| | Before long, however, as they arrived at a five-point intersection near the Republican Guard headquarters and the Defense Ministry, the cheering civilians disappeared, traffic vanished and the streets turned ghostly. As they set up roadblocks, rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire began whizzing toward them from the heavily defended compounds.
“I felt like I was in the middle of a duck shoot and we were the ducks,” said Mr. Smith, who was a SAW — squad automatic weapon — gunner. “I don’t know how many R.P.G.’s we took. One landed about five feet to the right of me and my buddy. I don’t know how it did not detonate, but instead it bounced. Bounced! I can’t believe we’re still alive.”
The fighting did not let up for many hours. “Whether or not I actually killed anybody with my own bullets, I don’t know,” Mr. Smith said. “I suspect so. But there were two to 12 guns going off at once, and only the snipers knew for sure.” At a certain point, the Iraqi fighters commandeered civilians’ cars, taking them hostage and ordering them to drive straight at the Marine positions. The marines were forced to shoot at everything headed their way.
“We were opening fire on civilians,” Mr. Smith said. “We were taking out women and children because it was them or us.”
Sergeant Major Lopez, his superior officer, said that his marines were “put in that position” and “trained to protect themselves first.”
“Our marines tried to limit civilian casualties,” he said. “Not a person there didn’t feel bad. But it had to be done.”
That day traumatized the reservists. Mr. Quiñones recalled a father carrying toward them the limp body of a young child. His voice cracking, he described a 5-year-old boy screaming as his car “turned into Swiss cheese.”
“I called cease-fire and I wanted to run and grab him, but there were machine gun rounds flying all around,” Mr. Quiñones said. “I watched this kid’s head get blown away, his brains splattering while his screams still echoed. Those images haunt me — haunt many of us — to this day.”
At the end of the day, 11 men in Mr. Smith’s company had been wounded but none were killed. The Iraqis fared worse. The Times’s correspondent, Dexter Filkins, described a fleeing family that lost three men, each slumped over a different car’s steering wheel. And it also described the marines, in tears, helping the wounded members of the family to safety.
Pro Forma Questions
Before they returned to the United States later in 2003, the reservists filled out questionnaires about their mental health. “Then they sat us down one after the other with an officer and he looked over the form, and said, ‘Are you doing O.K.?’ and, no matter what we wrote, we’d say yup, and then he’d say, ‘Next!’” Mr. Smith said.
A couple of months later, the Saints and Sinners parted company, but the Saints, some of whom were so saintly that they did not watch R-rated movies, kept close. Mr. Smith soon volunteered to go to Quantico.
After he collapsed on the firing range there, though, he disappeared from his band of brothers. “All I ever heard was Walter went nuts on the firing range, and then I never see this guy again until I see his picture on the front page looking like Grizzly Adams because he killed his girlfriend,” his fellow reservist Mr. Nibley said.
Mr. Nibley, who describes himself as adrift after two tours of duty in Iraq, said he was infuriated to learn later that Mr. Smith had been processed for discharge.
“I can’t tell you how angry I am at the Marine Corps that they just fast-tracked him out,” Mr. Nibley said. “It’s the culture and mentality of: ‘We don’t want a loser on our team. We’re not here to help you, you’re here to help us.’”
“I understand that we’re an infantry unit and if you’re not able to carry a gun and go into combat, that’s a problem,” Mr. Nibley said. “But we were his anchors, and we would have been his advocates. He was a mentally injured person because of his service to this country. He should not have been kicked out to go off on his own and deal with it all outside.”
The Marines do not discuss the specifics of any individual’s discharge. But the Marines do not discharge all who are diagnosed with combat trauma, said Major Eric R. Dent, a spokesman. “The goal of our competent medical professionals is to treat and return to full operational duty and full life functioning every marine who is diagnosed and treated with PTSD or any other stress injury,” Major Dent said.
Pillars of Stability Shaken
When Mr. Smith was discharged, he felt unmoored. He resumed his work at Wal-Mart, where he would stay, at one store or another, until he was arrested. He started receiving a monthly disability check of $661. He bought a place of his own, a century-old fixer-upper in Pleasant Grove, Utah. But because he no longer participated in weekend Reserve training and because he was questioning his faith, he lost touch with two pillars of his existence.
Further shaking Mr. Smith’s stability, his parents were going through a bitter divorce after 25 years of marriage and 12 children. Mr. Smith’s father moved in with Mr. Smith, his oldest son, and 2004 turned into a very difficult year for both of them.
“He definitely changed,” said Mr. Quiñones, a mail carrier, who remained friends with Mr. Smith. “After Iraq, he found it hard to care about life anymore. He became bitter to the point of suicidal.”
Mr. Smith was hardly the only one in his company to experience darkness and dysfunction. Of the approximately 40 men in his platoon, post-traumatic stress disorder was eventually diagnosed in at least 10 others, according to several of the reservists. But Mr. Smith carried the dubious distinction of being the first. As a result, he missed out on the group counseling sessions with a Navy psychiatrist that were offered on drill weekends back in Utah.
While his discharge was being processed, Mr. Smith was required to report monthly to an Air Force base in Utah, and he saw a psychiatrist there a few times. He also, reluctantly and at the Marines’ insistence, reported to the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Salt Lake City, where he attended a single group session for returning Iraq veterans.
“I’m sitting there and these guys are talking about the hard time they’re having because their supply unit heard some fire one time,” he said. “They never saw their buddies get hit. They never killed anybody. They had nothing to worry about. I never went back.”
V.A. officials, in consideration of his privacy, declined to discuss Mr. Smith’s health care. Speaking generally, Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the agency’s National Center for PTSD, said it was “unfortunately not unusual” for veterans with combat trauma to report “for a session, maybe get some medications prescribed and a therapist assigned and never come back.” One of the central symptoms of the stress disorder is avoidance, he noted, and some veterans do not want “to retell what happened” and risk being retraumatized.
“We all would want them to come back and are trying to increase the odds that they will come back by working with community organizations, making follow-up phone calls and educating families through public service announcements,” Dr. Friedman said. “Through the retro-scope, there’s always something more that could have been done had we been able to foretell the future.”
For a while, Mr. Smith took some prescription medications to help him sleep and soothe his anxiety, but he quit the pills when they did not seem to work. Gradually, he felt himself getting worse.
“Nothing seemed to quiet the storm in my head,” he said. “I started having nightmares and flashbacks or hallucinations. During the day, I was functioning O.K., but I was feeling antsy. I couldn’t find peace.”
Two things helped: drinking — 18 to 24 cans a day of Utah’s lower-alcohol beer — and pulling a trigger. “One day, I went out skeet shooting with a buddy, and I realized I felt so much better having a shotgun in my hand and watching something explode,” he said. He bought three guns of his own.
Very late on the night of July 1, 2004, Mr. Smith reached for one of those guns after an argument with his father. Slinging it over his shoulder and grabbing 25 rounds of ammunition, he started walking toward the Wasatch Mountains. “I wanted to stop it all,” he said. “I didn’t feel like thinking about Iraq anymore. I didn’t feel like freaking out on the side of the road because someone slammed on their brakes. I didn’t feel like going rigid when I smelled diesel fuel. I was so tired. I just wanted to sleep.”
Mr. Smith left goodbye messages for everyone in his cellphone directory. One of his Fox Company buddies was awake, though, and took his call. He forced Mr. Smith to tell him his location and then he called the Pleasant Grove police. The police intercepted Mr. Smith near a trail head for Mount Timpanogos, and when he saw the officers approaching, he loaded his shotgun. He later told a close friend that he had been hoping for “suicide by cop.”
The police did not oblige. Capt. Cody Cullimore, the former assistant police chief, said Mr. Smith was compliant. He was taken to a mental health center and admitted briefly for observation.
“Sometimes I think,” Mr. Smith said, “that if I had taken my life that day, I would have saved Nicole’s.”
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