to inflict mass damage and casualities. They demanded that Saddam Hussein come clean by revealing and destroying Iraq’s WMDs. But none appeared.
Bush pressed on during his 2003 State of the Union address, declaring that the country could not wait. The president insisted that Saddam was disregarding the UN by concealing WMDs from the prying eyes of their weapons inspectors, and that an ominous “mushroom cloud” of devastation loomed if these weapons were left unchecked.2 Bush and Blair argued that Saddam was as dangerous as he was intractable, and that the threat from his regime was imminent.
On March 20, Gray celebrated his twenty-third birthday. Just one day earlier in 2003, American forces and their allies pushed through the Iraqi border in the first days of their military campaign. Adam and Battalion 1-68 were on the front lines of battle in Iraq. He was at last a soldier in action.
* * *
After serving a year-long tour in Iraq Adam returned home to visit his family and friends in Tehachapi during March 2004. Cindy clearly remembered the day Adam pulled up to their house in Tehachapi after Roy picked him up from the airport. Adam seemed to have the same weathered disposition as her nephew, who also served in the Iraq war, and Cindy recalled having the same sense about his return.
He was glad to be home; he was safe.
Friends and family warmly welcomed Adam home. But they found it was sometimes hard to engage him in conversation. Adam’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. “He would get this glazed look over him and we’d be in the discussion and his eyes would literally get glassy and he would just disconnect,” remembered Cindy. Adam was in Tehachapi, but he seemed to be locked onto memories of Iraq. “And you know he was back there because there was something maybe in the background—maybe a song or the TV or something—and he would just stare straight ahead.”
You could almost hear the bombs and the noise, thought Cindy.
It seemed something had been growing inside him since he got back from Iraq. “This stuff was building up,” Cindy said. “He had to go do something before it exploded.” She phoned local veteran groups and asked their advice about how best to approach her son. She spoke to Vietnam vets and those who fought in Desert Storm (the first US war with Iraq in 1991).
“Don’t push him,” they would tell her. “He’ll talk about it if he wants to. Just don’t push him, because you don’t want to trigger anything … Don’t go up behind him without him knowing. Always speak before you go up behind him. Don’t shock him, because you may not come out of it. He doesn’t mean anything by it; it’s just a reaction.”
Cindy took their advice. She would tell Adam she was going out to pick up milk or run errands and wouldn’t come back for five hours in order to give him some space. She and Roy had learned that from noon to four o’clock in the afternoon “you didn’t talk with him … you just didn’t.” Cindy said he would “just get weird. I don’t know if he had to just reflect with himself or what, but he could get angry.”
“When he came home he was a different boy,” Roy said. “He was aggressive. His mood swings were horrible.”
Roy 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
