The Things They Cannot Say by Kevin Sites Page B

Same with Afghanistan. Crazy.
    WW: In Afghanistan it’s a totally different war. Of course, we’re doing sassel ops around here. You know, except for this. This is a . . .
    KS: When you say “sassel ops” what does that mean?
    WW: In a nutshell, it’s when you go around and you’re pretty much there for the people, you know? We hand out soccer balls and try to dodge IEDs every day. Make sure everybody’s doing good. Keep the schools running. Try to get the Iraqi police up, you know?
    KS: Right.
    WW: Here, it’s not what we’re doin’. Too many terrorists here. They eventually want us to do it here but it’s never gonna happen. This place is way too bad. Once they start letting the civilians back in, they have to let all the terrorists come back in.
    KS: Yep.
    WW: There’s a lot of terrorists left. They’re cowards. They shoot, throw down their weapons and run. If they come out and fight, the Marines will stick it to ’em. Yeah, we take some casualties, but we stick it to ’em. Ain’t no mistake the Marines are here. They can’t touch us. We get a casualty here and there. I shot six guys today. My Marine shot three others. One room. They can’t touch us. That Marine that got shot today? You should have heard what he said in the Humvee. “Wold, you better kill ’em all.” I think he said, “Wold, I love you. You better kill ’em all.” I don’t have no problem doing that. If they’re bad, they’re dead.
    KS: Is he a good friend of yours?
    WW: Yeah, he’s my one of my best friends. I met him when I first got to the fleet. We’ve been good friends ever since.
    KS: How bad was he hurt?
    WW: He took a few rounds. Took one in the arm, one in the shoulder. The sappy plate stopped about five. It was point-blank. He’ll be all right. He’s a strong guy. He’s the only guy I know who’d put a fight up with me. He’s a strong guy. He got . . . he’s the same situation as me. He’s got four months left. He’s got a fiancée back home. She’s even got the same name as mine. [ Yelling ] Right here!
    Note: Wold pushes out into the darkness with his team.
    O nly later, after watching the video of Wold many times, did I realize that the interview had revealed nearly all of what Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, in his book On Killing , labeled the six stages of response to killing in combat: concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, rationalization and acceptance.
    He writes, “Like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous stages in response to death and dying, these stages are generally sequential but not necessarily universal. Thus some individuals may skip certain stages, or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even acknowledge their presence.”
    W illiam Wold seemed fine initially when he came home from Iraq, according to his mother, Sandi Wold, when I speak to her by telephone seven years after my conversation with her son in Fallujah. Wold had begged his mother to sign a parental approval form when he wanted to join the Marines at seventeen, taking extra online classes to graduate a year early in order to do so. But after four years of service, he’d had enough.
    â€œThey were going to promote him to sergeant, but he didn’t want to reenlist. He just wanted to be normal,” she says, echoing his own words from our videotaped interview. His much-anticipated separation from the Marine Corps would come in March 2005, but in the interim, she had promised to treat him and a couple of other Marine buddies to a trip to Las Vegas as a coming-home present. She and her second husband, John Wold (William’s stepfather, whose last name he took), met the three Marines at the MGM Grand Hotel and got them adjoining rooms next to their own. Sandi was elated to see her son home safe and in one piece and she wanted to see