TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

'Engaging Targets': War Never Stops For Some Veterans

ADVERTISEMENT

By DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ, The New York Times

Published: January 13, 2008

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

Plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he said he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. So it was that night, when, seized by a feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame - and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

"Matthew knew he shouldn't be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven," Detective Laura Andersen said, "but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself."

As Sepi started home, two gang members, large and armed, stepped out of the darkness. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and "just snapped."

In the end, one gang member lay dead. The other was wounded.

Sepi fled, "breaking contact" with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

"Who did I take fire from?" he asked. The diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and instinctively "engaged the targets."

He shook. He cried.

"I felt very bad for him," Andersen said.

Nonetheless, Sepi was booked, and a local newspaper reported: "Iraq veteran arrested in killing."

Trail Of Death, Heartbreak

Across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: "Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife." Pierre, S.D.: "Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress." Colorado Springs: "Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring."

Taken together, these stories paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment - along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems - appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced charges for murder, manslaughter or homicide for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken or reckless driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Fallujah that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Spc. Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

The rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Thomas Varney, who was shot and killed by Seth Strasburg.

Strasburg, serving 22 to 36 years for the slaying, says he does not remember what provoked him but takes responsibility for the killing.

Neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department keeps track of such killings, most of which are prosecuted not by the military justice system but by civilian courts.

Given that many veterans rebound successfully from war experiences and some flourish as a result of them, veterans groups long have deplored the attention paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life.

Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans, many of whom struggle in quieter ways, with crumbling marriages, mounting debt, deepening alcohol dependence or more-minor tangles with the law.

But these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen.

Thirteen of these veterans took their own lives after the killings, and two more were fatally shot by the police. Several more attempted suicide or expressed a death wish, like Joshua Pol, a former soldier convicted of vehicular homicide, who told a judge in Montana last year, "To be honest with you, I really wish I had died in Iraq."

In some cases involving veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact that the suspect went to war bears no apparent relationship to the crime committed or to the prosecution and punishment. But in many cases, the deployment of the service member becomes a factor as the legal system, families and communities grapple to make sense of the crimes.

This is especially stark where a previously law-abiding young man - there is one woman among the 121 - appears to have committed a random act of violence. The Times' analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of these young men, unlike most civilian homicide offenders, had no criminal history.

'Unleashing Certain Things'

"He came back different" is the shared refrain of the defendants' family members, who mention irritability, detachment, volatility, sleeplessness, excessive drinking or drug use, and keeping a gun at hand.

"You are unleashing certain things in a human being we don't allow in civic society, and getting it all back in the box can be difficult for some people," said William C. Gentry, an Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a prosecutor in San Diego County.

Unlike it did in the Vietnam War, the military has made a concerted effort, through screenings and research, to gauge the mental health needs of returning veterans. But a Pentagon task force last year described the military mental health system as overburdened, "woefully" understaffed, inadequately financed and undermined by the stigma attached to post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Army recently has developed a course called "Battlemind Training," intended to help soldiers make the psychological transition back into civilian society. "In combat, the enemy is the target," the course material says. "Back home, there are no enemies."

This can be a difficult lesson to learn. Many soldiers and Marines find themselves at war with their spouses, their children, their fellow service members, the world at large and ultimately themselves when they come home.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT