned home in 1992, he nearly chose not to renew his contract with the Air Force until a chance encounter. He had moved to New York City to live with his mother after an argument with his father, and she sent him to see a psychiatrist named Kate Heightmeyer. When she learned of his circumstances, Kate contacted her predecessor, Joaquin Morales, who'd been treating another war photographer for similar reasons. Through him, James met Mark Walsh and ultimately decided to return to duty with Mark's encouragment.
  
  Rather than immediately return to the field, however, James requested to stay in the United States for another year or two to recover from his experience. During that time, he met and fell in love with Sharon Darby, a microbiologist who worked in Washington, D.C. for the Department of Energy. They were married a year later, and Sharon had time to give birth to their first daughter, Nicole Fryatt, before James ended up traveling to Somalia to give a firsthand account of Operation Restore Hope. He traveled with a United Nations peacekeeper force and took photographs of U.N. humanitarian workers providing food and other crucial supplies to the people. During this mission, James met General Maurice Vidrine, who was impressed with his work.
  
  Following UNOSOM's departure in March 1995, James returned home for a year and had a second child with Sharon, this time a son they named Louis. His wife's brother, Jason, attacked him outside their home later that year and beat him with a metal bat. James would have been killed had Sharon not stopped Jason to tell him she'd called the police. Unfortunately, Jason escaped and evaded a prison sentence, so James took his family and moved further west to settle down in Denver, Colorado. In September, the Air Force sent him back to Iraq despite his fear of leaving his family behind. Sharon convinced him to go rather than resign. Now that she was no longer working for the Department of Energy, his job in the military was all that could sustain them.
  
  During his tenure documenting the Kurdish Civil War, James helped in the evacuation of the Iraqi National Congress personnel out of northern Iraq. Back home, Sharon received a new job offer to work at Immunitech Research for Zeditron Industries. When James returned home, he was recommended to Stargate Command by General Vidrine. Initially, General George Hammond assigned him to help guard the gate room. Out of the group, he was the one responsible for calling in anything suspicious. When the stargate started to activate, he rushed to the phone and called for backup just before a wormhole was established [OOC: This is a break from canon. In the episode, he doesn't call for backup until it's too late]. Afterward, he hid behind a container and watched in fear as his comrades were gunned down around him.
  
  When General Hammond put together the nine SG-teams who would go through the gate, he assigned James to SG-8. He felt that Caroline, despite her hostility toward James, could eventually warm up to him. At the same time, James would get a chance to prove himself and document their experiences.