The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

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The carnage on all sides far surpassed anything Noah had seen six months earlier.

On February 27, Noah sent an anguished e-mail home. “Well, I had a really bad day mom,” it began. “First I totaled a hoadjies car, but I did that on purpose. but then we had to go back out for a second mission and i ran over a little boy on accident. I was the last vehicle and i ran him over on the left side so my crew didn’t see it. i told them later i must have hit a dog. the kid was between 8–10 years old only. hopefully the family doesn’t try and do anything because the army might think it was weird i total a car and kill a kid in a matter of a couple of hours. i feel really bad but i thought he would get out of my way.”

Noah wrote in a journal about the fear he had of roadside bombs, about friends who’d shot Iraqis and been put on suicide watch, and about his growing sense of isolation. He also kept with him a small graduation photograph of his sister, Sarah, and would look at it during dark moments. “Lately I have been thinking I don’t even want to come back alive,” Noah wrote on March 15. “Granted I would never kill myself, but I hate life. If I died here, I would be young and it would be an honorable way to go. Let’s face it, I have no future when I get back.”

Violence in Balad increased, and the unit started losing men. The constant mortar fire coming into their camp killed a soldier, and roadside bombs were exploding virtually every time they crossed the wire. Twice, Noah was riding in the gun turret when they were hit; twice he escaped apparently unharmed. He said privately, however, that he was certain he had some traumatic brain injury, although later, back home, he would skip appointments to test for it, afraid of what they might confirm.

At the end of April, he had to clear out of his living quarters when a medic became suicidal. “If this shit keeps up I will snap,” he wrote in his journal. “If I do, I’m just going to start killing motherfuckers. Either Iraqis or soldiers, whatever sets me off. I doubt I will, but this is gonna be a stressful 8 months.”

His next entry is two weeks later: “So far, this has been the worst month of my life. With all this work I have been ready to snap. I don’t know how much I can take. A car pissed me off last night. The fucker kept flashing me and when he pulled off the road I almost ran him over. I changed my mind though. I could have gotten away with killing that motherfucker though. My transmission was going out and I could have blamed it on that. I am just waiting for a good opportunity though. I am just waiting for the chance where I know people will die.”

The entry closes, “I am a bad person.”

 “It’s titanic pain that these men live with. They don’t feel that they can get that across, in part because they feel they deserve it, and in part because they don’t feel people will understand it,” says Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who has worked with combat vets for 23 years and written two books about PTSD, or psychological and moral injury, as he insists it should be known. “Despair, this word that’s so hard to get our arms around. It’s despair that rips apart people [who] feel they’ve become irredeemable.”

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