The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

“It was a quarter to five or so,” Cheryl recalls, “and so I pick up the telephone, ‘Hey it’s me, wanna know if you want to have dinner with me, see me, talk to me, but I guess not,’ and I hung up the phone, didn’t tell him I loved him or anything, just hung up the phone.” Twenty-five minutes later her phone buzzed with a text message from Noah. “I opened it up and it says, ‘i love you guys so much and i’m so sorry.’ I text him back, ‘You are my heart, Noah,’ and then I went to call him, and before I could call him Sarah called me. She wanted to know if I’d just got a text message from Noah, and I said yes and she started screaming.”

Noah was at “the spot”—where he’d practiced marksmanship at 13 with Tom and cut school to fish with his friends. He’d parked his old, brick-red Sonoma pickup in the clearing, between a small patch of birch trees and a discarded, upturned boat seat. With his knife he carved FREEDOM ISN’T FREE in the pickup’s dashboard. He took his photo IDs from his wallet and stabbed his face out of each one. He punched the rearview mirror, smashing the glass.

At some point, he took a picture of himself with his cell phone. It would be the last photograph of Noah alive. And it is a portrait of despair: His shirt is off and he looks as though he’s been crying. Between five and six that evening, he sent a message to his friends Ryan Nelson and Tyler: “bam life’s a bitch i’m out.”

Noah scrawled a suicide note on the back of a National Rifle Association pistol-safety certificate and then started drinking. “Time’s finally up,” he wrote, “I am not a good person, I have done bad things. I have taken lives, now it’s time to take mine.”

Noah put his .38 Special to his right temple, wedged one of his Army dog tags between the muzzle and his skin, and pulled the trigger.

A few weeks before Memorial Day 2008, fresh sod finally was laid over the loose dirt covering Noah at the Calvary Cemetery in Virginia, Minnesota, which crests a gentle hill, opposite the hospital. His mother and sister, who split their time between here and the spot, have finished decorating veterans’ graves with flags. They sit cross-legged on Noah’s plot, talking quietly.

In the first months after Noah’s death, Cheryl had gotten interest in her proposal to mandate counseling for returning veterans from Representatives Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Jim Oberstar (D-Minnesota) and Senators Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota). But now months have passed since she has received word from any of them. Sarah runs a fingernail through the etched letters on the headstone: I-r-a-q, she spells aloud. “It doesn’t need to say anything else,” Cheryl says.

“Have you had the urge to dig?” Sarah asks her mother. “I started one day. God, I’m so glad that the grass is down now. I just wanted to check he was still down there.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print