The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

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One day soon after, Noah was sitting with his mother in the living room, chatting, when his sister, Sarah, walked in. Noah leapt to his feet and threw her across the room. “He would snap and go into another world, his Iraq world,” Cheryl says.

“I don’t like to tell people that he hit me,” Sarah says, “because I don’t want people to think that that’s my brother; that was not him. It was him when he got back from Iraq.”

She remembers the story Noah told her, how one day he watched his best friend in Iraq blown up by a roadside bomb, how he went around with a plastic bag picking up body parts to send home. “When he left the room, I cried after that. I just cried,” Sarah says. “I couldn’t even imagine. I wouldn’t even want to.” But even if Sarah felt she understood the source of Noah’s rage, she never understood what set it off.

At the end of November 2006, Noah was sitting on the couch with Sarah, channel surfing, when he attacked her. “It was just from out of nowhere, I don’t know if it was something on the TV that triggered him,” she says. “I seriously couldn’t breathe because he was choking my life out of me. I mean, I could not breathe, my face was turning blue, and he was beating me with the phone.

“It was very scary, just straight evil came over his face. It was horrible. When he finally realized what he was doing, that’s when I got up and ran.”

Days later, Sarah came home early from work and found Noah packing his things. He was moving in with his friend Tyler Nuberg, who had a spare room. “I think he was worried he was going to hurt one of us,” Cheryl says. “We were sitting together one day, and out of the blue, matter-of-fact, he said, ‘I could kill every one of you in the house, not give it a second thought, and go to sleep.’ ”

Noah started working at Tyler’s family business, a kayak factory, and every evening he would sit in his chair next to a mini-fridge full of Michelob Golden Draft Light and listen to music. Almost every night he played an acoustic ballad by the band Smile Empty Soul called “This Is War.” In haunting detail, it describes kicking in doors and blowing people’s heads off “for my country.” The song is a favorite among many returning veterans. Noah requested in his suicide note that it be played at his funeral.

Cheryl was dropping by Tyler and Noah’s place virtually every day, and each time she left the house in tears. He was becoming angrier and would berate her in slurring, drunken tirades. “Noah drank to forget and he drank because he hated himself,” Cheryl says.

On Monday, July 25, 2007, it was already hot when Noah left for the kayak factory. He was in a good mood, and there was nothing strange about his behavior, except that for lunch he had only a beer, Tyler remembered later. Noah left work early, and at about five o’clock, his mother, planning to drop off mail and see her son, drove by his house and the factory looking for his truck. When she couldn’t find it, Cheryl assumed he was at the recruiter’s office. He had been talking about signing up again, but this time, he’d told Sarah, he planned on dying in Iraq.

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