The Things They Cannot Say

by Kevin Sites

  KS: Does it scare you at all, though? That, like, you have to break into a house like that and you guys have guns pointed at you?

  WW: I don’t have time to think about that shit. When I first got here, I was always worried about… my friend told me today, “Man, you were so worried about getting killed when you first got here.” But now, I don’t have time to think about that shit. You bust into a house… Just like today, I had people pointing AKs at me. And I was thinkin’, “I have to shoot them.” I shot six people in less than ten seconds. It’s just what you’ve got to do. That shit goes right out the window. And you don’t have to push.

  […]

  KS: If you weren’t gonna be deployed, would you stay in the Marine Corps?

  WW: Yeah. I don’t know if I could do another tour over here. ’Cause the more time you spend here, the more people you wanna kill. Right now, it’s… I’m so sick of ’em tearin’ up my buddies, I just wanna kill ’em all. The more time you spend here, the more time you just wanna get in there and kill ’em.

  KS: You think when you get home you’ll be able to turn it off?

  WW: I hope so. [His face shows uncertainty.] I really do. My fiancée’s really worried that I’m not gonna come back the same. I’ll never tell her what things I did here. I’ll never tell anybody. ’Cause I’m not proud of killing people. I’m just proud to serve my country. I never understood it until I got here, you know? I never understood any of it, like, you know, “Hey, I’m defending my country. I’m in the Marine Corps.” You don’t defend your country until you do something like this. Then you really understand it. The pride aspect really comes out of it. I hate being here but I love it at the same time. It’s got its ups and downs. I haven’t talked to my fiancée in almost a month. I’m just hoping she’s doing good.

  KS: Wanna use my phone?

  WW: Oh, no, I can’t… I can’t do that.

  KS: You’re welcome to.

  WW: Nah, I couldn’t do that.

  KS: I asked… I let the guys use them all the time, so …

  WW: Maybe if I see you around.

  KS: Yep.

  WW: I—

  KS: But I let a lot of the guys use them, so it’s not a big deal.

  WW: I miss everything out here. Our anniversary. My birthday, her birthday. It’s the last ones, though, man. Six months, I’ll be done. Two months left here.

  KS: What do you have to do when you go back to the States? You have to spend three months…?

  WW: I’ll be, like, three months left in the Marine Corps? Four months?

  KS: Just process you out?

  WW: I’ll get detached out. I’ll just work at the gym. I’m, like, a real gym buff. I lost thirty-five pounds since I’ve been here, so when I get back I really gotta hit the gym real hard.

  KS: You gonna go back and play football?

  WW: Yeah. I gotta get… I weighed two twenty-eight when I got out here, I’m down to about one ninety now. ’Cause I haven’t gotten to touch a gym once.

  KS: That’s hard…

  WW: It’s really hard.

  KS: Do you think that some of that anger you have out here, though, is that gonna go back with you, too?

  WW: You just learn how to channel your anger. I think I’ll be all right. I’m so excited to be a civilian that I’m sure it’ll all go away. Like, me and the guy that just got hit, all day today, all we could think today was about goin’ home and gettin’ a Big Mac and spending the night with our fuckin’… our fiancées, you know? It’s all we wanna do, just be normal people. This is his third deployment, you know? I can’t stand it.

  KS: It’s hard to do this?

  WW: It’s not hard to kill people. It’s hard not to get killed. My company’s got so many casualties it’s not even funny.

  KS: Yeah, especially in this event. A lot of casualties …

  WW: [Yelling] Hey, we’re pushing!

  […]

  WW: [Yelling and directing his fireteam] Hey, Dar, when you come up here, we’ve got friendlies down here. Hey, we’ve got friendlies down here! Hold up. Hold up! Hey, listen up! We’ve got friendlies down to the south! You hear me? Keep your eye on the rooftops and get low!

  KS: Which city in Washington?

  WW: Vancouver.

  KS: It’s a nice place.

  WW: It’s, ah, it’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to go home. I wanna get… um, my motorcycle only got three hundred and fifty miles on it. I can’t wait to get back and …

  KS: What kind of bike you got?

  WW: Just bought that new, uh, 636 Ninja. It’s Kawasaki.

  KS: What’s wrong with you, man? You guys always buy those when you go home.

  WW: Nah, I bought this, uh… I bought it before I came out here. I always wanted a bike.

  KS: Is “Willy” short for “William,” or is that what you go by?

  WW: Uh, William. I go by Willy, though.

  KS: You got brothers and sisters?

  WW: Uh, three brothers, two sisters.

  KS: Older or younger?

  WW: I’m the second youngest.

  KS: So what do they think about you being out here?

  WW: They can’t stand it. My little sister… if you ever see this, I love you, ’cause she writes me all the time. Her and my mom are writing me all the time, the only ones. And my fiancée, and that’s the only… that’s the sole purpose of why I can make it out here. Is family.

  KS: Well if I put you on TV, you ought to call them, so they can at least watch it.

  WW: What’s that?

  KS: I said if I put you on TV, you ought to at least call them so they can watch it.

  WW: I tried. It’s… I know I’m gonna be here for the rest of my tour, so… it’ll be at least a couple more weeks before I get to talk to ’em. Maybe I can get somebody to send ’em an e-mail or something.

  KS: Yeah, give me your e-mail address. I mean, ’cause I might use some of this tonight. Feed it out. We feed our stories every night.

  WW: I was on TV a few times. I was on CNN twice when the president had, um, chiefs of staff and he had, um, peacekeeping missions up at Camp David.

  KS: You did, uh, protection?

  WW: When he gets off the helo… when the head of state gets off the helo. Then we provide security for him.

  KS: So how’d you get to be a sergeant so fast?

  WW: I’m only corporal right now, but I’ll be a sergeant soon. I’m a good… I’ve always been a good PTer. I got… before I came out here, I’d go the gym every day. You know? I’m a good shot, as you can see today.

  KS: How many did you get? Six today?

  WW: I shot six out of nine. I could have shot more, but I’m so worried about putting one of my Marines’ lives in danger.

  KS: How long did that whole sequence take place?

  WW: The killing of those nine people?

  KS: Yeah.

  WW: Maybe thirty seconds. Just because I’ve got a slow Marine. He froze up on me. He almost got us killed. I can’t be mad at him. I get mad at the kid every day because he’s a really slow Marine, but I can’t get mad at him for that because morally… He told me morally he didn’t think he should kill him because he didn’t realize what was going on at first. Once I told him what to do, he did it. And he’s glad that… He’ll never question my authority ever again. I guarantee it.

  KS: They had the weapons pointed at you?

  WW: Yeah, I saved his life today. I’m really glad I did, too. I love the kid to death as a man, but as a Marine, he’s just not a very good Marine. [Yelling] Yeah? No, I don’t! What do you need?

  […]

  WW: [Sound of tank round hitting a house] That’s how we clear it. That’s probably our main objective. That’s how we clear a house. That’s how the Marines do it. Okay. We don’t mess around.

  […]

  WW: You gotta be careful, man. You ain’t got a gun?

  KS: Nah. Yeah, we’re noncombatants, so we’re not supposed to carry ’em.

  WW: I couldn’t do
that. If I’m gonna be somewhere like this, I gotta have me a gun. That’s the bad thing about this country. Everybody got a gun.

  KS: That’s right. Same with Afghanistan. Crazy.

  WW: In Afghanistan it’s a totally different war. Of course, we’re doing sassel ops around here. You know, except for this. This is a …

  KS: When you say “sassel ops” what does that mean?

  WW: In a nutshell, it’s when you go around and you’re pretty much there for the people, 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 fiancée back home. She’s even got the same name as mine. [Yelling] Right here!

  Note: Wold pushes out into the darkness with his team.

  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 On Killing, labeled the six stages of response to killing in combat: concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, rationalization and acceptance.

  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 fiancée 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, until the day he told her he was going to reenlist. He had been home for a year and a couple of months, much of it spent shuttling between doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists. But few were able to bring him comfort or relief. His frustration fed on what seemed perfect logic in his damaged brain: while his time with the Marines was the source of injuries, it was also the place he felt most protected.

  “My brothers will take care of me,” he told Sandi.

  “We tried to talk him out of it for hours. ‘Look what the Marines have done to you already,’” she says. She was desperate to keep him from returning to the place she felt had hurt him the most. “Get an education, be what you want to be. Look at where you’re at,” she pleaded.

  But she says it was already too late. “He wasn’t there anymore. The sparkle in his eyes was completely gone. He was hollow.”

  Sandi says things went farther downhill from there. After he reenlisted he was made a sergeant in the First Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, but according to her, he didn’t want to return to combat, but rather wanted to work as an armorer doing repair of light weaponry. His unit’s respect for his war service evaporated with their realization that he was addicted to OxyContin.