Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
January 20, 2008
Pg. 1
By Deborah Sontag
TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.
Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.
In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.
Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.
The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.
“There was no intent,” said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. “It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped.”
Clearly, Mr. Smith’s descent into homicidal, and suicidal, behavior is not representative of returning veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But among the homicide cases involving recent war veterans examined by The New York Times, Mr. Smith’s stands out because his identity as a psychologically injured veteran shaped the way that his crime was perceived locally and handled by local authorities.
Mr. Smith confessed to the killing at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which immediately set his crime in the context of his deployment and of a growing concern about care for veterans with combat stress. The fact that Mr. Smith was discharged from the Marines for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, made the prosecutor reluctant to bring the case to a jury.
“Did we want to go through a trial where basically we were going to have to defend the United States’ actions on how they treated him?” Mr. Searle said.
Nobody believes that Mr. Smith’s killing of Ms. Speirs can be justified. But many involved in the case have wondered aloud, at some point, whether Ms. Speirs’s life might have been spared if the marine’s combat trauma had been treated more aggressively.
Ms. Speirs’s parents do not engage in such speculation. They view their daughter as a victim of fatal domestic violence and not as an indirect casualty of the war in Iraq.
Last fall, sitting in their living room, across from framed samplers that said “Home Sweet Home” and “Welcome Friends,” John and Pauline Speirs remembered their daughter as a shy tomboy, a graphic designer and a proud young mother. In their estimation, Ms. Speirs herself has been ignored in all the attention given in Utah to Mr. Smith as a combat veteran.
“When they mention Nicole, it’s like an aside,” Mr. Speirs said, his voice quiet, his emotion muted. “I feel like a lot of people are using her death as something against the war. They practically are like saying that President Bush killed Nicole. Well, Walter killed Nicole. The war can be a factor. It’s not a reason or an excuse for it.”
Mr. Smith himself, in a long, dry-eyed interview in October, almost agreed. “I can’t completely, honestly say that, yes, PTSD was the sole cause of what I did,” he said, speaking through a plastic partition in a courthouse holding cell. “I don’t want to use it as a crutch. I’d feel like I was copping out of something I claim responsibility for. But I know for a fact that before I went to Iraq, there’s no way I would have taken somebody else’s life.”
Off the Preordained Path
As a teenager, Mr. Smith did not fit the prototype of the future marine. He was, in his description, “a loner and a geek” — “a math club, chess club, band and choir geek, with no interest in competitive sports past the age where you get the trophies for just showing up.”
Yet at a high school career day, Mr. Smith was drawn to the Marine Corps booth partly because the military seemed like a departure from a preordained path. “Growing up LDS,” he said, using the abbreviation for Latter-day Saints, “you’re pretty much told what you’re going to do. At the age of 19, the young men are supposed to go off on mission.”
In early 2000, Mr. Smith went off to boot camp instead, enlisting in the Reserves, like many other young Mormon recruits, so that he retained the option of mission duty.
Mr. Smith made an impression on the recruiters, scoring in the 99th percentile on the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery tests, said Christopher Nibley, a fellow reservist from Utah. “I was doing a stint in the recruiting office then,” Mr. Nibley said, “and I remember a recruiter saying, ‘Damn, that boy is so smart!’”
On Jan. 7, 2002 — Mr. Smith has a precise memory for dates — he received a phone call. “O.K., Smith, listen up and don’t interrupt,” an officer began. He read Mr. Smith his activation orders. Mr. Smith took a leave from a job at Wal-Mart and moved to Camp Pendleton near San Diego.
During the next year, when the Utah reservists lived in makeshift quarters on the Marine base, they bonded. Christopher Quiñones, now 32, who shared a bunk bed with Mr. Smith, described him as “a happy-go-lucky, ‘I want to go on a mission, I want to marry my high school sweetheart’ type.”
“Looking back on it,” Mr. Quiñones said, “I think Walter and a lot of guys probably should have experienced a lot more of life before we sent them off to get their heads blown off. But at that time, I couldn’t think of anybody else I’d rather go over there with.”
Mr. Smith’s superior officer, Sgt. Maj. Nick Lopez, was not as embracing. “He didn’t stand out as anything special, but he also didn’t have anything derogatory,” Sergeant Major Lopez, a Salt Lake City firefighter, said of Mr. Smith. “He was a marine who did his job, and he had a tough job, at home and in combat.”
In early 2003, the reservists of Fox Company deployed to Kuwait with the First Marine Division. After desert warfare training, they crossed into Iraq during the invasion. Crammed into the back of a large pickup truck, Mr. Smith and the other reservists traveled at a warp-slow speed at the dusty rear of a convoy miles long. Sandbags served as their armor, and, for one week, with a single M.R.E. each a day, adrenaline served as their fuel.
As they moved toward Baghdad, the gunfire cracked like whips around them, almost like sound effects for a war movie. Near Nasiriya, the reality of combat set in when they drove slowly past an amphibious vehicle containing the body parts of dead marines, their uniforms torn to shreds. Their first firefight was soon upon them.
“We were jumping concrete walls and diving headlong into it, and Walter was always putting himself out front,” Mr. Quiñones said. “Any sniper could have taken him out, but he was the type to throw himself out there to save the rest of us.”
Nothing that came before prepared the Saints and Sinners for April 8, 2003, which a New York Times correspondent later described as one of the war’s most “furious engagements.”
As dawn broke just outside Baghdad, they woke to find themselves staring at Armageddon, as Mr. Nibley said, with fires burning, helicopters shooting rockets and explosions echoing through the early-morning air. Entering the city, they climbed down from their trucks and fanned out. While the first platoon to move forward took fire immediately — with one marine shot through his helmet — others found themselves walking into the arms of exultant Iraqis.
January 20, 2008
Pg. 1
By Deborah Sontag
TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.
Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.
In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.
Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.
The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.
“There was no intent,” said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. “It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped.”
Clearly, Mr. Smith’s descent into homicidal, and suicidal, behavior is not representative of returning veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But among the homicide cases involving recent war veterans examined by The New York Times, Mr. Smith’s stands out because his identity as a psychologically injured veteran shaped the way that his crime was perceived locally and handled by local authorities.
Mr. Smith confessed to the killing at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which immediately set his crime in the context of his deployment and of a growing concern about care for veterans with combat stress. The fact that Mr. Smith was discharged from the Marines for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, made the prosecutor reluctant to bring the case to a jury.
“Did we want to go through a trial where basically we were going to have to defend the United States’ actions on how they treated him?” Mr. Searle said.
Nobody believes that Mr. Smith’s killing of Ms. Speirs can be justified. But many involved in the case have wondered aloud, at some point, whether Ms. Speirs’s life might have been spared if the marine’s combat trauma had been treated more aggressively.
Ms. Speirs’s parents do not engage in such speculation. They view their daughter as a victim of fatal domestic violence and not as an indirect casualty of the war in Iraq.
Last fall, sitting in their living room, across from framed samplers that said “Home Sweet Home” and “Welcome Friends,” John and Pauline Speirs remembered their daughter as a shy tomboy, a graphic designer and a proud young mother. In their estimation, Ms. Speirs herself has been ignored in all the attention given in Utah to Mr. Smith as a combat veteran.
“When they mention Nicole, it’s like an aside,” Mr. Speirs said, his voice quiet, his emotion muted. “I feel like a lot of people are using her death as something against the war. They practically are like saying that President Bush killed Nicole. Well, Walter killed Nicole. The war can be a factor. It’s not a reason or an excuse for it.”
Mr. Smith himself, in a long, dry-eyed interview in October, almost agreed. “I can’t completely, honestly say that, yes, PTSD was the sole cause of what I did,” he said, speaking through a plastic partition in a courthouse holding cell. “I don’t want to use it as a crutch. I’d feel like I was copping out of something I claim responsibility for. But I know for a fact that before I went to Iraq, there’s no way I would have taken somebody else’s life.”
Off the Preordained Path
As a teenager, Mr. Smith did not fit the prototype of the future marine. He was, in his description, “a loner and a geek” — “a math club, chess club, band and choir geek, with no interest in competitive sports past the age where you get the trophies for just showing up.”
Yet at a high school career day, Mr. Smith was drawn to the Marine Corps booth partly because the military seemed like a departure from a preordained path. “Growing up LDS,” he said, using the abbreviation for Latter-day Saints, “you’re pretty much told what you’re going to do. At the age of 19, the young men are supposed to go off on mission.”
In early 2000, Mr. Smith went off to boot camp instead, enlisting in the Reserves, like many other young Mormon recruits, so that he retained the option of mission duty.
Mr. Smith made an impression on the recruiters, scoring in the 99th percentile on the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery tests, said Christopher Nibley, a fellow reservist from Utah. “I was doing a stint in the recruiting office then,” Mr. Nibley said, “and I remember a recruiter saying, ‘Damn, that boy is so smart!’”
On Jan. 7, 2002 — Mr. Smith has a precise memory for dates — he received a phone call. “O.K., Smith, listen up and don’t interrupt,” an officer began. He read Mr. Smith his activation orders. Mr. Smith took a leave from a job at Wal-Mart and moved to Camp Pendleton near San Diego.
During the next year, when the Utah reservists lived in makeshift quarters on the Marine base, they bonded. Christopher Quiñones, now 32, who shared a bunk bed with Mr. Smith, described him as “a happy-go-lucky, ‘I want to go on a mission, I want to marry my high school sweetheart’ type.”
“Looking back on it,” Mr. Quiñones said, “I think Walter and a lot of guys probably should have experienced a lot more of life before we sent them off to get their heads blown off. But at that time, I couldn’t think of anybody else I’d rather go over there with.”
Mr. Smith’s superior officer, Sgt. Maj. Nick Lopez, was not as embracing. “He didn’t stand out as anything special, but he also didn’t have anything derogatory,” Sergeant Major Lopez, a Salt Lake City firefighter, said of Mr. Smith. “He was a marine who did his job, and he had a tough job, at home and in combat.”
In early 2003, the reservists of Fox Company deployed to Kuwait with the First Marine Division. After desert warfare training, they crossed into Iraq during the invasion. Crammed into the back of a large pickup truck, Mr. Smith and the other reservists traveled at a warp-slow speed at the dusty rear of a convoy miles long. Sandbags served as their armor, and, for one week, with a single M.R.E. each a day, adrenaline served as their fuel.
As they moved toward Baghdad, the gunfire cracked like whips around them, almost like sound effects for a war movie. Near Nasiriya, the reality of combat set in when they drove slowly past an amphibious vehicle containing the body parts of dead marines, their uniforms torn to shreds. Their first firefight was soon upon them.
“We were jumping concrete walls and diving headlong into it, and Walter was always putting himself out front,” Mr. Quiñones said. “Any sniper could have taken him out, but he was the type to throw himself out there to save the rest of us.”
Nothing that came before prepared the Saints and Sinners for April 8, 2003, which a New York Times correspondent later described as one of the war’s most “furious engagements.”
As dawn broke just outside Baghdad, they woke to find themselves staring at Armageddon, as Mr. Nibley said, with fires burning, helicopters shooting rockets and explosions echoing through the early-morning air. Entering the city, they climbed down from their trucks and fanned out. While the first platoon to move forward took fire immediately — with one marine shot through his helmet — others found themselves walking into the arms of exultant Iraqis.