The Things They Cannot Say (7 page)

According to the reports, agents from the NCIS spoke with Wold's psychiatrist and confirmed that he had been prescribed the following medications: fluoxetine (better known by its brand name Prozac, used to treat depression), quetiapine tablets (brand name Seroquel, an antipsychotic, often used to treat schizophrenia or in conjunction with other drugs to treat depression), clonidine (brand names Catapres, Kapvay, and Nexiclon, a high blood pressure medication), divalproex (brand name Depakote, used to treat mania, depression and epileptic seizures and approved for migraines), and finally clonazepam (brand name Klonopin, a type of drug known as a benzodiazepine, which can decrease abnormal electrical activity in the brain that can lead to seizures or panic attacks).

After his death, when the agents inspected the room they found bottles for the medications Wold had been prescribed, but also something else.

From county medical examiner's investigative report, submitted December 19, 2006:

They also located a small plastic baggie with several pills inside. The baggie was labeled Seroquel but the pills were later properly identified as methadone. Agents counted the medications and spoke with the decedent's psychiatrist. The doctor confirmed the medications that were prescribed included Prozac, Seroquel, Clonidine, Divalproex, and Klonopin. He confirmed that based on the medications remaining in the bottles found in the room, it appeared the decedent had been using them as prescribed but added that he had not been prescribed methadone and he was probably obtaining them from an outside source. Agents found no signs of a struggle, evidence of foul play, suicide notes, or illicit drugs in the room.

Seven days after Wold's death, an NCIS agent telephoned the medical examiner's office to provide this additional information, which was included in the investigative report.

From county medical examiner's investigative report, submitted December 19, 2006:

During interviews with the decedent's friends, Nathaniel Leoncio and Joshua Frey, they learned that following the tattoos, the decedent reportedly reached into his pocket and offered his friends a pill to help with the soreness. The friends declined and they noted that the decedent took at least one pill before lying down. Before they left the room, they noticed that the pill had “begun to kick in” and they saw him place tobacco into his mouth and lay down. When they returned the following morning the decedent was in the same position he was in when they left his room the previous night.

In his opinion concerning the cause of death, the San Diego County deputy medical examiner wrote the following.

Autopsy Report, November 11, 2006; 0911 Hours

Toxicological studies were positive for methadone (0.32 mg/L), fluoxetine (0.20 mg/L), norfluoxetine (0.33 mg/L), 7-aminoclonazepam (0.07 mg/L), and nordiazepam (trace). The concentration of methadone in his blood is within a range that has been associated with death; and while the other medicines are in low or therapeutic ranges, they can have similar, additive sedating effects, especially in combination with the methadone.

Based on these findings and the history and circumstances of the death as currently known, the cause of death is best listed as “methadone, clonazepam, diazepam, and fluoxetine toxicity” and the manner of death as “accident.”

Steven C. Campman, MD, Deputy Medical Examiner

William Christopher Wold, in the opinion of the deputy medical examiner, had been supplementing his prescription medication drug regimen with methadone, a drug best known for treating heroin and other opiate addicts by preventing withdrawal symptoms, reducing the cravings, but not providing the euphoric rush associated with heroin use. But the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center says abuse of methadone is on the upswing, especially by heroin and OxyContin users, because of methadone's increasing availability. Because of its effects on the body, which can include slowed breathing and irregular heartbeat, methadone overdoses can be extremely dangerous, leading to “respiratory depression, decreases in heart rate and blood pressure, coma and death.”

In Wold's case, as the deputy medical examiner wrote, his prescription drugs were at a therapeutic level in his body but may have provided an additional sedative effect on him, possibly, as his friend noted, resulting in a forgetfulness of at least what prescription medications he had already taken and presumably leading to a similar lack of awareness about the number of doses of methadone he was taking from his plastic baggy.

Regardless, Sandi Wold, like any mother would, says she has many unanswered questions about her son's death. But as a professional private investigator herself, she was willing to push it more than most. She wondered about things, like why she received the insurance money settlement on Wold's death even before she received his body. Was it an effort to keep her from poking around too much? More sinister, though, she claims that after making calls inquiring into his death she received some anonymous telephone threats herself, but when prompted refused to disclose their nature or reveal any other details.

When I found her initially, it was through an image search for Wold on the Internet. His picture was on a car-racing site that Sandi and her husband John hosted. She got into auto racing as a hobby after a life-changing medical diagnosis.

“Back in 1991, I was diagnosed with MS [multiple sclerosis],” Sandi tells me over the telephone. “I woke up one morning with everything on the left side of my body completely paralyzed. I had red flags like double vision and numbness in my legs, which I had ignored. They did an MRI and diagnosed me with MS. The neurologist said, ‘You're not going to walk again.' ”

That was all the challenge she needed. She pushed herself to overcome the initial onset of the disease symptoms and not only started walking again but decided she wanted to start racing cars as well, which she now does, with John.

“Bill [William] loved the fact I was racing,” she says, and while he wanted to join her in the hobby after coming back from Iraq, she said it was just impossible for him; he was unable to keep his own life, let alone a race car, on track. Sandi's husband John said they used some of William's life insurance money to invest in Sandi's GT race car.

“I learned a lot from that young man in his short years,” she tells me in an e-mail.

But what seems impossible to her is that her son could survive some of the harshest combat since the Vietnam War and yet not survive his own homecoming and transition to civilian life. While he did his duty for the corps, both protecting the president personally and protecting his nation overseas, she feels the corps did not protect him in the end. This is a belief echoed by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay and others who work with returning veterans. “When you put a gun in some kid's hands and send him off to war,” he told me during an interview, “you incur an infinite debt to him for what he has done to his soul.”

Despite her anger with the Marines, Sandi Wold knew her son loved the camaraderie of the corps, but she also understood the internal conflict it had caused him. Still, she had him buried in his dress blues, knowing that underneath them, on the right side of his chest, her son bore another tattoo, this one of praying hands with a banner reading, “Only God Can Judge.”

Staff Sergeant Mikeal Auton, U.S. Army

1st Battalion, 4th Infantry

The War in Iraq (2004 and 2006)

Chapter 2: Pulling the Trigger

When I got here I found out that pulling the trigger wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. All except the first one.

M
ikeal Auton was a twenty-one-year-old Army specialist who had already killed twelve men in combat when I first met him in Iraq in the spring of 2004. He was camped with his unit, an element of the 1st Armored Division, in the searing heat and the yellow, powdery sands outside the Shiite holy city of Karbala. It was only May, but members of his 3rd Platoon extended tarps and camouflage netting from their Bradleys (armored personnel carriers) and Abrams A1 tanks to create enough shade to keep from frying in their boots. But circumstances were miserable for these soldiers for reasons far worse than the heat. After a yearlong tour in Iraq and on the verge of going home, the 1st Armored Division had been extended in country for another three months. Twin uprisings of Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Shiite militiamen in Karbala and Najaf triggered a tsunami of instability that threatened to turn the entire coalition occupation into chaos. Because of their experience and firepower, the 1st Armored was ordered south to take on Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. The fighting had been frequent and bloody, with masses of poorly trained Shiite militiamen flooding the streets with nothing much going for them tactically but their anger. They would fire what American and British troops scathingly referred to as the “Iraqi overhand,” an AK-47 held high and purged on full auto and just as likely to slip from their grips and tag their own guys who were unlucky enough to be in front of them when they started shooting. But many more were cut down in battles with the American troops. Some soldiers told me they were disturbed by the sheer numbers of men they could kill during a battle, mowing them down with intersecting fields of fire (troops firing from right and left flanks across a center line), as if they were nothing more than zombies in a B-movie.

During their downtime, the 3rd Platoon's soldiers did what all soldiers do: cleaned their weapons, played cards and bullshitted with each other. I witnessed the taunting and merciless teasing, but also moments of clear-eyed introspection that made the soldiers, once again, seem like the vulnerable and innocent high school seniors they had mostly been just a year or two ago. But then, as I wrote in an online article for MSNBC.com at the time, they also did things like this:

Nearby one soldier passes a couple of American flag patches to another. In between the bars on the patch are the words, handwritten in ink: Dirty for Dirty. They are calling cards to put on the bodies of dead enemies, a non-sanctioned post-mortem psych-out. Something to let the Muktada al-Sader's militia know who they are and what they are up against. The same soldiers tell me about a recent fight they were in in which a Shiite militiaman popped into an alleyway and began firing his AK-47 at a tank. “You could see the turret swivel around, train its 50 [caliber machine gun] on the guy and fire. It blasted a huge hole right through his middle.” He shows dinner plate size circumference with his hands.

Auton, I noticed, had a small chain attached to a belt loop on the front of his BDUs (battle dress uniform), which dangled into one of his pockets. When I asked him to show me what was tethered on the other end he lifted the chain from his pocket and retrieved a tiny book, which he flipped open and thumbed from right to left. Its pages were covered with Arabic script, a miniature Koran. Auton said it had been a gift given to him by his Turkish girlfriend, whom he met while stationed in Germany.

While there was a certain irony to a Christian American soldier carrying a Koran into battle against Muslim enemies, I found it more interesting that Auton simply ignored the grief that other soldiers gave him for having it. He carried himself with the rare confidence of someone who didn't have to sell you anything, least of all his reasons for doing something. While he was like so many other troops who carried some special token into battle, Auton's choice of lucky charm was my first clue that he was not just your average grunt. This was a soldier, I believed, who would answer my most difficult questions, such as the one I asked him next: How did he feel about all the killing he had done?

“When I got here I found out that pulling the trigger wasn't as hard as I thought it would be,” Auton said from the back of the Bradley where we sat talking, with the troop hatch open. “All except the first one. It was ‘Wow, I just killed a man,' ” he said. “You start thinking he coulda been a guy just protecting his family. But then you think, ‘Okay, he's running around out here with an AK-47 shooting at us,' then you just get over it. Move on.”

Auton did move on but he never forgot the details of his first kill. It was in a Sunni section of Baghdad known as al-Adhamiyah. Auton's platoon was part of a QRF, or Quick Reaction Force, which stands ready to respond when another unit is attacked or needs help.

The platoon was ordered on a mission one night and rolled out of their base with tanks and Bradleys. They didn't have to wait long for enemy contact. Almost as soon as they pushed into the neighborhood they were hit with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire. Most Bradleys are configured with three crew, a vehicle commander, driver and gunner, and carry six or seven additional troops crammed in a small hold in the rear. While the hammer of automatic rifle fire against the metal can make the troops feel like they're inside a steel drum that's being pounded on both sides, a rocket-propelled grenade round is much worse. It can be roughly equivalent to the explosive depth charges used against a submarine, whose concussion can send shock waves that leave both ears and bodies ringing.

After maneuvering to a position where the Bradley's hatch could be lowered and the soldiers dismounted, Auton and members of his fireteam set up fighting positions using buildings and alleyways for cover. Once the shooting started, Auton says, the more restrictive rules of engagement went out the window; anything on the street was considered a fair target.

“I was set up on a corner with my squad leader and we had a guy headed in our direction who had his hands in his pockets,” says Auton.

While they couldn't tell if he was carrying a weapon or not, the squad leader gave Auton the order to shoot him. Auton peered through the optical scope on his M4 rifle, lined up the reticle crosshairs on the man's head, then gently squeezed the trigger. The bullet dropped slightly over the hundreds of feet of distance, but so did Auton's target.

“I shot him in the throat at about two hundred to two hundred and forty meters. He fell to his knees, gasping for air.”

Auton and the squad leader moved in closer to inspect. The guy was still alive but hunched over. But Auton said they still weren't sure what he had in his pockets.

“What do you want me to do?” Auton asked his squad leader. The squad leader hesitated for a few seconds.

The choice to complete the unfinished process of taking a life in war leads directly to consequences unknown. Some would say it carries twice the moral weight by offering the soldier another chance to reconsider the delivery of a mortal blow. But which decision will be easier for the soldier to live with, confirmation of the original intent to kill, or watching an enemy suffer by allowing him to continue to live or die without intervention?

This is perhaps the most poignant dilemma in Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel of World War I
All Quiet on the Western Front
, in which German soldier Paul stabs a French soldier who has stumbled into his trench, but instead of dying immediately the man's agony is both intimate and prolonged. Paul nearly goes mad watching him suffer from just a few feet away: “These hours . . . The gurgling starts again—but how slowly a man dies! For this I know—he cannot be saved. Indeed, I have tried to tell myself that he will be, but at noon this pretence breaks down and melts before his groans. If only I had not lost my revolver crawling about, I would shoot him. Stab him I cannot.”

Here, on this street in Iraq, for Auton and his squad leader, the questions had real consequences. Had the man been subdued? Was he no longer a threat or did he still conceal some unseen harm? The choice they would make would have a lifetime impact on them and would have to be justified on legal as well as personal and moral grounds.

The squad leader, believing the Iraqi could still be a threat, said, “Finish it.” Auton raised his rifle to the man a second time.

“I fired two rounds in his ear at two feet away.” His brains splattered across the street and blood seeped out in a large, dark crimson pool. When they pulled the now-dead man's hands from underneath him and checked his pockets, Auton said they found a little black fragmentation grenade with the pin still in place. Auton said he and his squad set up on another corner and repeated the procedure several more times that night. When someone would run through the streets, his squad leader would spot him with the narrow beam of his SureFire flashlight and Auton would take the shot.

“I wasn't there to care,” Auton said without any affection of false bravado. To him, it was a matter of ultimate practicality. “You don't hold on to it. There's a time for remorse, there's a time to think about what happened. But it wasn't that moment. You have to just be thankful it wasn't you.”

I track Auton down by e-mail six years later. He's still with the same unit based in Germany, but now leading a platoon as a staff sergeant rather than a member of a squad. He has done well by the Army and he feels they've done the same by him. And despite another deployment to Iraq, two years after we first met in Karbala, his attitude has changed little. He plans on being a “lifer,” making the Army his career. He broke up with his Turkish girlfriend after his deployment ended but tells me in an e-mail from Germany that he still carries his lucky charm.

“I do still have the small Koran and will keep it until the day I die. My last deployment I had the Koran with me as well, even though her and I had been split up for over two years. I will carry it again when I go to Afghanistan in the near future.”

Auton's perspective on killing hasn't changed much either, despite the fact that he's now an older, experienced leader. “I must say that with my time deployed I feel outstanding for every life that I have taken,” he says in an e-mail. “I know now that those men that I personally killed would have killed me or my buddy to the left or right at any chance they could have gotten. I am glad I am the one who could take their life. I feel as if I saved many lives by doing so. I would do it all a million times over if I had to or need to for my fellow Soldiers and country!!”

While this response might seem overly gung-ho or even callous for those who haven't shared his experiences, during my time with him Mikeal Auton convinced me that he's a reasonable, polite and well-adjusted individual. But unlike many of his fellow soldiers struggling with their experiences of killing and seeing others killed, he, at least at for now, seems unfazed by the deadly business in which he has been employed for the last third of his life.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and all other manner of social scientists have struggled with the idea of killing and how we live with ourselves in the aftermath of having taken the lives of others. The psychological concept of the “shadow self” looms large here. The idea was first advanced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who wrote in his study
Psychology and Religion: West and East
, “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

It's a Western variation on the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, where opposite forces, light and dark, masculine and feminine, coexist and are interdependent on each other. But unlike yin and yang, where these opposites are not necessarily distinctions between good and evil, Jung believed the shadow was a receptacle for human darkness, but also a place of creativity. Many scholars of war have interpreted the shadow as the best way to explain the human capacity for killing and our response to it.

In
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
, the philosopher and World War II combat veteran J. Glenn Gray wrote, “Becoming a soldier was like escaping from one's own shadow. To commit deeds of violence without the usual consequences that society visits upon the violent seemed at first a bit unnatural but for many not unpleasant. All too quickly it could become a habit.”

For a rare few, the shadow is the dominant or conscious, rather than subconscious, force in life. They're commonly referred to as sociopaths or psychopaths. According to Dr. Martha Stout in her book
The Sociopath Next Door
, the 4 percent of the American population in this category lacks any trait of empathy or remorse even when it comes to killing other people. Though there are no clear statistics on the number of sociopaths in the military as opposed to the rest of society (there are psychological screenings in place intended to weed them out from military service), it would seem a fair number would tend to gravitate toward a profession where lack of emotion in the face of death could be considered a virtue.