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"FacebookPinterest\n\nBy January 2008, former Marine gunnery sergeant Matthew Hevezi was just trying to hold on. His depression, which he likened to quicksand, had him by the balls, and each day he was being pulled down deeper. Nothing, not even sleep, came naturally anymore. He used medication to put himself out at night and sheer willpower to get up in the morning. Dreams from the night before leaked into the day\u2014young Marines beheaded or impaled on spikes, he himself trapped in a car under the ocean, his 11-year-old boy caught and killed in crossfire\u2014dreams that appalled and exhausted him. He barely ate. He was constantly cold. His only foothold, the bit of steel inside: He had to stay alive for his two sons.\n\nThat winter afternoon when his wife saw him standing silently in the bedroom doorway, she turned o` the TV and asked what was wrong. \"Time to go to the hospital,\" Matt said. This would be his fourth trip to the psych ward, and no, he didn't need her to drive him. He'd already called his \"li'l brothers\"\u2014former Marines major Gamal Awad and sergeant Justin Inabinette\u2014and they were standing by, ready to take him to the VA in San Diego. They'd all been in and out of psych wards; they knew the drill.\n\nMatt showed up at Gamal's front door in Temecula, pain printed so sharply on his face that it seemed to have frozen it. He said nothing to Gamal, just stared unblinkingly into his eyes. To anyone else, it would have been unsettling, but Gamal had long since lost the ability to be unnerved. In a crisis, his heart shut down and his brain switched into action mode, a useful quality if it weren't for the fact that Gamal lived every day in a state of crisis, so he hardly felt anything anymore, his heart a tomb, and he planned every trip out of the house, even taking his dogs for a walk, as if he were ecuting a military mission. Gamal saw Matt and began issuing orders. \"Justin drives,\" he said. \"I'm shotgun. Matt, you're in the back.\" His brisk, almost overly efficient manner was partially for Matt's benefit, \"to let him know we've got him, we'll carry him now.\"\n\nThey could've put Matt in the trunk, for all he cared. \"I was fucking flatlined,\" he says.\n\nGamal had already prepared his car for the sixty-mile drive to San Diego\u2014cell phone on the dashboard, camera facing forward, ready to record any problem that might arise, GPS with their destination punched in. Camp Pendleton Marine base, where they had all served and where all three were discharged against their will, lay close by. Neither Gamal nor Justin asked Matt a single question. Theirs is a \"probe-free relationship,\" as Gamal calls it. In fact, if there were any rule to their friendship, it would be just that: No probing. VA doctors, military shrinks, curious civilians with nothing at stake ask questions. They stick a shovel in your brain: How does it feel? Gamal put the radio on, killing the silence.\n\nWhen they arrived at the VA, Gamal told Justin where to park. Gamal had been here many times before\u2014not inside the hospital but sitting in this parking lot, trying to will himself out of the car and into the emergency room to ask for help. He could never do it, though; he didn't believe there was any treatment that could fix him. As he led Matt toward the emergency-room doors, a nonsensical thought ran through his brain: There are many ways to dissect a frog, but the frog is still dead.\n\nThey walked up to the intake window. There were questions, and Gamal answered for Matt, occasionally turning to him: \"Is that accurate? That pretty close?\" Then they sat waiting for a doctor. \"He seemed catatonic,\" Gamal remembers. \"Nothing behind the eyes.\"\n\nWhen the doc arrived, Gamal swung to his feet and, taking one last look at Matt, walked away. He said nothing, not even good-bye. \"What can you say? 'I'm here for you, buddy'? He already knows that. 'Tomorrow will be a better day'? There's nothing to say but 'Things are fucked-up.' And he knows things are fucked-up and I know things are fucked-up, so\u2026\"\n\nMany months later, once we'd all gotten to know one another, after hundreds of phone calls and e-mails and interviews, Justin phoned me at 2 a.m. to say, \"You know what you should call your story, the story of me and Matt and Gamal? 'The Lost Convoy.'\"\n\n\n\nI met Gamal first. Three years ago, a veterans' advocate called to tell me he knew of a Marine major who was willing to go on the record about suffering from PTSD and, after being charged with misconduct, had been drummed out of the Corps. He didn't have to say anything more. Marines don't suffer from PTSD; a private or lance corporal may occasionally, reluctantly, suffer from \"combat stress.\" But Marine officers? They don't even get head colds.\n\nThe Marines, or Many Americans Running into Endless Shit, as they refer to themselves, are notoriously stoic. From the moment they enter boot camp, they're taught that nothing is stronger than the will, which can push the body through heat, mud, fear, exhaustion, and pain. The Marines are the \"first to fight,\" the \"tip of the spear\"; they take the land, and then the Army rolls in and holds it. They call themselves the shit's shit; other soldiers call them bullet bags and bullet sponges.\n\n\"When you earn the title Marine, the expectations of toughness are inherited,\" Matt says. \"As soon as you put the uniform on, you're expected to be a Marine, and Marines are not weak\u2014physically or mentally. The culture doesn't allow it.\" A broken Marine is not only useless, he's morally suspect\u2014a malingerer, a nonhacker, a shitbird, a broke dick, a 10-percenter, a light-duty commando, one of the sick, lame, and lazy. As Gamal puts it: \"You have a mental illness? Get a straw and suck it up.\"\n\nBut untreated mental wounds don't just fade away. Fifty-two active-duty Marines committed suicide in 2009; only thirteen more were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that year. Binge drinking and abuse of prescription painkillers are on the rise, and every day some of these Marines who try to suck it up are kicked out of the Corps for misconduct. Many of them self-medicated with booze and drugs, or got violent with their wives, blew up on the job, or didn't show up for work at all. And they found out that the Marine Corps shows no mercy to those who step out of line. Last year, the Corps prosecuted roughly six times the number of troops for misconduct as the army did, though it is only one-third the size. Medals, commendations, years of service, combat tours\u2014it all melts away in the face of a misconduct charge.\n\nAmong the three of them, Gamal, Matt, and Justin gave thirty-eight years to the Corps. They were career Marines, in for the long haul. \"There's nobody like the Marines,\" Matt says. \"You can go anywhere, do anything. Put as much weight on me as you like and I'll fucking lift it, and I'll go. I was deep, deep into the Marine Corps thing. They were la mia famiglia.\n\n\"It's all storybook until it goes bad. And when it changes, it's like living in a sewer, spiritually. After a completely stellar career\u2014every command I served at I served with distinction, with honors and awards and certificates\u2014everything changed for me when I got sick. None of my friends from the Marine Corps talk to me anymore. Everybody turns their back on you. It's the deepest sense of betrayal and abandonment you can feel.\"\n\n\n\nIt was midnight when I dialed Gamal's number, because that's when he had asked me to call. He couldn't sleep at night, he explained, hadn't in six years. \"It's the worst fucking feeling in the world,\" he said. I could hear a TV droning in the background and the occasional yap of a dog. He told me his fianc\u00E9e, Hawley, was asleep upstairs and that he was stationed down in the family room, where he felt the safest. \"I can hear and see everything,\" he said, as if he were on sentry duty. \"It's a good vantage point.\"\n\nAs we talked, Gamal took occasional hits off a pot pipe. He had a doctor's prescription for medical marijuana to deal with his PTSD, as well as antidepressants, antianxiety medication, and blood-pressure meds to alleviate his physical reactions to nightmares. He talked almost nonstop for the next four hours, describing his fourteen-year career in the Corps, how he had been afraid to ask for help when he developed PTSD, and, when he had, how badly it had gone. He obsessed about losing his belief in God. \"I had such a strong faith,\" he said. \"But once you see the reality\u2014people praying to their God, and still, shit happens? I don't see the divine inspiration in a little kid\u2026\" He didn't finish the sentence. \"I don't see how God has his or her hand in something so shocking that it doesn't even feel like it should be real.\" Over the next few months, Gamal and I spoke like this every other day. These weren't interviews, exactly. He hated direct questions. Sometimes he'd call because he'd just remembered an incident he needed to tell me, leaving a message on my machine that began: \"Don't pick up, Kathy.\u2026\" So much of what he had gone through had been denied, ridiculed, twisted, the truth known only to him, and so almost every incident he described was followed up by an email containing \"supporting documentation.\" When he spoke of trying to kill himself in Iraq, he sent me a photo of the bullet that misfired.\n\nIn all, I would receive 376 e-mails from Gamal\u2014military fitness reports, doctors' records, letters he wrote while he was stationed in Iraq (to be opened in case of his death), e-mails from his ex-wife, navy and Marine Corps awards and commendations, and the transcript of his Board of Inquiry: United States v. Gamal F. Awad Major, USMC. The culmination was a 680-megabyte disc, titled \"Semper Infidelis: My Plight with PTSD, Misconduct the U.S. Marine Corps,\" a step-by-step recounting, told purely through official documents, of a psyche hammered once, twice, three times, and then falling apart in slow motion.\n\nThere were crucial incidents he just would not talk about. \"Was there a convoy situation in Iraq involving a family?\" I asked one day, after reading about it in his files and realizing I had come across the little kid whose fate had caused Gamal to lose faith in God.\n\n\"I don't want to talk about that,\" he said flatly.\n\nOne afternoon, I heard another man's voice in the background. \"That's Matt Hevezi,\" Gamal said. \"Another Marine. He's basically homeless, so he's living here.\" Matt was a seventeen-year veteran, considered one of the top Marine photojournalists before he was booted from the Corps after checking himself into the hospital for depression. \"Matt really had his shit locked on tight.\" He'd been in and out of psych wards for the past two years, battling depression. He described Gamal's house as a \"nest\" and a \"cave.\"\n\nBefore long, Gamal and Matt were calling me together on speakerphone. If they were drinking, the mood was jagged and boisterous\u2014Matt would say they were holding a meeting of the \"Self-Medicating Fucked-over Former Marine Association of Temecula,\" and they'd argue about who was \"blacker,\" Matt or Gamal.\n\nIn June 2007, Gamal and Matt started telling me about \"this kid Justin,\" a 26-year-old sergeant and Iraq veteran who'd also been tossed from the Corps. Gamal had met Justin in the psych ward at Balboa in March 2005, and now he and Matt were keeping an eye on him, an iffy business at best. Justin apparently had the habit of disappearing for days at a time.\n\nJustin had become bipolar while serving in Iraq and was suffering from PTSD. He was living on a rundown sailboat off a San Diego pier, and on his bad days he either rented a cheap motel room in Tijuana and tried to drink himself to death or holed up in his boat, never leaving his bed, peeing in bottles and shitting in bags, as he waited out the demons in his head. \"He has no reprieve from his own mind,\" Gamal said.\n\nAt the end of July, Justin called Gamal from the pier. He was crying. \"I can't take it anymore,\" he said. They persuaded him to take a bus to Temecula. The next day, Justin arrived with his laundry, and Gamal gave him the upstairs office to sleep in.\n\nSpeaking with Justin for the first time was like being lifted up by an ocean wave. \"I only have two volumes, loud and louder,\" he shouted into the phone. His laugh was a distinct, openmouthed ha-ha-ha. In the Corps, his nickname was Moto. For \"motivation.\" Now whenever Gamal and I talked late at night, I could hear Justin's walloping voice in the background, his happy bark of a laugh. Matt was usually upstairs, under the spell of his sleep meds, but Gamal and Justin would spend their nights playing video games, working out, watching TV, trolling the Internet. Occasionally either Gamal or Justin would nod off, but only if the other one was right there and awake. They were on the \"fifty-fifty watch program,\" Gamal said.\n\nAnd so there they were, three former Marines, broken by the Corps and then cut loose because they had outlived their usefulness, three Marines adrift and keeping one another afloat because that's what they had been trained to do. \"That's the way I grew up in the Corps,\" Matt said, \"believing you never leave a Marine in trouble.\" And for a few weeks, they seemed to be holding up okay. But as August drew to a close, Gamal started sounding twitchy. He could feel time collapsing, the days rushing him forward.\n\nAnd on September 15, Matt and Gamal called. They were both on the line. There was no hello. \"Do you want to tell her or should I?\" Matt said.\n\n\"You tell her.\"\n\n\"Gamal tried to off himself,\" Matt said. He'd taken an overdose of his antianxiety meds two nights before. There was a pause, filled by the raggedy sound of Gamal's breathing. \"Anniversary reaction.\"\n\n\n\nSix years earlier, on September 11, 2001, Captain Gamal Awad was doing recon inside the Pentagon. He had just moved to D.C. after being handpicked to serve at the Office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, a prestigious assignment and a sure steppingstone to promotion.\n\nUp until that point, Gamal's life had followed a trajectory of up, up, up, driven purely by sweat and determination. After working as a janitor to put himself through Catholic high school, Gamal enrolled in the University of Maryland, and in 1991 he joined the Marine Corps and went into Officer Candidate School.\n\nIn the fall of '98, Lieutenant General Peter Pace, who would become a general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added these remarks to Gamal's fitness report: \"What a superb officer. A standout from the day he reported aboard. Assign with care\u2014he is one of our best.\" He got married to a Marine captain two years later, but their career paths kept them from living together, and he moved to D.C. alone.\n\nAt 8:30 a.m. on September 11, Gamal received a call to report to the Navy Annex across the street from the Pentagon for a briefing. The meeting was well under way when a plane was heard flying close overhead. Then the building shook, and a low rumbling sound filled the air. Alarms began clanging, but the Annex's system was so antiquated that the alarms were always going off for no reason at all, and Gamal's boss, a retired Marine colonel, continued with the briefing. A man was heard running through the corridors, yelling, \"Everyone get the fuck out!\" No one moved.\n\n\"Sir, maybe we should get the fuck out,\" Gamal offered. Outside, black smoke rolled over the streets. Gamal could hear screams from the direction of the Pentagon. He wanted to go to them.\n\n\"Sir, request permission to leave,\" Gamal asked his CO.\n\n\"Permission denied.\"\n\nThe screams grew sharper. They were the screams of people burning. Two years later, Gamal would write in his journal: \"All we could do is listen. The screaming. I remember it stopping. I can still smell them.\"\n\nWhen the Marines were dismissed, Gamal made his way toward the Pentagon. \"I knew there were Marines down there,\" Gamal says. \"I couldn't just walk away.\"\n\nFour years later, testifying in his own defense at his Board of Inquiry, Gamal was asked to describe what happened next. For a while, he couldn't speak.\n\n\"It's okay,\" his lawyer said. \"Just take a second.\"\n\n\"There was a woman that I tried to help,\" Gamal said. \"When I\u2026 When I grabbed her, her skin came off in my hands; I can still feel it like it was yesterday. I moved her to what I felt was a more comfortable position. And then went on to the next person. I will never forget that. She\u2014 She died right there, and I didn't add to her comfort.\"\n\nLitter-bearer teams were formed, and though the fires were still burning and the building unstable, men made their way inside. Gamal refuses to talk about it now, so official records are left to tell the story. From the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal given to Captain Gamal F. Awad for \"Heroic achievement on 11 September, 2001: Captain Awad distinguished himself by responding as a volunteer to assist in the search and rescue efforts after the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. He repeatedly joined his recovery team to attempt to go deep into the crash site at great risk to his personal safety. Captain Awad's initiative, dedication, and quick thinking aided in establishing litter-bearer teams and aided in the establishment of the crash site's makeshift morgue.\" The commendation doesn't mention that Gamal found no survivors, only charred and white-ashed body parts, hundreds of them, strewn throughout the wreckage.\n\nThree days later, Gamal went to his boss and reported the state of his soul; he was as formal and vulnerable as a Catholic boy at confession. He said he was having nightmares, sir; flashbacks, sir; he thought he needed to get some psychological treatment. The distaste on the colonel's face was plain. \"As long as it doesn't interfere with your duties,\" he said. The message was clear: You're a goddamn Marine captain. Suck it up.\n\nFor almost a year, Gamal didn't seek treatment.\n\n\"The military mentality is: You go to a doctor, you get in, and you get out,\" he said. \"You need extended care, they're not going to need you.\" He moved into a new apartment, stocked the refrigerator with champagne because he thought he should celebrate being alive, but drank gin every night to knock himself out. He kept showing up at work, kept performing, but he was not getting better.\n\nIn May, desperate for some relief, he went to the Pentagon Wellness Clinic and met with Colonel Dermot Cotter, an army psychiatrist. Cotter diagnosed him with PTSD, prescribed antidepressants, and recommended therapy. When Gamal told his boss what he'd done, he was warned about the effect it could have on his career. Gamal wrote in his journal: \"As day turns to night, the thought\u2014the horror\u2014of having to relive another night of those terrible images haunts me. I find myself going over every detail of that day hoping for that one moment to relieve me of this burden.\" Nearly 200 had died that day in the Pentagon, and Gamal had survived. To a generous and fair-minded man, this was an outrageous tipping of the scales.\n\nThere was only one way to fix that: He would ask to go to Iraq. \"\n\nI thought I would be able to go over there and help,\" he said. \"I might be able to find a redeeming moment that would make up for all the other shit.\"\n\nCotter was so impressed by Gamal's patriotism that he released him from treatment so he could serve in the combat zone.\n\n\n\nWhen Gamal arrived at Camp Pendleton in August 2003, he bought a house in Temecula, and his wife came west and moved in. On the day he reported to his new CO, Gamal was a deeply divided man. He was still intent on being the good Marine, but hopelessness was beginning to overtake him. \"I remember checking in to see my commanding general the first time and in my head saying, 'Don't you be fucking weak. Don't let him see your weak side.'\"\n\nFive months after arriving at Pendleton, Gamal was off-loading ships in Kuwait. It was there, while driving from the port to the base, that he came across a pickup truck flipped over, women and children sprawled out on the street, their dresses and hair soaked in blood. \"We were told we couldn't stop,\" he says. \"And that's when it all started again.\" Images from September 11, screams and burning smells, invaded his brain.\n\nBefore Gamal left Kuwait to return to Pendleton in March '04, he filled out his postdeployment health-assessment form, the form the services use to pinpoint military members with mental-health problems so they can get them treatment. He answered all the questions honestly: Yes, he'd seen dead bodies; yes, he felt \"numb and detached\"; and yes, he was interested in receiving treatment. The navy medic who received the form noted that Gamal had been temporarily assigned to the unit and therefore the unit had \"no medical responsibility for this Marine's postdeployment follow-up care.\"\n\nFive months later, in August, Gamal would be stationed at Al Taqaddum in Iraq. Before leaving, he took out five life-insurance policies; this time he had no intention of returning home. He didn't have a suicide plan, but he was going into a war zone. He figured it would be easy to die.\n\nAl Taqaddum was mortared constantly, and at the first whistling hint of incoming, everyone would dive for cover\u2014everyone, that is, except Gamal. He would stand there, not even flinching. He began drinking and took to wandering the base, trying to find some time alone so he could cry. \"I mean, to not be able to tell someone you feel like blowing your brains out?\" he says. \"And having to still shoot your weapon, to be out there when planes are flying overhead and helicopters are taking off, on no medication, no therapy, nothing\u2026\"\n\nHe volunteered for night convoys, highly unusual for a major. On one of those convoys, a van that was heading toward them ignored their warning shots. After firing in the air, the soldiers fired at the tires and then inside the vehicle, killing a mother and child. The father was at the wheel, wounded but alive, and for one long moment he looked Gamal straight in the eye.\n\nAt his wife's e-mail urgings, Gamal went to see a shrink on base. The doctor diagnosed him with PTSD (again), noting that he exhibited \"passive suicidal ideation\"\u2014and cleared him for duty.\n\nIt was late September when Gamal began an affair with a married enlisted Marine. Sex freed him from self-hatred, from guilt and grief, from thinking altogether. He felt, for the first time in years, like a normal human being. But when a Marine reported hearing sounds of sexual activity coming from Gamal's quarters, several officers went to investigate. According to the testimony of one of those officers, Gamal came to the door with his sweatpants on backward. The officer tripped over a woman's shoe. Inside Gamal's locker, they found the female Marine wearing only a T-shirt, as well as copies of Hustler, X-rated videos, and booze stored in Listerine bottles.\n\nGamal was relieved of his weapon and put on suicide watch. His boss and friend, Lieutenant Colonel Macon Robinson, spoke with him that night. \"He conveyed he was relieved,\" Robinson wrote the board. \"He had been contemplating suicide for some time, because he felt his life had been out of control ever since the Pentagon incident.\" His wife put it even more succinctly. In a letter to the commanding general at Pendleton pleading for mercy, she wrote, \"9/11 broke my husband's heart.\"\n\nWhen he returned to Pendleton to face punishment in February 2005, Gamal knew his career was over. But when he tried to resign his commission, the command refused. They called for legal proceedings. They wanted him drummed out on an other-than-honorable discharge, which would cut his access to medical treatment.\n\nAs he waited for his Board of Inquiry to begin, the people closest to Gamal were pretty sure he was going to kill himself.\n\nOne night that March, his wife, Meredith, found him cleaning his gun in the upstairs office. He didn't respond to her voice. The next day, she persuaded him to check himself into the hospital. It was there, in the psych ward at Balboa, that Gamal met Sergeant Justin Inabinette. Justin was short, dark-eyed, intense; you could hear him across the whole ward, friggin' awesome, fucking hilarious, ggggreat! The floors of the ward were a black-and-white checked linoleum, and Gamal noticed that Justin never stepped on the white squares.\n\nAssigned to the second wing of the psych ward was Gunnery Sergeant Matt Hevezi, who'd been hospitalized for depression.\n\nIn January 2008, nine months after my first phone call to Gamal, I asked if I could fly out to California to meet all three of them. \"Yeah, but I'm warning you, it's pretty grim here,\" Gamal said. \"People are looking at us like we have eyeballs growing out of our asses.\" Matt had just been released from the VA hospital and was now living at home, determined to perform \"daddy duty,\" as he called it, though he could barely put a sentence together. And the night before I arrived, Justin abruptly moved out, too, bound for who knows where.\n\n\"There's too much negative energy here,\" he announced as he headed out the door.\n\nGamal's reply to that: \"No shit.\"\n\n\n\nA sign next to Gamal's door reads: no soliciting. After I rang the bell, Gamal cracked the door open and stuck his head out. \"So you're real,\" he said. His head was shaved close, slick as a bullet. After introducing me to Hawley, his fianc\u00E9e, and some of her friends, he gave me a tour of the house, including \"Justin's room,\" which doubled as an office, and \"Matt's room,\" which had a mattress on the floor and shelves full of combat-photography books. Then he took me out to the garage so we could be alone while we talked. \"I think it's better to get to know a person on the phone first,\" Gamal said. \"You can just totally be yourself, you know?\" He looked at me directly with brown, friendly eyes and then leapt from the chair to get his lighter and assembled his pot pipe.\n\nOur chairs were set snugly between a punching bag, a pull-up bar, and a treadmill. Gamal worked out for three to four hours every day. \"I have to stay in good shape, because what if someone decides to break into the house and rape the females and kill everyone?\" he said. He started talking about two Cessnas that had collided midair in Orange County yesterday. \"The debris landed on top of this car dealership, and they thought an engine part had gone through the showroom, but it was a body. That's the kind of shit you don't expect to see. I mean, you're talking like we are, and all of a sudden\u2014boom!\u2014a body.\"\n\nI saw no signs of the explosive temper I'd heard so much about. \"Like a heart attack on a freeway\" is how Matt had described it over the phone. I was told there was rarely any warning with Gamal\u2014he cut off friendships, screamed at people, one day even jumped from Hawley's moving car because she wasn't following his orders to take the quickest route home. This was why he rarely left his house. He was afraid of hurting somebody; he was afraid to feel afraid.\n\n\"I don't exist,\" Gamal said. \"I just stay in this house.\" The house was his cocoon, his armor, the only safe place, but he could no longer afford to live there. He wasn't able to work, and he had tried. He took a job last year as a massage therapist at a local spa, but when a baby started crying in the reception area, he was overwhelmed by images; no, not images\u2014screams, burning smells, flesh, plastics, gasoline, and heat, heat of an immense fire\u2014and he could hear every voice in that office, every one-sided phone conversation, a door shutting somewhere down the hall, the whir of a file-cabinet drawer opening, a laugh, a murmur, sounding all at once, louder and louder, until doors and file cabinets seemed to be murmuring and laughing and people opening their mouths to whir, slam, and scratch. He fled. His employers did not ask him back.\n\nSince then, nothing. He spent his days writing to banks, and to veterans' organizations and charities, selling off his coin collection, fighting to keep his home.\n\nJustin called Gamal's house the first day I arrived and promised to come over but never showed up. Later, Justin's new housemate called to say that Justin had just taken her truck without asking permission; she wanted to know where the hell he had gone. \"Mexico,\" Gamal replied flatly. Justin had \"borrowed\" Hawley's truck once, driving off in the middle of the night because Gamal had run out of antidepressants and Justin was determined to get some pills on the black market in Tijuana. \"His heart was in the right place, but\u2026,\" Gamal said. Another night, Gamal had found Justin lying on the couch pointing a loaded gun at his head. He'd managed to yank the gun away, but he had to explain that to Hawley, too, to try to make it okay somehow that she might wake one morning to find Justin with his brains blown out in the family room.\n\nAnyway, Justin never showed.\n\nOver the next couple of weeks, whenever I came over, Gamal was usually busy on his laptop, scanner, or cell phone. Occasionally he would kick back and wrestle with the dogs, surprising them with kisses on their snouts: \"Ohhh, you didn't see that coming, did you, did you? Ohhh no, you didn't.\" Some nights we sat out back by the fire pit drinking beer and listening to the sound of choppers overhead. One of those evenings, I struck an artificial note, saying something to him about his service to the nation, thanking him, really, and he said, \"All I hear right now is a bunch of static, you're going wah-wah-wah, I can't hear a thing you're saying.\" And then he got up and walked away.\n\n\n\nOn my third day in Temecula, I interviewed Matt in the family room while one of Gamal's robot vacuums patrolled the floor. Matt lowered his long frame onto the couch and slumped there, as if he'd never find the energy to get up again. He was lean, blond, blue-eyed, the type of guy you'd cast in a movie to play a Marine. He was the kind of leader who was on call for his junior Marines twenty-four-seven; when Gamal overdosed, the first thing Matt did was clear Gamal's house of weapons, and then when Gamal broke down and cried, Matt held him. It was a little awkward, Matt said, but so what?\n\nLong silences punctuated the next hour, during which Matt would stare straight into my eyes, his gaze naked and desolate. Haltingly, he told me how, when his younger son was 3, he would ask for military music to be played and then march around the house naked except for his daddy's dress-blues hat. His older son, Mike, was enrolled in the Marine Corps Junior ROTC and barely talked to him now. His marriage was as good as over. \"My family has been shattered into a million pieces,\" he said.\n\nUnlike Gamal and Justin, Matt didn't suffer from PTSD. Matt's problems developed after he was issued Lariam, an antimalarial drug, while stationed in Okinawa in 2003 and had a psychotic reaction to it. Within days of taking his first dose, he began to suffer vivid nightmares. His hands shook; his head swam. He was filled with a sourceless dread. \"I thought it was my fault,\" he said. \"Something genetic. After the second week of it, I thought, I'm going to be like this forever.\"\n\nMatt soldiered on, though, hiding his symptoms because he knew the Corps' \"zerodefect\" mentality. But then a new boss came on board at the Okinawa Public Affairs office, a guy Matt had worked with years before who he said hated him. No particular reason\u2014just personality differences. Matt's old boss had recommended that he be promoted to master sergeant, but one week after the new boss took over, he hauled Matt into the master gunnery sergeant's office and read aloud a list of Matt's deficiencies. At that very moment, Matt's \"spidey sense,\" as he calls it, told him something was very wrong. Were they gunning for him? Was this the opening move toward ruining his career?\n\nThe stresses continued to pile up. For months after he'd been given Lariam, Matt's wife, Adriana, kept telling him, \"You're not normal,\" but her voice, so crisply certain of itself, only filled him with anxiety, and he began to avoid her. He started sleeping in his truck. They argued fiercely about her desire to return to California with their two sons. Adriana contacted his command and told them her husband was \"acting strange\"; she wanted to leave the island, but he was refusing to pay for their flights home. His command immediately sent Adriana to the counselors at the Family Advocacy Program\u2014they interviewed her once, a charge of spouse abuse was drawn up, and the case was presented to the Marine Corps Case Review Committee.\n\nThere is nothing in the civilian world that resembles a Case Review Committee. It is called to investigate accusations of abuse. The committee consists of social workers and representatives from the military police, legal divisions, and the base command. It meets behind closed doors, and the accused cannot be present. One day he's simply told that he's been found guilty of physical, financial, or emotional abuse and is assigned a level of abuse\u2014one through five. Level five is reserved for assault with a deadly weapon or attempted murder.\n\nThe committee determined Matt was a levelfour \"emotional spouse abuser.\" For a gunny sergeant, that's a career-killer. The command ordered him to stay away from his family. \"I was like, man, my family's gone, my career's gone, my mind is gone,\" Matt said. \"I just want to get off Okinawa before they manufacture some crazy charge and throw me in the brig.\"\n\nWhen he transferred back to Pendleton in 2003, Matt worked hard to prove that he was a good Marine, putting in long days at the base newspaper, garnering one journalism award after another, but the trauma of Okinawa eventually got the best of him. In March 2005, he checked himself into the psych ward at Balboa. On the day of his release, his command had him arrested at the hospital, charging him with unauthorized absence. He was ordered to appear before an involuntary administrative separation board. The command sent Marine chasers to the hearing, signaling to the board that the gunny was a dangerous man who might flee. It was all over in an hour. The board moved to separate Matt from the Marine Corps, characterizing his discharge as \"general under honorable conditions for reasons of misconduct.\" Which meant that Matt was stripped of everything, including all of his benefits and retirement pay. With almost eighteen years of service (and only two months shy of medical retirement), Matt would be forced to support his family on Social Security alone. He was no longer a Marine. \"It was such an unfair fight,\" Matt said with a small, dark laugh. \"Like Urkel versus Goliath.\"\n\n\n\nAfter three days in Tijuana, Justin had returned. We spoke on the phone; he said he no longer felt like putting a bullet in his friggin' brain, ha-ha-ha. He was now eager for us to meet, so I drove down to Carlsbad to see him at his new bunking-out place.\n\nIt was dark when I pulled up to the house, but I could make out a short, wiry figure standing on the lawn. It was his carnivallights voice that was immediately recognizable: \"Heyyy! Ka-thee!\" Once we were inside, he asked how Matt and Gamal were doing, the worry in his eyes so naked that he looked like he was about 8 years old.\n\nJustin told me that living here in Carlsbad was just a temporary \"chapter\" in his life. He, Gamal, and Matt needed to be apart for a while, he explained. \"It's like boot camp. One big friggin' pajama party, but then you get sick of each other, and then, when they're not around anymore, you start to miss them.\" There were many reasons why Gamal and Matt felt so protective of Justin: He was ten years younger than they were; he was guileless and enthusiastic; but most of all, they knew about his fourteen months in the brig, many of those spent in solitary, stripped down to his underwear while su`ering from PTSD and bipolar disorder.\n\nJustin described his early years in the Corps. There was nothing plodding or methodical about his rise: He was a goddamn shooting star, graduating boot camp second place in a company of 430 men; being selected to join an elite antiterrorism brigade; by 21, teaching biological, nuclear, and chemical defense to FBI and Secret Service agents. After four years of active duty, he married a Hooters waitress and they returned to his hometown in Indiana. In May 2004, Justin was sent to Iraq with a Marine Reserve company based in Chicago.\n\nAt Forward Operating Base St. Michael in Mahmudiyah, Justin became top sergeant quickly. He was put in charge of training security and running all patrols within rocket range of the base. He performed those jobs so well that he was tasked with managing the armory, and then with overseeing the detainees. He slept about three hours a night, ran from job to job like a jackrabbit on speed. \"They gave me a job, I did it to the heart,\" Justin said.\n\nThe camp was mortared relentlessly. During the day it reached 115 degrees, and a horrible fungus began to grow on Justin's feet. His wife called to say she was leaving him. A suicide bomber blew himself up in front of Justin, leaving only his penis intact. The Marines made a headstone for the penis. He saw a 22-year-old lance corporal bleed to death as medics rushed to save him. Stray dogs roamed the base, and Justin adopted one. He named him Shit Stain. \"Oh, my God, he was so cute,\" he said. \"He was just a little guy, and he took a shit, and he had crap still stuck to his ass!\"\n\nFour months into his tour, Justin's only friend, Sergeant Nick Bennett, asked Justin to put him on security. He wanted some trigger time. \"I had friggin' direct pull,\" Justin said. \"When I said to the CO, 'This guy goes on security,' it happened.\" A week later, while Justin was briefing the security personnel, a 107-millimeter rocket landed fifty feet away from Bennett. Shrapnel ripped through Bennett's arms and back, peeled the skin and flesh off his left hand, and opened his right shoulder to the bone. Justin was sitting on the ground afterward, head in his hands, when a first sergeant walked by. \"Sergeant Inabinette, someone vomited over there. Get somebody to clean it up.\"\n\n\"It wasn't throw-up,\" Justin says. \"It was parts of Sergeant Bennett friggin' strung out all over the place.\" Bennett survived, after twenty-seven surgeries.\n\nBy the end of November, whenever Justin called home to his grandparents, he spoke only about this puppy he'd adopted. Shit Stain followed him everywhere. Once, when he'd gotten caught in some concertina wire, Justin had to save him. Whenever Justin returned to the camp, fried with exhaustion, nerves stretched tight, Shit Stain was there to greet him, yapping happily.\n\nThen the CO decided that the dogs in the camp were a biohazard, and he ordered them killed. \"The MPs pulled a nine-millimeter Beretta and shot Shit Stain point-blank in the head,\" Justin said. \"They threw him on top of the burn pile, and the way he landed, his legs stuck up for a week and a half until the pile burned down.\"\n\nAfter Shit Stain's death, Justin's mind broke. \"All the love left in me was gone,\" he said. \"I'd wake up screaming, not knowing where I was. It was reported that I was pissing in the bed. I don't even remember that crap.\" One night, in a full-blown manic state, Justin packed a Glock and a grenade inside an old television set and mailed it off to his grandfather in Northern California. To this day he has no idea why he sent his grandfather a grenade, but Justin turned around and told his command what he'd done.\n\nHe was shipped from Iraq and into solitary confinement at Pendleton's brig.\n\nOne day the chief warrant officer noticed Justin playing with an invisible puppy in his cell. He sent Justin to Balboa. When Justin was returned to the brig a few weeks later, he got hold of some bootlaces and tried to hang himself. Back to the psych ward he went, this time with ligature marks on his neck. During the entire fourteen months of confinement, his command refused to take him to his court-ordered psychiatric visits. Why waste manpower on a shitbird Marine? Justin was found fit to stand trial. He received a dishonorable discharge. At the court-martial's end, the judge told him, \"I hope you get help, Sergeant Inabinette.\" And that was all he had, the judge's hope.\n\n\n\nBefore I left California, I drove to Camp Pendleton and met with Lieutenant Colonel Colby Vokey, a nineteen-year veteran and the Marine Corps' chief defense lawyer in the western United States. Gamal, Matt, and Justin had all been represented by lawyers under Vokey's command, but Vokey was most familiar with Gamal's and Matt's cases.\n\nEvery Marine in trouble passes through Pendleton's legal offices\u2014Marines facing court-martial, nonjudicial punishment, involuntary-separation proceedings, and Boards of Inquiry. Many of them were good Marines until they were broken and committed misconduct. \"We've had case after case after case,\" Vokey said. \"It just kind of eats at you.\"\n\nIn the Corps, when a Marine gets in trouble, \"we hammer the snot out of the guy,\" Vokey said. \"That's just the way we are. We just hammer 'em, hammer 'em, hammer 'em.\" Good discipline and order? Of course, that's necessary in a fighting force, he said, but something's very wrong with a system that kicks mentally injured Marines to the curb. \"And that's based on the fact that they were fine when they went to Iraq and Afghanistan. We broke them. This is what combat did to them, and I think we should feel some responsibility for what happens to them in the long run.\"\n\nThough Matt's misconduct case was unrelated to combat stress, it infuriated Vokey. \"I thought it was the harshest result of any of these cases I've ever seen. Here's a guy who had almost eighteen years in the Marine Corps, and he still got out of here with losing everything? I was\u2014\" Vokey slapped the desk hard with his open hand. \"I don't think the guy deserved to lose his retirement benefits, and he did. He lost everything. Utter and complete bullshit.\"\n\nVokey was close to Gamal, and he constantly comes across people who don't believe PTSD had anything to do with Gamal \"screwing an enlisted,\" as Vokey put it. \"His misconduct, is it related to PTSD?\" Vokey asked. \"I don't know. And I'm not trying to tell you it is. His career was dead. Everybody knew that. He was never going to be promoted again. But they were trying to hang him.\" Vokey met with the general at Pendleton to discuss Gamal's case, telling him that Gamal knew his Marine Corps career was over, \"but let's just settle this so he can have a general discharge so that he's not cut off from his benefits. Because this is a guy who needs it.\" The general was unmoved.\n\nBefore I left, Vokey asked me how the three men were doing. \"Not so good,\" I said.\n\nHe shook his head. \"If we broke 'em, we should fix 'em,\" he said.\n\n\n\nA few months after I left Temecula, Gamal asked Matt to move his things out of the house, and then he cut both Matt and Justin off, refusing to answer any of their phone calls. \"I love them, but whenever I look at their faces, I see their military and medical records, and I just can't deal,\" he told me. Matt continued to keep an eye on Gamal, though. He had a routine: \"I pull into his driveway, he knows the minute I pull in that I'm there, and then I turn the radio on and wait. If the garage doors open, I'm over the Chinese wall. If they don't open, I leave.\"\n\nJustin drove a friend's truck into a cement pillar in July but didn't manage to kill himself. In August, he called me at 1 a.m.\u2014he was drunk, armed with a knife, and the police were outside the house. \"Honestly, Kathy, I'm not a bad guy, but if they come through the door, I'm done,\" he said. Then he was shouting that the cops were inside, moving toward his room. \"I can't, Kathy, I can't, I can't!\" he screamed, and the phone went dead. Later I found out the police broke down the door, hit him with Tasers, and carted him off to Paradise Valley hospital. Being Justin, he was abashed that the police had taken him down with one zap. He thought a Marine should be tougher than that.\n\nMatt drove down to the hospital to see Justin the next day. And the day after and the day after that. But after a week of arguing with administrators who wanted to release Justin while he was still sick, Matt began to sound exhausted and then paranoid. Black-windowed vehicles followed him on the street; the NSA was listening to our phone calls. When I expressed doubt, he said, \"Improbable? Yes. Impossible? No.\" He was hanging on by a thin thread. Then Matt's wife asked him to move out of their house.\n\nAs the months passed, they went spinning off into their own orbits, farther and farther away from one another. In September, Matt flew to Japan to study Zen meditation. \"I swear you won't even recognize me when I return,\" he told me. His plan was to kill off the old Matt\u2014the tense, threatened, grieving Matt\u2014and become someone new. The night before he left, he drank like a dog. He was holding an \"Irish wake,\" he said, for himself. After being released from the psych ward, Justin moved back to Indiana, where he hopped between his mother's and stepfather's houses, feeling like Superman one day, a piece of bird crap the next, while he worked on a new Web site that would offer online therapy for military veterans\u2014armed with his first (and perhaps only) commandment: Leave no man behind. And Gamal? He continued to guard his hermitage. He would ask me for updates on Matt and Justin but still refused direct contact. On Christmas Eve, Gamal married Hawley, with only her family and their civilian friends in attendance.\n\nThey had lost everything, and there was no going back to make things right or even to retrieve a piece of their old lives. Finally it had sunk in. The uniform would never be worn again, the wife would not come smiling home, the days would not become orderly once more\u2014sense, purpose, pride, they were really gone. They had struggled against these things for a long time.\n\n\"They break us, blame us for allowing ourselves to be broken, and we feel guilt that we are broken,\" Gamal wrote me recently. \"And so we try to gain that back. I've concluded that's impossible. Fuck redemption, fuck getting centered. What is that, anyway? How do we gauge where the center is? Who is the authority on that?\"\n\nkathy dobie is a writer in Brooklyn."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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