Chapter One
WOUNDED WARRIOR
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igel McCourry couldn’t sleep, and when he did, the nightmares about what he’d done in Iraq woke him up. He’d been a lance corporal in a weapons platoon in the United States Marine Corps, part of a squad that would sweep into an Iraqi town after it had been bombed by fighter jets. That was now years ago, but the scenes of carnage haunted him—his comrades blown to pieces by roadside bombs and innocent Iraqis caught in the crossfire between the Marines and Iraqi insurgents. The honorably discharged but psychically wounded Marine would stand at the window of his apartment in Greenville, South Carolina until four or five in the morning, convinced someone was coming to get him. Crowds terrified him. Other times, he’d get this strange sensation that he was living his life from a third-person perspective, like he was watching a film about himself. And it could turn easily into a horror movie, especially when he thought back to that moment in 2004 when he and a machine gunner opened fire on a truck that refused to stop as it approached his platoon during a firefight south of Baghdad, along the Euphrates River. Two little girls, not more than four and six years old, had been riding in the truck with their father. The father survived, but the daughters didn’t, and Nigel couldn’t get the blood-drenched images of the aftermath out of his mind, the scene in the cab of the truck and the father carrying his daughters’ limp bodies back into the desert. It took seven long years for him to finally get a diagnosis from the Veterans Administration that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. By then, in 2011, he’d alienated most of his family and friends and had grown increasingly isolated. He’d been drinking heavily, which “took off the edge,” but did not address the underlying guilt, anger, and fear—and led to more problems.
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