The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

By summer 2003, Noah was suffering constant nightmares and couldn’t sleep. To blow off steam he and other members of his platoon had taken to abusing suspects. “Whatever they’d do for stress relief,” Cheryl says, “hit a prisoner—because you’re so frustrated that you haul him off and slug him—well, Noah did those things along with the rest of them. The difference is he suffered from it. He felt guilty afterwards.”

With each passing day in the desert, though, Noah’s guilt was turning to confusion and anger. “Well, staying here has had one good impact on me,” he wrote. “I no longer regret what I did during the war. I have so much hatred in me I could go murder more sandniggers and I would just smile. That goes for almost everyone here. We had sympathy for them after the war but now we have absolutely nothing but hatred for them. We should have killed more during the war. I let all kinds of ‘innocent’ people go when I should have just mowed them down.”

By August, as their deployment drew to a close, Noah and some of his friends found a new way to vent: Close to Noah’s camp, two hens were kept in a hole deep enough that they couldn’t escape. Soldiers regularly pelted the hens with rocks until they were near death. One day, a sergeant caught them. “It was funny as hell,” Noah wrote. “He stood there watching in total disbelief for a good five minutes. Then he asked if we needed to talk to a chaplain. We told him we already talked to a psychiatrist and a chaplain and that it doesn’t help. He continued to watch like we were crazy then told us to quit.”

Then, as a casual coda—almost an afterthought—Noah added: “Oh yeah, one of my friends that I do this with accidentally killed a 3-year-old kid. He was shooting a SAW (fully automatic machine gun) at a car and a stray bullet caught this kid in the head. Oh well, one less motherfucker that won’t grow up and continue this shit. Luckily he is not in any trouble. They are keeping it quiet though. Well, fuck this place and I am going to vent some stress on the chickens and hopefully hoadjis later. I love you guys. Love, Noah.”

In September 2004, Noah’s 15 months were up, and he was sent back to Fort Stewart. He took a two-week leave to go home. Cheryl was enormously proud of her son and often told him so. “He’d get mad because he didn’t think there was anything to be proud of,” she says.

“It’s like the devil followed him home and wouldn’t let him be,” Tom Softich tells me. “I don’t have the answer. I know I feel that we failed him somehow. . . . I tried to get his mind into other places. I’d do things with him that he liked to do.”

For the first time in our days together, Tom’s emotions get the better of him. He rasps an apology before starting to sob.

In February 2005, Noah returned to Iraq. He was assigned to a new unit and sent to Balad, a city of 100,000, 50 miles north of Baghdad. Insurgent activity was at record levels, and immediately the unit began making contact with their elusive enemy.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print