by Kevin Sites
“I shot him in the throat at about two hundred to two hundred and forty meters. He fell to his knees, gasping for air.”
Auton and the squad leader moved in closer to inspect. The guy was still alive but hunched over. But Auton said they still weren’t sure what he had in his pockets.
“What do you want me to do?” Auton asked his squad leader. The squad leader hesitated for a few seconds.
The choice to complete the unfinished process of taking a life in war leads directly to consequences unknown. Some would say it carries twice the moral weight by offering the soldier another chance to reconsider the delivery of a mortal blow. But which decision will be easier for the soldier to live with, confirmation of the original intent to kill, or watching an enemy suffer by allowing him to continue to live or die without intervention?
This is perhaps the most poignant dilemma in Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel of World War I All Quiet on the Western Front, in which German soldier Paul stabs a French soldier who has stumbled into his trench, but instead of dying immediately the man’s agony is both intimate and prolonged. Paul nearly goes mad watching him suffer from just a few feet away: “These hours… The gurgling starts again—but how slowly a man dies! For this I know—he cannot be saved. Indeed, I have tried to tell myself that he will be, but at noon this pretence breaks down and melts before his groans. If only I had not lost my revolver crawling about, I would shoot him. Stab him I cannot.”
Here, on this street in Iraq, for Auton and his squad leader, the questions had real consequences. Had the man been subdued? Was he no longer a threat or did he still conceal some unseen harm? The choice they would make would have a lifetime impact on them and would have to be justified on legal as well as personal and moral grounds.
The squad leader, believing the Iraqi could still be a threat, said, “Finish it.” Auton raised his rifle to the man a second time.
“I fired two rounds in his ear at two feet away.” His brains splattered across the street and blood seeped out in a large, dark crimson pool. When they pulled the now-dead man’s hands from underneath him and checked his pockets, Auton said they found a little black fragmentation grenade with the pin still in place. Auton said he and his squad set up on another corner and repeated the procedure several more times that night. When someone would run through the streets, his squad leader would spot him with the narrow beam of his SureFire flashlight and Auton would take the shot.
“I wasn’t there to care,” Auton said without any affection of false bravado. To him, it was a matter of ultimate practicality. “You don’t hold on to it. There’s a time for remorse, there’s a time to think about what happened. But it wasn’t that moment. You have to just be thankful it wasn’t you.”
I track Auton down by e-mail six years later. He’s still with the same unit based in Germany, but now leading a platoon as a staff sergeant rather than a member of a squad. He has done well by the Army and he feels they’ve done the same by him. And despite another deployment to Iraq, two years after we first met in Karbala, his attitude has changed little. He plans on being a “lifer,” making the Army his career. He broke up with his Turkish girlfriend after his deployment ended but tells me in an e-mail from Germany that he still carries his lucky charm.
“I do still have the small Koran and will keep it until the day I die. My last deployment I had the Koran with me as well, even though her and I had been split up for over two years. I will carry it again when I go to Afghanistan in the near future.”
Auton’s perspective on killing hasn’t changed much either, despite the fact that he’s now an older, experienced leader. “I must say that with my time deployed I feel outstanding for every life that I have taken,” he says in an e-mail. “I know now that those men that I personally killed would have killed me or my buddy to the left or right at any chance they could have gotten. I am glad I am the one who could take their life. I feel as if I saved many lives by doing so. I would do it all a million times over if I had to or need to for my fellow Soldiers and country!!”
While this response might seem overly gung-ho or even callous for those who haven’t shared his experiences, during my time with him Mikeal Auton convinced me that he’s a reasonable, polite and well-adjusted individual. But unlike many of his fellow soldiers struggling with their experiences of killing and seeing others killed, he, at least at for now, seems unfazed by the deadly business in which he has been employed for the last third of his life.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and all other manner of social scientists have struggled with the idea of killing and how we live with ourselves in the aftermath of having taken the lives of others. The psychological concept of the “shadow self” looms large here. The idea was first advanced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who wrote in his study Psychology and Religion: West and East, “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
It’s a Western variation on the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, where opposite forces, light and dark, masculine and feminine, coexist and are interdependent on each other. But unlike yin and yang, where these opposites are not necessarily distinctions between good and evil, Jung believed the shadow was a receptacle for human darkness, but also a place of creativity. Many scholars of war have interpreted the shadow as the best way to explain the human capacity for killing and our response to it.
In The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, the philosopher and World War II combat veteran J. Glenn Gray wrote, “Becoming a soldier was like escaping from one’s own shadow. To commit deeds of violence without the usual consequences that society visits upon the violent seemed at first a bit unnatural but for many not unpleasant. All too quickly it could become a habit.”
For a rare few, the shadow is the dominant or conscious, rather than subconscious, force in life. They’re commonly referred to as sociopaths or psychopaths. According to Dr. Martha Stout in her book The Sociopath Next Door, the 4 percent of the American population in this category lacks any trait of empathy or remorse even when it comes to killing other people. Though there are no clear statistics on the number of sociopaths in the military as opposed to the rest of society (there are psychological screenings in place intended to weed them out from military service), it would seem a fair number would tend to gravitate toward a profession 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 The Hurt Locker. The EOD team planted C4 plastic explosives around the walls and leveled half the building. Once the dust cleared, Auton saw a vent duct above the stairwell. If the attacker had been in the vent, he had to be dead now. But that thought disappeared as soon as his team began taking fire from the vent. They returned fire, pumping more than a thousand rounds into the hole, but according to accounts from the soldiers, the stubborn sniper continued to fire back.
“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 in the civilian life could I do that? Also, everything is paid for. The only worry I have is the loss of my life or a soldier’s life, and I have come to peace with both of these.”
Postscript
In March 2012, I got an e-mail from Auton telling me that he got married in October 2011 in a small German town called Wetzlar. He told me that he also passed the Army’s twenty-four-day Special Forc
es assessment and selection process at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, less than two hundred miles from where he grew up. In the fall he would attend the five-phase qualification course. If successful, Auton would wear the dagger-and-crossed-arrow flash of one of the most elite, highly trained and legendary units of the American military, the Green Berets.
Part II: The Wounds of War
What’s It Like to Be Shot, Bombed or Burned in Combat?
The brightest best thing in my life was the war and there won’t be anything better. And the blackest lousiest thing in my life was also the war, and there won’t be anything worse. So my life has been lived.
—Arkady Babchenko, Russian soldier, journalist
From One Soldier’s War, Arkady Babchenko, translated by Nick Allen (Grove Press, 2008).
Babchenko was a conscript for the first Chechnya campaign in 1995 and volunteered for the second in 1999.
Chapter 3: Survivor’s Guilt
I am only twenty-four and have lived a life I wish on no one.
Lance Corporal James Sperry, U.S.M.C.
3rd Battalion, 1st Marines
The War in Iraq (2004)
Redemption can come from the most unlikely places. Mine is a present from a war-damaged twenty-four-year-old in Lebanon, Illinois, who e-mailed these words to me.
Dear Mr. Sites
You were imbedded [sic] with 3rd Bn/ 1st Mar. Div. during operation phantom fury. I was the Marine that you helped care me to saftey after i was shot by a sniper. I want to say thank you very much for helping me out. I was wondering if you had taken any photos of me during that time of injury and any of my fallen friends. i have lost twenty friends in this war and would like to get as many pictures as I can. I will pay what ever you want for the pictures. Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all you did for me. i now have a three year old child that would nevr of came if was for your help. I will for ever be in your debit. Thanks