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 be a police officer.”
“Nothing like that,” he said
There were limited options for him in Tehachapi, and few jobs remotely close to what he had hoped to do in the military. “You’re going to be very unhappy,” Cindy warned him.
She reminded him that he always wanted to be in the military, and even wanted to be a tanker since he was a small boy. “That’s what you wanted to do your whole life.”
He paused and reflected on what she said.
Adam seemed resigned to his situation. In the end, he decided to stay put in Alaska and bide his time until he was called up for battle again.
Cindy and Adam talked during the evening of August 29, 2004, when he was in his barracks in Fairbanks. He seemed upbeat and talked about preparing for a getaway with an Army friend during his off days. Cindy could rest that evening without worrying about his mood or career problems. He seemed to be working through his issues.
The following morning, at around eight, she got a call from her exhusband, Adam’s father, Jeff Gray. He lived in Wisconsin, where they were originally from. Adam’s parents were separated by thousands of miles but remained friends and kept in touch about their son’s welfare.
“Cindy, why would there be a soldier coming here?” Jeff asked Cindy.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. She assumed that Adam and his friends went off drinking the night before and got into trouble. “He’s probably coming to find out who wants to bail the kid out.”
They laughed about it, knowing their son’s pugnacious spirit. “Okay, I don’t have this kind of money,” she told Jeff, fearing how much bail they’d have to pay to spring Adam from a night in jail. “Maybe you could do it. And you’re closer to him; you could fly up there.”
In the end, she relented and agreed to come up with the cash. Jeff promised to call her back with an update after he met the officers at his door.
Cindy waited a long time for the phone to ring. When it finally did, she snatched up the receiver.
“Okay, how much do I owe you?”
Her offer was met with a halting silence. And then he told her.
“Adam’s dead.”
“What?”
Jeff repeated the words to her.
“Oh, bullshit. That’s not even funny. I just talked to him last night.”
But Jeff wasn’t kidding, and Cindy froze in stunned disbelief. No, they’ve got the wrong kid, she told herself. After all, Adam seemed to be in high spirits the night before. He was just heading off to bed so that he and his friend could get up early for their trip.
That might have been the case, said Jeff, but the officers who had just visited him said they were sending someone from Edwards Air Force Base to Cindy and Roy’s house in Tehachapi to relay the news about their son.
Cindy waited by the door and held her breath as she peered through the window and watched the cars drift by. One finally pulled into her driveway. Two uniformed officers got out and walked towards the house.
“Then I knew it wasn’t a lie,” she said.
I visited Cindy in August 2007 just a few days before the anniversary of her son’s death. It had been three years since officers walked to her door. Her memories were still fresh, her emotions still raw.
She remembered that a chaplain accompanied the military entourage, and how they greeted her. They could tell she was
