Kevin Sites - The Things They Cannot Say

“I don’t think I was sad. I was angry more than anything,” Auton says. “He was such a young guy. It motivates you to be there even more and to find them [the attacker]. I don’t know if we got the exact one, but we got plenty of them. We cordoned off the area, did raids for the next three hours—it wasn’t knocking, it was hard raids.”

While Auton can be stirred by the loss of one of his men, his mostly unemotional nature sometimes gives him the leverage to understand things his more emotionally charged comrades can’t. When Auton does his job, killing the enemy, he doesn’t feel the need to hate or dehumanize them. If they’re a threat to him and his men they’re dead. But since he doesn’t choose to see them as anything less than himself, as anything other than warriors doing their jobs, he can also offer them the same respect when they prove particularly worthy and tenacious adversaries, as did one he encountered during that same tour, in a city on the western border of Iraq.

After searching a barn in a nearby village and finding explosives and suicide vests buried in the hay, Auton moved his fireteam to the house next door to continue the search. They cleared the house floor by floor, from bottom to top. But when they reached the final floor of the house it appeared to be completely empty. They all relaxed for a moment… until they heard the unmistakable sound of metal on concrete. Their eyes opened wide as an olive-green Russian-made grenade came rolling across the floor toward them. “Grenade,” one of the soldiers yelled, and they all dove for cover as the small powerful explosion cratered the floor and forced shards of metal into the concrete walls on all sides. They were so surprised by the attack that they felt whoever had tossed the grenade might as well have been invisible.

“We know we cleared the room,” says Auton, “so we figured the guy had to actually be inside the wall somewhere.” That’s when they called in the EOD unit, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the same kind of specialists depicted in the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker . The EOD team planted C4 plastic explosives around the walls and leveled half the building. Once the dust cleared, Auton saw a vent duct above the stairwell. If the attacker had been in the vent, he had to be dead now. But that thought disappeared as soon as his team began taking fire from the vent. They returned fire, pumping more than a thousand rounds into the hole, but according to accounts from the soldiers, the stubborn sniper continued to fire back.

“I personally threw five grenades into the hole and the guy wouldn’t go down,” Auton says with a laugh. After a few hours of exchanging fire with the sniper, EOD planted C4 in what was left of the remaining walls and turned the entire building into rubble with a huge explosion. When the dust and smoke cleared, they saw the sniper lying in a pile of broken cinder blocks and concrete. But Auton and his men were astounded by what happened next. Like one of the machines out of the Terminator films, the Iraqi seemed almost impossible to kill.

“The dude sat up with his AK-47 from the rubble, turned and looked at us—he had to be on adrenaline or something,” says Auton. Another sergeant tossed a grenade at him, finally ending the five-hour standoff.

“You rarely encounter someone like that. This guy gave his position up. He could’ve hid and we wouldn’t have known he was there. You give respect for something like that, for bravery or whatever else. I can clearly picture him, skinny, five foot nine, clean-shaven face, black hair, black T-shirt, pair of jeans, and his whole body full of holes after the grenade.”

As Auton prepares for his third deployment, this one to Afghanistan, he’s now engaged to a German woman but uncertain if they’ll be able to work out their differences. She wants to stay in Germany, which Auton says he also loves, but he will have to go wherever the Army decides to send him. He will not abandon the family that he believes has given him his true place in this world. He already knows this will be his career no matter how many times he gets deployed. Somehow, despite what he’s had to do, this work has filled the empty spaces in him and given him both stability and a sense of calm and purpose. He tells me so in an e-mail.

“The army is the simplest job you can have. All you have to do is be where you are supposed to be on time and do what you are told,” says Auton. “The higher the rank you get the better the job. I am at the point in my career where now I issue the orders and teach the soldiers, this I love to do! I can retire at 39 yrs old. Where else in the civilian life could I do that? Also, everything is paid for. The only worry I have is the loss of my life or a soldier’s life, and I have come to peace with both of these.”

In March 2012, I got an e-mail from Auton telling me that he got married in October 2011 in a small German town called Wetzlar. He told me that he also passed the Army’s twenty-four-day Special Forces assessment and selection process at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, less than two hundred miles from where he grew up. In the fall he would attend the five-phase qualification course. If successful, Auton would wear the dagger-and-crossed-arrow flash of one of the most elite, highly trained and legendary units of the American military, the Green Berets.

Redemption can come from the most unlikely places. Mine is a present from a war-damaged twenty-four-year-old in Lebanon, Illinois, who e-mailed these words to me.

Dear Mr. Sites

You were imbedded [sic] with 3rd Bn/ 1st Mar. Div. during operation phantom fury. I was the Marine that you helped care me to saftey after i was shot by a sniper. I want to say thank you very much for helping me out. I was wondering if you had taken any photos of me during that time of injury and any of my fallen friends. i have lost twenty friends in this war and would like to get as many pictures as I can. I will pay what ever you want for the pictures. Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all you did for me. i now have a three year old child that would nevr of came if was for your help. I will for ever be in your debit. Thanks

His note arrives at a time when I’m feeling worthless, when I peer into the mirror in the morning at my tired and puffy face and wonder what right I have to be here at all. I’m struggling to write; I’m struggling with alcohol, drinking a fifth of vodka or whiskey every other day; I’m struggling to find some hope and a sense of purpose outside a war zone. For an elusive moment, James Sperry has given me both.