LITMIR.BIZ

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saw how his stepson seemed to be deeply affected by his time in Iraq, yet trying to disengage from it while he was on leave. He saw that Adam often remained reticent, latched onto solitude, and mostly sat in his room for hours. At times, Roy saw Adam’s anxiety boiling over.

      “You could sometimes hear him screaming in his sleep and not being able to talk about anything,” said Roy.

      “He would have his dark moments,” Cindy remembered. “He’d play his guitar, and he would get into music and just disconnect, but not really disconnect because he always had that kind of glazed look on his face.”

      Sometimes he would tell his mother, “I shouldn’t be here.”

      “Why shouldn’t you be here?” she would ask. If not here, then where? she wondered.

      “I should be back there with my guys.”

      In a way, she wasn’t surprised by his state of mind. She had grown up during the 1970s and remembered the empty stares and tensed bodies of returning Vietnam veterans. But it was unsettling to see her son and other returning Iraq war veterans exhibit the same behavior.

      “Just looking at him—it was very weird, very surreal,” she said. “He was way different, that’s for sure …”

      I gently pressed Cindy to further describe how her son had changed. She paused as her mind recreated that visit three years ago.

      “He looked troubled. I think that’s the only word I could say. Troubled for what he saw, troubled for maybe what he had to do,” she said.

      Why was he troubled? I asked.

      “That I don’t know, Josh. That’s what I want you to find out.”

      Adam seldom discussed events in Iraq with anyone. At one point, he promised to open up to his family.

      “One day I’ll tell you guys,” he said.

      After a long night of drinking, he finally did. He told his mother about some of his experiences, including how his unit went on patrols in Iraq’s volatile Sunni triangle. They surveyed for improvised explosive devices (known as IEDs) and those who planted them, and occasionally took machine gunfire. One evening, Adam’s tank was on patrol and fired on a small group of insurgent suspects, killing two of the three Iraqis they targeted. They later noticed the Iraqis weren’t insurgents after all, but a small family that included a little girl.

      “Ma, we couldn’t see,” he told his mother, choking back tears. “It was just the night vision, and all it does is give you a shadow.”

      Maybe, she figured, it distressed him so deeply because he had such a strong affinity for the Iraqi children he saw. But he was upset about other experiences as well. Adam told his mother how he and fellow soldiers kept order in a small jail in Balad, Iraq, by instructing their prisoners not to speak to one another. And he described what they would do to detainees who disobeyed them.

      “Inevitably one will start speaking,” Adam explained to Cindy. “So then we tie their hands up and then tie them to the highest rung on the [jail] bars. And then they’d have to hang there for a couple of days and they’re not allowed to sleep, drink, eat.”

      Adam told her how they kept detainees up all night long by blasting loud music next to their ears, and how troops tried to frighten detainees when questioning them. For example, Adam described how he brought hooded detainees into a room, placed them in chairs, and removed their blindfolds. It took a while for the detainees’ vision to clear, and when they were able to focus they would see that the walls and floor were splashed with blood.

      Adam assured his mother that “it wasn’t any human blood—it was chicken blood. But they didn’t know that, because they were blindfolded. And then we’d take the blindfold off and they’d start screaming.”

      They screamed uncontrollably, he told her. Other detainees would hear their friends shrieking in horror. “And they’d tell us anything because they were so sleep-deprived and hungry and everything else,” he explained to his mother. “That’s when [we] started getting them to spill their guts.”

      During that night of heavy drinking, Adam revealed why they felt compelled to abuse their detainees, and he detailed the techniques they used. Cindy patiently listened to her son’s justifications for mistreating Iraq detainees, and yet she felt that Adam was still troubled by what he had done. She told him to stop describing the torture they used—she couldn’t bear to hear any more. It sounded “so incredibly inhumane.”

      “I’d rather be shot in the head than have to torture somebody like that,” she said. Yes, she understood it was war. And yes, they faced lifeand-death decisions. But as a mother, she still felt sympathy for the Iraqi prisoners.

      “They’re people, they’re human beings,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference who you are, just because they live in a different environment. Those mothers still love their children.”

      The evening of beer and confessions wore down, and mother and son finished discussing disturbing wartime memories. After that evening, Cindy partly understood what troubled her son. But she didn’t want that evening to be his lasting memory of being back home. With limited time to cheer up her son during his short leave in Tehachapi, she offered to take him to Las Vegas. He had always wanted to go there.

      “No, mom, I don’t think I could handle the noise.”

      But she pressed on, and threw parties for Adam. In fact, she crammed all the year’s holidays into his March visit. They went to a local nursery to buy a tree for Christmas, festooned their house with festive lights, and baked holiday cookies. Then they celebrated New Year’s Eve and quickly slipped in Valentine’s Day. And finally, they commemorated his twenty-fourth birthday on March 20.

      Adam left Tehachapi shortly thereafter. During his time off he was able to decompress, unload some of his memories, and be cheered by loved ones. Cindy captured some of the happier moments in photographs. She shuffled through a pile of pictures before her on the coffee table, and softly teared up.

      “The very last picture that I got of him was at that birthday party,” she said. “He never came home.”

      After his month-long leave in Tehachapi, Adam headed to Alaska to undergo training for armored combat vehicles known as Strykers. According to Adam, the training was delayed because of a hold-up with the Strykers’ production. He quickly found himself stuck in Fairbanks with little activity, few friends, and no battle comrades. He told his mother that he felt lonely and frustrated by the lack of action, and had trouble relating to the soldiers at Fort Wainwright.

      “Ma, there’s not one of these sons of bitches up here that has ever been out of the country,” he told her. “They’ve never been to Iraq. They’ve never been to anywhere. Alaska is the farthest away that they’ve ever been from their homes.”

      The soldiers at Fort Wainwright sensed his resentment and his lingering feelings about Iraq.

      Get over it, they told him. And that only incensed him further.

      Some soldiers taunted him about his moodiness and bitterness. Adam seethed with anger, and he finally snapped. He pinned down a soldier who had goaded him and held a knife to his throat.

      “If you were over there, you’d be dead right now,” Adam told him.

      Soon Adam was called before a board of officers and received a dressing-down. One of them called him a “waste of flesh,” Cindy recalled, and he could only stand at attention and absorb their reprimands.

      “I think at that point it crushed Adam’s spirit because he took those men as gods,” Cindy said. He told her he would rather be in Iraq fulltime than be in Fairbanks. At least he had a purpose there.

      He even considered quitting the service and returning home.

      “Adam, when you come back here, then what are you going to do?” his mother asked him. “What’s your plan of attack? I mean, you could be a prison guard, you could

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