you know? We hand out soccer balls and try to dodge IEDs every day. Make sure everybody’s doing good. Keep the schools running. Try to get the Iraqi police up, you know?
KS: Right.
WW: Here, it’s not what we’re doin’. Too many terrorists here. They eventually want us to do it here but it’s never gonna happen. This place is way too bad. Once they start letting the civilians back in, they have to let all the terrorists come back in.
KS: Yep.
WW: There’s a lot of terrorists left. They’re cowards. They shoot, throw down their weapons and run. If they come out and fight, the Marines will stick it to ’em. Yeah, we take some casualties, but we stick it to ’em. Ain’t no mistake the Marines are here. They can’t touch us. We get a casualty here and there. I shot six guys today. My Marine shot three others. One room. They can’t touch us. That Marine that got shot today? You should have heard what he said in the Humvee. “Wold, you better kill ’em all.” I think he said, “Wold, I love you. You better kill ’em all.” I don’t have no problem doing that. If they’re bad, they’re dead.
KS: Is he a good friend of yours?
WW: Yeah, he’s my one of my best friends. I met him when I first got to the fleet. We’ve been good friends ever since.
KS: How bad was he hurt?
WW: He took a few rounds. Took one in the arm, one in the shoulder. The sappy plate stopped about five. It was point-blank. He’ll be all right. He’s a strong guy. He’s the only guy I know who’d put a fight up with me. He’s a strong guy. He got… he’s the same situation as me. He’s got four months left. He’s got a fiancee back home. She’s even got the same name as mine. [
Only later, after watching the video of Wold many times, did I realize that the interview had revealed nearly all of what Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, in his book
He writes, “Like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous stages in response to death and dying, these stages are generally sequential but not necessarily universal. Thus some individuals may skip certain stages, or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even acknowledge their presence.”
William Wold seemed fine initially when he came home from Iraq, according to his mother, Sandi Wold, when I speak to her by telephone seven years after my conversation with her son in Fallujah. Wold had begged his mother to sign a parental approval form when he wanted to join the Marines at seventeen, taking extra online classes to graduate a year early in order to do so. But after four years of service, he’d had enough.
“They were going to promote him to sergeant, but he didn’t want to reenlist. He just wanted to be normal,” she says, echoing his own words from our videotaped interview. His much-anticipated separation from the Marine Corps would come in March 2005, but in the interim, she had promised to treat him and a couple of other Marine buddies to a trip to Las Vegas as a coming-home present. She and her second husband, John Wold (William’s stepfather, whose last name he took), met the three Marines at the MGM Grand Hotel and got them adjoining rooms next to their own. Sandi was elated to see her son home safe and in one piece and she wanted to see him leave the war in Iraq behind as quickly as possible.
“There’s no way I can show you how much I appreciate your willingness to die for me,” she remembers telling the three. But she tried her best anyway, going so far as to hire in-room strippers for them through an ad in the Yellow Pages.
“They talked me into buying them suits and renting a stretch limo. These guys show up and they go out partying that night, these guys are pimped out, I’m spending so much money it’s stupid,” she says, laughing at the memory. “Those Marines swam down some drinks, just the three of them. The hotel called my room, ‘Do these Marines belong to you?’ as they’re stumbling down the hallways.”
When the strippers showed up to the Marines’ room, Sandi says, the sound of partying was like its own war zone. Then around midnight there was a loud banging on the adjoining door.
“The door swings open and it’s Silly Billy, drunk and laughing, and he introduces us to them [the strippers]… I could’ve gone a lifetime without meeting them,” Sandi says.
“He says, ‘Mom, I’m going to need an extra twelve hundred dollars.’ ‘Dude,’ she remembers telling him, ‘you gotta be fucking shitting me.’ But I’m counting the money out, he’s dancing around, happy as can be.”
The whole trip, she says, was indicative of the closeness of their relationship. He would always stay in touch with his mom even while he was in Iraq.
“He would hang out with the snipers at night,” Sandi says, “because they always had sat phones and he would make sure to try and call me almost every week. It would just be, ‘Hey, I’m fine, can’t talk long, love you. Bye.’
“He was through and through a mama’s boy. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t share with me,” she says. “Sometimes I had to tell him I just don’t want to know.”
But Sandi says she began to sense something was wrong after William made a trip back east to see a woman he had met while doing presidential protection duty at Camp David. He had called her his fiancee and said he planned to marry her, but the relationship ended after his visit with her.
“He flies back there and doesn’t last twenty-four hours,” Sandi says. “He lost it. He calls me and tells me to find him a flight home. ‘I can’t close my eyes, I can’t sleep,’ he tells me, ‘what’s wrong with me?’ I think he knew he was so unstable he was going to end up hurting her.”
The extent of his post-traumatic stress became clear to Sandi that summer after his discharge.
“Fourth of July was just horrible for him,” says Sandi. “Some neighbors had firecrackers they were setting off in the distance.”
But for William that set off a circuit that couldn’t be grounded.
“He just starts twitching. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I told him, but he pushed me back and screamed, ‘You don’t know what’s going on in my brain, there’s no switch you can shut off what’s going on in here!’ He’s sweating and pacing, just the look in his eyes. It went on for thirty to forty-five minutes. I visibly see his pulse, two fifty to two sixty, he’s going to stroke out. How do I stop it? I need to get three octaves above him. That’s what Marines respond to. He’s looking for someone in authority to take control. Now we’re talking insanely loud, I’m screaming at him, ‘You need to bring it down!’ trying to use military phrases. I start screaming at him, ‘Marine, stand down! Marine, stand down! Marine, stand down!’ About the fifth time I did it, it had an effect.’”
Wold stopped shouting and began to calm down, perhaps beginning to realize how much of the war had actually come home with him.
“Afterward I think he was mortified that he was in a position to hurt me,” she says. “Before he left for Iraq he had a sparkle in his eye, he cared about people. He made a commitment to his country and he took it seriously. But when he came home, he was torn and tattered. I hired psychologists, everything we tried to do for him.
“On the backside of my house we have a gazebo and there’s a pond. It’s where I’m talking to you right now,” Sandi tells me. “It’s the place where you get right with the world. It’s surrounded by trees. No one can see you. He loved being here. He loved being here! He lived with us for a while, then bought a house, but after a while said he couldn’t live alone anymore. He just couldn’t do it.”
With everything he had seen and done in Fallujah in November 2004, Wold told medical professionals, he was having difficulty adjusting to civilian life and was struggling with nightmares, flashbacks and emotional numbing. He was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He had also reportedly suffered from a blast injury in Iraq, which I could find few details about, but medical records indicate he was experiencing serious cognitive difficulties consistent with traumatic brain injury.[10] Like so many other service members coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan physically or psychologically damaged, or both, Wold’s life began to revolve around a potent cocktail of painkillers, muscle relaxants and antidepressants he used to cope with his injuries.
According to Wold’s military and medical records, at some point after his return from Iraq he began abusing the powerful painkiller OxyContin and became addicted to it. Wold grew more restless and agitated, Sandi says,
