Based on these findings and the history and circumstances of the death as currently known, the cause of death is best listed as “methadone, clonazepam, diazepam, and fluoxetine toxicity” and the manner of death as “accident.”
William Christopher Wold, in the opinion of the deputy medical examiner, had been supplementing his prescription medication drug regimen with methadone, a drug best known for treating heroin and other opiate addicts by preventing withdrawal symptoms, reducing the cravings, but not providing the euphoric rush associated with heroin use. But the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center says abuse of methadone is on the upswing, especially by heroin and OxyContin users, because of methadone’s increasing availability. Because of its effects on the body, which can include slowed breathing and irregular heartbeat, methadone overdoses can be extremely dangerous, leading to “respiratory depression, decreases in heart rate and blood pressure, coma and death.”
In Wold’s case, as the deputy medical examiner wrote, his prescription drugs were at a therapeutic level in his body but may have provided an additional sedative effect on him, possibly, as his friend noted, resulting in a forgetfulness of at least what prescription medications he had already taken and presumably leading to a similar lack of awareness about the number of doses of methadone he was taking from his plastic baggy.
Regardless, Sandi Wold, like any mother would, says she has many unanswered questions about her son’s death. But as a professional private investigator herself, she was willing to push it more than most. She wondered about things, like why she received the insurance money settlement on Wold’s death even before she received his body. Was it an effort to keep her from poking around too much? More sinister, though, she claims that after making calls inquiring into his death she received some anonymous telephone threats herself, but when prompted refused to disclose their nature or reveal any other details.
When I found her initially, it was through an image search for Wold on the Internet. His picture was on a car-racing site that Sandi and her husband John hosted. She got into auto racing as a hobby after a life-changing medical diagnosis.
“Back in 1991, I was diagnosed with MS [multiple sclerosis],” Sandi tells me over the telephone. “I woke up one morning with everything on the left side of my body completely paralyzed. I had red flags like double vision and numbness in my legs, which I had ignored. They did an MRI and diagnosed me with MS. The neurologist said, ‘You’re not going to walk again.’”
That was all the challenge she needed. She pushed herself to overcome the initial onset of the disease symptoms and not only started walking again but decided she wanted to start racing cars as well, which she now does, with John.
“Bill [William] loved the fact I was racing,” she says, and while he wanted to join her in the hobby after coming back from Iraq, she said it was just impossible for him; he was unable to keep his own life, let alone a race car, on track. Sandi’s husband John said they used some of William’s life insurance money to invest in Sandi’s GT race car.
“I learned a lot from that young man in his short years,” she tells me in an e-mail.
But what seems impossible to her is that her son could survive some of the harshest combat since the Vietnam War and yet not survive his own homecoming and transition to civilian life. While he did his duty for the corps, both protecting the president personally and protecting his nation overseas, she feels the corps did not protect him in the end. This is a belief echoed by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay and others who work with returning veterans. “When you put a gun in some kid’s hands and send him off to war,” he told me during an interview, “you incur an infinite debt to him for what he has done to his soul.”
Despite her anger with the Marines, Sandi Wold knew her son loved the camaraderie of the corps, but she also understood the internal conflict it had caused him. Still, she had him buried in his dress blues, knowing that underneath them, on the right side of his chest, her son bore another tattoo, this one of praying hands with a banner reading, “Only God Can Judge.”
Chapter 2: Pulling the Trigger
Mikeal Auton was a twenty-one-year-old Army specialist who had already killed twelve men in combat when I first met him in Iraq in the spring of 2004. He was camped with his unit, an element of the 1st Armored Division, in the searing heat and the yellow, powdery sands outside the Shiite holy city of Karbala. It was only May, but members of his 3rd Platoon extended tarps and camouflage netting from their Bradleys (armored personnel carriers) and Abrams A1 tanks to create enough shade to keep from frying in their boots. But circumstances were miserable for these soldiers for reasons far worse than the heat. After a yearlong tour in Iraq and on the verge of going home, the 1st Armored Division had been extended in country for another three months. Twin uprisings of Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Shiite militiamen in Karbala and Najaf triggered a tsunami of instability that threatened to turn the entire coalition occupation into chaos. Because of their experience and firepower, the 1st Armored was ordered south to take on Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The fighting had been frequent and bloody, with masses of poorly trained Shiite militiamen flooding the streets with nothing much going for them tactically but their anger. They would fire what American and British troops scathingly referred to as the “Iraqi overhand,” an AK-47 held high and purged on full auto and just as likely to slip from their grips and tag their own guys who were unlucky enough to be in front of them when they started shooting. But many more were cut down in battles with the American troops. Some soldiers told me they were disturbed by the sheer numbers of men they could kill during a battle, mowing them down with intersecting fields of fire (troops firing from right and left flanks across a center line), as if they were nothing more than zombies in a B-movie.
During their downtime, the 3rd Platoon’s soldiers did what all soldiers do: cleaned their weapons, played cards and bullshitted with each other. I witnessed the taunting and merciless teasing, but also moments of clear- eyed introspection that made the soldiers, once again, seem like the vulnerable and innocent high school seniors they had mostly been just a year or two ago. But then, as I wrote in an online article for MSNBC.com at the time, they also did things like this:
Nearby one soldier passes a couple of American flag patches to another. In between the bars on the patch are the words, handwritten in ink: Dirty for Dirty. They are calling cards to put on the bodies of dead enemies, a non-sanctioned post-mortem psych-out. Something to let the Muktada al-Sader’s militia know who they are and what they are up against. The same soldiers tell me about a recent fight they were in in which a Shiite militiaman popped into an alleyway and began firing his AK-47 at a tank. “You could see the turret swivel around, train its 50 [caliber machine gun] on the guy and fire. It blasted a huge hole right through his middle.” He shows dinner plate size circumference with his hands.
Auton, I noticed, had a small chain attached to a belt loop on the front of his BDUs (battle dress uniform), which dangled into one of his pockets. When I asked him to show me what was tethered on the other end he lifted the chain from his pocket and retrieved a tiny book, which he flipped open and thumbed from right to left. Its pages were covered with Arabic script, a miniature Koran. Auton said it had been a gift given to him by his Turkish girlfriend, whom he met while stationed in Germany.
While there was a certain irony to a Christian American soldier carrying a Koran into battle against Muslim enemies, I found it more interesting that Auton simply ignored the grief that other soldiers gave him for having it. He carried himself with the rare confidence of someone who didn’t have to sell you anything, least of all his reasons for doing something. While he was like so many other troops who carried some special token into battle, Auton’s
