The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

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I tell Shay about Noah’s experiences in Iraq, in particular the killing, the loss of comrades, the nightmares. He’s saddened but not surprised: “The flip side of this fellow’s despair was the murderous rages he experienced on his second tour. In combat, soldiers become each other’s mothers. The rage, need for revenge, and self-sacrificial commitment toward protecting each other when comrades are killed [are] akin to when a mother’s offspring are put in danger or killed.”

“On July 4th I went to kill a man that came too close to my truck,” Noah wrote in his journal in 2005. Consumed by paranoia and a lust for revenge, Noah assumed the driver had to be a car bomber—and if he wasn’t, he deserved a bullet anyway. “Well, my dumb ass forgot to chamber a round, I got lucky because it was just a stupid driver, and he got lucky from my mistake. I’m pretty pissed about it, I had him dead in my sights. I got to shoot at some other people that day, but missed I guess. We didn’t actually stop to check.”

That month, after writing about another bomb attack and his decision to become an alcoholic back home—“If you don’t give a shit about anything, nothing can bother you”—Noah stopped keeping his journal. He wrote letters only occasionally.

Near the end of his deployment, Noah was assigned guard duty at a checkpoint. A man in a car failed to slow down, and Noah killed him. The dead man was discovered to be a doctor. “That was the last person Noah killed,” Cheryl tells me, as if unburdening herself of this final secret. But still she defends him. “It was on orders from his commander, and Noah shot the man. A nice clean shot.”

Noah took a picture of the grisly scene with his cell phone. “We saw it,” Cheryl recalls, “and said, ‘You have it in your head, you don’t need to see it every time you open your phone.’ So Tommy threatened he was going to smash the phone or something, and Noah got rid of it. He left his wallet lying around and I went through it one day and found a note written to this doctor. He was apologizing over and over, ‘I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?’ [That] type of thing. I took that note and threw it on the stove and burned it. I figured it was something he didn’t need.”

After his honorable discharge on June 26, 2006, Noah moved back into his basement bedroom. “I can honestly say he was nothing but a messed up, confused little boy—man, child, all wrapped into one. Didn’t know . . .” Cheryl pauses to gather herself, “. . . didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t drive a car really, because driving he was constantly worried about car bombs. You’re not the same after. He didn’t laugh anymore, he didn’t smile anymore, and if he did, it was phony and it never went to the eyes.”

Noah visited the VA clinic and talked about his nightmares. A therapist prescribed Ambien and told him to come back in a couple of months. The sleeping pills didn’t help, and he started drinking more heavily. He quit his job as a janitor at the U.S. Steel plant where Tom worked, after some men ridiculed him for having PTSD. Noah pissed into a mop bucket, soaked a cloth in it, and wiped down their lunch table before leaving.

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