The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Lonely-Death-Noah-Pierce-PTSD-Iraq-War.aspx
A small-town soldier returns from Iraq broken. He is not alone. He
thinks he is.
March-April 2009
text and photos by Ashley Gilbertson, from the Virginia Quarterly Review
Noah Pierce's headstone gives his date of death as July 26, 2007,
though his family feels certain he died the night before, when, at
age 23, he took a handgun and shot himself in the head. No one is
sure what pushed him to it. He said in his suicide note it was
impotenceone possible side effect of posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). It was "the snowflake that toppled the iceberg," he wrote.
But it could have been the memory of the Iraqi child he crushed under
his Bradley. It could have been the unarmed man he shot point-blank
in the forehead during a house-to-house raid, or the friend he tried
madly to gather into a plastic bag after he had been blown to bits by
a roadside bomb, or it could have been the doctor he killed at a checkpoint.
Noah grew up in Sparta, Minnesota, a town of fewer than 1,000 on the
outskirts of the Quad CitiesMountain Iron, Virginia, Eveleth, and
Gilberton the Mesabi Iron Range. Discovered on the heels of the
Civil War, the range's ore deposit is the largest in the United
States. Around the clock, deep metallic groans come out of the ground
and freight trains barrel through, horns screeching. Locals are proud
of their hardworking, hard-drinking heritage. There are more than 20
bars on Eveleth's half-mile-long main street. On a typical night last
May, loudspeakers affixed to lampposts blared John Denver's "Take Me
Home, Country Roads," and Harleys thundered through town. One bar
closed early, when a drunk got thrown through the front window.
Noah was a quiet, sensitive kid. He kept a tight circle of friends
and passed time with them building tree forts and playing army in the
woods. Noah's biological father separated from Noah's mother shortly
after she became pregnant, but Tom Softich, Noah's stepfather,
treated the thin-skinned boy as his own. When Noah turned 6, Tom took
him hunting, and by 13 Noah had his own high-powered rifle. For
practice, they went rabbit shooting together at a small clearing a
mile from their house. It became such a regular place to find Noah
that his family and friends began referring to the clearing simply as
"the spot."
When Noah went missing in July 2007, after a harrowing year adjusting
to home following two tours in Iraq, police ordered a countywide
search. His friend Ryan Nelson thought he might know where to look.
When he pulled up to the spot, he immediately recognized Noah's
truck. Inside, Ryan found his friend slumped over the bench seat, his
head blown apart, the gun in his right hand. Half a bottle of Jack
Daniel's Special Blend lay on the passenger seat, and beer cans were
strewn about. On the dash lay Noah's photo IDs; he had stabbed each
photo through the face. And on the floorboard was the scrawled,
rambling suicide note. It was his final attempt to explain the
horrors he had seenand committed.
In April 2008, Ira R. Katz, deputy chief patient care services
officer for mental health at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs,
became embroiled in scandal when a memo surfaced in which he
instructed members of his staff to suppress the results of an
internal investigation into the number of veterans attempting
suicide. Based on their surveys, along with tabulations from the
National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease
Control, Katz estimated that between 550 and 650 veterans were
committing suicide each month. It pains Noah's family and friends
that the Pentagon will never add himnor the thousands like himto
the official tally of 4,000-plus war dead.
Likewise, PTSD and minor traumatic brain injuries (MTBI) are excluded
from the count of 50,000 severe combat woundseven though PTSD and
MTBI often have far greater long-term health effects than bullet
wounds or even lost limbs. A study by the RAND Corporation found that
approximately 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veteransone in
fivesuffer from depression or stress disorders and another 320,000
suffer from MTBIs that place them at a higher risk for depression and
stress disorders.
Noah's mother, Cheryl Softich, believes her son's death could have
been avoided had he received counseling. Statistically, veterans
outside the VA system are four times more likely to attempt suicide
than those within the system. Now Cheryl's mission is to have a
clause inserted into every standard military contract that would
require veterans to visit a therapist every two weeks of the first
year after a combat deployment. "Soldiers are taught to follow
orders," she says. "It needs to be mandatory. Noah was an excellent
soldier, and if it was mandatory, he would have gone faithfully to
every appointment."
Cheryl is a slight, chain-smoking woman of 50, whose disarmingly
direct approach to conversation could easily be mistaken as brusque
by an outsider. Sinking into the oversize leather couch in her living
room, she recounts her 12-hour labor, two days before Christmas 1983.
She remembers the blinding pain of each contraction and smiles when
she recalls that the doctor asked permission for a group of 20
medical students to observe. "As long as you get this baby out of me,
I don't care who watches," she remembers saying. Then her smile
fades: "As soon as they put him in my arms, this feeling washed over
me, and I knew instantly that I was going to outlive this child. Did
not know how or why, but I was going to outlive this child."
The feeling returned the day, not long after 9/11, that Noah came
home with enlistment papers. He was a few months shy of 18 and needed
a parental signature. "He put me between a rock and a hard place,"
Cheryl says. " 'Either sign these papers and show you support me and
my decision, or I'm signing them in a couple of months without your
support.' Well, no child of mine is going off to war thinking I don't
support him. Did I try to talk him out of it? Hell, yes. Did I
finally give up trying to talk him out of it? Yes, because it was
what he was going to do, so I accepted it, and I was proud of him for
his decision."
Not everybody was as understanding. "When he joined the Army, my
heart sank," says Sally Galbraith, a family friend who was virtually
a second mother to Cheryl's children. "I thought, 'Noah, you're too
sensitive, you're too caring; how are you ever going to get through this?' "
In June 2002, Noah went to boot camp in Fort Stewart, Georgia, and
began regularly writing letters home. He expressed surprise at seeing
fellow soldiers break down in tears, homesick and scared, but
admitted to feeling a little that way himself. "During practice we
had to yell stupid stuff," Noah wrote in August. "The drill sergeant
would ask, 'What makes the green grass grow?' We would yell, 'Blood,
blood, blood makes the green grass grow.'"
The Iraq invasion began in March 2003, and Noah's battalion was
assigned to the front line. He rolled northward in a heavily armored
infantry track vehicle equipped with surface-to-air Stinger missiles,
but Saddam's army had virtually no helicopters or jets, so Noah's
unit was tasked with kicking in doors and searching houses. By early
April, American troops had reached Baghdad, and the airwaves were
filled with images of Saddam's statue toppling in Firdos Square and
the troops being hailed as conquering heroes. Noah was outraged.
"It sounds like you guys in the States are for the war," he wrote in
a letter home. "All the soldiers I know including me think it is a
bunch of bullshit. We came in and invaded this country and murdered a
lot of innocent people. So tell me how we are heroes."
Noah's unit's turf was the Abu Ghraib neighborhood on the outskirts
of Baghdad. One night Noah's platoon went out on a mission to guard
buildings against looters. While he was in the turret of his truck, a
van drove toward him and someone started shooting. "I just grabbed my
M16 and put it on 3 round burst and led the tracers into the driver's
window," Noah wrote a few days later. "Right away the van stopped. I
just finished the magazine. I watched it for a minute and someone ran
around from the passenger side and dragged (I assume the body) into
the back seat. I didn't shoot anymore and just let them leave. The
gunner and track commander were asleep in the truck and didn't wake
up so I never mentioned it to anybody. I can't wait until I get out
of here and I hope I never have to do something like this again."
The letter ended: "It's definitely been an experience I'll never
forget, hopefully I will be able to forget most of it someday, but I doubt it."
"Everything good Noah got from Tommy. From me he inherited an overly
sensitive heart," Cheryl says. She wants me to understand that, no
matter the terrible things her son may have done, he was a good
person. It was his sensitivityher sensitivitythat burrowed under
his skin, that would come to make him edgy and aggressive.
By summer 2003, Noah was suffering constant nightmares and couldn't
sleep. To blow off steam he and other members of his platoon had
taken to abusing suspects. "Whatever they'd do for stress relief,"
Cheryl says, "hit a prisonerbecause you're so frustrated that you
haul him off and slug himwell, Noah did those things along with the
rest of them. The difference is he suffered from it. He felt guilty
afterwards."
With each passing day in the desert, though, Noah's guilt was turning
to confusion and anger. "Well, staying here has had one good impact
on me," he wrote. "I no longer regret what I did during the war. I
have so much hatred in me I could go murder more sandniggers and I
would just smile. That goes for almost everyone here. We had sympathy
for them after the war but now we have absolutely nothing but hatred
for them. We should have killed more during the war. I let all kinds
of 'innocent' people go when I should have just mowed them down."
By August, as their deployment drew to a close, Noah and some of his
friends found a new way to vent: Close to Noah's camp, two hens were
kept in a hole deep enough that they couldn't escape. Soldiers
regularly pelted the hens with rocks until they were near death. One
day, a sergeant caught them. "It was funny as hell," Noah wrote. "He
stood there watching in total disbelief for a good five minutes. Then
he asked if we needed to talk to a chaplain. We told him we already
talked to a psychiatrist and a chaplain and that it doesn't help. He
continued to watch like we were crazy then told us to quit."
Then, as a casual codaalmost an afterthoughtNoah added: "Oh yeah,
one of my friends that I do this with accidentally killed a
3-year-old kid. He was shooting a SAW (fully automatic machine gun)
at a car and a stray bullet caught this kid in the head. Oh well, one
less motherfucker that won't grow up and continue this shit. Luckily
he is not in any trouble. They are keeping it quiet though. Well,
fuck this place and I am going to vent some stress on the chickens
and hopefully hoadjis later. I love you guys. Love, Noah."
In September 2004, Noah's 15 months were up, and he was sent back to
Fort Stewart. He took a two-week leave to go home. Cheryl was
enormously proud of her son and often told him so. "He'd get mad
because he didn't think there was anything to be proud of," she says.
"It's like the devil followed him home and wouldn't let him be," Tom
Softich tells me. "I don't have the answer. I know I feel that we
failed him somehow. . . . I tried to get his mind into other places.
I'd do things with him that he liked to do."
For the first time in our days together, Tom's emotions get the
better of him. He rasps an apology before starting to sob.
In February 2005, Noah returned to Iraq. He was assigned to a new
unit and sent to Balad, a city of 100,000, 50 miles north of Baghdad.
Insurgent activity was at record levels, and immediately the unit
began making contact with their elusive enemy.
The carnage on all sides far surpassed anything Noah had seen six
months earlier.
On February 27, Noah sent an anguished e-mail home. "Well, I had a
really bad day mom," it began. "First I totaled a hoadjies car, but I
did that on purpose. but then we had to go back out for a second
mission and i ran over a little boy on accident. I was the last
vehicle and i ran him over on the left side so my crew didn't see it.
i told them later i must have hit a dog. the kid was between 8–10
years old only. hopefully the family doesn't try and do anything
because the army might think it was weird i total a car and kill a
kid in a matter of a couple of hours. i feel really bad but i thought
he would get out of my way."
Noah wrote in a journal about the fear he had of roadside bombs,
about friends who'd shot Iraqis and been put on suicide watch, and
about his growing sense of isolation. He also kept with him a small
graduation photograph of his sister, Sarah, and would look at it
during dark moments. "Lately I have been thinking I don't even want
to come back alive," Noah wrote on March 15. "Granted I would never
kill myself, but I hate life. If I died here, I would be young and it
would be an honorable way to go. Let's face it, I have no future when
I get back."
Violence in Balad increased, and the unit started losing men. The
constant mortar fire coming into their camp killed a soldier, and
roadside bombs were exploding virtually every time they crossed the
wire. Twice, Noah was riding in the gun turret when they were hit;
twice he escaped apparently unharmed. He said privately, however,
that he was certain he had some traumatic brain injury, although
later, back home, he would skip appointments to test for it, afraid
of what they might confirm.
At the end of April, he had to clear out of his living quarters when
a medic became suicidal. "If this shit keeps up I will snap," he
wrote in his journal. "If I do, I'm just going to start killing
motherfuckers. Either Iraqis or soldiers, whatever sets me off. I
doubt I will, but this is gonna be a stressful 8 months."
His next entry is two weeks later: "So far, this has been the worst
month of my life. With all this work I have been ready to snap. I
don't know how much I can take. A car pissed me off last night. The
fucker kept flashing me and when he pulled off the road I almost ran
him over. I changed my mind though. I could have gotten away with
killing that motherfucker though. My transmission was going out and I
could have blamed it on that. I am just waiting for a good
opportunity though. I am just waiting for the chance where I know
people will die."
The entry closes, "I am a bad person."
"It's titanic pain that these men live with. They don't feel that
they can get that across, in part because they feel they deserve it,
and in part because they don't feel people will understand it," says
Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who has worked with combat vets for 23
years and written two books about PTSD, or psychological and moral
injury, as he insists it should be known. "Despair, this word that's
so hard to get our arms around. It's despair that rips apart people
[who] feel they've become irredeemable."
I tell Shay about Noah's experiences in Iraq, in particular the
killing, the loss of comrades, the nightmares. He's saddened but not
surprised: "The flip side of this fellow's despair was the murderous
rages he experienced on his second tour. In combat, soldiers become
each other's mothers. The rage, need for revenge, and
self-sacrificial commitment toward protecting each other when
comrades are killed [are] akin to when a mother's offspring are put
in danger or killed."
"On July 4th I went to kill a man that came too close to my truck,"
Noah wrote in his journal in 2005. Consumed by paranoia and a lust
for revenge, Noah assumed the driver had to be a car bomberand if he
wasn't, he deserved a bullet anyway. "Well, my dumb ass forgot to
chamber a round, I got lucky because it was just a stupid driver, and
he got lucky from my mistake. I'm pretty pissed about it, I had him
dead in my sights. I got to shoot at some other people that day, but
missed I guess. We didn't actually stop to check."
That month, after writing about another bomb attack and his decision
to become an alcoholic back home"If you don't give a shit about
anything, nothing can bother you"Noah stopped keeping his journal.
He wrote letters only occasionally.
Near the end of his deployment, Noah was assigned guard duty at a
checkpoint. A man in a car failed to slow down, and Noah killed him.
The dead man was discovered to be a doctor. "That was the last person
Noah killed," Cheryl tells me, as if unburdening herself of this
final secret. But still she defends him. "It was on orders from his
commander, and Noah shot the man. A nice clean shot."
Noah took a picture of the grisly scene with his cell phone. "We saw
it," Cheryl recalls, "and said, 'You have it in your head, you don't
need to see it every time you open your phone.' So Tommy threatened
he was going to smash the phone or something, and Noah got rid of it.
He left his wallet lying around and I went through it one day and
found a note written to this doctor. He was apologizing over and
over, 'I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?' [That]
type of thing. I took that note and threw it on the stove and burned
it. I figured it was something he didn't need."
After his honorable discharge on June 26, 2006, Noah moved back into
his basement bedroom. "I can honestly say he was nothing but a messed
up, confused little boyman, child, all wrapped into one. Didn't know
. . ." Cheryl pauses to gather herself, ". . . didn't know what to
do. Couldn't drive a car really, because driving he was constantly
worried about car bombs. You're not the same after. He didn't laugh
anymore, he didn't smile anymore, and if he did, it was phony and it
never went to the eyes."
Noah visited the VA clinic and talked about his nightmares. A
therapist prescribed Ambien and told him to come back in a couple of
months. The sleeping pills didn't help, and he started drinking more
heavily. He quit his job as a janitor at the U.S. Steel plant where
Tom worked, after some men ridiculed him for having PTSD. Noah pissed
into a mop bucket, soaked a cloth in it, and wiped down their lunch
table before leaving.
One day soon after, Noah was sitting with his mother in the living
room, chatting, when his sister, Sarah, walked in. Noah leapt to his
feet and threw her across the room. "He would snap and go into
another world, his Iraq world," Cheryl says.
"I don't like to tell people that he hit me," Sarah says, "because I
don't want people to think that that's my brother; that was not him.
It was him when he got back from Iraq."
She remembers the story Noah told her, how one day he watched his
best friend in Iraq blown up by a roadside bomb, how he went around
with a plastic bag picking up body parts to send home. "When he left
the room, I cried after that. I just cried," Sarah says. "I couldn't
even imagine. I wouldn't even want to." But even if Sarah felt she
understood the source of Noah's rage, she never understood what set it off.
At the end of November 2006, Noah was sitting on the couch with
Sarah, channel surfing, when he attacked her. "It was just from out
of nowhere, I don't know if it was something on the TV that triggered
him," she says. "I seriously couldn't breathe because he was choking
my life out of me. I mean, I could not breathe, my face was turning
blue, and he was beating me with the phone.
"It was very scary, just straight evil came over his face. It was
horrible. When he finally realized what he was doing, that's when I
got up and ran."
Days later, Sarah came home early from work and found Noah packing
his things. He was moving in with his friend Tyler Nuberg, who had a
spare room. "I think he was worried he was going to hurt one of us,"
Cheryl says. "We were sitting together one day, and out of the blue,
matter-of-fact, he said, 'I could kill every one of you in the house,
not give it a second thought, and go to sleep.' "
Noah started working at Tyler's family business, a kayak factory, and
every evening he would sit in his chair next to a mini-fridge full of
Michelob Golden Draft Light and listen to music. Almost every night
he played an acoustic ballad by the band Smile Empty Soul called
"This Is War." In haunting detail, it describes kicking in doors and
blowing people's heads off "for my country." The song is a favorite
among many returning veterans. Noah requested in his suicide note
that it be played at his funeral.
Cheryl was dropping by Tyler and Noah's place virtually every day,
and each time she left the house in tears. He was becoming angrier
and would berate her in slurring, drunken tirades. "Noah drank to
forget and he drank because he hated himself," Cheryl says.
On Monday, July 25, 2007, it was already hot when Noah left for the
kayak factory. He was in a good mood, and there was nothing strange
about his behavior, except that for lunch he had only a beer, Tyler
remembered later. Noah left work early, and at about five o'clock,
his mother, planning to drop off mail and see her son, drove by his
house and the factory looking for his truck. When she couldn't find
it, Cheryl assumed he was at the recruiter's office. He had been
talking about signing up again, but this time, he'd told Sarah, he
planned on dying in Iraq.
"It was a quarter to five or so," Cheryl recalls, "and so I pick up
the telephone, 'Hey it's me, wanna know if you want to have dinner
with me, see me, talk to me, but I guess not,' and I hung up the
phone, didn't tell him I loved him or anything, just hung up the
phone." Twenty-five minutes later her phone buzzed with a text
message from Noah. "I opened it up and it says, 'i love you guys so
much and i'm so sorry.' I text him back, 'You are my heart, Noah,'
and then I went to call him, and before I could call him Sarah called
me. She wanted to know if I'd just got a text message from Noah, and
I said yes and she started screaming."
Noah was at "the spot"where he'd practiced marksmanship at 13 with
Tom and cut school to fish with his friends. He'd parked his old,
brick-red Sonoma pickup in the clearing, between a small patch of
birch trees and a discarded, upturned boat seat. With his knife he
carved FREEDOM ISN'T FREE in the pickup's dashboard. He took his
photo IDs from his wallet and stabbed his face out of each one. He
punched the rearview mirror, smashing the glass.
At some point, he took a picture of himself with his cell phone. It
would be the last photograph of Noah alive. And it is a portrait of
despair: His shirt is off and he looks as though he's been crying.
Between five and six that evening, he sent a message to his friends
Ryan Nelson and Tyler: "bam life's a bitch i'm out."
Noah scrawled a suicide note on the back of a National Rifle
Association pistol-safety certificate and then started drinking.
"Time's finally up," he wrote, "I am not a good person, I have done
bad things. I have taken lives, now it's time to take mine."
Noah put his .38 Special to his right temple, wedged one of his Army
dog tags between the muzzle and his skin, and pulled the trigger.
A few weeks before Memorial Day 2008, fresh sod finally was laid over
the loose dirt covering Noah at the Calvary Cemetery in Virginia,
Minnesota, which crests a gentle hill, opposite the hospital. His
mother and sister, who split their time between here and the spot,
have finished decorating veterans' graves with flags. They sit
cross-legged on Noah's plot, talking quietly.
In the first months after Noah's death, Cheryl had gotten interest in
her proposal to mandate counseling for returning veterans from
Representatives Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Jim Oberstar
(D-Minnesota) and Senators Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota) and Amy
Klobuchar (D-Minnesota). But now months have passed since she has
received word from any of them. Sarah runs a fingernail through the
etched letters on the headstone: I-r-a-q, she spells aloud. "It
doesn't need to say anything else," Cheryl says.
"Have you had the urge to dig?" Sarah asks her mother. "I started one
day. God, I'm so glad that the grass is down now. I just wanted to
check he was still down there."
"I was thinking the same thing," Cheryl replies, "that I'm so glad
the grass is there, otherwise I'd be digging. Just to get to him,
just to see him one more time."
--
Ashley Gilbertson's many honors include the 2004 Robert Capa Gold
Medal, the Photographer of the Year from the National Photo Awards,
and selection of his work for Time magazine's "Pictures of the Year."
He is the author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle
of the Iraq War. His website is www.ashleygilbertson.com. Excerpted
from the Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2008), a national journal of
literature and discussion; www.vqronline.org.
.
