where lack of emotion in the face of death could be considered a virtue.
For the other 96 percent of us, our ability to kill may simply be enabled by our shadow self, but its consequences are borne by our other half. For some, that burden is permanently debilitating, regardless of the circumstances. For others, it may be compartmentalized or shuffled somewhere in the folds of the mind, where it’s contained and does not interfere daily with an otherwise normal life. And it may be this group in which the early experiences of one’s life profoundly affect that person’s ability to reabsorb their shadow self into its interstitial space and keep it fully in check when not at war.
Auton, I realize, lives in that place where bullets and background intersect. The hard realities of rural poverty he experienced as a child and that he learned to contain, rather than let them define him, prepared him quite thoroughly, it seems, for the things he would have to do in war.
“To be honest with you—this sounds weird or hard to understand—you just put it behind you,” Auton tells me during a telephone call. “You can’t live in the past; you have to live in the present.”
Far from judging him, I have great respect for his reasoning and his ability to steady himself in the face of powerfully destabilizing experiences. I envy the inner strength and resolve by which he has “soldiered” on, while I, who have taken a life by the confused incompetence of inaction rather than pulling a trigger, sometimes have had difficulty in finding both meaning and worth for my own life in the aftermath of the incident.
And for Auton, living in the present is certainly preferable, considering how he grew up in rural Lenoir, North Carolina, bordering the Pisgah National Forest, sixty miles northwest of Charlotte. Auton was the third youngest of four siblings, an older brother and sister and a younger brother.
“I grew up in a very poor family. I remember days where I would heat water on a kerosene heater in order to have hot water for a bath,” says Auton. “I always knew what I would have for dinner when I got home from school because it was always cabbage and potatoes.”
Auton’s parents were divorced and he says his mother focused more on other men than her children.
“My sister and I were always close to each other and she is still the only one I speak to this day out of my family. My sister and I came home from school one day and found a note on the kitchen table with some money, I think around three hundred dollars. I was around ten years old if I remember right. The note said, ‘Here is the next two months’ rent, I hope you can find a place to live.’” He says his mother left with a man she had known for a few weeks.
His sister, Elizabeth, was fifteen at the time and had an older boyfriend whose family took them both in and raised them, Auton says, like they “were their own children,” for the next eight years of his life.
But by his senior year in high school he became rebellious and moved in with some other friends, hitting the streets at night, drinking and getting into a little bit of trouble. He says he struggled through his senior year of high school but kept it together just enough to graduate. His sister married the same man she was with when their mother left them. But Auton says he has no idea where his mother or brothers are. He broke off relations with his father when he refused to take them in after they were abandoned. He says because he was abandoned by his parents a lot of people looked at him as a lowlife, a “bottom-feeder.” That motivated him to prove them wrong and do something with his life. That’s when he decided to join the Army.
To Auton, the Army became the family he felt he never had. It seemed to give him all the basic things his own did not: food, shelter, clothing, money and, perhaps equally important, people to share the challenges and successes of life with. But while the Army helped him to feel like he was part of a community, Auton’s past taught him not to invest too deeply in emotions. Being able to contain the hardships and unhappiness of his childhood allowed him to “move on,” as he said, and live in the present. He would use the same skills, successfully, to push past the darkness and trauma of war.
It wasn’t always easy. When Auton became a leader in the Army, he became responsible for the health and well-being of his men, which required a closeness that made him more vulnerable, though as always he did his best to contain that as well. When Auton was deployed again to Iraq in 2006, his unit was focused on helping to clear insurgents out of Ramadi in the Sunni-dominated al-Anbar Province. A well-liked twenty-two-year-old sergeant named Edward Schaeffer was part of Auton’s squad. Auton says Schaeffer was so smart, they nicknamed him “the Brain.” But that November, while on patrol, the lead vehicle of Auton’s convoy hit an improvised explosive device and the Bradley burst into flames. The driver was Schaeffer. He was blown out of the hatch and landed ten feet away in a ball of flames. Another soldier put him out with a fire extinguisher. His burns were so severe, he later died from them. Auton admits the death affected him.
“I don’t think I was sad. I was angry more than anything,” Auton says. “He was such a young guy. It motivates you to be there even more and to find them [the attacker]. I don’t know if we got the exact one, but we got plenty of them. We cordoned off the area, did raids for the next three hours—it wasn’t knocking, it was hard raids.”
While Auton can be stirred by the loss of one of his men, his mostly unemotional nature sometimes gives him the leverage to understand things his more emotionally charged comrades can’t. When Auton does his job, killing the enemy, he doesn’t feel the need to hate or dehumanize them. If they’re a threat to him and his men they’re dead. But since he doesn’t choose to see them as anything less than himself, as anything other than warriors doing their jobs, he can also offer them the same respect when they prove particularly worthy and tenacious adversaries, as did one he encountered during that same tour, in a city on the western border of Iraq.
After searching a barn in a nearby village and finding explosives and suicide vests buried in the hay, Auton moved his fireteam to the house next door to continue the search. They cleared the house floor by floor, from bottom to top. But when they reached the final floor of the house it appeared to be completely empty. They all relaxed for a moment… until they heard the unmistakable sound of metal on concrete. Their eyes opened wide as an olive-green Russian-made grenade came rolling across the floor toward them. “Grenade,” one of the soldiers yelled, and they all dove for cover as the small powerful explosion cratered the floor and forced shards of metal into the concrete walls on all sides. They were so surprised by the attack that they felt whoever had tossed the grenade might as well have been invisible.
“We know we cleared the room,” says Auton, “so we figured the guy had to actually be inside the wall somewhere.” That’s when they called in the EOD unit, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the same kind of specialists depicted in the Oscar-winning film
“I personally threw five grenades into the hole and the guy wouldn’t go down,” Auton says with a laugh. After a few hours of exchanging fire with the sniper, EOD planted C4 in what was left of the remaining walls and turned the entire building into rubble with a huge explosion. When the dust and smoke cleared, they saw the sniper lying in a pile of broken cinder blocks and concrete. But Auton and his men were astounded by what happened next. Like one of the machines out of the Terminator films, the Iraqi seemed almost impossible to kill.
“The dude sat up with his AK-47 from the rubble, turned and looked at us—he had to be on adrenaline or something,” says Auton. Another sergeant tossed a grenade at him, finally ending the five-hour standoff.
“You rarely encounter someone like that. This guy gave his position up. He could’ve hid and we wouldn’t have known he was there. You give respect for something like that, for bravery or whatever else. I can clearly picture him, skinny, five foot nine, clean-shaven face, black hair, black T-shirt, pair of jeans, and his whole body full of holes after the grenade.”
As Auton prepares for his third deployment, this one to Afghanistan, he’s now engaged to a German woman but uncertain if they’ll be able to work out their differences. She wants to stay in Germany, which Auton says he also loves, but he will have to go wherever the Army decides to send him. He will not abandon the family that he believes has given him his true place in this world. He already knows this will be his career no matter how many times he gets deployed. Somehow, despite what he’s had to do, this work has filled the empty spaces in him and given him both stability and a sense of calm and purpose. He tells me so in an e-mail.
“The army is the simplest job you can have. All you have to do is be where you are supposed to be on time and do what you are told,” says Auton. “The higher the rank you get the better the job. I am at the point in my career where now I issue the orders and teach the soldiers, this I love to do! I can retire at 39 yrs old. Where else
