Post by crudo on Dec 1, 2005 20:40:06 GMT -5
On Sunday, January 9th of this year, Marine Lance Cpl. Andy Raya left Camp Pendleton, took a one-way flight from San Diego to Sacramento, grabbed an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle he had obtained illegally, and made his way home to Ceres, a farming town in the Central Valley. Three months earlier he had returned from Iraq, where he had spent seven months driving supply trucks in the Sunni Triangle. Other than Marine Corps barracks, Ceres was the only place Raya had ever lived. He was nineteen. At 8 p.m., carrying the SKS and several spare clips, Raya walked out of the night's drizzle and into the safety lights of George's Liquors, screaming that he hated the world. A toxicology report would later show that he had a "potentially toxic" level of cocaine in his bloodstream. George's is just a few blocks from the Camp, the migrant-farmworker projects where Raya grew up. The community is working-poor and encroached on by several white middle-class neighborhoods, but it turns briefly slummy around George's. Raya hadn't mentioned his homecoming to anyone. His friends and family thought he was at Camp Pendleton. In his long, hooded rain poncho, lustrous in the wet, he was not immediately recognizable.
Before walking into the store, Raya fired once at a nearby building. Inside, he said he had been shot at and asked the clerk to call the police. To the clerk, he seemed to be elsewhere. Another employee tried to calm him down. Both employees noticed the rifle under his poncho. Raya told them not to be afraid -- they were civilians and would not be harmed. Then he walked outside.
The employees immediately locked the front door. The clerk described Raya's behavior to the 911 dispatcher. Raya was pacing in front of the store, bouncing on the balls of his feet, scanning the street, waiting for the police to arrive, readying his rifle. The SKS is a Russian-designed, Chinese-made semiautomatic. It is similar to the M-16 Raya had carried in Iraq, but it fires bigger, heavier rounds, rounds powerful enough to pierce the body armor cops wear. Raya had bought it for that purpose.
One end of George's Liquors faces Caswell Avenue. The other end abuts Jiro Tire, which faces Central. An empty lot between them extends to the intersection. In Marine Combat Training, Andy Raya had spent a lot of time studying this kind of urban geometry.
Concealing himself behind George's storefront, Raya watched as Officer Sam Ryno and an officer-in-training, Chris Melton, drove up and parked in front of Jiro Tire. They walked cautiously to the front wall of Jiro's, which took them out of Raya's view, and began moving toward the building's plate-glass corner -- a straight diagonal across the lot from Raya. Raya listened and then stepped into the lot for a second to measure their approach. He pulled back just as Ryno glanced around the corner of Jiro's.
Ryno glanced again, and at the reappearance of his face, Raya shot two concentrated bursts. Two, he had been taught, is the optimal number in close quarters -- more and you risk compromising your aim. His shots shattered the plate glass and lifted Ryno fully off his feet. The SKS has a range of 1,300 feet, making the distance between Raya and Ryno effectively point-blank. Raya paused almost imperceptibly to register the effect of his shots -- there was no return fire -- and then stepped forward briskly and fired twice more. The bones in both of Ryno's legs were shattered; one was nearly severed.
From this fractional first pause until the end of his attack, Raya was in continuous textbook motion; what he had learned had become reflexive. After his second shot he ran straight at his targets, firing deafeningly in the echo chamber of the half-walled lot, his poncho rising capelike behind him and shining through the thin, hesitating smoke of his rounds. He knew that superior firepower affords great advantages and that unrelentingness preserves them.
Melton had dragged Ryno back from the corner, out of the line of fire. When Raya passed the building edge, he began side-stepping as he shot, forming a half-circle whose centerpoint was Ryno and Melton. Raya perpetually reoriented his body to this center point, never losing his preternatural poise: spine straight, gun rotating strictly. This tactic, called "pieing," gave his fire a double effect: It became both offensively overwhelming and defensively suppressive. He also remained a swiftly moving target. By this time, Raya had opened up two more big holes in Ryno's body, destroying his lower abdomen.
At that moment another policeman, Officer John King, pulled up and quickly opened fire on Raya with a high-powered rifle. King was able to protect Melton and Ryno only because he had arrived exactly when he did, with Raya about eight feet into the circumference of his circle, and because he had parked, by chance, in a good offensive position. Raya reacted to King's fire as if he had been expecting it: bolting, head down, back to the shelter created by the intersection of the buildings.
Raya stopped and listened; it was quiet. He was untouched. Eighteen seconds had passed since the beginning of the assault. Melton and King were concentrating solely on evacuating Ryno, which was very brave, because they had not neutralized Raya and had no idea whether he had accomplices.
More than a half million U.S. soldiers have now done at least one tour of duty in Iraq. The universal nature of combat there -- the war zone is the whole country -- damages every soldier who serves, regardless of assignment. Before January 9th, the violence committed by Iraq War veterans fell along a limited continuum: Soldiers came home and killed themselves; they assaulted people; they abused their spouses. Then Andy Raya came home and created an approximation of the combat environment he had just left, and the continuum seemed to lose its limits.
Before Iraq, Raya hadn't displayed any emotional instability or propensity for violence. He had the kind of personality that pulled people out of themselves and into common space. When his family and friends reminisce about him, they not infrequently jump up and act out things he did. He was one of the first kids in his class to realize that just before Christmas break you could say, "See you next year," and he drew out the confusion by saying it over his shoulder as he left. Every Easter he painted a raw egg and fake-hid it and broke it over someone's head. In elementary school he designed his own symbol, which looked something like a manta ray, and made tiny reproductions of it wherever he stopped. In high school he would walk complicated paths while eating oranges one after the other and dropping the peels at intervals, so you could track him. "Everyone was always waiting to see what he would do," his father told me.
Raya's parents, Tomas and Julia, picked peaches and apricots in the commercial orchards that begin at the edge of Ceres and extend for miles into the Valley. They lived in the Camp, which had been sheltering migrant farm workers since the Depression. By the time Tomas and Julia got there, in 1983, it had become a county housing project.
Back then, the Camp had sporadic problems with drugs and with the Nortenos, a street gang that originated in the California prison system in the 1960s. But it was basically a hardworking place, and the government-subsidized rent allowed many immigrants to take the transformative step from fieldwork to steadier employment. Tomas got a job at a canning factory; Julia became a nurse's aide. They bought their own home shortly before Andy entered high school.
Andy was proud of being from the Camp and proud of being Mexican. He visited his father's hometown, in Michoacan, several times, and it changed the way he thought about himself. He bought books on pre-Columbian Mexico and collected Mayan and Aztec iconography. When he was ten, the housing authority began a campaign of evictions in the Camp, which sharply reduced the Norteno presence there, but the gang had come to represent the Camp. Its name refers to Northern California, and every neighborhood kid knew Norteno signs and recognized the autonomy and power inherent in its name. If you were a kid in the Camp just coming into adolescence and proud of where you came from, you inherited a Norteno loyalty.
By the time he was thirteen, Andy was talking about joining the Marines and vowing to finish high school on time so he could sign up as quickly as possible. His father likes to tell the story of how, right after the graduation ceremony, Andy found him in the crowd and said, "See, Pop? I told you." Before he began his initiation into the Marines, he said, "Just wait, Pop, just wait. It won't be long before I have my honors" -- his first ribbons -- and the next time he came home, he had them.
Raya loved boot camp in San Diego, and he loved Marine Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, outside St. Louis. The discipline and suffering suited him. The setting of his life had never changed before. He had never before been anonymous. Submerged in Marine culture, he fashioned himself into a hard kid from a hard neighborhood. He called the Nortenos his "boys" and threw around pictures of himself and his childhood friends flashing Norteno signs. He showed off his tattoos like they were gang symbols; he was always listening to gangsta rap. He bragged about getting "locked up," but he was vague on the details -- he'd been arrested only as a juvenile, once for having a pot pipe and once for using a Piccolo Pete firecracker to blow up a mailbox.
Andy returned from his seven-month tour in Iraq in September 2004. He was posted to Camp Pendleton and expected to be shipped back to Iraq. His parents picked him up at the base on the day he arrived. He was still in his fatigues. He seemed totally disoriented. He never stopped examining his surroundings, and he remained in a silence that forestalled questions. He was "very, very quiet," his father says.
His parents stopped at a restaurant not far from Camp Pendleton. When they got out of the car and started to shut the doors, Andy yelled, "Don't close the doors! Don't close the doors!" He began rifling the car for his M-16. It took his parents a few minutes to convince him that he was where he was.
The restaurant was crowded, and Andy sat with his back against the wall, staring everywhere and at everyone. He looked, according to his father, "lost, just all lost." His father asked what was wrong. "I don't know, Pop," he said. "I don't know."
For the three days of his leave, Andy stayed in the house. He was not inclined to do much more than sleep and eat. When he sat he was always straight-backed, his knees making right angles, as he had learned to do in the Marine Corps. His attitude was usually that of someone concentrating hard on a problem. To questions about Iraq, he almost always said, "Well, you guys wouldn't understand." He had nightmares every night, but he didn't talk about them. He had photographs of his buddies in Iraq, and also of rubble and ruined vehicles and wounded soldiers. One picture showed the aftermath of an improvised explosive device that had almost killed him, but he wouldn't say much about it. Another showed him in his barracks holding up a handmade sign that read "Operation Send Me Home."
When he came home again for Christmas, he said he didn't want to return to Iraq. With no elaboration, he said the war was not right. "The only thing I think about is dying out there," he told his cousin Rebeca. "That's the worst thing that could happen to me is that my mom sees me die in Iraq." In public, he often said, unprompted, "These are all civilians." Many times he declared to family members, "You guys are considered civilians." He called men "males" and women "females" and sometimes spoke in Marine slang: zero-dark-thirty, gungy, deuce gear. His family kept saying, "We don't understand you," and he kept saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys are civilians," but he never really stopped. Sometimes he just sat and stared at nothing for four or five minutes.
One day, Andy pulled a metal ball out of his pocket and threw it hard at his cousin Alex. Before Alex had a chance to respond, Andy said, "How you felt it is how I felt it." It was a piece of shrapnel that he said had shattered the body armor covering his chest. Andy often carried it, holding it in his palm and metronomically tossing it up and down.
Andy was most like his old self when he was with his friends, hanging out smoking and drinking. One night they broke into the high school gym, tore up an American flag and used the strips to spell "Fuck Bush" on the floor. Andy said things to his friends he didn't say to anyone else. He said, "Bush is a fucking devil. People just don't realize how much power he's got and how much he's using it." He said, "You can't picture hell any worse than Iraq -- that is hell." He had known very little of the world before he went to Iraq, but the world, he said, wasn't right: There was no point in it; it was full of sin; it was going to end.
After a few seconds of surveillance in front of George's, Andy Raya threw his poncho over his shoulder and again stepped toward the lot, his rifle in firing position. He could have rushed and killed Melton and Ryno and King, but with studied caution he pulled back, paced, appeared to reload -- a three-second procedure -- and then seized up at the sound of another approaching officer, Sgt. Howard Stevenson.
Stevenson had driven slowly down Caswell toward Central and pulled to within a half-block of George's. He unholstered his pistol and began walking along a white fence that partially screened him from the storefront. Raya dashed in a crouch to the side window of a car parked in front of George's, rose slightly to fix his target with his eyes and then drew his body downward and backward: a pretty, pendular motion that brought him to rest in a stable firing position. "Shoot me, motherfucker!" he was screaming. "Shoot me! Shoot me!" Stevenson had walked past the end of the fence. Aiming at the figure behind the car, he yelled, "Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon!"
Raya fired two bursts through the car window. As before, he was in constant motion after his initial shot -- he moved forward into a deeper crouch and shot twice over the car's trunk. Raya rushed Stevenson as soon as he began to fall, firing accurately. The officer was no longer moving when Raya reached him. Raya bent down and shot him twice in the back of the head, like a technician. Then he kept running, telling one woman to get back into her house -- she was a civilian and would not be harmed. After a half-block, he veered from the street and vanished into a residential grid of yards and alleys and houses.
By the time Raya got to Iraq, in February 2004, the Marines had invested scores of hours in teaching him how to kill other human beings and desensitizing him to the act. The military now excels at overriding the nearly immutable human instinct against intraspecies killing: In World War II, at least seventy-five percent of American soldiers under fire did not shoot their weapons; today, nearly ninety-five percent do. Five decades of military research has produced photo-realistic targets, complex and visceral virtual-reality scenarios, three-dimensional human mannequins that bleed and fall, and exercises in which live humans believably die when hit by simulated ammunition. Recruits kill in this way many hundreds of times, until destroying a manifestly fragile human form becomes automatic and affectless and associated with honor. They never have to label their marks humans or people or soldiers or even them. They shoot at targets or positions or hostile fire or the enemy. They are not killing; they are not even shooting: They are attriting, suppressing, returning, engaging.
After six months of training and conditioning, Raya was shipped to Ramadi, a shot-up provincial capital of cement and mud brick in the middle of the desert. Saddam Hussein had drawn most of his special forces from the city. When his army was dissolved, the country's best fighters went home to Ramadi. They brought a sophistication to the local insurgency that rivaled the American military's.
Insurgents in Ramadi plotted Marine troop movements and diagrammed ambushes in three dimensions. In street battles they sometimes stood and fought to the death, sometimes flanked Marine positions and sometimes re-treated in tactical sequence. They were good with rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-launched missiles, and they had professional snipers: In a firefight in April 2004, two months after Raya arrived, five Marines died or were badly wounded by single shots to the head.
Weapons stockpiles and bands of disguised insurgents were everywhere. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind, " an American soldier told a reporter toward the end of Raya's tour, "would be to kill the entire population."
Raya's camp, like every other Marine camp in and around Ramadi, took rocket and mortar and small-arms fire almost every day. That March, bomb attacks in the city wounded nineteen soldiers in two days. On June 21st, four Marines died defending an observation post. On July 1st, one Marine was killed and seven wounded by a roadside bomb. Every Wednesday for the following three weeks, insurgents inflicted multiple casualties on patrols by coordinating the opening volleys of their attacks. One Marine company whose tour overlapped with Raya's saw more than sixty of its 185 soldiers killed or wounded.
Raya drove seven-ton supply trucks from Ramadi to strategic points all over the Sunni Triangle. During his tour, a driver in every twentieth convoy was killed or wounded. Drivers could expect to encounter hostile fire every fourth or fifth mission. One of the first times Raya went out, insurgents detonated an improvised explosive device under a truck in his convoy. The IED was in a dead dog. The explosion lifted the multi-ton truck several feet off the ground and left its occupants unconscious and bleeding in the road. Raya was temporarily deafened by the explosion; a military doctor later told him he would soon lose all hearing in one ear.
To hurt transport convoys, which tend to be big and have a lot of firepower, insurgents fired 120 mm missiles or rocket-propelled grenades from rooftops or palm groves or the far side of sand berms. They put mortar tubes in the trunks of cars and used the car battery to fire 82 mm or 122 mm artillery shells. By the beginning of Raya's tour, insurgents had begun filling cars with explosives -- sometimes more than a thousand pounds of explosives -- and driving them into convoys. Insurgents posing as road crews built median strips to house IEDs. They set IEDs under overpasses so they exploded downward. They planted fake IEDs to delay convoys, and they responded to radio jamming by using timed detonators.
Over a period of six months in Ramadi, insurgents planted more than 400 IEDs on a single stretch of road. Ramadi convoys often had to take or cross a 4.5-mile section of a major highway known as Route Michigan. Insurgent shelters -- a crowded market and a series of mosques -- line it. Drivers called it the "suicide train." One morning just after Andy Raya left Iraq, American soldiers found or were wounded by nine bombs on Route Michigan: an IED for every half-mile.
Serious ambushes took a classic form. They began with the detonation of an IED, or a daisy chain of four or eight or ten IEDs, and then proceeded to RPG and mortar fire. Injuring and pinning a convoy in this way made close-range rifle and machine-gun fire sustainable, and it pretty much guaranteed casualties. A convoy was ambushed in Ramadi on July 21st. When a rapid-reaction force arrived, it was ambushed as well.
Raya sometimes drove at night, when convoys moved fast, often without headlights. Visibility on moonless nights, even with night-vision goggles, was no better than a few hundred yards: At times, drivers saw little more than the chemical lights attached to the bumper in front of them. In daylight, roads were impinged on by sheep, immolated military vehicles, mule carts, fuel tanks, dead animals. Blast craters and sandstorms appeared unpredictably. Desert crevices cut into truck routes. Irrigation canals ran along raised roads -- driving on them was like driving on top of a wall. Quicksand could grip seven-ton trucks for hours. Drivers had not been trained to operate in these conditions, and there was no time to practice. Learning on the job, they killed and injured themselves in crashes and rollovers, and died because their mistakes made them good targets.
Iraqis wove in and out of American convoys as a gesture of disrespect and tried to get hit so they could file compensation claims. In narrow city streets, where potential enemy firing positions seemed absurdly close, traffic slowed convoys to a walk, or halted them. Insurgents engineered traffic jams and posed as traffic cops. As suicide car bombings became common, all traffic came to seem intolerable. Because children sometimes ran in front of trucks to halt convoys in advance of ambushes, drivers were ordered not to stop for children and not to look back. So they cultivated in themselves a readiness to keep driving.
Every truck driver in Iraq heard tales of what happened to every other driver: When Iraqis in a Baghdad street, resuming their errands and transactions minutes after an IED attack, inadvertently stepped on the brains of a dead driver; when drivers consciously crushed children; when IED explosions threw severed American heads into the air and soldiers had to go retrieve them.
Raya wrote many letters home, but he almost never called -- he had seen too many people get depressed afterward. An acquaintance had shot himself in the head after his girlfriend told him she was sleeping with someone else. "I could of lived happily," Andy wrote to his cousin Marisa, "without seeing what I've seen."
A number of people saw Andy Raya disappear from the street after he killed Sgt. Stevenson. Ceres police were soon able to identify the yard he had entered. An 11-99, which summons every officer who hears it, had been broadcast; units from all the surrounding counties were arriving. The police received several calls from residents as they glimpsed or heard Raya amid their houses. This information and a surfeit of manpower enabled them to rapidly establish a perimeter that was tight and wide enough to contain him.
High-powered spotlights on the roofs and doors of squad cars lit the sightlines from the perimeter into the cordoned area. A California Highway Patrol helicopter held at 800 feet, dropping sometimes to 500. The helicopter had a 50-million-candlepower searchlight that was impossible to look at directly and that illuminated -- like daylight, people in the neighborhood said -- several front yards at once. With a good approximation of Raya's position and this amount of movable light, the perimeter closed fast, stopping at one square block. Firepower had been concentrated wherever there was a clear view of the alley. Snipers climbed onto surrounding rooftops. Ten policemen with semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles stationed themselves about 300 feet from Raya's position, behind a black flatbed pickup parked in front of a house.
Before walking into the store, Raya fired once at a nearby building. Inside, he said he had been shot at and asked the clerk to call the police. To the clerk, he seemed to be elsewhere. Another employee tried to calm him down. Both employees noticed the rifle under his poncho. Raya told them not to be afraid -- they were civilians and would not be harmed. Then he walked outside.
The employees immediately locked the front door. The clerk described Raya's behavior to the 911 dispatcher. Raya was pacing in front of the store, bouncing on the balls of his feet, scanning the street, waiting for the police to arrive, readying his rifle. The SKS is a Russian-designed, Chinese-made semiautomatic. It is similar to the M-16 Raya had carried in Iraq, but it fires bigger, heavier rounds, rounds powerful enough to pierce the body armor cops wear. Raya had bought it for that purpose.
One end of George's Liquors faces Caswell Avenue. The other end abuts Jiro Tire, which faces Central. An empty lot between them extends to the intersection. In Marine Combat Training, Andy Raya had spent a lot of time studying this kind of urban geometry.
Concealing himself behind George's storefront, Raya watched as Officer Sam Ryno and an officer-in-training, Chris Melton, drove up and parked in front of Jiro Tire. They walked cautiously to the front wall of Jiro's, which took them out of Raya's view, and began moving toward the building's plate-glass corner -- a straight diagonal across the lot from Raya. Raya listened and then stepped into the lot for a second to measure their approach. He pulled back just as Ryno glanced around the corner of Jiro's.
Ryno glanced again, and at the reappearance of his face, Raya shot two concentrated bursts. Two, he had been taught, is the optimal number in close quarters -- more and you risk compromising your aim. His shots shattered the plate glass and lifted Ryno fully off his feet. The SKS has a range of 1,300 feet, making the distance between Raya and Ryno effectively point-blank. Raya paused almost imperceptibly to register the effect of his shots -- there was no return fire -- and then stepped forward briskly and fired twice more. The bones in both of Ryno's legs were shattered; one was nearly severed.
From this fractional first pause until the end of his attack, Raya was in continuous textbook motion; what he had learned had become reflexive. After his second shot he ran straight at his targets, firing deafeningly in the echo chamber of the half-walled lot, his poncho rising capelike behind him and shining through the thin, hesitating smoke of his rounds. He knew that superior firepower affords great advantages and that unrelentingness preserves them.
Melton had dragged Ryno back from the corner, out of the line of fire. When Raya passed the building edge, he began side-stepping as he shot, forming a half-circle whose centerpoint was Ryno and Melton. Raya perpetually reoriented his body to this center point, never losing his preternatural poise: spine straight, gun rotating strictly. This tactic, called "pieing," gave his fire a double effect: It became both offensively overwhelming and defensively suppressive. He also remained a swiftly moving target. By this time, Raya had opened up two more big holes in Ryno's body, destroying his lower abdomen.
At that moment another policeman, Officer John King, pulled up and quickly opened fire on Raya with a high-powered rifle. King was able to protect Melton and Ryno only because he had arrived exactly when he did, with Raya about eight feet into the circumference of his circle, and because he had parked, by chance, in a good offensive position. Raya reacted to King's fire as if he had been expecting it: bolting, head down, back to the shelter created by the intersection of the buildings.
Raya stopped and listened; it was quiet. He was untouched. Eighteen seconds had passed since the beginning of the assault. Melton and King were concentrating solely on evacuating Ryno, which was very brave, because they had not neutralized Raya and had no idea whether he had accomplices.
More than a half million U.S. soldiers have now done at least one tour of duty in Iraq. The universal nature of combat there -- the war zone is the whole country -- damages every soldier who serves, regardless of assignment. Before January 9th, the violence committed by Iraq War veterans fell along a limited continuum: Soldiers came home and killed themselves; they assaulted people; they abused their spouses. Then Andy Raya came home and created an approximation of the combat environment he had just left, and the continuum seemed to lose its limits.
Before Iraq, Raya hadn't displayed any emotional instability or propensity for violence. He had the kind of personality that pulled people out of themselves and into common space. When his family and friends reminisce about him, they not infrequently jump up and act out things he did. He was one of the first kids in his class to realize that just before Christmas break you could say, "See you next year," and he drew out the confusion by saying it over his shoulder as he left. Every Easter he painted a raw egg and fake-hid it and broke it over someone's head. In elementary school he designed his own symbol, which looked something like a manta ray, and made tiny reproductions of it wherever he stopped. In high school he would walk complicated paths while eating oranges one after the other and dropping the peels at intervals, so you could track him. "Everyone was always waiting to see what he would do," his father told me.
Raya's parents, Tomas and Julia, picked peaches and apricots in the commercial orchards that begin at the edge of Ceres and extend for miles into the Valley. They lived in the Camp, which had been sheltering migrant farm workers since the Depression. By the time Tomas and Julia got there, in 1983, it had become a county housing project.
Back then, the Camp had sporadic problems with drugs and with the Nortenos, a street gang that originated in the California prison system in the 1960s. But it was basically a hardworking place, and the government-subsidized rent allowed many immigrants to take the transformative step from fieldwork to steadier employment. Tomas got a job at a canning factory; Julia became a nurse's aide. They bought their own home shortly before Andy entered high school.
Andy was proud of being from the Camp and proud of being Mexican. He visited his father's hometown, in Michoacan, several times, and it changed the way he thought about himself. He bought books on pre-Columbian Mexico and collected Mayan and Aztec iconography. When he was ten, the housing authority began a campaign of evictions in the Camp, which sharply reduced the Norteno presence there, but the gang had come to represent the Camp. Its name refers to Northern California, and every neighborhood kid knew Norteno signs and recognized the autonomy and power inherent in its name. If you were a kid in the Camp just coming into adolescence and proud of where you came from, you inherited a Norteno loyalty.
By the time he was thirteen, Andy was talking about joining the Marines and vowing to finish high school on time so he could sign up as quickly as possible. His father likes to tell the story of how, right after the graduation ceremony, Andy found him in the crowd and said, "See, Pop? I told you." Before he began his initiation into the Marines, he said, "Just wait, Pop, just wait. It won't be long before I have my honors" -- his first ribbons -- and the next time he came home, he had them.
Raya loved boot camp in San Diego, and he loved Marine Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, outside St. Louis. The discipline and suffering suited him. The setting of his life had never changed before. He had never before been anonymous. Submerged in Marine culture, he fashioned himself into a hard kid from a hard neighborhood. He called the Nortenos his "boys" and threw around pictures of himself and his childhood friends flashing Norteno signs. He showed off his tattoos like they were gang symbols; he was always listening to gangsta rap. He bragged about getting "locked up," but he was vague on the details -- he'd been arrested only as a juvenile, once for having a pot pipe and once for using a Piccolo Pete firecracker to blow up a mailbox.
Andy returned from his seven-month tour in Iraq in September 2004. He was posted to Camp Pendleton and expected to be shipped back to Iraq. His parents picked him up at the base on the day he arrived. He was still in his fatigues. He seemed totally disoriented. He never stopped examining his surroundings, and he remained in a silence that forestalled questions. He was "very, very quiet," his father says.
His parents stopped at a restaurant not far from Camp Pendleton. When they got out of the car and started to shut the doors, Andy yelled, "Don't close the doors! Don't close the doors!" He began rifling the car for his M-16. It took his parents a few minutes to convince him that he was where he was.
The restaurant was crowded, and Andy sat with his back against the wall, staring everywhere and at everyone. He looked, according to his father, "lost, just all lost." His father asked what was wrong. "I don't know, Pop," he said. "I don't know."
For the three days of his leave, Andy stayed in the house. He was not inclined to do much more than sleep and eat. When he sat he was always straight-backed, his knees making right angles, as he had learned to do in the Marine Corps. His attitude was usually that of someone concentrating hard on a problem. To questions about Iraq, he almost always said, "Well, you guys wouldn't understand." He had nightmares every night, but he didn't talk about them. He had photographs of his buddies in Iraq, and also of rubble and ruined vehicles and wounded soldiers. One picture showed the aftermath of an improvised explosive device that had almost killed him, but he wouldn't say much about it. Another showed him in his barracks holding up a handmade sign that read "Operation Send Me Home."
When he came home again for Christmas, he said he didn't want to return to Iraq. With no elaboration, he said the war was not right. "The only thing I think about is dying out there," he told his cousin Rebeca. "That's the worst thing that could happen to me is that my mom sees me die in Iraq." In public, he often said, unprompted, "These are all civilians." Many times he declared to family members, "You guys are considered civilians." He called men "males" and women "females" and sometimes spoke in Marine slang: zero-dark-thirty, gungy, deuce gear. His family kept saying, "We don't understand you," and he kept saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys are civilians," but he never really stopped. Sometimes he just sat and stared at nothing for four or five minutes.
One day, Andy pulled a metal ball out of his pocket and threw it hard at his cousin Alex. Before Alex had a chance to respond, Andy said, "How you felt it is how I felt it." It was a piece of shrapnel that he said had shattered the body armor covering his chest. Andy often carried it, holding it in his palm and metronomically tossing it up and down.
Andy was most like his old self when he was with his friends, hanging out smoking and drinking. One night they broke into the high school gym, tore up an American flag and used the strips to spell "Fuck Bush" on the floor. Andy said things to his friends he didn't say to anyone else. He said, "Bush is a fucking devil. People just don't realize how much power he's got and how much he's using it." He said, "You can't picture hell any worse than Iraq -- that is hell." He had known very little of the world before he went to Iraq, but the world, he said, wasn't right: There was no point in it; it was full of sin; it was going to end.
After a few seconds of surveillance in front of George's, Andy Raya threw his poncho over his shoulder and again stepped toward the lot, his rifle in firing position. He could have rushed and killed Melton and Ryno and King, but with studied caution he pulled back, paced, appeared to reload -- a three-second procedure -- and then seized up at the sound of another approaching officer, Sgt. Howard Stevenson.
Stevenson had driven slowly down Caswell toward Central and pulled to within a half-block of George's. He unholstered his pistol and began walking along a white fence that partially screened him from the storefront. Raya dashed in a crouch to the side window of a car parked in front of George's, rose slightly to fix his target with his eyes and then drew his body downward and backward: a pretty, pendular motion that brought him to rest in a stable firing position. "Shoot me, motherfucker!" he was screaming. "Shoot me! Shoot me!" Stevenson had walked past the end of the fence. Aiming at the figure behind the car, he yelled, "Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon!"
Raya fired two bursts through the car window. As before, he was in constant motion after his initial shot -- he moved forward into a deeper crouch and shot twice over the car's trunk. Raya rushed Stevenson as soon as he began to fall, firing accurately. The officer was no longer moving when Raya reached him. Raya bent down and shot him twice in the back of the head, like a technician. Then he kept running, telling one woman to get back into her house -- she was a civilian and would not be harmed. After a half-block, he veered from the street and vanished into a residential grid of yards and alleys and houses.
By the time Raya got to Iraq, in February 2004, the Marines had invested scores of hours in teaching him how to kill other human beings and desensitizing him to the act. The military now excels at overriding the nearly immutable human instinct against intraspecies killing: In World War II, at least seventy-five percent of American soldiers under fire did not shoot their weapons; today, nearly ninety-five percent do. Five decades of military research has produced photo-realistic targets, complex and visceral virtual-reality scenarios, three-dimensional human mannequins that bleed and fall, and exercises in which live humans believably die when hit by simulated ammunition. Recruits kill in this way many hundreds of times, until destroying a manifestly fragile human form becomes automatic and affectless and associated with honor. They never have to label their marks humans or people or soldiers or even them. They shoot at targets or positions or hostile fire or the enemy. They are not killing; they are not even shooting: They are attriting, suppressing, returning, engaging.
After six months of training and conditioning, Raya was shipped to Ramadi, a shot-up provincial capital of cement and mud brick in the middle of the desert. Saddam Hussein had drawn most of his special forces from the city. When his army was dissolved, the country's best fighters went home to Ramadi. They brought a sophistication to the local insurgency that rivaled the American military's.
Insurgents in Ramadi plotted Marine troop movements and diagrammed ambushes in three dimensions. In street battles they sometimes stood and fought to the death, sometimes flanked Marine positions and sometimes re-treated in tactical sequence. They were good with rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-launched missiles, and they had professional snipers: In a firefight in April 2004, two months after Raya arrived, five Marines died or were badly wounded by single shots to the head.
Weapons stockpiles and bands of disguised insurgents were everywhere. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind, " an American soldier told a reporter toward the end of Raya's tour, "would be to kill the entire population."
Raya's camp, like every other Marine camp in and around Ramadi, took rocket and mortar and small-arms fire almost every day. That March, bomb attacks in the city wounded nineteen soldiers in two days. On June 21st, four Marines died defending an observation post. On July 1st, one Marine was killed and seven wounded by a roadside bomb. Every Wednesday for the following three weeks, insurgents inflicted multiple casualties on patrols by coordinating the opening volleys of their attacks. One Marine company whose tour overlapped with Raya's saw more than sixty of its 185 soldiers killed or wounded.
Raya drove seven-ton supply trucks from Ramadi to strategic points all over the Sunni Triangle. During his tour, a driver in every twentieth convoy was killed or wounded. Drivers could expect to encounter hostile fire every fourth or fifth mission. One of the first times Raya went out, insurgents detonated an improvised explosive device under a truck in his convoy. The IED was in a dead dog. The explosion lifted the multi-ton truck several feet off the ground and left its occupants unconscious and bleeding in the road. Raya was temporarily deafened by the explosion; a military doctor later told him he would soon lose all hearing in one ear.
To hurt transport convoys, which tend to be big and have a lot of firepower, insurgents fired 120 mm missiles or rocket-propelled grenades from rooftops or palm groves or the far side of sand berms. They put mortar tubes in the trunks of cars and used the car battery to fire 82 mm or 122 mm artillery shells. By the beginning of Raya's tour, insurgents had begun filling cars with explosives -- sometimes more than a thousand pounds of explosives -- and driving them into convoys. Insurgents posing as road crews built median strips to house IEDs. They set IEDs under overpasses so they exploded downward. They planted fake IEDs to delay convoys, and they responded to radio jamming by using timed detonators.
Over a period of six months in Ramadi, insurgents planted more than 400 IEDs on a single stretch of road. Ramadi convoys often had to take or cross a 4.5-mile section of a major highway known as Route Michigan. Insurgent shelters -- a crowded market and a series of mosques -- line it. Drivers called it the "suicide train." One morning just after Andy Raya left Iraq, American soldiers found or were wounded by nine bombs on Route Michigan: an IED for every half-mile.
Serious ambushes took a classic form. They began with the detonation of an IED, or a daisy chain of four or eight or ten IEDs, and then proceeded to RPG and mortar fire. Injuring and pinning a convoy in this way made close-range rifle and machine-gun fire sustainable, and it pretty much guaranteed casualties. A convoy was ambushed in Ramadi on July 21st. When a rapid-reaction force arrived, it was ambushed as well.
Raya sometimes drove at night, when convoys moved fast, often without headlights. Visibility on moonless nights, even with night-vision goggles, was no better than a few hundred yards: At times, drivers saw little more than the chemical lights attached to the bumper in front of them. In daylight, roads were impinged on by sheep, immolated military vehicles, mule carts, fuel tanks, dead animals. Blast craters and sandstorms appeared unpredictably. Desert crevices cut into truck routes. Irrigation canals ran along raised roads -- driving on them was like driving on top of a wall. Quicksand could grip seven-ton trucks for hours. Drivers had not been trained to operate in these conditions, and there was no time to practice. Learning on the job, they killed and injured themselves in crashes and rollovers, and died because their mistakes made them good targets.
Iraqis wove in and out of American convoys as a gesture of disrespect and tried to get hit so they could file compensation claims. In narrow city streets, where potential enemy firing positions seemed absurdly close, traffic slowed convoys to a walk, or halted them. Insurgents engineered traffic jams and posed as traffic cops. As suicide car bombings became common, all traffic came to seem intolerable. Because children sometimes ran in front of trucks to halt convoys in advance of ambushes, drivers were ordered not to stop for children and not to look back. So they cultivated in themselves a readiness to keep driving.
Every truck driver in Iraq heard tales of what happened to every other driver: When Iraqis in a Baghdad street, resuming their errands and transactions minutes after an IED attack, inadvertently stepped on the brains of a dead driver; when drivers consciously crushed children; when IED explosions threw severed American heads into the air and soldiers had to go retrieve them.
Raya wrote many letters home, but he almost never called -- he had seen too many people get depressed afterward. An acquaintance had shot himself in the head after his girlfriend told him she was sleeping with someone else. "I could of lived happily," Andy wrote to his cousin Marisa, "without seeing what I've seen."
A number of people saw Andy Raya disappear from the street after he killed Sgt. Stevenson. Ceres police were soon able to identify the yard he had entered. An 11-99, which summons every officer who hears it, had been broadcast; units from all the surrounding counties were arriving. The police received several calls from residents as they glimpsed or heard Raya amid their houses. This information and a surfeit of manpower enabled them to rapidly establish a perimeter that was tight and wide enough to contain him.
High-powered spotlights on the roofs and doors of squad cars lit the sightlines from the perimeter into the cordoned area. A California Highway Patrol helicopter held at 800 feet, dropping sometimes to 500. The helicopter had a 50-million-candlepower searchlight that was impossible to look at directly and that illuminated -- like daylight, people in the neighborhood said -- several front yards at once. With a good approximation of Raya's position and this amount of movable light, the perimeter closed fast, stopping at one square block. Firepower had been concentrated wherever there was a clear view of the alley. Snipers climbed onto surrounding rooftops. Ten policemen with semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles stationed themselves about 300 feet from Raya's position, behind a black flatbed pickup parked in front of a house.