long enough with nothing coming out, I would start drinking again, trying to trick myself into believing it would loosen my brain and the words would come. They rarely did. I became so frustrated that I convinced myself that the problem wasn’t post-traumatic stress but attention deficit disorder. I knew the drug Adderall was commonly prescribed for ADD, but I also knew that college students used it illicitly to help them focus, study harder and stay up longer. I finally got the courage to ask my doctor to prescribe it for me as a test. He did so, reluctantly.
The first time I took it, I used the proper dosage of two ten-milligram pills. It gave me a jittery sensation, but also, I believed, the ability to better concentrate. In a few days I had written more than I had in weeks. For a moment, I felt I had found my cure. But when it wore off, I was exhausted. Like cocaine, Adderall puts your whole nervous system on overdrive. I started exceeding the proper dosage by twice or sometimes three times the amount. I would sit down at my computer, type a few lines but then become too jittery to work. I needed a drink to cut the effect and then a cigarette with the drink. Soon I was on the floor of my apartment again instead of at my laptop, blowing billows of smoke up at my chimney that drifted, I imagined, down to the common, mingling with the ghosts of Washington and his army preparing to lay siege to Boston. After this brief surge of pharmaceutical- induced hope, my writing again hit a wall.
But while I couldn’t write, I could think, and Taleb Salem Nidal was never far from my thoughts. In my head, I would play back the video I shot of him, see the resignation on his face and hear his voice as I walked away. Sometimes when I was fully immersed in the Mardi Gras of my own self-destruction, I would try to talk to people about what I had done, and the combination of my desperate earnestness and slurring words made the dark tale even more unpalatable and almost impossible to understand. The burden remained mine alone.
Once, after a night of heavy drinking, I stood staring up at a lamppost, wondering why I shouldn’t just unsheathe my belt, loop it over my neck and tie the other end to the base of the light. It was, I thought, simple math—a life for a life. If not that night, soon I would have to make a choice.
Part I: The Killing Business
Phantom Noise
Chapter 1: Killing Up Close
Imagine you are a Marine ordered to clear a building during one of the bloodiest battles of a particularly brutal and dirty war. Anything could be waiting for you inside: mines, booby traps, goats, women, children… or fully armed enemy fighters. Once you discover what’s on the other side of the wall, you will have to make a decision in a fraction of a second about whether you need to pull the trigger or not. The marvels of modern weaponry—robot drones, guided cruise missiles and even small arms that have great accuracy over long distances—have made this kind of close-quarters combat mightily rare and mostly unnecessary. But this day, for Corporal Willy Wold, is one of the exceptions. When I see him, he’s standing in front of a wall outside a mosque in Fallujah and firmly in the almost manic-rapturous throes of a full-tilt adrenaline dump, the kind you get when you come face-to-face with your enemies and kill half a dozen of them before they can kill you.
Only about forty minutes ago, his fireteam had entered the mosque in south Fallujah from which insurgents had been shooting. At one point during this war American military leadership had decided not to attack mosques, even if insurgents were fighting from inside. The public-relations blowback of destroying a Muslim holy place undoubtedly created more insurgents instead of fewer. But this unofficial policy also gave rise to what American military strategist and historian Edward Luttwak calls the “paradoxical strategy of war,” which, in very simplified terms, proffers that regardless of the soundness of your strategic thinking on the battlefield, your enemy will quickly adapt and use your practices against you. Because the Americans weren’t attacking mosques, insurgents routinely fought from them, even using their towering minarets as sniper nests. Frustrated, American generals decided before Operation Phantom Fury, a major offensive to drive insurgents from Fallujah, that the restraints were coming off and if insurgents holed up in a mosques, those mosques were coming down.[6]
This mosque that Willy Wold entered would be an example of that new policy. When Marines took fire from it, they responded by blasting holes through the walls with high-explosive rounds fired through the 120 mm main guns of their M1A1 Abrams tanks. Soon after, a squad of Marines led by Lance Corporal Patrick O’Brien entered the mosque. They found one dead and five wounded insurgents (the same mentioned in the prologue), likely the result of the tank’s rounds.
The wounded Iraqis inside the main hall surrendered without a fight, slumped against the back wall bleeding and broken. But there was another room that hadn’t been checked out yet. O’Brien ordered Wold and his three-man fireteam to stack on it (SWAT-style) and make sure it was clear.
Wold did as he was told and on his signal, his men loaded into the room, one sweeping to the right with his rifle muzzle, the other to the left and Wold up the middle, like the linebacker he was in high school. They found nothing initially, but there was another doorway.
The first Marine entered and his pupils nearly popped trying to take in what was before him inside: nine armed insurgents, all bearded and ranging in age from midtwenties to midthirties. Some wore shirts and trousers,
