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Article Excerpt
THEY BEGIN MAKING LOVE in Kim O'Neal's gold BMW at the far end of a Camp Pendleton barracks parking lot, But the car is cramped for 33-year-old, 225-pound marine gunnery sergeant Archie O'Neil Jr, and his girlfriend, Kim, uncomfortable anyway under the parking lot lights, drives Archie to Deer Park, a picnic area about a mile away on the sprawling San Diego County base, The wooded park is empty on this moonless night of February 29, 2004, Though the couple share the same last name, just one vowel separating the two, they are married to other people. [paragraph] Archie, a handsome African American man with boyish features, is about to be redeployed on his second Iraq tour the next morning. Earlier in the day he drove with his wife, Monique, and their eight-year-old son to lunch at Sonic, then to a Burlington Coat Factory in Fullerton and to McDonald's for ice cream. Archie left his two Ruger pistols at home and took a Heckler & Koch .45 along for the ride. Whether tooling around Oceanside near the base, or driving up to Los Angeles for a day of shopping in the Fashion District, hanging out at the Santa Monica Pier, or grabbing a bite at Roscoe's, he always has a pistol with him. Monique argues with him about the guns.
Things have been this way ever since he returned from his first tour of duty in Iraq. Feeling the constant need to be armed is a symptom of his undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder; he says he doesn't know how many guns he would need to feel safe. There have been other changes as well. Archie turned the garage of their home on the base into a bunker, stocking it with military rations and alcohol. Monique finds dozens of bottles, all types and sizes, hidden in coolers and empty ones in the garbage. She knows her husband roams the house as the family sleeps each night. He's jumpy in crowds, too, but Archie won't seek help.
Archie has been seeing Kim, a 39-year-old Department of Homeland Security immigration examiner, for more than a year, the affair carried on by e-mail when he was in Iraq. In her messages Kim told Archie that she wanted the spelling of her last name to change--she wanted him to leave Monique and marry her. He was her king and she was his queen. "I am your future and don't forget that I will have all of you," she wrote. "Easy on that drama," Archie would tell her. Trying to control him, he wrote, was like taking a bite from a sea snake: "no cure and the poison kills within a matter of hours."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Kim stops the car toward the back of Deer Park, close to a stand of trees. Before she and Archie make love in the night air, he drops the HK45 in the grass so Kim won't see it. Afterward he heads for a Porta-John across a narrow clearing near a fence, scooping up the gun and tucking it into his jeans waistband. He emerges expecting "I'm going to miss you." But Kim, who has been growing more desperate about the status of their relationship, laughs at him. "You're just like all the rest of them dumb, stupid motherfuckers," he'll remember her saying. "I can't wait to kill your bitch and your bastard-ass son while you're in Iraq."
That's when Archie pulis out the HK45 and fires. I can't believe you shot me," she says, backing behind the car. He changes magazines, shoots several rounds into a ditch, and shoots again at Kim--11 bullets hit her--until she lies down, silent. He paces, knowing he should call 911 or try to stop the gushing blood. Only when he spots the lights of an approaching Humvee and hears a distant voice shout orders does he hop a fence and throw himself into a patch of roadside weeds. Five cars pass before he flags down a silver Mitsubishi and, sweating, hitches a ride to the barracks, where before driving his van home, he asks another marine to hold his gun overnight.
Archie runs a scalding bath and scrubs, trying to feel clean. Dry and dressed in camouflage, he stuffs his civilian clothes in a garbage bag, dumps them in a neighbor's trash bin, and loads his van. Six hours from now he'll ship out with Camp Pendleton's 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, for a Kuwait stopover en route to Iraq. Heading with his men for the bus that will take them to March Air Reserve Base and then a plane, he waves good-bye to his wife and little boy, who watch proudly from inside their van. The HK4S is in his seabag and will never be found.
BY THE TIME THE IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN wars are over--troops will be out of Iraq in 2011, according to Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--some 150,000 veterans will have returned to California. No state has a larger population of veterans, and no county has more than Los Angeles. A University of California, San Francisco-led study found that more than 40 percent of Veterans Affairs patients from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been diagnosed with psychological or behavioral problems. Twenty-two percent have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. "It's not unreasonable to expect PTSD cases to triple, and we have to be prepared to treat cases of that magnitude" says Colonel Kathy Platoni, a psychology consultant with the army's Medical Service Corps. But true numbers may be impossible to tally. Troops are often reluctant to report PTSD symptoms to the military. Those heading home after deployment can be detained for evaluation if they do, and active-duty troops go uncounted if they seek private care to avoid career damage. Moreover, symptoms--insomnia, nightmares, anger, flashbacks--can surface months or...
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