The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (20 page)

The gang brought pain, but it also gave him power. Ayala’s high school principal sought him out to help negotiate a truce between rival gangs. He started dating an older girl from the neighborhood and soon she was pregnant. Ayala’s father sat him down in the backyard again. You did this, his father told him. You need to be responsible. You don’t bring kids into the world and not care for them. When the baby was born, Ayala would stuff diapers and wipes in his pockets and carry his infant son out to the corner to hang with his friends.

He wanted to quit school and join the military, but he wasn’t old enough and his mother wouldn’t sign the papers for him. She told him to wait until he was eighteen.
After high school, he enrolled at a local community college, where he played baseball and dreamed of the majors. Then one winter Saturday night he was driving around with some guys from Sunrise when they heard that a friend had been shot while ordering tacos from a fast-food truck. They rushed to help him, but on the way they ran into a carload of guys from a rival gang and got into a shoot-out, driving fast as they fired. When they saw lights and heard sirens, they turned a series of corners and tossed the guns
beneath roadside ivy bushes one by one. With the cops behind them, they ran a red light and T-boned a truck. The police cuffed them all and hauled them to jail. They charged Ayala and his friends with assault with a deadly weapon, but they didn’t find the guns.

In jail, a group of rival gang members beat Ayala so severely that he woke up chained to a hospital bed. He looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize himself. He was disappointed that his gang friends hadn’t stepped in to protect him. He was disappointed in himself. When he got out, he had lost his spot on the community college baseball team, and he never went back. Instead, he went straight to the Army recruiter’s office. He was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division and that spring, he boarded a plane for Georgia to start basic training. It was his first flight, and he had never been so happy.

After what he’d lived on the streets, basic training felt easy. He liked the structure and the whiff of adventure, and most of all he liked being away, far from the darkness, the drugs and suicides. He quickly established himself in his platoon as a scrappy fighter. One night when they were all trying to sleep, a big black guy from Boston ordered a meek white kid to shine his shoes. The smaller soldier told the big man to leave him alone, but the guy wouldn’t stop. Finally, Ayala couldn’t take it. ‘Listen, why don’t you go back to your bunk, go shine your own shoes,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to get some rest here.’

‘What are you going to do?’ the big guy said.

Pretty soon Ayala was out of bed and had the other recruit under a bunk, smashing his head against the bed frame. Drill sergeants came in and everyone spent the next two hours outside, in push-up positions, in their underwear.

In spite of the discipline or maybe because of it,
Ayala excelled at basic training as he never had in high school. He racked up high scores on physical fitness and qualification tests. He learned to parachute out of helicopters. In airborne school, someone pulled him and a handful
of other young soldiers aside and offered them slots in a Ranger battalion if they could survive the training. The Ranger Indoctrination Program started with forty-seven men. By the end, only thirteen were left, and Ayala was one of them. He was assigned to the Second Ranger Battalion in Fort Lewis, Washington.

In the fall of 1983, at the height of the Cold War,
Ayala’s unit was sent to Grenada to stop the Soviet Union from gaining a new strategic foothold in the Caribbean. A coup had unseated the Grenadian prime minister, the left-wing military had seized power, and the Rangers were ordered to take control of the island’s main airport. As they neared the landing strip, rounds hit the bellies of their aircraft. The pilots flew off and doubled back, and someone told the Rangers to get ready to jump. They parachuted in from five hundred feet, lower than Ayala had ever practiced. They landed on the runway and fought their way to the control tower.

The next day, they flew to a different part of the island to rescue a group of stranded American medical students—the “hostages” everyone back home was talking about. On the way, Ayala’s helicopter was shot down and crashed in a cove. No one was seriously hurt, but they had to destroy the chopper in place and board another. They found the students huddled together in a room, loaded them onto helicopters, and flew them to the airfield. That night, their mission complete, they turned in their ammunition and grenades and celebrated as they waited to fly home. But the next morning, the officers passed out the ammunition again. Several hundred soldiers from the leftist Grenadian military were dug into a training base on the other side of the island. The Rangers were going to confront them.

Ayala and the other men boarded Black Hawk helicopters. As they skimmed over the treetops, one copter took fire and crashed into another. A third chopper struck the first two, and in the tangle, several
Rangers were chopped to bits. Eight or nine Rangers, including Ayala, were ordered to collect the wounded and the dead. He had been trained never to leave a fellow soldier behind, but he’d assumed that the bodies would be whole. They worked with medics, building piles of remains that would be loaded into body bags. One of the dead men had gone through the Ranger Indoctrination Program with Ayala. Another had been celebrating with him the night before. They had found some wine and Cuban cigars at the airfield, and the man had raised a toast. Less than twenty-four hours later, Ayala gathered up what was left of him. When he and his fellow soldiers got back to Fort Lewis, people greeted them with banners and marquees that said “Job well done, Rangers!” and “Welcome Home!” Operation Urgent Fury was Ayala’s first lesson in the difference between a war’s ground truth and the way people saw it back home. He felt proud and tried not to think about the body parts strewn amid the trees.

He left Fort Lewis the following year and moved back to Southern California, where
he joined the 12th Special Forces Group in Los Alamitos as a weapons sergeant, deploying briefly to Honduras and Panama. It was a reserve unit, so Ayala returned to civilian life. He got a job delivering wrought iron fences, went to school at night, and eventually built a career in telecommunications. He married and had two more sons. But he missed the Army, so he reenlisted in the 1990s, joining a Special Operations team training drug enforcement agents. He and his wife divorced, and Ayala needed cash for alimony and child support.
A Special Forces buddy had started a company that offered bodyguards for hire, and Ayala started working for him on the side. When the mayor of Moscow came to Los Angeles, Ayala and a team of contract security guards protected him, along with astronaut Buzz Aldrin and TV and radio host Larry King. Then came September 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. In 2002, the same friend told Ayala
that the State Department was looking for bodyguards to work overseas. Ayala applied and a few days later, the phone rang.
It was DynCorp, the private security company hired to protect Hamid Karzai, the new president of Afghanistan.

He spent about fifteen months guarding Karzai, but in early 2004, he was lured to Iraq by a job protecting American officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority at a salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars a month,
nearly twice what he had been paid in Afghanistan. At first, he lucked into protecting a high-level American diplomat in Irbil, the relatively peaceful capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the green hills and waterfalls reminded him of California wine country. But soon he was back in Baghdad, escorting American executives up and down Route Irish, as coalition forces called the road from the airport into town. Every day, they passed burning vehicles on the roadside, some belonging to other, less fortunate protection details. They were ambushed and trapped by attackers who pulled ahead and to either side of them, blocking the road and forcing them to stop. Men dropped grenades from bridges as Ayala’s convoy sped below, and gunmen fired as they passed, or launched “rolling ambushes,” in which cars hurtled down highway on-ramps, pulled alongside convoys, fired, and exited at the next opportunity, disappearing into the labyrinth of the city. Ayala and his team lived in a fortresslike compound near the airport. At night they would sit on the roof drinking cold beer and watching insurgent rockets and mortars arc overhead, aiming for the American soldiers at Camp Victory.

The skills and techniques of a bodyguard are not those of a soldier. Soldiers are trained for offensive action, while bodyguards call themselves “bullet catchers” because they step into danger on purpose. Being big and tough is helpful in close protection, but mental acuity matters more. The job rewarded the alertness that had distinguished Ayala as far back as his gang days, a sensitivity to the tension running
through a crowd, a feeling for what was coming before it happened. Bodyguards are taught to scan their surroundings for color, contrast, and movement. Look for patterns, they’re told, and don’t just look,
see.
Pay attention to hands, not faces. Concentrate on midsections, where guns and bombs hide beneath layers of cloth. If something happens, a bodyguard’s first thought isn’t to take out the assailant. He puts himself between the attacker and the principal, brings the principal to the ground if necessary, and gets him out of there.

On the morning of Ayala’s sentencing, a sunny day in May 2009, I drove to the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. Ayala and his family stood out front dressed in dark, tailored clothes. His girlfriend, Andi Santwier, was petite and blond, with waxen skin and a torch singer’s raspy voice. She wore a dark suit and big sunglasses that hid her eyes, but the tightness around her mouth suggested the intensity of her effort to hold herself together. They looked like mourners at a graveside as they shook hands with well-wishers. The brick courthouse stood across the street from a manicured park where office workers ate lunch on benches in warm weather. I crossed the park slowly. Ayala stood with his back to me, but he was easy to pick out, a man in a dark suit with the bearing of a Secret Service agent. We had never met in person, but when I drew within twenty feet of him, Ayala turned and looked back over his shoulder, staring directly at me. He reached to shake my hand, greeted me by name. This was the uncanny sense of peripheral vision—an awareness not just of what lay in front of him, but of who stood behind him—that had made him such a gifted bodyguard. During a visit to Maiwand earlier that spring, I had wondered aloud whether Ayala might have been angry with himself for failing to protect Loyd. His former team leader, Mike Warren, had nodded curtly.
When Ayala shot Abdul Salam, Warren told me, he had really been shooting himself.

Ayala and his supporters filed into the courthouse a little before
9 a.m. When his case was called, he left Santwier’s side and moved to the defense table. His lawyer, Michael Nachmanoff, outlined the aspects of the case that the defense and prosecution agreed on:
that Paula Loyd’s death was a “tragedy.” That she had endured “unimaginable suffering” and death as a result of Abdul Salam’s attack. “We also agree that Mr. Salam deserves no sympathy,” Nachmanoff told the judge. Ayala’s victim had “committed an unspeakable act against an unarmed woman who had dedicated years of her life to helping the Afghan people.”

Federal sentencing guidelines set a range of sanctions for every crime, from probation to prison time. The actual sentence can vary based on a defendant’s criminal history and other factors, but the judge usually chooses a sentence somewhere within the guideline range.
For manslaughter, the guidelines recommended six to eight years in prison.
Nachmanoff was asking the judge not to imprison Ayala at all, but to sentence him to probation, an outcome that even the public defender viewed as unlikely. Still, it was worth a try. A judge is not bound by the sentencing guidelines if he believes the appropriate sentence lies outside them, and Nachmanoff would argue that if ever a case warranted a departure from the guidelines, Ayala’s was it.
Most voluntary manslaughter cases involve fights: drunken barroom brawls, a husband coming home to find his wife in the arms of another man. Crimes of passion constitute the legal “heartland” of manslaughter, but Ayala’s offense fell well outside this familiar territory. He had killed Abdul Salam on a distant battlefield at a moment of perceived imminent danger to himself, his teammates, and the soldiers.
The struggle to subdue the Afghan had been “very violent,” a soldier had told Army investigators, and the detainee, though physically slight, had fought hard, even trying to grab one of the soldiers’ guns. They’d had reason to think that the assault on Loyd might be part of a more complex attack, and in that
context, the defense argued,
Salam could be seen to pose a continuing threat, even with his hands cuffed behind his back.

A victim’s behavior—his role in provoking the attack that kills him—is an important factor in manslaughter sentencing. In Abdul Salam, Ayala had encountered
“the kind of provocation that I think this court has never seen and I hope will never see again,” Nachmanoff told the judge. Paula Loyd had been unarmed, asking questions and taking notes, when Salam doused her with gas and set her on fire.
Her assault was “a terrorist act,” for which the Taliban had claimed responsibility, Nachmanoff said. Ayala, on the other hand, was not just an accomplished and law-abiding American, but
an “outstanding individual, a hero  . . . who’s dedicated his adult life to public service and protecting others.”
If Ayala’s friends and relatives were surprised that he had killed the Afghan, the soldiers of the 2–2 were no less so.
Ayala routinely scolded them for “morbid jokes” and “frequently encouraged us to be very gentle” with Afghans, Lieutenant Pathak, the platoon leader, had told Army investigators.

Anyone would have been angry at what Salam had done, Nachmanoff told the judge. But anger didn’t fully explain what had happened or why. What did explain it, according to the defense, was an error of judgment resulting from nearly lifelong exposure to violence and combat trauma.
A manslaughter sentence can be reduced if the defendant can prove he was “suffering from a diminished capacity,” and this was where Charles Figley, the trauma specialist, came in. When Ayala had shot Salam, Figley surmised, he had been suffering from “a significantly reduced mental capacity” brought on by battle fatigue and trauma. In a life of combat, Ayala had been shot at eight times and physically assaulted three times, Figley wrote. He had cleared and secured homes or other buildings on eighteen occasions, twice helped to clear makeshift bombs, and witnessed two explosions. On five
occasions, he had known someone who was injured. He had seen the dead bodies of enemy fighters, soldiers, civilians, and children more than a dozen times, and handled the bodies of dead American soldiers twice. He had experienced “intense fear” in combat on five occasions, and twice thought he would not survive. These experiences, Figley wrote, had significantly impaired his judgment. The accumulated weight of them had made it impossible for him to understand, in that moment in Maiwand, that his behavior was wrong and to stop himself. The attack on Paula Loyd had led to a convergence that had “awakened” Ayala’s “previously dormant combat stress injuries,” Nachmanoff argued, causing him to shoot Salam.