Part One

Heading east across Iraqi Kurdistan toward the and the border with Iran, we pass from a land of sand and dust into the green prairies of Mesopotamia. For an hour, we cross fields of barley and watermelons, and orchards of figs and pomegranates. Reaching the foothills, we follow a tumbling cloud of swifts, like a hundred tiny crossbows, into a canyon that plunges to the heart of the massif. After a while, the gorge arrives at a natural rock amphitheater enclosing the small frontier town of Tawella. And there, saddling his mules in front of a warehouse just off the bazaar, I find an old highlander in a jacket, cummerbund, baggy trousers, dress shirt, and dress shoes who agrees to tell me about the smuggling.

The boxes his four grown sons are humping from the warehouse are 70-pound air conditioners, the man says. They’re wrapping them in gray and orange plastic sacks to keep out the rain and dust, then strapping them four at a time to the mules. Once the animals are loaded, his boys will lead them up a zigzag out of Tawella’s ravine. Avoiding border patrols and 40-year-old mines left over from the Iran-Iraq War, they will slip through terraces of walnuts and almonds, then copses of wild oaks and pistachios. Above that will come crevices and caves where Neolithic families once lived, now home to bears, eagles, wolves, and leopards. Above the tree line, the men will risk open ground—first thistly yellow-grass hillside, then shale, then scree. After several hours and 2,000 feet of climbing, they’ll reach a patch of bare earth beneath the snowy peaks that the map on their phones will identify as the point where Iraq meets Iran. This is the bargah, where Iraqi Kurds hand off their sacks to Iranian Kurds known as kolbars, after the Kurdish for “back” (kol) and “load” (bar). Evading their own patrols and mines, the kolbars will lug the loads five hours down their side of the mountain to the town of Nowsud. There they will stack them onto trucks, to be driven through the night to Tehran, arriving in time for the morning market.

The smuggling has its roots in the clumsiness of rulers who for hundreds of years have taken the thousand-mile Zagros range as the boundary between Arabia and Persia but ignored how Kurds live on both sides. Petty smuggling between cousins has existed here forever. But trade soared after 1991, when the U.S., the UK, and France created a no-fly zone to the west of the mountains to protect Iraqi Kurds from gas attacks by Saddam Hussein. The new area became Iraqi Kur­distan, an autonomous enclave of five million that today is stable, open for trade, and tolerant of alcohol and sexual freedom. That liberation contrasts with the restricted lives of 84 million Iranians to the east—­including eight million Iranian Kurds—who are cut off from the world by and Iran’s own prohibitive taxes and inhibited by strict laws against alcohol and sex. The chief effect of this juxtaposition, the old man says, has been to ensure that “the Iranians want everything” that the Iraqi Kurds have.

So it seems. Walking around Tawella, I find hundreds of houses built to the same unique design: comfortable villas with balconies and roof gardens on the first floor, overlooking cavernous warehouses at street level. Inside the stockrooms, I spy more air conditioners, plus towering stacks of washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, boxes of tea, cigarettes, pet food, beer, whisky, and lingerie—the secret shopping list of an entire nation. The old man says that on busy days the line of men and mules snaking up the hills can be a mile long. On the Iranian side, where discrimination against Kurds leaves them few alternatives to kolbar work, it can be several miles long.

And that’s just Tawella. Along the Zagros lie hundreds of villages and towns devoted to high-altitude smuggling. The estimates that around 300,000 smugglers per year are humping appliances and contraband over these 14,000-foot peaks, mostly for about $15 per load, or $20 to $25 for Iranian kolbars desperate enough to cross the border and make the entire journey themselves. The Iranian parliament puts the value of all that trafficking at $25 billion, roughly the same as Iraqi Kurdistan’s GDP, or the annual trade . Later, looking at satellite images of wide, dusty mountain paths, I realize that this is smuggling you can see from space.

The scale of the business ensures its terrible human cost. Iraq’s police largely tolerate it, apparently appreciative of the legal precision of Iraqi Kurds who, since most never set foot in Iran, are not technically breaking the law. It’s a different story in Iran. Last year its border guards shot dead 43 kolbars and injured 151, while arresting untold numbers. (Iran does not publish statistics on kolbar detentions, but the frequency with which kolbars report them suggests thousands each year.) Those figures were down from 55 and 142, respectively, in 2019, and 71 and 160 in 2018. The violence provides more evidence of Iran’s anti-Kurdish racism. It also has a lethal secondary effect: persuading kolbars trying to dodge patrols to set out in poor weather or on dangerous routes, leading to dozens more deaths and hundreds more injuries as they fall from steep paths or drown under loads or step on land mines or perish in snowstorms, such as the five young Kurdish Iranians this past January.

To Western ears, a town where old men dress up to go smuggling, in a mountain range called the Zagros, in an imaginary country called Kurdistan, which historians say doubles as an approximation for Eden, can all sound a little unreal. To place this phenomenon in more familiar context, then: several times more people die in the Zagros in a typical year than are killed on all 14 eight-­thousand-meter peaks in the Himalayas and Karakoram combined.

The difference between dying in the mountains for glory and dying there for twenty bucks a day should give any climber pause. Just as arresting: the realization that the on which the reputations of a K2, a Denali, or an Eiger are built are nothing next to a single season in the Zagros. Half the elevation of the Himalayas, all but unknown to the outside world, almost never summited, these are by far the deadliest mountains on earth.

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Even the most seasoned travelers consider certain destinations too difficult, dangerous, or remote to explore—but the reality can be different. We found three end points that fit the bill. Yes, you’ll have to spend a lot of time in transit and adapt on the ground. But we promise it will be worth the effort.

Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal, Siberia

Here’s how I got to this oblong island in Russia’s Lake Baikal: A 5.5-hour flight from Moscow to Irkutsk (canceled once, delayed twice). Then a bone-rattling seven-hour minivan ride to a rickety dock at Sakhyurta. Finally, a ferry crossing of the deepest lake in the world, which bottoms out at more than 5,300 feet. I disembarked on an island, slightly smaller in size than New York City, that was equal parts dense boreal forest and wide-open steppe. And that was the fast way. Many travel 3.5 days from Moscow on the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway.

Only 1,500 people, many of whom are indigenous Buryat, call Olkhon home year-round. Most seasons, including winter, when the lake freezes over and tourists from China and Russia come to see unique freezing patterns on the ice, you’ll likely go days without encountering anyone. You will, however, see wildlife, from freshwater Baikal seals to wild horses. There are no paved roads or hiking trails; to get anywhere, you’ll need to ask a local for help using basic Russian. Pack a tent, download an offline map, and set out from the town of Khuzhir for the two-day, 50-mile round-trip trek through larch woodlands and along empty beaches to Cape Khoboy, on the island’s northeastern tip. , with several guest rooms (from $200) as well as campsites (from $6.50), rents paddleboards for a fauna-filled tour of the lake. It’s run by the Yeremeev family, who will make you feel at home in a place that otherwise seems like anything but. —Sebastian Modak

Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan

People used to tell Douglas Layton, owner of the local company Explore Mesopotamia, that no traveler in their right mind would ever visit the place he raved about most—Iraq. His response? “But they’ll go to the other Iraq!” By that he meant Iraqi Kurdistan, the temperate, gorgeous, and supremely friendly region in the north that couldn’t be more different from what most probably imagine. Here, snowcapped peaks dive into rivers, green hillsides hide ancient ruins, and it’s nearly impossible to visit a bazaar and not get invited for tea.

Base yourself on the banks of the Great Zab River at the new (from $100), a 37-room boutique hotel about two hours north of the capital, Erbil. From there you can take guided day hikes into the Zagros Mountains and the Barzan nature area, the only preserve in the country; explore Bestoon Cave, to the south, which was once used by Neanderthals; and tube down the Zab. The area is much safer than Mosul, 50 miles to the west, but be prepared to pass through some heavily armed checkpoints, and you’ll want to avoid border towns. can help you organize trips that include hotels, food, transfers, and a guide (from $250 per day). —Tim Neville

Kubu Island, Makgadikgadi, Botswana

The first time you see it, you’ll probably mistake Kubu Island for a mirage. After driving 370 miles north from the capital of Gaborone, or 240 miles south from the Okavango Delta, you’ll hit a seemingly never-ending expanse of salt pans, and then, soon after, a lone ­granite outcropping that’s about 30 feet high and covered with Dalí-style baobab trees. The thrill—and the challenge—of this corner of Botswana’s Sua Pan is its desolation. Yet there’s a lot to do: hiking the fossil-strewn surroundings, off-roading across the pans, and stargazing without a single light to wash out the view.

To get there in the rainy season, from November to March, you’ll need a four-wheel-drive vehicle with off-road navigation. Pack everything—food, water, gas, and camping equipment—and book a campsite under a baobab (from $14) through the , a group comprising members of the nearby Mmatshumo settlement who act as custodians of Kubu and make for expert hiking guides. —S.M.

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When Will “Akuna” Robinson reached the northern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail in Glacier National Park on Sunday, September 15, he wasn’t thinking about race and gender or PTSD or ceiling-shattering accomplishments. Instead, his first thought was one of mild terror: What if he was dreaming the completion of this 3,100-mile trail? AlreadyÌęthere’d been high water to ford and nearly unprecedented snowpack. He’d strained his Achilles tendon, further complicating old injuries to his hips and knees. Maybe this moment, hugging the marker designating the U.S. border with Canada, was just a cruel figment of his imagination.

“I was literally thinking, God, what if this is a dream and I’m actually sleeping in a flooded tent back in Colorado?” he told me.

It took Robinson, who is 38 and a combat veteran, a few minutes to persuade himself he’d actually made it. And then, like any thru-hiker, his thoughts immediately turned to all the food he intended to eat: boiled shrimp, po’boys, sausage—real Louisiana fare.

When I caught up with him viaÌęcell phone, he was actually sitting in the parking lot of one of his favorite New Orleans take-out places, ready to make up for months of living on energy bars and instant noodles. He’d have gotten there sooner, he said, but he needed to finish doing some filming for a new documentary about his experience and a couple of TV appearances, along with an appointment at aÌęVeterans Administration hospital.

And while all of this was preventing him from digging into classic Big Easy cuisine, it’s also what makes the completion of his hike so extraordinary. Robinson is the first recorded African American male to complete hiking’s triple crown—the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide Scenic Trails (we say recorded because the , which maintains records of triple-crown recipients “on the honor system,” does not maintain records regarding race, gender, or other demographics). Fewer than 400 people have logged their completed triple crown on the ALDHA web page. Last year, became the first recorded African American woman to complete the sameÌęfeat.

“It’s pretty wild that it took until 2019 for this record to happen,” Robinson says. “But when you get out on the trail, you kind of understand why.”

Growing up in coastal Louisiana, Robinson saw his fair share of racism and discrimination. When he began his first long-distance hike, in 2016, he was hyperaware that he was a minority on the trail. And he was also more than a little wary of the prejudice he might experience there.

“I didn’t know if I’d be accepted on the trail,” he says. “So I tended to isolate myself—I’d camp alone, I never shared rooms with anyone. I was definitely on guard.”

Still, he knew he had to be there.

After graduating fromÌęhigh school, he enlisted in the Army. In 2003, he was deployed to Iraq, where he was tasked with repairing the electronic systems on Apache helicopters. He spent hisÌędowntime thumbingÌęthrough boxes of books sent by well-meaning civilians. In oneÌęhe found a discarded guide to the Pacific Crest Trail. He’d never heard of the PCT, but thumbing through that guidebook became his escape from the ugliness of war.

During his deployment, Robinson developed PTSD. He returned home physically wounded as well: a shattered right wrist required six surgeries to partially reconstruct, mostly out of metal. He walks with knee braces and a constant limp on account of a hip injury. And throughout all the surgeries and rehabilitation for his injuries, Robinson’s PTSD became worse. It was further complicated by intensifying anxiety and depression.

“I came back broken. I didn’t think I had a future at that point,” he says in aÌęshort biopic documentary produced by Merrell, which sponsors Robinson.

Therapy wasn’t working, he says. Neither were medications prescribed for the mental trauma. Over the next decade, he began to isolate himself more and more, sometimes staying in his room for days on end. He says he self-medicated with alcohol and painkillers.

“Nothing made sense anymore,” says Robinson. “If I didn’t do something drastic, it wasn’t going to go much further.”

Then, one night in 2016, he was channel surfing on his TV and stumbled upon a rebroadcast ofÌęWild, the film based on Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir. There was Reese Witherspoon, shouldering an oversizeÌębackpack as she struggled down the trail. And as she passed a mile marker, Robinson had one thought,ÌęI bet she’s on the PCT. He grabbed his phone and Googled the movie and the book. And sure enough: here was the trail that had kept him occupied in Iraq, now in living color in his bedroom.

“I had tried so many things by that point,” he says now. “I had gotten really good at hiding things, but I still hadn’t solved anything. And so I thought, Maybe this is what it’s going to take.”

Robinson admits he didn’t know a thing about hiking. He’d never heard of ,Ìęa World War II vet and the first person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, who famously said he did so to “walk the Army out of my system.” Nor did he know about initiatives likeÌę, a nonprofit organization thatÌęhelps other veteransÌęcomplete the big three scenic trails, along with other endurance opportunities (though he did contact the groupÌęlater for tips on gear that veterans could afford).

But he did know this was the only option left. And so he spent that entire night and much of the next morning ordering gear online and reading aboutÌęhow to be a thru-hiker.

In the spring of 2016, three weeks after seeing the movie, RobinsonÌęwas at the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. His only experience with having a pack on his back were ruck marches in basic training.

“I literally had no idea what I was doing,” he says.

But as soon as he was on trail, he fell in love with the experience. A fellow hiker quickly dubbed him “Akuna,” a nod to the Swahili phrase Hakuna Matata meaning “no worries,” popularized by a song in The Lion King.

Still, the physical demands of the trail caught up with him. Recurring knee problems sabotaged that first PCT attempt, in 2016, but he returned and completed the trailÌęthe trail the following year. Before he had even returned to Louisiana, he had committed to doing the other big two. Last yearÌęhe tackled the AT. About 40 miles in, he ran into Dawn “Undecided” Potts, another thru-hiker. They’d met for about five minutes on the PCT in 2017, and both remembered the encounter. They spent the rest of their hikes together and became romantic partners along the way (they also hiked the Continental Divide Trail together this year.)

Some 7,000 miles later, Robinson says he’s become accustomed to the stares and even eye rolls prompted by his being a hiker of color. And he thinks the lack of diversity still seen on our national trails can make being there a heavy burden for racial and ethnic minorities.

“I still encounter so many people who say they’ve never hiked with a person of color,” says Robinson. “And so I feel like I have to be an ambassador for my race. That can making hiking tough.ÌęIn addition to all the hiker logistics, I’m also always trying to make sure I’m on my very best behavior so that things are easier for the next African American on the trail. That can be super stressful.”

He says he’s heartened by some of the diversity initiatives launched by Merrell and other outdoor brands.

“If more people of color, more LGBTQ people, more veterans start seeing themselves represented outside, they’ll feel safer there. And then they’ll be more likely to get involved.”

Back in coastal Louisiana, Robinson has begun volunteering withÌę, a nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing the lack of outdoor opportunities forÌękids in New Orleans. He’s been sharing his own trail experience in schools there, hoping he can inspire the next generation of hikers of color.

“Growing up, a lot of kids don’t get that experience. We’re told that we don’t belong outside or that’s not what we do. And so we decide that it’s altogether off limits for us.”

More than ever, Robinson wants to change that. He says there’s no doubt in his mind that hiking saved his life.

As he and Potts neared the end of the CDT last week, he decided to forego the fast-food-restaurant paper crowns that a lot of people wear when they complete their third big thru-hike. He wanted one that really reflected who he was—a legit crown, with some real bling, and a fleur-de-lis to pay tribute to his beloved New Orleans. He found the perfect one online and had it shipped to a resupply stop just outside Glacier National Park.

Donning it near then northern terminus, Robinson says he knew that crown was made for him. “I put it on, and all I could think was, I’m somebody in this moment. I’m actually, truly somebody.”

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lives a life straight out of a novel. Traveling the world for both work and play, the 50-year-oldÌęhas navigated massive peaks, deep oceans, and frozen tundra. He’s rowed a boat from Canada to France, climbed and skied the highest mountain in Iraq, and pedaled a fat bike 745 miles across the Arctic. Even that name—Laval St. Germain. It’s almost too good to be true.Ìę

St. Germain’sÌęfull-timeÌęjob helpsÌęhim conduct these crazy feats andÌęexplore the far corners of the globe. “When I was 11 or 12, my dad noticed I read a lot of National Geographic,” St. Germain says. “He said if I really wanted to see those places in the magazines, I should become a pilot. SoÌęI did.” He started studying for his license when he was 15 and was flying floatplanes and forest-fire-control planes in northern Canada by the time he was 17, what he describes asÌę“the typical Canadian bush-pilot life.” At 21, he started working for Canadian North Airlines, a position that not only requires him to fly all over the worldÌębut also grants him several days off between on-duty stretches—time he uses to train and knock out extensive solo expeditions.

Aside from offering sage career advice, St. Germain’s father also sparked his longing for exploration, feeding him classic books like Tarzan, Moby Dick, and White Fang when he was a kid. In the past three decades, St. Germain has used this passion to buildÌęa thick adventure rĂ©sumĂ©. He was without supplemental oxygen, working his way up the Tibetan sideÌęin 2010. He’s scaledÌęthe highest peak on all seven continentsÌęand trekked across fields of land minesÌęto summit and ski Iraq’s tallest peak, 11,847-foot .

YetÌęthese thrilling adventures don’t always go as planned. First example: he lost three fingers on his right hand to frostbite while summiting Everest. However, St. Germain insists that having those fingers amputatedÌę“wasn’t a big deal. Once you freeze it, you can’t feel it.” InÌęNovember 2018, heÌęattempted to ski to the South Pole and climb Antarctica’s tallest peak, 16,050-footÌęMount Vinson. But his sled, warped due to a manufacturing flaw,Ìękept taking a hard right turn every time he tried to ski forward, forcing him to quit 13 days and 124 milesÌęinto the projected 745-mile cross-country trip. St. Germain ditched the faulty sled and went ahead and climbed Mount VinsonÌębut will have to go back to finish skiing across the continent before he can close the book on that expedition. He’s hoping to returnÌęnext year.Ìę

Despite overcoming these obstacles, St. Germain says the adventures he’s most proud of are the ones that didn’t make the papers. “I look back on some of the tough trips my wife, Janet, and I took with our kids before they were even teensÌęand am amazed we pulled them off,” St. Germain says. “A multi-day bike tour across the Arctic above tree line with grizzly bears and black flies,Ìętaking them to Namibia to climb in the desert, or to Guyana to explore one of the last-frontier rainforests in the world. Showing our kids they can do tough stuff in the outdoors, that’s what I’m most proud of.”

St. Germain and his wife put a lot of energy into instilling a sense of adventure in their children, just as his own father did for him. Tragically, the couple lost their oldest child, Richard, to a canoeing accident on the Makenzie River in Canada five years ago. He was just 21 and beginning his own careerÌęas a bush pilot. “The outdoors has given us a lot as a family, but it’s taken a lot away, too,” St. Germain says. “It’s the toughest thing we’ve ever been through, and it’s still tough. But it reinforced my desperate struggle to cram a lot into my life. I use the outdoors as a therapy. Struggling out there, it’s cathartic.” Since that devastating event, St. Germain has used his expeditions as a way to help others. He delivered a check for $5,000 to the search and rescue team on the Mackenzie River during his long-distanceÌęArctic fat-bike ride last spring. His row across the Atlantic raised more than $60,000 for the .

In order to stay in shape for these intense feats, St. Germain says he rarely indulges in a rest day. “Basically, I’m always training,” he says. “It’s my lifestyle more than anything.” He hasÌęnever hiredÌęa coach, and while he does schedule in up to three days of weight training a week, he refuses to do cardio indoors. InsteadÌęhe rides his bike nine milesÌęto work each way, which he calls “free training,” and plans out epic comboÌędays, where he peddles to the Rockies, stashes his bike, summits a mountain, and rides home. In the winter, heÌędoes something similar with a fat bike and telemark skis.

St. Germain also has a circuit in his hometown of Calgary that involves biking between five different sets of outdoorÌęstairs and running five reps on each. “I love training on stairs, because it’s low impact and you get a lot of bang for your buck,” he says, adding that his greatest stair workout happened in China when he was picking up a plane for his airline. “I ran 7,000 steps cut into the side of Mount Tai,” he says. “It was like heaven.”

Currently, St. Germain is planning a 186-mileÌęgravel ride from Calgary to Fernie, a city deep within British Columbia’s mountains. He also has a bigger expedition on the horizon that he’s reluctant to talk about because it’s in a geopolitical hot zone and the logistics aren’t set in stone. It’sÌęlikely bound to be difficult and dangerous, something that would fit into the pages of the classic literature he devoured as a child. “I love sticking my neck out and embracing discomfort,”ÌęSt. Germain says.Ìę“The whole world is designed to avoid discomfort right now, but anything that’s worth doing will be uncomfortable and challenging.”

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The months apart were not kind.

When we finally track down our motorcycle on the outskirts of Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, the engine is dead and all three tires are flat. The sidecar has become a trash can, strewed with empty beer bottles, newspapers, and a splash of motor oil. “Sorry, old girl,” sighs Carmen Gentile, my traveling companion and the bike’s owner. He slumps in the saddle for a while, head bowed, a little heartbroken. “I’m sad, dude,” he says. “This bike deserves so much better.”

In the summer of 2017, while reporting on a campaign by Iraqi forces to purge the Islamic State from the city of Mosul, Carmen had found the bike—a Russian-made Ural—buried under the rubble of a mortar strike, its gas tank crushed, its fenders shot through with bullet holes. An incurable moto enthusiast, he launched a salvage mission that involved jury-rigging parts and schmoozing his way through countless checkpoints on the 50-mile drive east to Erbil. The bike was then left with a friend of a friend, who apparently didn’t share Carmen’s affections.

Nearly a year later, with the jihadists on the run, we’re back to explore Iraqi Kurdistan’s potential as the Middle East’s next great adventure destination. Our plan is to dust off the Ural and ride with photographer Balazs Gardi, who’ll rent a car, traveling from the sunbaked plains up to the mountains that flare along the Iranian border—an alpine wilderness that’s home to virgin peaks, raging whitewater, and the region’s first national park. It’s not far from where a group of American hikers were taken prisoner nine years ago by Iranian border guards, an incident that muted the media hype that Kurdistan was the next big thing. But I’m in contact with a guide who knows the terrain well, and several high-octane travel dispatches I’ve seen online (“Taking on Kurdistan’s Wildest Mountain River,” “Iraqi Kurdistan: Intrepid Skiers Break New Ground”) suggest that a serious outdoor scene is emerging in the high country. We want to check it out.

The Ural won’t get us there, obviously, so we head to a bustling moto market in a different part of town. Rows of cheap Iranian 125cc four-speeds fail to rouse our spirits, but we have no choice. We settle on a pair of Honda knockoffs, slap on some stickers of Che Guevara for good luck, and ride down to the old city center to buy last-minute provisions.

I’ve been here before. On my first visit to Kurdistan, in 2007, the Iraq War was raging full tilt. It was the deadliest year yet for U.S. troops. Sections of Baghdad and the southern cities were no-go zones, terrorized by suicide car bombs and sectarian death squads. In contrast, Erbil, a city of around one million, was a bastion of calm guarded by the fearsome Peshmerga (“those who face death”), the Kurds’ national fighting force.

Having a U.S. passport in Kurdistan was a bonus. Soon after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. enforced a no-fly zone over the region that helped stop Saddam Hussein’s brutal counteroffensive against the Kurdish rebellion, and Kurds have never forgotten that. I was invited to a wedding, ate free meals, and celebrated the Muslim New Year with friends and fireworks beneath the towering walls of the ancient citadel of Erbil, one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the world. It’s hard to believe that two wars have happened since my last visit.

Carmen and I park next to a glitzy new plaza that fronts the citadel and hike up to the viewing platform. The skyline bristles with shopping malls, cranes, and half-built condominium complexes thrown up by developers from Turkey and Dubai. Swarms of package tourists from Baghdad shamelessly snap selfies around us, but I don’t see any Westerners.

Kurdish authorities have tried hard to promote Kurdistan as “the other Iraq,” but to most foreigners it’s still a land synonymous with the bloodshed and beheadings that have stigmatized the rest of the country. In September 2017, flush from victory in their three-year battle against Islamic State militants, Kurdish leaders made matters worse by holding an independence referendum, in defiance of Iraq’s central government. It backfired catastrophically. Iraqi forces retaliated by seizing swaths of oil-rich Kurdish lands and banning international flights to the region’s airports. We arrived just weeks after the embargo was lifted.

Following a stroll through another market for supplies, we return to our bikes. This time mine won’t fire up. I stomp the kick-starter again and again, issuing a flurry of f-bombs and drawing a small crowd.

“Engine too much gas,” a mustached man says when I stop to catch my breath.

I grunt out a yes. Inevitably, he asks me where I’m from.

“Ah, Amreekah friend,” he says when I tell him. “Rambo number one! Bush good also.”

Another man squats down to my right and starts stripping the plastic off my ignition cable with his teeth. He pulls out a knife to finish the job, twists the bare copper threads into a braid, and taps the spark plug. On his cue, I give the bike a sharp kick, and it starts with a whimper, then revs to life. The group erupts into trilling, high-pitched ululations that send us off.

Kurdish hospitality is as robust as ever, but the early signals are clear. Nothing will come easy on this trip.

In the morning, we ride northeast up Hamilton Road, an old British-built highway that snakes some 110 miles from Erbil to the Iranian frontier. Near the city limits, a series of Peshmerga checkpoints give way to rolling hills dotted with farmhouses and stone fortresses dating back to the tenth century. Balazs is following us in a chase car, but it’s not long before we’re chasing him.

Just as the landscape opens up, my bike starts to flag. I pin the throttle, to no effect. A cling-clang of loose metal rattles around in my engine. “Man, this is not good!” I shout to Carmen, who’s having gear problems of his own. The predicament is made worse by Kurdish motorists who seem hell-bent on running us off the road. We sputter on, past a billboard honoring the “immaculate precious bodies” of all the Peshmerga martyrs who’ve fought and died to defend this terrain.

Kurdish history is a catalog of tragedy. Blessed with natural beauty and cursed by location, the ancestral heartland straddles a tangle of ethnic, religious, and geopolitical fault lines where conflict has ebbed and flowed for centuries. During the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, when Allied powers divvied up the region, plans to create an independent Kurdish state never came to fruition. Today some 30 million stateless Kurds are spread across four countries—Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. In Iraq, decades of ruthless government persecution have hardened the Kurds’ drive to carve out a homeland of their own.

Two hours, many stops, and maybe 35 miles up the road, we pause to rest at the edge of a sprawling farm valley outside the town of Shaqlawa. A pair of aging freedom fighters in traditional Kurdish costume—baggy pantaloons, vest, cummerbund, head wrap—a°ù±đ thumbing prayer beads in the dusky light. They say as-salaamu alaikum (peace be upon you) and touch their hearts. I introduce myself and say what a beautiful place it is.

“You should have been here in ’74,” says Qasim Abdullah, the taller one, warming up to tell a story. “Saddam’s fighters were up there and we were over there, firing artillery back and forth.” He points across the valley to where he was. “At night we sometimes had to cross minefields between us. Too many men died here.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam tried to Arabize Iraq’s estimated six million Kurds. More than 4,000 Kurdish villages were razed and entire communities forcibly relocated. When Iraqi Kurdish fighters sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, Saddam launched a scorched-earth campaign of bombing and chemical attacks that claimed at least 50,000 lives. Ahmad Mustafa, the shorter, stouter man, says that 20 of his neighbors were rounded up and executed. An additional 120 were taken from the next village. “No one knows what happened to them,” he says.

Like most able-bodied Kurdish men, Qasim and Ahmad fought with the guerrillas for several years. But with families to look after, they eventually fled to Iran, part of the more than one million Kurds who left the country in waves that lasted into the early 1990s. A 1991 uprising ultimately evicted Iraqi forces from the north and led to de facto self-rule, thanks largely to the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone that targeted Iraqi jets flying over Kurdish airspace, but not before a bloody crackdown by Saddam. Rival Kurdish factions then turned against each other in a civil war that ended in 1998, splitting the government in two. The groups did not merge again until after Saddam’s ouster and the drafting of the 2005 constitution.

As Iraq plunged into chaos, Kurdistan became the paradigm of peace and prosperity that American leaders had envisioned for the entire country. Qasim and Ahmad came home to try and realize the dream of a free and independent state. But that dream is fading. Clashes with the Iraqi army following the hasty independence referendum saw the vaunted Peshmerga concede to Iraq a reported 40 percent of the disputed territory they had controlled since the 2014 fight against the Islamic State. This area includes the city of Kirkuk, whose oil fields drive the Kurdish economy and would be the lifeblood of a state. Turkey is launching cross-­border attacks against Kurdish rebels and talking about a ground invasion, while Iran is targeting Iranian Kurdish opposition bases inside Kurdistan. “We’ve never been comfortable in our lives,” says Qasim. “This peace won’t last.”

Back on the highway, the knocking in my engine seems to be amplified by the darkness, and the bike stalls out on a steep, potholed descent. My rear wheel slides, and I almost crash before skidding to a stop. Balazs is somewhere up ahead in the car, so I wait for Carmen. A half hour passes before I walk back down the road and find him talking with a Peshmerga officer at a checkpoint. Turns out his front tire went flat and I’d left him behind. “Nearly lost it,” he says. “What happened to you?” He bursts into lunatic laughter when I tell him I’ve stalled.

The motorcycle trip is becoming a fiasco. Waiting for a flatbed trailer to haul our broken bikes back to Erbil, Carmen decides to fold and go home to Croatia early. He has just published a war memoir about getting shot in the face with a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan, and he needs to prepare for a book tour in the U.S. Balazs and I will head deeper into the backcountry in pursuit of wild mountains and rivers. But first we need to find our guide.

“Man, we're gonna do some crazy shit together,” Nabil Musa told me the first time we connected on the phone. Nabil was recommended by an American friend who used to live in Kurdistan, with the caveat that he’s an environmentalist, not a backcountry guide. I took his gonzo talk as just that: talk.

As Iraq’s lone representative for Waterkeeper Alliance, a global advocacy group based in New York City, Nabil is tasked with protecting waterways that flow through Kurdistan. This involves a mix of protest stunts and derring-do: multi-day swims across freshwater lakes that are being poisoned by industrial pollution, kayak trips to highlight the threat of multiplying Turkish dams, and so forth. More recently, an antidumping campaign had him doing headstands by the oil pools outside Sulaymaniyah, his birthplace and Kurdistan’s second-largest city. Balazs and I detour to meet him there.

Nabil is 41 but appears a decade older, with the road-worn look of a chain-smoker who’s spent his life on the move. Wearing sandals, shorts, and a tank top that reveals a strong build, he cooks us dinner at his apartment and riffs rapid-fire about his plans to raft and trek in the mountains around Choman, a gateway town near the Iran-Iraq border. He’s been stuck in Sulaymaniyah for more than a month, and his restlessness verges on manic. “I just need to get out,” he says in a faint British accent picked up abroad. “I go mad if I don’t get outside enough.”

In the morning, we load his pickup from a garage full of kayaking and rafting gear, and soon we’re back on the road, climbing past sawtooth ridges and burned limestone canyons, with “Guantanamera” blasting out of his speakers. In a cloud of smoke, Nabil recalls how, back in the mid-1990s, during the civil war, the two main Kurdish political factions—the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), led by Masoud Barzani, and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)—exchanged mortar and artillery fire on the strategic heights above us. Thousands died in the fighting, and Kurdish hopes for self-determination nearly perished with them.

Like most Kurds of his generation, Nabil has seen violence. As a teenager during the 1991 uprising against Saddam, he witnessed the death of his two best friends during a battle for the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s Sulaymaniyah headquarters, a former torture chamber that’s now a bullet-pocked museum. In 1996, during the civil war, he fled overland to Turkey, then to Europe. He spent several years busking on the streets and joined a traveling theater group in the UK before returning home permanently in 2011 to take the Waterkeeper job.

In the time Nabil had been away, a population boom and rapid development had taken a toll. Trash and toxic runoff choked the river he grew up fishing. Nabil had dreamed of this river while in exile, and he was angry that no one seemed to care. “Everyone here is obsessed with security and making money,” he says. “The environment didn’t have many defenders.” A friend told him about the Waterkeeper gig, and he decided to become “a voice for the rivers.” He has tattoos of the organization’s logo, a sturgeon mosaic, on his calf and shoulder.

About 20 miles past the resort town of Rawanduz, Nabil pulls over near a bridge spanning the Azadi River, one of Kurdistan’s fastest. Or so he says, and I’m taking his word for it. My online searches yield no details on the waterway, and there are no legitimate outfitters in the area for us to consult. Nabil figures that the stretch of rapids we’re sizing up are Class IV-plus, though he admits he can’t be sure. To his knowledge, no one has ever run them. He wants to be the first.

A stocky fire-brigade rescue swimmer named Khalil Mahmoud walks over and asks what we’re up to. When we tell him, he says, “You are not right in the head. It’s full of trash, and there are hidden currents—this is a death river.” Every year, 15 to 20 people drown, he says, adding, “Four days ago I pulled out another man.” A government placard behind him states the obvious: SWIMMING HERE IS DANGEROUS.

Nabil starts pacing back and forth, taking long pulls on his cigarette. “Fuck it,” he finally says. “Let’s do this.”

I like Nabil's can-do attitude, but our combined experience running hardcore rapids is limited. On the drive up, he told us about the last time he paddled a portion of the Azadi, in 2014, as part of an anti-dam campaign. One of the men in his group had his hand cut open by underwater debris. My whitewater experience includes a few Class IV rafting trips in the Himalayas, all with internationally recognized outfitters.

“You’re free to do whatever you want—I just have to warn you,” Khalil says. But he’s also a little excited by the turn of events and offers to stand at the water’s edge to save us if we flip. He points to the opposite bank, where a nasty concrete shelf juts out beyond the crux of the whitewater, bristling with shafts of rebar. “If you make it through, you must avoid that!” he says.

Balazs hangs back with Khalil to photograph our passage through the crux. Nabil and I drive a few miles upriver, inflate a big raft, and don helmets and vests. “Just follow my lead,” he says, “and when I say paddle, give it everything you got.” We push off, me in the front, him driving at the rear, easy drifting. The cliff to our left soars more than 300 feet and, at intervals, hangs over the river like a roof, lined with tumbledown vines that glisten from the last rainfall. On a day like today, it’s hard to believe that there’s no one else out here.

Suddenly, Nabil shouts “Hard right!” We’re too late. An eddy catches the edge of the boat and we whipsaw around, bouncing backward off the rocks. I turn to look at Nabil, alarmed.

“OK, that was my bad,” he says. “I fucked that one up.”

We shake it off and keep drifting. The next rapids are slippery smooth. Rounding a wide bend, the flow starts to surge, the roar of the water becomes more deafening. I thought I had a good read on the rapid from above, but at this level, the line through the boulders is invisible.“Which way?” I shout back. “Which way? Nabil?”

The current has a grip on us, and all I hear is “±ÊČč»ć»ć±ô±đ!” In an instant, we smash straight into a rock and spin sideways into an adjoining chute of whitewater that almost throws me from the raft.

As we slide deeper into the churn, I see Khalil, poised in a wrestler’s crouch, ready to jump in to save us. Balazs is right behind him, tracking us with his lens. At that moment we’re swept left and shot into the bank of broken concrete. The side of the raft shrieks against the metal spikes. Somehow it doesn’t burst. We spend the last leg of the trip gliding in silence, soaked and shaken.

“If this raft were Chinese, we’d be dead,” Nabil says as we step onto the riverbank. My jaws are clenched.

With no footpath to speak of, Khalil and another man help us scrape the raft up the canyon face. Down the road, a flatbed truck is backing up to the river’s edge to dump a load of rubble. “Look at this bastard,” says Nabil. He jogs over and turns on his camera to shame the driver. The driver stares back at him, confused. Tons of rocks go crashing down the bank, adding new complications to the rapid we just passed through.

Night is fallingÌęwhen we pull into Choman. Erbil, around 100 miles west of here, seems a world away. The main street is empty and quiet, except for the patter of yellow and green political banners that flap in a crisp breeze. Up ahead, Mount Halgurd—at 11,831 feet, the highest peak situated entirely inside Iraq—is socked in by clouds.

During the drive, I asked Nabil if it would be possible for us to climb Halgurd. Ever the optimist, he said we’d have to speak to his friend Bakhtyar Bahjat, acting director of Halgurd-Sakran, the first national park in Iraqi Kurdistan. I’d been told that the roughly 460-square-mile park—set high in the border triangle of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey—contains unclimbed peaks and dense forests prowled by bears, wolves, and Persian leopards. It’s also home to armed guerrillas whose presence both protects an extraordinary natural bounty and keeps part of the park off-limits.

The next morning, Bakhtyar meets us at the visitor center. He’s a hale man with a buzz cut and the earnest gusto of a schoolteacher (his day job). His crisp suit and upbeat attitude are at odds with the dereliction around us. The park’s carved entrance sign has been pulled from the ground and leans sideways against a wall. The courtyard fountain is dry, and the faux-log-cabin-style offices—crammed with topographical maps, pastoral nature paintings, and creepy taxidermy—a°ù±đ covered by a sheet of dust, remnants of a grand dream now forsaken. “Unfortunately, we are facing some challenges at the moment,” Bakhtyar says.

Background information on the park is scarce, but some articles about it say that the vision for a national park came to Choman’s former mayor Abdulwahid Gwani after a 2010 trip to Austria. Gwani mobilized a team of international experts to draw up boundaries and a multiyear growth plan to transform one of the most land-mine-

ridden areas in the world into a nature reserve. Backed by a million-dollar grant from the Kurdish government, he expanded the park to include Mount Halgurd and other peaks, brought in teams of designers, and hired dozens of rangers, mostly Peshmerga veterans, to crack down on illicit hunting and tree felling. With time, Bakhtyar says, many locals began to “see tourism as a future.”

And then came the Islamic State.

In June 2014, the jihadists stormed across the Nineveh Plains and eventually made it to within 20 miles of Erbil. Every one of the park’s rangers dashed to the front lines. Islamic State bombs and booby traps stymied their counteroffensive, and demining teams working around the park were called in to help. Globally, oil prices crashed, slashing the salaries of park employees. Bakhtyar went back to working full-time as a teacher. His codirector left for a job in Erbil. Poaching resumed, and locals hacked trees to replace winter fuel they could no longer afford. Worse, in mid-2015, a three-decade-old conflict reignited between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), leftist militants whose territory overlaps with the park, bringing regular air strikes and artillery barrages that reportedly have killed civilians. A final blow came last year when Gwani died.

“Right now, Halgurd-Sakran is just a name on paper,” says Bakhtyar.

With park visits down about 80 percent in 2018 compared with the year before, Bakhtyar is in an accommodating mood. No matter that we want to climb Iraq’s tallest mountain on a day’s notice and don’t have any gear. We stop by the local mountaineering club and enter a dank basement, where Bakhtyar starts digging through milk crates. In short order, I’m equipped with a yard sale’s worth of secondhand climbing gear from Eastern Europe: a neon snowsuit, trekking poles, gloves, and bent crampons. Balazs, who stands a brooding six foot five, is issued black pleather gaiters that rise to his knees and might have seen previous action in an S&M club.

Up on the mountain the next day, a drift of leaden clouds obscure the summit, dimming our chances of reaching it. But I’m more concerned about what’s underfoot. Mount Halgurd’s flanks are littered with land mines and unexploded munitions from conflicts that date back four decades. Kurdish fighters based in these mountains have alternately faced off against Iranian attackers, Iraqi jets armed with Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons, Turkish commandos, and each other during civil war.

Scanning the wind-raked slope we’re crossing, I see bits of shrapnel, mortar shells blasted into rusty flower shapes, Soviet anti­personnel mines, and the melted husks of American-made “toe poppers.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve been up here too many times,” Bakhtyar says, reading our minds. He assures us that the route we’re on has been cleared by experts, though we don’t see any sign of a trail and demining efforts around here seem to be scattershot at best.

Earlier that morning, on the drive up the Iraqi-army-built supply road, we passed a government warning sign about land mines that had been bulldozed by locals. Bakhtyar explained that land appropriation is on the rise, but there’s nothing he can do since the park has no rangers left to enforce the rules. Farther along, red metal posts topped with white skull-and-bones symbols line the road. These indicate mines still to be removed. But it appears that rockslides have shifted the positions of some of the posts.

Less than 30 minutes into our trek, we see other posts higher up the slope, which we’re traversing single file. Several feet to my right, I spot a beige plastic disc in the gravel.

“Is that what I think it is?”

Bakhtyar is in front listening to music on his phone. He turns and squints at the mine, a bit confused.

“Hmm
 Someone must have thrown it,” he says.

“So this is not a minefield, but there are mines everywhere,” Balazs deadpans.

Bakhtyar is already walking again, lost in thought or pretending not to hear us. Nabil looks unsure.

Balazs and I exchange a glance. Both of us spent many years covering the war in Afghanistan, often hitched to U.S. combat units in the badlands of Helmand province, a Taliban hellscape. Firefights in 100-degree heat were bad, but nothing was worse than the improvised explosive devices that routinely took lives and limbs. After starting a family, Balazs had sworn off war zones. I’d done the same, but it took a couple of years before I could stroll through a park without reflexively appraising the ground.

Now I’m trying to walk in Bakhtyar’s footsteps, to minimize contact with uncertain terrain. My legs feel sluggish, the trekking poles an added liability.

I tell myself that I’m being melodramatic. But a familiar low-grade dread is setting in. As we pick our way through the final stretch of rocky dirt, heading for the snow line, Kurdistan is starting to feel a lot like Iraq.

It's well past noon when we reach the shoulder; clouds sheath the entire peak, which is under a fresh layer of snow. We pull out our crampons and lace up. Bakhtyar reckons that it will take at least another four hours to reach the summit, maybe more. Given our late start, we were kidding ourselves that we could reach the top and get down in a day.

I hand out energy bars, and Nabil shares a story about the last time he tried to climb Halgurd. A macho American guy in his group insisted that he knew a better route up the south side. Soon the climbers found themselves wandering lost through waist-deep snow, with mine posts sticking up now and then. After telling us this, Nabil says his foot hurts, so he’s going to head back to the truck, taking a roundabout route to avoid encounters with unexploded ordnance. “You guys enjoy,” he says.

Balazs and I follow Bakhtyar up a steep bowl toward the base of the rock face. The going is slow. For the next hour we crunch and stumble, the warped crampons sliding off my feet. We eventually stop at the edge of a couloir scattered with ice fragments. The passage is technical; thick snowfall dims visibility. Go any farther and we’re pushing our luck for no good reason. It’s time to turn back.

“We have a saying,” says Bakhtyar, trying to lighten the mood. “Touching the top is not like touching the stone of Kaaba,” a reference to a sacred shrine in Mecca. I catch my breath. Balazs tightens his gaiters while Bakhtyar takes selfies. Then we turn and start down.

The going is smooth until the ice runs out and we’re on rock and scree. Bakhtyar decides we’ll follow a different route down, one that leads us through an alley of loose, rain-slicked rock. Clumsy steps send a jackrabbit scrambling up the opposite side of the ravine, giving me a jolt. To keep my mind occupied, I take a cue from Bakhtyar and look for wild mushrooms, which are plentiful this time of year.

And then I spot another mine. I warn Balazs to give it a wide berth. We shuffle down the scree with active feet, nervous and hyperalert, studying the ground obsessively. Bakhtyar is way ahead of us, singing along to folk songs about PKK martyrs. He has supreme confidence in his memory—or a cool fatalism I don’t share.

Nabil is sucking on a cigarette when we reach the truck. Butts dot the ground. Apparently he strayed from the “safe route” he intended to follow, an error he realized only when he looked up and saw skull-and-bones markers staring back at him. “Man, I nearly shit myself,” he says. He swipes his phone to show us the highlights, including an unexploded 82-millimeter mortar round.

The sun dips behind us on our drive back to Choman, casting shadows on Mount Sakran, across the valley. Beyond it lies the Iranian frontier, where in 2009 three young American hikers were arrested by border guards and imprisoned—one for 14 months, the others for more than two years. This foreboding stretch of land is seeded with land mines and the bones of countless Iranian troops who parachuted into paradise during the war. To this day, snipers stationed at the high army posts take potshots at Kurdish shepherds who wander too close. At night their floodlights glare down like menacing eyes.

Near the bottom of the mountain, we pass a scruffy Western backpacker on foot. Nabil throws the truck in reverse and we greet him. He says his name is Kaspars, that he’s from Latvia, and that he plans to climb Halgurd at dawn. “Some locals are going to meet me at the top,” he says. “They told me it’s easy. Just follow the path.”

“Who told you that?” Bakhtyar says, scowling.

The kid can’t remember their names but assures us: “They are nice guys.”

“You know, there are mine fields up there,” I say. “No joke—we just walked out of one.” Everyone chimes in, and the Latvian seems to reconsider. We wish him luck. For the rest of the drive, Bakhtyar grumbles about who Kaspars might have talked to, the dangerous ignorance of some people in Choman, and the general lack of order since the park project fell apart.

By definition, war is the enemy of development and tourism. Sometimes, though, it’s nature’s friend. According to Bakhtyar, the only part of Halgurd-Sakran National Park where poachers and tree cutters don’t operate with impunity is the roughly 20 percent under the control of the PKK, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. “They are hardcore fighters, but they also care a lot about nature,” he says. “It’s at the heart of their philosophy.”

I want to meet these conservationist rebels. Their stronghold is just a short drive from Choman, one valley over, in the Qan­dil Mountains. Trouble is, since fighting resumed with Turkey three years ago, air strikes and shelling attacks there have escalated. And with the presidential elections coming up in Turkey, the military has been ratcheting up bombardments to please its Islamist nationalist base.

My first e-mail query to the PKK came back negative. Near the end of our stay in Choman, I follow up. We don’t need a formal reception, I write—we just want to make a quick stop at a martyrs’ museum and cemetery that Nabil visited several years earlier, to take pictures and learn more about how the PKK is protecting its homeland from pollution, poaching, and overdevelopment. This time the guerrillas’ contact, nom de guerre Zagros, agrees.

“You can visit the Museum,” he writes. “You can also visit the site of the Zargali massacre. As I told you, the guerrillas cannot accompany you. Better not to stay in the area for too long. Because both of the sites have been bombarded before.”

Twenty minutes south of Choman, we reach the turn to the Qandil Mountains. The sign at the junction gives no indication of where we are, as though the valley road does not exist. Nabil gets out at the KDP checkpoint to register our names with local authorities, who tell us we’re on our own. We wrap around a ridge and a lush green vista unfurls in front of us. A couple of miles on, two PKK guerrillas emerge from the trees in traditional Kurdish shawls, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, their vests sagging with the weight of hand grenades. They wave us on.

We’re waiting by a destroyed hillside portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the group’s founder, when Zagros pulls up and extends a hand. “You are most welcome in Qandil,” he says. I thank him and ask about the drones from Turkey. “They are not here at the moment, but when they see guerrilla clothes, armed men, they call in jets, which arrive in less than 15 minutes. The past few months have been especially bad—they hit this road three days ago.” Zagros suggests we head toward the museum. “Also bombed,” he adds with an apologetic smile.

I’m eager to move. Balazs and I join Zag­ros in his truck, and it dawns on me that we’re going to be driving 30 miles on a road that is regularly targeted by air strikes. With Nabil trailing us, we’re in what amounts to a convoy. In his blunt, Hungarian manner, Balazs voices what I’m thinking: “There are no other cars on the road.” Farther along, the charred wreckage of a family vehicle destroyed by a Turkish strike offers a visual we would rather not see.

Zagros drives with the beatific expression of a man who has surrendered to his fate. Handsome, with a strong, dimpled chin and a brushy black mustache, he says he used to be a high school teacher in western Iran, living a comfortable middle-class life. But he was haunted by the persecution of his people. When Ocalan was captured during a joint U.S.-Turkish operation in Kenya in 1999 and placed in solitary confinement in Turkey, Zagros came to view him as something like a Kurdish Nelson Mandela.

“Through him, I felt the isolation of the Kurds, that the Kurds have no friends in the world,” he says. He left Iran for the mountains, later joined by five students—two of whom have since been killed. “My concern is not for myself but for my people,” Zagros says. “PKK is not only a party, it’s a new way of life, a new world vision.”

He ticks off the movement’s basic goals: the right to self-determination, the liberation of women, and the protection of the environment. He says that respect for the land and ethnic diversity were destroyed by modern nation-states like Turkey, the militants’ archnemesis, which has tried to erase the identity of its 15 million Kurds, in part by repressing the Kurdish language. “If real democracy is achieved in these countries, the Kurdish question will be resolved,” he says. “Until then we will fight, as long as it takes.”

Women make up more than 45 percent of the PKK’s ranks, from foot soldiers to commanders. Cruising along, we pass giant billboards that show photographs of female guerrillas who were killed in battle against the Islamic State, draped in ammo belts and thick hair braids. Some are buried in the martyrs’ cemetery, where the rows of gravestones are lined with roses and grouped according to the battles they were in: Sinjar, Al Hasakah, Kobani. The museum that stood here at the time of Nabil’s last visit is now just a hole in the ground. An unexploded bomb rests in the adjacent crater.

Near the end of the valley, Zagros stops at a Kurdish nomad camp. We spread out on a tattered kilim in the shade of a tree, and a woman with facial tattoos brings us a pot of hot tea and sugar cubes. Her sons are out grazing their flocks on meadows that run up the valley’s ridges. Moving with the seasons, living off the land, they are the embodiment of an ideal Zagros is ready to die for. For now the air trills with birdsong, rent by the barks of fighting mastiffs. The mountains brim with life.

They also take it.

The explosion echoes across the valley late in the afternoon, when demining teams around Choman are no longer working. Bakhtyar, Nabil, Balazs, and I are on a ridge outside of town, photographing the mountains, and it’s close enough to startle us. Bakhtyar texts around and learns that a local man named Haidar Shwan accidentally set off a mine near the Grmandil Mountains, one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War. He was blown to pieces.

Under a full moon, we drive up to a cemetery overlooking town. A single streetlamp lights a backhoe digging Haidar’s grave, a reminder that nighttime burials are not uncommon. I meet the victim’s brother, who shows me a picture of Haidar: soldier, father of four, and the sixth member of his family killed by a land mine. He suspects Haidar was taking the mine apart for the gunpowder, which sells for $45 a pound on the black market. “It was one of his hobbies,” the brother says.

Packs of men file in from the darkness and gather around the grave, murmuring, until the crowd numbers more than 400. A few shed tears, but most remain stoic, partaking in a ritual of shared grief that has affected families in Choman as far back as they can remember. They’ve all been here before, and they will be here again.

The casket is lowered and spades are handed out. Young men take turns furiously shoveling dirt into the hole, as though Haidar’s safe passage to heaven depended on their speed. Five hours after he was killed, he’s underground. The imam offers a prayer, and everyone goes home.

Our last day in the mountains is May Day, and for Kurds that means picnics. Nabil, Balazs, and I take the valley road out of Choman toward the Iranian border, until the pavement ends. We park by a stream too fast to ford, and a group of friends from Erbil wave us over to their fire for chicken skewers and fermented goat’s milk. We eat our fill and talk about why the U.S., staunch ally of the Kurds since the Saddam era, didn’t back last year’s ill-fated independence bid, considering all the social and economic progress and stability that Iraqi Kurdistan has achieved compared with the rest of Iraq. I don’t have a good answer.

As we get up to leave, one man warns half-jokingly: “Don’t walk too close to Iran.” We hike across a moraine and crest a small ridge to find a potbellied man in pantaloons bent over, staring at the ground, an AK-47 strapped to his back. Kayvan Ezzat, a 37-year-old policeman, is mushroom hunting and invites us to tag along. “I’m fat, but I can climb the mountains all day,” he says with a toothy grin. “Walking out here will make all your troubles go away.” Though with wild animals around and hostile Iranian soldiers within firing range, he always brings the gun. “It’s like having 50 men with you,” he explains.

I ask how he knows where to step. “I know because I’ve been walking in these hills since I was a boy,” he says. “Here is OK, but there and there,” he adds, tracing lines with his hand that I can’t begin to see, “are not OK.”

The mind starts to play its games. My time in Kurdistan has shown me that even confident, in-the-know locals have their blind spots, and missteps can be fatal. I’ve also come to understand that the Kurds’ nature-loving ways are inseparable from the threats that seed and surround their homeland. Living at danger’s edge has a way of magnifying the essential. And in the moment, these haunted mountains sharpen my senses, quicken my pulse, and whisper vast possibilities to be explored. The old expression “Kurds have no friends but the mountains” has a new layer of meaning.

I take in the breeze and exhale. I’ll just follow the policeman’s tracks. And try to think of mushrooms.

Jason Motlagh () wrote about the Afghan sport of buzkashi in November 2017.

The post My Crazy Kurdistan Road Trip appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call theÌęÌętoll-free from anywhere in the U.S. at 1-800-273-8255. (To reach theÌę, press 1.)

Dan Sidles grew up in northern Iowa, where the cornfields stretch to the horizon without a blip of elevation and the roads run bullet straight for miles through towns like Pocahontas (“the Princess City”) and Mallard (“We’re friendly ducks”).

He detasseled corn in those fields in the summers and hauled beer kegs out there with friends. He wakeboarded on Five Island Lake and played football for the , where he was a standout on offense and defense. After a directionless year in community college, he left Iowa for the Marine Corps in 2001.

His older sister still lives in the area, and I stopped by her house to pick him up. “I have Daniel ready for you,” Amy Gilderhus said and handed me a small Folgers coffee container with strips of duct tape securing the plastic lid. The weight surprised me, heavier than I had imagined. An urn decorated with an American flag held the rest of his ashes; it sat on a living room shelf next to a picture of Sidles and a large frame that displayed a folded flag and his medals from the Marines.

Gilderhus wanted some of her brother’s ashes spread on the mountains he had climbed, the places where he seemed happiest. I had offered to help get them there, together with some of Sidles’s other friends and climbing partners.

We started a few weeks later, on a July day in 2016 in the , the giant slabs of tilted sandstone that rise up along the western edge of Boulder, Colorado. They were a favorite climbing destination for Sidles. He’d scrambled up them scores of times, usually alone, wearing his earbuds and a red bandana, and often shirtless, revealing a thickly muscled tapestry of tattoos.

I had climbed the Second Flatiron with Sidles a few years earlier. That was my first time on something so high without a rope. I begged off the last short stretch, which required a move back onto the face near the top—heady for a new climber. Sidles continued, breath quick and heart drumming. Afterward he wore a giddy smile, still riding the adrenaline spike. “I haven’t felt like this since the last time I was in a firefight,” he said.

Now I started up the slab again, with a half-dozen others who had shared climbs with Sidles. Just ahead of me, Erik Weihenmayer, the , danced his hands across the rock and settled on a hold. In 2010, he and several friends from that Everest expedition had guided 11 wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans up a 20,075-foot peak in Nepal. I wrote about the expedition for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, which is how I met Sidles. We spent hours talking on the trail. He was curious, self-aware, and determined to find some peace in his life. A natural storyteller, he punctuated the serious with humor and a laugh that a high school friend described as “a little girl getting licked to death by puppies.” Of the veterans—a mix of men and women with amputations, traumatic brain injuries, and post-traumatic stress—he seemed to be the person who gained the most from the trip. Sidles reveled in the physical challenge and believed that the outdoors might offer him a way forward.

In Nepal and afterward, Sidles spoke with remarkable clarity and insight about himself, his motivations and shortcomings. He knew that he’d been self-destructive and mired in self-pity after two tours in Iraq, and that many who cared for him had suffered because of it. He spoke not as someone lost in the darkness but as one emerging into the light. “I’m not going to give up, even on the roughest days. I don’t want to be a statistic, someone who resorts to doing drugs and drinking my face off to deal with my problems,” he told me. Perhaps other veterans would find some hope in his story. “Maybe they’re thinking about hurting themselves,” he said. “Before they run for the razors, maybe they’ll run to someone who can get them into something like this.”

He went on to climb in Ecuador, Alaska, and across the West. He summited in Russia and in Argentina. Gilderhus figured she might get a call one day that Sidles had been in a terrible accident in the mountains. An avalanche. A fall. But not that he’d killed himself.

I didn’t ask why. Few of us did. We knew Sidles had been struggling. But plenty of questions remained. He had participated in so many outdoor programs, most of them geared toward veterans and meant to help them reintegrate, find fellowship and purpose, and overcome some of war’s damages. For years he’d used the health care services offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Why hadn’t he seen more progress?

Many of those who knew him thought they’d failed him. Had they? Had the VA failed him? Had the country failed him, with its inability to understand what people like Sidles lived through?

Was this conclusion inevitable—dead at 34, a decade after he’d taken off the uniform? Or might things have turned out differently? And might his story tell us something about how to heal other combat veterans? To know that, I needed to understand what had happened to him.

But first we would return some of Sidles to one of his favorite places. After 1,000 feet of mellow climbing, we gathered near the top. Matt Murray opened a sleeve of Clif energy chews and passed them around, a toast of sorts. “Dan ate these like candy,” he said. Bald-headed, with a booming baritone voice, Murray flew A-10 attack jets in the first Gulf War. He had climbed with Sidles occasionally for the past several years, but mostly he had been his friend’s unwavering supporter. Sidles had twice lived with Murray and his wife for several months.

I pulled a small glass jar from my pack, containing a portion of Sidles’s remains that his sister had given me, and handed it to Murray. He tipped the jar and pale ash poured out. Some lifted on the breeze. Pebble-size pieces of bone and teeth tinkled down the rock face.

“There he is,” Murray said. He dragged his fingertips across the fine gray pile, then rubbed them together.

I have known several veterans who killed themselves, and many more who tried, some of whom I served with in Iraq in the Army infantry, and others I’ve met since. It sometimes seems I know more combat veterans who have considered suicide than haven’t.

kill themselves every day. While that tally presents the problem in scale, it obscures the fantastic complexity of each story. Cure a disease and millions might benefit from the same protocol. Not so for suicide, its causes and preventions so highly personalized. There can be myriad factors unrelated to war or military service: crumbling relationships, lost jobs, terminal illness, depression. And what pulls one veteran back from the edge might not help the veteran sitting next to them.

Despite the common portrayal of service members and veterans who die by suicide as young and battle scarred, most recent victims did not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. According to , 65 percent were aged 50 or older when they died—though they could still have been dealing with combat trauma, which sometimes doesn’t manifest for decades. Among the younger veterans, who die by suicide at a higher rate than older veterans, more than half didn’t go to war. And of those who deployed, many didn’t see heavy combat.

But Sidles did.

Assigned to weapons company, , he rolled into Iraq on March 20, 2003, in the turret of a Humvee. The .50-caliber heavy machine gun he manned fired half-inch-thick bullets that could tear a man in half and shear off limbs. Twenty-one years old and a couple of hours into his war, he shot up a car full of fighters, sending it off a bridge and into the water. He’d fire more than 1,000 rounds on that first day of the invasion. He and his friends fought north toward Baghdad, the invasion wound down, and they went home, where they drank themselves senseless and acted the part of victorious Marines, cocky and belligerent.

Sidles and two buddies all got the same tattoo: Unscarred. After surviving the war, they imagined themselves untouchable. Sidles got another postwar tattoo, inked across his chest: Laugh Now, Cry Later. “Looking back,” he told me, “it’s almost like I had the feeling that what we were doing over there was going to haunt me. The first time was so easy compared to what happened the second time. We used to laugh and be filled with pride when we killed. Then you get out and no one understands how you could do that. People you would die for think you’re a psycho, and that makes you cry.”

The following spring, Sidles was back in Iraq, this time outside Fallujah, a city boiling with tension. Days after he arrived, , killing them, dragging their charred bodies through the streets, then stringing them from a bridge over the Euphrates river. Sidles’s unit went out that night and cut down the corpses.

In response to the killings, the Marines encircled and then pushed into Fallujah to clear it of insurgents, engaging in house-to-house fighting. On the city’s outskirts one afternoon in April, Sidles and two other Marines climbed atop a tower with an M240G machine gun and several belts of ammunition to observe enemy movements. But on the flat roof, in the full light of day, they were observable, too, with barely a concrete lip for cover. As they settled in, gunfire erupted from buildings and streets to their front and on both sides. Bullets snapped overhead, inches away, and several rocket-propelled grenades whooshed past, just missing them. If they stayed on the roof, they would die. The only way down was a ladder exposed to all that gunfire. Sidles ordered the other Marines off the roof while he covered them. He’d soon shot through nearly all 400 rounds, and he didn’t see how he’d get down alive.

“I just accepted the fact that I was about to die. And when you do that, when you believe that, your life goes poof!—right in front of your face,” he told me one morning in Nepal as we sat on a stone wall outside a mountaintop monastery. “Every choice I had made in life led me to that rooftop, and it was all over. I don’t think you’re ever the same after that. A piece of you is taken.”

As bullets pinged around him, Sidles scurried down the ladder and made it to safety. He still had six months to go.

Most U.S. combat deaths and injuries in Iraq were a result of improvised explosive devices. Insurgents hung them from highway overpasses and stuffed them into dead dogs along the road. They hid them in trash piles and car trunks, and most often, they buried them in the dirt. One of these exploded under Sidles’s truck on a scorching-hot July day. The blast burned and bloodied his face, mangled the medic’s arm, and took off the gunner’s hand. What Sidles would remember most, for years, was the terrible screaming.

As he walked into the chow hall hours later, with his own blood and that of his friends still on his uniform, a senior Marine told him he’d need to change before entering. The pettiness and lack of understanding enraged Sidles.

On his next patrol, four days after the blast, another Marine in Sidles’s Humvee noticed a battery half-buried near where they’d parked. He dug in the dirt. “Dan, we’ve got to go,” he said. “We’re on top of an IED.”

The bomb had malfunctioned. The truck’s weight had engaged the pressure plate, which should have ignited the massive artillery shells buried beneath it. The disposal team later told them that had the IED exploded, they’d all be dead. “What do you do? You just shake it off,” Sidles told me. “You can’t dwell on that stuff. Until years later, when it starts to really set in, what you’ve been through. That’s when it starts to screw with you.”

He spent his last year in uniform instructing new recruits in rifle marksmanship, then returned to Iowa. In the Marines, he and his buddies had relished their image as fighters and killers. Back home, in a world where people didn’t understand where he had been or what he had been doing on their behalf, the ground seemed to shift. Sidles, who had grown up with a lazy right eye, was already sensitive to people’s stares. Now it was all he could see. Judgment. He compared himself to a tiger on a chain, gawked at by strangers: “ ‘Hey, he’s been to combat. Want to go talk to him, want to go touch him?’ You just feel like this wild animal, and it’s like, oh man, I’m a human being.”

He’d sit in a bar in Emmetsburg, wearing a brooding mask of meanness, and wait for someone to start eyeing him. Drunken fights became a pastime. He spent a few nights in jail and missed out on more because the cops knew him and knew he’d been to war.

He still hung out with a few close friends from high school, but those trusted relationships had changed, too. James Davis, for one, felt a yawning distance. “He was talking to me, telling me a story, but he was just looking right through me,” Davis said. Sidles told him that people didn’t understand how crazy the war had been or how hard it was to readjust to life afterward. “It felt like a script he gave people,” Davis said. “Like he was trying to placate me.”

“He’ll always be my best friend,” Sidles told me. “He’ll bring up things that, no matter how many times he said it, always made me piss my pants. And now when I’m back, he’ll bring it up: Remember that time? And it’s not even funny to me. For him I’ll try to fake it. But he can tell.”

Sidles knew he was alienating people but felt helpless to stop the spiral. A drunk-driving charge earned him two weeks in jail. “I was throwing my life away, but I didn’t know why,” he said. “I didn’t know what was causing it.”

He moved from Iowa to Phoenix, but the change didn’t help. He couldn’t escape the aimlessness and boredom. Nothing matched the terrible excitement of the war. His social worker at the VA had an idea. She connected Sidles with Weihenmayer, who invited him to join the team that would climb Lobuche.

War veterans have long found relief in the solitude, perspective, and physical challenge of the outdoors. Earl Shaffer, who fought in the Pacific in World War II, told a friend he was going to “walk the Army out of my system, both mentally and physically” and became the , in 1948. Paul Petzoldt, who started the (NOLS), fought in Italy during World War II with the Army’s storied Tenth Mountain Division, as did , the first executive director of the , and the founders of several American ski resorts.

with a formalized program meant to calm the mind and salve the wounds of combat. Rheault fought in Korea and Vietnam with the Special Forces and retired in 1969 in a haze of scandal after his men killed a South Vietnamese double agent. He retreated to the outdoors and worked at the in Maine for 32 years. In 1983, he started a program for Vietnam veterans that promoted the physical challenge and camaraderie of the military in the mountains of New Hampshire. “We need each other to share the heavy loads, to help a vet who is hurting, to lend a hand across a dangerous or difficult spot in the trail, to make camp in the wild,” he wrote in . “The experiences duplicate everything except the shooting, the wounding, and killing.”

Despite promising results, nature-based programs for veterans didn’t gain wide interest until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave us a new generation of struggling veterans. Today that landscape is crowded with groups offering everything from sailing and surfing to horseback riding and ice climbing. Many of these programs are event based, not built around continued engagement. Some are meant just to be fun outings, a “Thank you for your service.” Others, like Weihenmayer’s group, have more elaborate ambitions to ease PTSD symptoms and help the injured overcome limitations.

For the Nepal expedition in 2010, Weihenmayer and his climbing buddies reasoned that mountaineering could mimic the best parts of military service: teamwork, a sense of mission, and a shot of adrenaline. That’s what Sidles found when he strapped on a pair of crampons and slogged toward the Lobuche summit. He liked the rush he felt in the mountains, outside his comfort zone, a little bit scared and not wanting to let down those around him. “It takes courage to face your fears,” he told the filmmaker Michael Brown, “and if there’s no fear, there is no courage, you know what I’m saying?”

Brown, who has summited Everest five times, ran what was then called the . Students usually made their own short movies during multi-day backcountry trips, but on the Nepal expedition they all worked together to film the veterans. The resulting documentary, , prominently featured Sidles. After the expedition, Brown interviewed Sidles in Phoenix and filmed him in a boxing gym. Murray, a longtime friend of Brown’s, had climbed with us in Nepal and helped Brown with the follow-up interviews for the film.

“I feel like now that I know what I’m capable of, I just want more,” Sidles told them. “That feeling of just being alive.”

Brown and Murray both lived in Boulder and encouraged Sidles to relocate to Colorado. A few months later he moved into Murray’s basement, with mountains now in his backyard. He started climbing with a friend of Murray’s who had taught bouldering and mountaineering at NOLS. Sidles wanted to work as a guide and figured that attending NOLS could be a good route. He enrolled in the outdoor-educators course—three months of skiing, canyoneering, climbing, and wilderness first aid meant to prepare students for outdoor careers. That program now draws two dozen vets a year; Sidles, who used his GI Bill benefit to pay for the course, was one of just two who took part in early 2012.

Kyle Drake, a field instructor that semester, was Sidles’s adviser. Sidles told him about the Marines, his time in Fallujah, and the years that followed. Most of the other students were just out of college, and at times Sidles grew frustrated with their immaturity. He argued with a fellow student during a skiing exercise, so Drake positioned himself near Sidles, should he need to intervene. “I wasn’t sure what his life experiences had done to him,” Drake told me. “Is he a ticking time bomb, or is he just going to be angry?” But Sidles knew he needed to remove himself from the situation and find release through exertion. Duckwalking in his telemark skis, he charged ahead, dragging his sled—upside down—through the snow.

“Hey Dan,” Drake called. “Do you need help?”

“No,” Sidles said. “I’m good.”

During the canyoneering section, with two weeks left in the semester, Sidles again argued with a fellow student. In the Marines, that sort of confrontation—stern voices and threats—wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. But this one, while not physical, concerned the instructors enough that they sent Sidles out of the mountains early. NOLS awarded him a certificate for completing the course, which was necessary for the VA to reimburse the cost under the GI Bill.

The chance to use his new outdoor skills came soon after. Weihenmayer organized another expedition for wounded vets, this time to Ecuador’s 19,347-foot Cotopaxi. Several veterans from the Nepal trip, including Sidles, would serve as mentors. Matt Burgess, a military policeman who fought in Iraq, credits Sidles with keeping him on the expedition. Disillusioned by the physical demands, Burgess had wanted to quit. Sidles told him of his own doubts in Nepal. “He’d pull me aside on a daily basis. ‘You doing OK? You still glad to be here?’ ” Burgess told me. “At one point I fell and slipped. It was Dan who stopped me. Knowing he was there and had my back was extremely comforting.”

Weihenmayer and the other guides from the Nepal trip had all summited dozens of other challenging mountains. They knew the stresses of expeditions. For the veterans, they surmised, success in the mountains could be taken back to their daily lives. “We were overconfident. We tried it again, and the whole thing almost fell apart,” Weihenmayer said of the Ecuador trip. “There’s a fine line between an adventure and the chaos of retriggering some of the wounds they were there to fix.”

In a lodge halfway up Cotopaxi, Sidles and another veteran mentor nearly came to blows over Sidles’s contention that the other man wasn’t pulling his weight. Sidles also had strong words for the guides, who he felt were underprepared. That day a guide had misjudged a route, turning a four-hour acclimatization hike into an all-day grind. The rancor soured the overall mood, which worsened a few days later when only half the group summited. “We should have been more prepared,” Weihenmayer told me.

His group, now called , has since run dozens of veteran trips. They’re done on a smaller scale, with an emphasis on the overall experience rather than reaching the summit. The staff receives three days of suicide-prevention and crisis-management training, and a staff social worker checks in with the veterans before the trip and for several months afterward to see how they’re integrating the experience into their daily lives.

The problems on Cotopaxi highlight the shortcomings of some programs, which can be heavy on good intentions and skills acquisition, but light on mental-health expertise and a deep understanding of the physical and psychological issues veterans often face. And many of the programs might not be reaching those who could most benefit.

“It’s much easier to work with a veteran who has his shit together, who shows up, has a good time—you can take some pictures, and you don’t have to deal with them again,” Joshua Brandon told me. Brandon used to run the program, which takes veterans mountaineering, rafting, climbing, and fishing. Most of the vets who came on his trips didn’t have what Brandon calls “hardcore” issues. “It’s the guys and gals who are the most self-destructive, and destructive to the people around them, who are the most work,” he said, “but they also need the most help. And they’re the ones we should be helping.”

Brandon met Sidles on a climbing trip and thought he could be a good leader for the Sierra Club’s program. He understood Sidles’s struggles—the alienation, despondency, and wrecked relationships. He had dealt with the same challenges after three combat tours in Iraq, which earned him a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars with Valor. He and some fellow soldiers taught themselves to climb on Washington’s Mount Rainier and found that the adversity, risk, and teamwork eased their minds in ways therapy and medication alone couldn’t.

But while therapies like yoga, meditation, and virtual reality have been validated by studies and utilized by the Pentagon and the VA, there has been little research about the benefits of nature for veterans. In a for the Sierra Club, in which veterans participated in canoeing, rock-climbing, backpacking, and skiing trips, the 98 subjects reported improvements in psychological well-being, more social connectedness, and a more positive life outlook, though a month after the trips the benefits had largely dissipated. “Nature is a momentary fix,” Brandon said. “Much like medication, you have to keep dosing.”

Brandon left the Sierra Club but still puzzled over how best to reach veterans like Sidles. He believes that ongoing outdoor experiences built around tight community and self-examination, rather than just escape and thrill, can help. Working with a team of researchers at the University of Washington—and backed with a $100,000 grant from REI and additional support from —Brandon designed a pilot study that started earlier this year. Veterans recruited from the Seattle area met regularly for small-group excursions and casual social gatherings to augment traditional treatments and medication.

If the results are positive, Brandon hopes to see programs like this incorporated as a core element of treatment protocols. But he recognizes the difficulty of shifting institutional mindsets and working with volatile veterans. “You really have to care about someone to put up with some of that, to fight through and not take offense at some of their bullshit,” Brandon said. “It’s the same issues we’re trying to help them with that are causing them to lash out at friends and family.”

For Sidles and many vets like him, it’s not just the combat that wrecked them. While his battlefield experiences alone would have been enough to twist his sense of self and derail his relationships, Sidles’s war started long before he set foot in Iraq.

“I taught myself to tie my shoes, for fuck’s sake,” Sidles told Brown in a documentary interview. No one bothered to show him, and he feared asking for help, so he figured out his own system of loops and knots, which carried through to adulthood. He was the youngest of four siblings by eight years, with 16 years between him and his eldest sister. “My dad pretty much told Daniel that he was a mistake,” said Gilderhus, who is 48. “He didn’t have parents. They were old and sick.”

Their father had a heart transplant in 1998, and their mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around that time. To be closer to medical care, the family moved from Graettinger to nearby Emmetsburg, a town five times bigger, with 4,000 people. In high school, Sidles excelled in sports, but academics came harder. “You got this douche dad who says, ‘You’re a no-good punk who’s not going to amount to nothing,’” he said. “A test or something comes up in school, and you say, ‘I’m not going to study, what’s the point? I’m just going to fail. My dad tells me that all the time.’ And then what happens? You take the test and you fail. And he gets the report card and says, ‘Yeah, that figures.’”

Neglect and emotional abuse, shaping a kid’s sense of identity and self-worth, can damage them as much as physical or sexual trauma. To gauge exposure to these negative events, mental-health providers use a ten-question survey about family instability and incidences of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Divorced parents? One point. Parent in prison? Another point. Two questions stood out to me as particularly relevant to Sidles: “Did a parent often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you?” and “Did you often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special?” Based on what I know of Sidles’s childhood, I figured his score at a four.

Male veterans of today’s all-volunteer military as their civilian counterparts to have endured difficult childhoods, which wasn’t the case during the Vietnam War, when the draft selected more broadly from the population. (Female veterans and civilians have similar numbers of negative childhood events, and while female veterans are half as likely to kill themselves as male veterans, they’re more than twice as likely as female civilians to do so.) Many people, like Sidles, join the military to escape a crappy home life and for the camaraderie and opportunities they didn’t have growing up. But unresolved childhood trauma can stack the deck and cause bad experiences later in life to do far more damage. “The guys who come in with a lot of emotional baggage, it just gets compounded, especially with combat tours like we had,” Ryan Thompson, Sidles’s section leader during his Iraq deployments, told me.

Compounding trauma increases the likelihood of suicide. of male veterans in an inpatient program for combat-related PTSD, more than 40 percent reported four or more adverse childhood experiences. Those with a greater number of ACEs were significantly more likely to have thought about suicide or tried it. But if the military screened out those with bad childhoods, it would lose an enormous chunk of the recruitment pool. The services have a hard enough time filling their ranks. Most young Americans——a°ù±đ , too sick, or perform too poorly on aptitude tests for military service, or they have disqualifying histories of crime, drug use, or mental illness.

In many ways, Sidles was an ideal recruit: strong, driven, devoted, and searching for belonging. The Marines offered him respect, adventure, and a sense of purpose and worth far from small-town Iowa and far from his family. If he had had a different job in the military—say, helicopter mechanic—things might have turned out much differently. He’d be a couple of years from retirement today. But he chose the infantry.

“I adapted to war really well,” Sidles said. “A lot of people who join the military come from broken homes like me. I’m no exception. So you’ve got some anger. You can’t deny that. It’s there. And then the Marine Corps just adds to that.”

Sidles felt bullied by his father and elder brother, and he considered terrorists the biggest bullies of all, so he channeled that anger. Friends who were injured or killed stoked the flames. “The fire just keeps burning and burning and burning,” he said. “And then you come back here and try to put it out, and it’s, like, impossible.”

During my two Iraq tours with an Army infantry company, I had some close calls, but I didn’t see anything like the combat Sidles did. Even if I had, my upbringing better prepared me to deal with the ramifications. I left for war knowing that my family loved and supported me, and I returned to the same. Within several months my violent dreams, startled responses, and irritability eased as my mind readjusted to life outside a war zone.

Sidles didn’t come home to that kind of safe harbor. “The love I didn’t get at home I got from my friends. I felt that a lot in the Marine Corps,” he said. “There’s no situation that’s too tough as long as you have people who care about you, and you care about them, to go through it with you. Once I got out of the military, I realized I was really, really on my own.”

His own choices may have led him to that rooftop in Fallujah— most prominently, enlisting in the Marines—but other factors beyond Sidles’s control played a part, too. He understood this, and it fueled his resentment toward his father. “He told me I would never make it in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t even make it through boot camp,” Sidles said. “I did two combat tours, Purple Heart, awards that say things like courage under fire, and he tells me I did nothing in Iraq.”

“Daniel wanted one thing from my dad: a sincere apology,” Gilderhus recalled. “For everything.”

“You don’t have to forget,” she told her brother, “but you might have to forgive a little to go on.”

Sidles tried to repair the relationships, but it was short-lived. Family wounds aren’t easily mended, and the hurt ran deep. His mother, for whom he cared greatly, died while he was living in Phoenix. His family didn’t call. A friend told him several days later. He wanted to confront his father at the funeral home, but Gilderhus stopped him. She invited him to her home for Christmas. Trying to navigate the bitter family emotions, she decided to have a gift exchange with her father at her mother’s graveside, then celebrate with her brother later. But Sidles learned of this. He drove to the cemetery, saw his father, and kept driving. After an argument with Gilderhus that night, Sidles left. The last of the frayed family threads had snapped.

I last saw Sidles in July of 2013 while in Boulder for Michael Brown’s wedding. The morning of the ceremony, I climbed the with Murray. We were just starting the initial pitch when Sidles passed by on the trail, hiking down from the top. I called to him, but he didn’t hear. Or maybe he did. He just kept charging down the path.

Later I sent him a text asking if he’d like to get a beer and catch up.

“Fuck no,” he wrote back. “I’ll go ahead and skip story telling time.”

The message stung. Storytelling time. I read this as an indictment: he saw me not as a friend but as a journalist, someone else who had taken advantage.

“He thought we used him,” Brown said. “And we did.”

Like Brown, my relationship with Sidles began as a lopsided exchange. Journalists and filmmakers are gatekeepers of our subjects’ most personal experiences, and the transaction is tilted decidedly against them: Tell me your story, with all its intimate, painful, and embarrassing details, and I’ll share it with the world. The interview itself can retraumatize, a possibility I wrestle with routinely when writing about people who’ve been emotionally and physically scarred. For this they receive no compensation, only the possibility that someone somewhere might be exposed to their story and moved by it.

When he first saw my șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű piece about the Lobuche climb, Sidles worried about how others would view him. “Then I had gotten a couple hits on Facebook from a couple guys who had been to combat,” he told Brown, “and they basically told me that they felt exactly how I felt, and it was almost like a thank-you for speaking up.” This prompted Sidles to open up more for the documentary. “Instead of worrying about how I was going to look,” he said, “I threw that aside and said, You know what? I’m going to be honest. I’ll let people see how I live and how I think.”

I helped with some of the editing, and as we reviewed the footage, Brown mentioned several times that he wished he could make a whole film about Sidles, so eloquent, honest, and funny were his reflections and insights. We both loved spending time with him. “If he smiled or laughed, and you were at the other end of that, it was the best feeling in the world,” Brown said.

He showed Sidles the documentary before almost anyone else had seen it. “Yeah,” Sidles told Brown. “It’s all true.” But he came to regret his involvement. He felt like some of the guides on the trip had used him as a prop—look how we’re helping these wounded veterans. He also nursed resentment toward some veterans in the film who hadn’t been wounded in combat or, he felt, had embellished their experiences.

Though the infighting on the Cotopaxi expedition had exacerbated these frustrations, Sidles continued to take part in veterans outdoor programs. He wanted the opportunities but seemed to resent it at the same time, as though his participation confirmed that he couldn’t help himself. Yet he believed that the outdoors had been truly good for him, and he wanted to use his experiences to help other vets. Climber , who cofounded the adaptive program , worked with Sidles to market himself to the professional climbing and outdoor-recreation communities. In 2014, Sidles at a Paradox ice-climbing event in Ouray, Colorado, and though he was racked with nerves beforehand, the talk went well, and he enjoyed the experience.

But the rhythms and demands of everyday life confounded him. He felt he had been at his best in Iraq, fighting alongside his brothers. Back home, where people’s reactions to him ranged from curiosity to wariness and concern, he seemed to long for the war’s simplicity and the sense of worth and purpose it brought him.

“Dan seemed like he was still a gunner in Iraq,” Nick Watson told me. “He was just stuck there. He never made that leap to having an identity in the civilian world, having something to get up and look forward to.” Watson, a former Army Ranger, runs Veterans Expeditions (), which has taken thousands of former military men and women climbing, rafting, mountain biking, and mountaineering. He linked up Sidles with a former special-operations Marine who runs rafting trips and offered to train Sidles as a guide. “I thought it was perfect,” Watson said. But Sidles didn’t last the day. Watson’s friend told him Sidles bristled at interacting with the younger guides.

Another friend of Sidles in Colorado had connected him with an assistant guiding job on Denali. I figured this could be a good step, moving him away from his primary outward identity as a war vet. As a guide he’d be expected to check his emotions, work with a team, mitigate conflict, and meet the needs of paying clients. But this turned out to be another false start. He enjoyed the work and got along well with clients, but he argued with the lead guide. He didn’t work another Denali expedition.

Watson climbed with Sidles several times over the years, both on Vet Ex trips and just the two of them. Sidles eventually cut off contact with Watson, but even before that, in the months leading up to Sidles’s decision to distance himself, Watson had sensed a shift. “The outdoors wasn’t fun to him anymore,” he said. “The thing that was keeping him going, he lost that.”

After texting me that afternoon in Colorado, Sidles sent Murray a note berating him for giving me his new phone number. “Every time I hear about you and everyone living their happy lives,” he texted, “it reminds me of what a piece of shit I am.”

Sidles stopped talking to Murray, apparent punishment for the breach of trust. He apologized months later, and their friendship resumed. Over the next two years, I often asked Murray about him, but I didn’t reach out myself. Before Sidles died, and many times afterward, I wished that I’d set ego aside and written to him or called, to let him know that I valued him as a friend and hoped to share a trail or rope with him again soon.

After the NOLS course, Sidles moved into an apartment in Gunbarrel, just outside Boulder. As he had while living in Phoenix and in Murray’s basement, he spent much of his time alone, playing guitar, watching history documentaries, and reading. When he was still talking to Gilderhus, he would sometimes call her late at night and tell her about episodes of Dr. Phil he had seen, how the analysis might apply to his own life.

He had worked for a few years as a personal trainer after the Marines and enjoyed the autonomy and the one-on-one interaction with clients. He couldn’t imagine himself in a regular job, beholden to a company’s norms, rules, and schedules and forced to deal with coworkers and customers. The VA agreed, deeming him unemployable, which qualified him for monthly compensation in addition to his disability benefits. Still, he wanted to work, and the verdict of his inability to support himself weighed heavily, Gilderhus said.

The gym offered refuge. For hours he lifted weights and exhausted himself with boxing drills, a Sisyphean attempt to quiet his mind. While living in Boulder, he scrambled up the Flatirons alone several times a week, sometimes every day. He often climbed the First Flatiron, where a fall, though unlikely for a decent climber, could be catastrophic. Climbing without a rope freed him from the need for a belay partner. He could climb when he wanted, without coordinating schedules, without judgments or expectations. But soloing also offered risk and thrill, the ever present what-if?

Sidles told his Marine buddy Adamn Scott that he liked the high stakes. “You screw up and you die,” he said. Scott sensed that this also bothered Sidles—being so drawn to the danger, the same craving they felt for the rush of combat.

“Don’t you ever get nervous being by yourself?” Scott had asked him. “What if something happens?”

“Who cares?” Sidles said.

Scott had been with Sidles through boot camp, infantry school, and both tours in Iraq. They shared the same Unscarred tattoo.

“When we first got out, I couldn’t function in society ,” Scott said. Every day a sight, smell, or sound reminded him of Iraq. He tried the VA, but like Sidles and so many others, he felt that the therapists couldn’t understand his time in combat and were more interested in medicating him. “What helped us the most was getting together and talking about it,” Scott said. Each summer he’d invite a half-dozen Marines to his house in Bloomfield, Iowa, for a few days of beers, grilling, and catching up. Sidles always attended.

Sitting around the fire, they talked about how they were getting by since they left the Marines. They talked about the war, and they talked about suicide. “We’d all thought about it,” Scott said. Sidles told him he’d never do it. “He called it the pussy way out,” Scott said. They had talked about it in Iraq, too, in a broader conversation about heaven and hell, and where they, as killers of men, might be headed. “Dan was of the understanding that you didn’t go to heaven if you commit suicide,” Scott said.

During a visit a few summers ago, they spent the day out on a boat, skiing, wakeboarding, and drinking beer. Back at the house, they drank into the night. In Scott, Sidles saw everything he didn’t have: a good job, a loving wife, kids, a house.

“Dude, your life is the shit,” Sidles told him.

“You could have this, too,” Scott said. He hoped Sidles would return to Iowa one day and buy a house near him.

“Nobody’s going to want me,” Sidles said. “I’m a broken old piece of shit.”

Scott wasn’t buying it. “I just chose not to be miserable anymore,” he told Sidles, and chided him for not being more grateful for what he had, traveling the world to climb mountains, often with other people funding the trips.

Then Sidles punched Scott, and Scott punched back, the two men bloodying each other’s faces.

Other Marines tried to reach him as well. After Sidles guided on Denali, he stayed for a few weeks with Ryan Thompson, his old section leader, who lives in Anchorage. They would spend hours talking. “He still had a lot of deep-seated anger,” Thompson said. Anger at himself for leaving the Marines and for getting arrested, which closed off job opportunities. Anger at civilians for not understanding him. Anger at his family.

“I had some pretty frank discussions with him about how self-destructive he was and how he needed to find a more positive path in his life,” Thompson said. “One time I even asked him: Are you going to hurt yourself? Are you thinking about suicide?”

“No,” Sidles said. “I’ve got too much fight left in me for that.”

Sending soldiers to war is far easier than bringing them home. More than 15 years of continuous warfare has flooded the VA with men and women struggling with physical and mental wounds. Of the 2.7 million who have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, have been diagnosed with PTSD. They are often prescribed medication and offered one of two widely used treatments. In , the veteran writes a detailed account of a traumatic incident, like a bomb explosion that might be causing nightmares, irritability, and substance abuse. The story is recorded and then played back, over and over, until recalling the incident doesn’t cause distress. In , a veteran describes a traumatic incident, then discusses it with a therapist to identify irrational beliefs associated with the trauma, such as guilt that a bomb wasn’t spotted before it exploded.

. More than half of the veterans who start prolonged-exposure or cognitive-processing therapy don’t complete the 12-session regimen. And for veterans like Sidles weighed down by multiple traumas, focusing on one incident often isn’t enough. Plenty of veterans have received excellent medical and mental-health care. But with an institution so big, the demand so great, and individual needs so complex, not all veterans get the specific help they need.

Sidles also complained about therapists who don’t know war—“like me giving mothering advice to a mother,” he said. Group therapy was hard for him as well. He wasn’t interested if it meant sitting in a circle with people who hadn’t been in combat pulling triggers. Each negative therapy experience compounded the problem: open up a few times, see poor results, and lose incentive to dig in and tell the story again.

But Sidles still relied on the VA for medical care. He needed knee surgery and had been prescribed medications for depression, sleep, and pain in his shoulder, knee, and hips from military and sports injuries. A VA doctor advised him to quit climbing or he risked needing hip replacements. Sidles figured he’d be better off with his own therapy regimen—smoking weed and climbing.

On a fall day in 2014, he called the VA’s outpatient clinic and was soon yelling at a nurse about an upcoming appointment. Patricia Alexander, the clinic’s supervisor of mental-health services, took the phone. “We couldn’t sort through the obscenities,” she told me. “I got tired of it and hung up.” An hour later, Sidles was sitting in the clinic. Alexander, five feet tall and 100 pounds, stood in front of him. “Hi, I’m Dr. Alexander. How can I help you?”

“I want to talk to the motherfucker who hung up on me,” Sidles said.

“I would be that motherfucker,” Alexander said. “How can I help you?”

The response threw him off, and calmed him. They went to her office to talk, the first of what would be six visits in all. They established something of a pattern in their relationship, with Sidles testing and Alexander pushing back but not rejecting. “I could just pick you up and snap your neck, and there’s nothing you could do about it,” he told her in a session a few weeks later.

“Yeah, but could you wait?” Alexander said. “I just got custom ski boots and I’d like to use them.”

Sidles laughed at this and relaxed.

“I never felt I was in danger from him,” Alexander said. “Never once, even when he was raging.” The clinic director, Kris Johnson, who served eight years as an Army doctor, told me he interpreted Sidles’s comment more as a statement of frustration than a threat. “I’ve seen so many people like that. They’re pissed at the world, not you specifically,” Johnson said. “At some point they give up. This is just some other fucking VA doc who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The VA had previously diagnosed Sidles with borderline personality disorder, characterized by impulsive behaviors, extreme emotional responses, and unstable relationships. The military considers this a preexisting condition, not service related—war didn’t break them, they were screwed up already—and has used the diagnosis to discharge service members and deny disability benefits to thousands of combat veterans. “Someone who didn’t know what they were doing gave him that diagnosis,” Alexander said. “I got that overturned. Dan had untreated PTSD.” She also got Sidles’s PTSD disability rating bumped up to 100 percent.

In Alexander, a former Air Force and Army psychologist, Sidles had a passionate advocate. Her youngest son had served a violent tour in Afghanistan as an Army paratrooper, and afterward he boozed and fought. Alexander told me that a therapist at the Denver VA identified his PTSD symptoms but did little to alleviate them. Alexander could sense her son’s mounting hopelessness and devised her own treatment regimen, outside VA channels, including , yoga, , and . “Without it,” she said, “I think he would be dead.”

She thought Sidles was headed down the same path and figured he could be helped by a similarly tailored intervention. Alexander recognized the importance of addressing Sidles’s childhood, which she said is too often overlooked within the VA. Many providers don’t understand or appreciate how early trauma compounds war trauma, or they’re hamstrung by the handful of treatments they can offer.

The first few sessions with Sidles were triage. Alexander sketched a human brain and explained to him how traumatic memories are stored and the neurological effects of too much stress. She wanted to get Sidles a brain scan, to show him how PTSD and his injuries had altered his neurological function, influencing behaviors.

Adrenaline, a critical component of our fight-or-flight response, heightens our senses, dulls pain, and curbs our need for food and sleep. It’s designed for short bursts. But if the brain is chronically stressed—by childhood abuse, combat, or a toxic mix of the two—adrenaline stays high, masking the commensurate drop-off in other brain chemicals that regulate emotions and sleep. Boxing and climbing the Flatirons without a rope offered a little shot of adrenaline, a fix to calm the mind and body. “He was raised on fight-or-flight, so he was going to be drawn to things that would push that adrenaline up. Fighting. Screaming. Thrill seeking,” Alexander said. “He was trying to manage that incredible imbalance in his system. Then you add traumatic memories and losses, and no one explains it to you, you’re going to get hopeless real fast.”

To help Sidles, she needed to regulate that roller coaster of hormones. “What could we do to calm your brain down?” she asked him.

Skiing, he said.

He didn’t have the equipment, or money for a ski pass, so Alexander worked on getting him both. Others at the VA told her to stop because it wasn’t an appropriate treatment, Alexander said. She refused, and Sidles eventually obtained equipment through , a nonprofit supporting veterans. “It was a totally appropriate treatment,” she told me. “He needed to be outside.” Sidles got the skis, but their next meeting was their last.

“How’s it going?” Alexander asked as they sat down in her office, and that set him off. He yelled and pounded on a metal bookshelf. Other staff heard the commotion and stepped into the hallway. Someone called the police, and Sidles left. Johnson and Alexander wanted to continue seeing him, but others at the clinic felt unsafe. The VA’s disruptive-behavior committee in Denver, which reviews the cases of veterans who may be a threat to staff or other patients, banned Sidles from the Golden clinic and said he would need a police escort at the Denver VA. Sidles thought it was Alexander who had banned him. Another person he trusted had let him down.

“If we could have kept him here, I think we could have made a difference in his life,” Alexander said.

In 35 years as a psychologist, and many years working with combat veterans, Alexander has had many clients kill themselves. But she thinks most often about Sidles. “I feel like we failed him,” she said. “We’re losing a generation, and I can’t stand it anymore. We’re not doing our job.” Alexander retired from the VA last December and has joined a Denver-based nonprofit, , which will offer veterans the kind of treatments that helped her son—­treatments she feels could have helped Sidles.

The VA has made suicide prevention its top priority, this year allotting $500 million to pay and resources. But even if the VA filled every job vacancy, the fix assumes that doctors and therapists are providing the right care at the right time to the right people. As Sidles’s case shows, that isn’t always so.

“We give it our best guess, and then we start throwing medication at people,” Alexander said. “People lose hope and become suicidal when they can’t fix it and they don’t know why.”

Over the course of several months of talking with people about Sidles for this story, I had become increasingly discouraged; so many told me that they had been aware of his struggles but had felt helpless to stop the slide. If nothing could have been done, digging into his life felt grotesquely voyeuristic. But Alexander and Johnson helped me understand two critical pieces of Sidles’s story: his path was not inevitable, and he was not an exception. His actions may have seemed extreme to those with a frame of reference based on a better childhood and more conventional adult experiences. But Alexander and Johnson found his story far too familiar.

Several combat veterans expressed the same thing to me. “A lot of people look at Dan like he was some fucked-up outlier,” Brandon said. “No. He could be any one of us.” Good treatment was critical for Brandon, but so was community, and Sidles’s increasing isolation left him without that.

“The community piece is huge,” Brandon said. “Loneliness is a fucking killer.”

Kremmling, Colorado, sits on a high plain 100 miles northwest of Denver. The old mining and ranching town of 1,500 doesn’t have much charm, but it’s cheap and well situated for climbing and skiing in the surrounding mountains. Another try at a fresh start.

In December of 2015, after briefly moving back into Murray’s place in Boulder, Sidles relocated to the Kremmling Apartments, a two-story building in the center of town with a couple dozen units. He was glad to be away from the Front Range congestion and from Boulder, where he felt out of place. But this put him far from what remained of his support network. His physical remove mirrored his growing emotional isolation.

If he wasn’t out climbing or skiing, Sidles was often at , a mixed-martial-arts gym in Granby. He worked out alone, pounding the bags, sweat pooling on the floor. At home he’d drink beer, maybe smoke some weed, play guitar.

Kremmling isn’t very welcoming to strangers, and neither was Sidles. A confrontation, whether just likely or inevitable, occurred on the evening of February 4 outside his apartment. Sidles said it wasn’t his fault; the police disagreed. He had yelled at a woman as she smoked a cigarette outside her apartment, accusing her of messing with his car. The woman’s brother heard the commotion and approached Sidles, who knocked him down with a punch that broke a tooth.

The police charged him with third-degree assault and disorderly conduct. A Breathalyzer test said he was plenty drunk. Deputy Jesse Stradley, the sheriff’s department’s veteran-liaison officer, served in the Navy and worked at the jail. He first met Sidles the night of his arrest. “I told him not to come toward me,” Sidles told Stradley, referring to the fight. “Why would a guy pet a barking dog?”

A barking dog. A tiger on a chain. A disposable razor. Sidles saw himself in many ways, few of them good.

Sidles was released the next night on $1,500 bail and assigned a court date the following month. He and Stradley met again by chance a few days later. After that they got together at least once a week for lunch or a workout. Sidles called or texted him most days, often to vent his frustrations about his landlady, how old he felt, or how people didn’t understand him.

He also reached out to Duane Dailey. As a medic and surgery tech in Vietnam, Dailey had repaired soldiers’ bodies; as the veterans service officer for Grand County, he helped them repair their lives, connecting them with VA programs, medical benefits, and employment. In March, Sidles asked Dailey for a ride to pick up his car at the mechanic. “Why are you living in Kremmling?” Dailey asked as they drove. “It’s a sucky town unless you’re a cowboy or you love to fight.”

Close to the mountains, Sidles said.

As he did after all his veteran interactions, Dailey jotted down brief notes about his phone calls and meetings with Sidles.

March 7—He wanted to be in a small town to get away from the bullshit.
 No one understands. He’s very lonely and has no friends. Needs meds for depression. He informed me he understands why so many vets kill themselves.

March 18—Dan is very depressed, despondent, paranoid.

Sidles appeared in court on March 21, and the case was continued to May 2. Dailey found Sidles a cheap apartment in the nearby town of Parshall and helped him move some belongings into a storage unit, preparations for Sidles’s new plan: an eventual move to Thailand, where a Marine buddy owned a mixed-martial-arts gym.

“I’d like to go out with a girl and just talk to her, be like a normal person,” he told Dailey as they drove. “That doesn’t work. I can’t do it.”

At the storage unit, Sidles beat his fists against the door and wept.

“Dan,” Dailey said, “we need to get you some help.”

Dailey reached out to a friend, Kris Johnson, who told Dailey he already knew Sidles from the Golden clinic. Johnson planned to be in Kremmling later that month for a town-hall meeting on veterans’ benefits. If Sidles wouldn’t attend, he and Dailey would stop by his apartment to see him.

But that was three weeks off, and the pressure was building. With a court date looming, Sidles oscillated between pragmatism and despair.

“Totally serious, can you work out in jail?” he texted to Stradley. “Do you get to bring books, etc?”

Stradley told Sidles that jail time in Grand County would be easy. The food was good, the atmosphere relaxed. He could read books and do body-weight workouts.

The assault charge carried a maximum sentence of two years in jail and a $5,000 fine. Someone with no criminal record might not get any jail time, but Sidles was looking at 30 days and a bill for the man’s broken tooth. Brett Barkey, the district attorney for Grand County, felt jail might be good for Sidles. “Sometimes that’s enough to encourage them to take a different path,” he said.

Dailey disagreed. “He’s like a caged animal now,” he said. “If you put him in a real cage, it will make it worse.”

Barkey, a retired Marine colonel, served three tours in Iraq. That he had worn the same uniform and still wanted him locked up felt like another betrayal to Sidles.

“For him to expect to get a pass because I’m a Marine is misplaced,” Barkey told me. “Folks who aren’t held to account end up exhibiting these behaviors that are counterproductive and dangerous. I’m not going to be an enabler.”

Many of those who pushed back against Sidles found themselves cut out of his life. But the arrest thrust Sidles into a realm he couldn’t simply turn his back on.

April 11—Vet has no friends. No one cares about him. He will kill himself if he has to go to jail. He’ll break the neck of man who he assaulted. He understands why so many vets kill themselves.

While awaiting his court date, Sidles stewed in Parshall, a has-been town with a couple of bars and a few dozen people. The apartment building wasn’t much: a long, single-story cinder-block building next to the post office, divided into five units. Sidles had two small rooms and a walk-through bathroom, furnished with a bed, a small table, and a couch, for $500 a month.

He told Dailey he was happy with the new apartment, away from gawking neighbors in Kremmling, but within days he complained to Stradley about the isolation, neighbors slamming doors, and spotty cell phone service.

As Sidles spiraled, Chad Jukes, another veteran from our 2010 Nepal climb, was back in the Khumbu Valley, headed toward Mount Everest. In Iraq, a roadside bomb had damaged his right leg, which was later amputated below the knee. Like Sidles, Jukes had climbed all over the world. He’d gained a few gear sponsorships, often spoke to groups about his experiences, and taught ice climbing—a life Sidles had imagined for himself. The Nepal trip had seemed like a launching pad for Sidles as well, but almost six years on, the two men couldn’t have been in more different places or states of mind.

On April 3, Sidles posted a Facebook link to a story about a bid by Jukes and another veteran to become the first combat amputees to summit Everest—which Jukes would do on May 24, , veteran reintegration, and suicide. Above the link Sidles wrote: “All you I fought with in Fallujah, this is a real hero.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment; Jukes was wounded running convoys in Iraq, not kicking down doors and hunting insurgents. Sidles found the distinction extreme. “If you want to be inspired by this ‘look at me fuck’ I’ve seen guts this girl doesn’t have,” he wrote in the comments.

In one of his last Facebook posts, dated April 22, Sidles shared a link about an Army veteran who had killed herself. “I’m sorry life didn’t work out the way you deserved,” Sidles wrote. “If there’s an afterlife, protect us. We’ll see you soon.”

He left Dailey a voice mail on April 26, telling him that he was depressed. Dailey called him the next day, but Sidles didn’t answer.

The following day, Dailey brought a local Marine veteran to visit him. Sidles’s gray Toyota FJ Cruiser was parked outside. They knocked; no answer. Dailey could guess where this was headed. He had had one other suicide, a few years earlier. Police found the veteran in his car along a remote road, dead from a shotgun blast, with Dailey’s card in his pocket. On the back, the Marine had written “My only friend.”

Stradley was worried as well. He hadn’t heard from Sidles since a text on April 25. “He said to me once that he’s not going to make it,” Stradley told me. “It was sickening to me, because I didn’t know how to help.” Sidles told him that just having someone to talk to, someone to listen, had been a great help. “I considered him a friend, and I told him that,” he said. “You don’t push a person if they don’t want to be pushed. I didn’t want him to delete me as a friend. Being up here, you need somebody.”

The day after Dailey’s visit, Stradley called his boss, who dispatched deputies for a welfare check.

They found him in the bedroom.

Sidles, who so often climbed without a rope, without that umbilical to keep himself anchored to the earth, to save himself should he fall, had ended his life with a tether. He unlaced his boxing gloves and looped a noose around his neck, and in his small closet he tied the other end to a bar on the back wall, about four feet off the ground. This was not a quick or inevitable death, with agency withdrawn and the course set after an initial action: a trigger pull, a step off a bridge, a leap from a rock face.

Instead, Sidles fought. He fought against himself, against the world, until his very last moment. With his feet propped against the wall, Sidles pushed. He pushed so hard that the bar bent nearly into a U.

They found him on a Friday, and by Monday, news of his death had migrated to Facebook. Messages flooded his page. Grief and shock, but anger, too.

“Dude we talked two weeks ago about all this shit going on in your life and when I asked you if you were good you said yes. So you lied to me which is why I’m disappointed. I’m angry with myself for not flying up there and making your ass come home with me.”

“I’m pissed that you bitched out on the rest of us and now there’s one more brother I have to let go of. We’re all hurting inside from the past that haunts us and the memories that can never be forgotten But I’m going to walk this one out until my days are ended but not by my own hand.”

“One of the baddest motherfuckers that ever set foot on Gods green Earth
 I’m fucking heartbroken.”

Tami McVay, who served in the Marines and dated Sidles briefly after our Nepal trip, had been doing a push-up challenge popular on Facebook—22 push-ups a day for 22 days, to raise awareness about veteran suicide. “About midway through, I shared a little bit about Dan in a post. I said, ‘My friend has gotten into mountaineering, he’s doing really well,’ ” McVay recalled. “And then three days later this happened.”

Sidles left a note. Gilderhus hasn’t let anyone read it, but she told me some of it: “I tried to get help, and this is what happened. I’m sorry for hurting everybody, especially the ones I love.” He also figured not many people would care about his passing. “There will only be a few people at my funeral, maybe 20,” he wrote.

He was wrong about that. Dailey and Stradley spent a few days organizing a memorial, and on May 5, . Climbers crowded next to local veterans and law-enforcement officers. More than 30 Marines who served with Sidles gathered from across the country. Several had been in touch over the years; others hadn’t seen Sidles, or each other, in a decade.

A bagpiper played the “Marines’ Hymn” and the American Legion honor guard fired a three-volley salute. Led by the Marines, everyone filed past the table and laid a hand on the box that held Sidles’s remains. In the minds of many people at the memorial, his was a combat death, the same as if he had fallen in Fallujah.

His Marine buddies gathered that afternoon in a pub down the road. They drank and laughed and traded stories about Sidles, about the war, and about everything afterward. Some military units have been stalked by suicides, but Sidles’s was the first for his company. The Marines implored each other: Reach out. Don’t let this happen again.

For the next two years, Sidles’s friends would carry him around the world, to the places most meaningful to him. A cousin who is also a Marine spread some of his ashes this spring on a memorial hill at , in California, where Sidles had been stationed, and Gilderhus is coordinating with to have some of his remains interred there, which she expects to happen this fall.

Last fall, Kevin Noe, who climbed with Sidles in Colorado and on Aconcagua, spread some ashes on Lobuche, where Sidles’s life in the mountains had begun. A few months before that, Noe and I tucked a bottle with ashes into a backpack and headed for Mount Elbrus in southeastern Russia for our own unfinished business.

On our first Elbrus attempt, in 2012, Noe and I climbed with Sidles, Murray, and Steve Baskis, who had been blinded by a roadside bomb and had been with us in Nepal. Halfway to the summit, still two hours before dawn, Murray fell ill. He tried to continue but didn’t have the energy. He said he could turn back alone, but we quashed that. In the dark, with one blind and one sick climber, we figured it was safer to move as a group. Sidles felt strong, and we encouraged him to continue with the other climbers—a Russian woman and two Chinese with a Russian guide. We wished him luck, and the beam of his headlamp faded as he trudged higher up the mountain.

As we headed down, a spitting snow rose into a swirling, howling whiteout. We lost our way and veered far off the route. After dawn, during a brief break in the snow and clouds, we could see base camp a half-mile away. We started for it and walked into a vast crevasse field obscured by a layer of fresh snow. With a thunderstorm parked overhead and charging the air, we roped up and picked our way through the field. Noe walked point, poking a trekking pole into the snow to search out solid ground. Hours later, exhausted, we staggered back into camp.

Sidles fared better. The Chinese climbers turned back with their guide an hour after we had turned back, but the Russian woman climbing with Sidles said she’d been to the summit before and that they should continue. They climbed on, with daylight bringing only slightly better visibility. In the clouds and the snow, they could just make out the sporadic wands along the route. A summit marker and small shrine told them they had reached the top of Europe.

Now we walked the path Sidles had taken five years earlier, across the broad saddle between the two summits and onto the slopes of the higher peak. The wind dropped to a mild breeze, and the rising sun warmed us.

We stepped onto the summit under a clear sky, mountains stretching to the horizon. I thought of Sidles standing here in the clouds and the snow, never seeing the world spread out before us now. And I thought of the chaplain’s blessing on the grassy, windy hilltop in Colorado. “It seems fitting that we should leave our comrade to rest under the arching sky, as he did when he pitched his tent, or laid down in days gone by, weary and footsore,” he’d said. “May each of us, when our voyages and battles of life are over, find a welcome in that region of the blessed, where there is no more storm-tossed sea or scorching battlefield.”

Every moment, every choice, for the living and the dead alike, had led us here.

Noe tipped the small bottle, and the ashes poured out, pale gray on a field of white.Ìę

Contributing editor BrianÌęMockenhaupt wrote about nature therapy for prison inmatesÌęin September 2016.

The post The Mountains Weren’t Enough for Marine Dan Sidles appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It was a little after 10 p.m. on a bitterly cold January evening in 2015Ìęwhen ISIS launched one of its most devastating assaults yet. Paddling on rafts across the muddy brown Upper Zab River,Ìęa tributary of the mighty Tigris River,Ìę160 fighters used the cover of a thick fog bank to sneak up on a dozing company of Iraqi Kurdish troops stationed near Mosul. By the time the unprepared soldiers had roused themselves and located the ISIS fighters among the mist, the jihadists had burrowed deep into their base andÌę.

Two weeks later, ISIS deployed similar tactics—a sneak attack in bad weather—50 miles down the frontline, at the disputed northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Under a steady downpour, with visibility cut to almost zero, three suicide bombers hurled themselves at a Kurdish security installation located in an abandoned hotel and several nearby checkpoints, intent on and rebar defenses. They failed, but not before they’d killed at least four sentries, who had been unable to spot the bombersÌębefore it was too late.

Across war-torn swathes of Iraq and Syria, particularly in the hilly regions, weather has become a military ploy in the war with ISIS. Storms often provide rare windows in which the jihadists can win decisive breaks on the ground.ÌęFor those facing off against ISIS along a several hundred-mile-long battlefront, it’s added a level of worrying unpredictability. “When you’re fighting in nice weather, there are few surprises,” Ebbas Mohammed, an officer in the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia told me soon after his unit had beaten back an ISIS night time strike to the south of Qamishli,Ìęin late 2014. “But when it’s raining,Ìęwhen you can’t see, anything can happen.”

ISIS first displayed this environmental awareness when its fighters surged out of the desert in June 2014 and seized Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the country’s northern hub. Operating in convoys of Toyota pick-up trucks, its fighters launched lightning assaults on unsuspecting towns and cities, where demoralized and poorlyÌęled security forces mostly melted away in fright. But with the black-flag-waving extremists threatening to push even deeper into Iraq, the U.S and its regional allies stepped in, targeting the group’s vehicles with air strikes. ISIS commanders, unable now to dispatch conspicuous convoys across the semi-arid flatlands, were left with no choice but to change tactics.Ìę

Recognizing that heavy rain and overcast skies limit ground-spotters’ ability to accuratelyÌęsendÌęcoordinates to circling coalition bombers in the sky, jihadists have taken to attacking with greatest frequency from early December to early March, when Iraq’s usual sun and high temperatures—which can reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit—temporarily give way to fierce downpours, occasional electrical storms,Ìęand overcast skies. The four most deadly attacksÌęagainst Iraqi Kurds,Ìęincluding those at Gwer and Kirkuk,Ìęhave since taken place in winter. Humanitarian coordinators in Iraq say that when the skies turn particularly bleak, there’s almost bound to be a battle. They call these conditions “ISIS weather.”

“The first time I went to the Bashiqa area [a jihadi-occupied town near Mosul] in 2014, there was a storm. It was awful, and you just knew there was going to be an attack,” saysÌęTom Robinson, director of the , which analyzes aid requirements among displaced Iraqis. “And yes, that night the weather gave them an opportunity to crawl right up to the Pesh positions.” Robinson and his colleagues, like others who work in close proximity to the frontline, are careful to factor the weather into their risk assessments when considering potential dangers in the field.

Anti-ISIS troops have, for the most part, realized their increased vulnerability during inclement weatherÌęand have changed their behavior as well. Rather than relax during lulls in the fighting, as is typical in sunnier months, many maintain an edgy alertness when there’s low visibility.

The approaching winterÌęalso presents serious obstacles for troops launching counter offensives against ISIS. Armored vehicles get stuck in boggy terrain when the rains come. Narrow routes turn into impassable mires. It’s become relatively common to see stalled or exceedingly slow-moving military convoys near the frontlinesÌęin December. It’s so punishing that the U.S Army, which hasÌęspecial forces on the ground in Iraq and eastern Syria, has a history of restricting operations during the nastiest conditions for fear of being unable to offer support if needed. “Patrols generally didn’t leave bases if the weather was so poor as to prevent medevac helicopters from flying,” said Wayne Hsieh, a military historian at the U.S Naval Academy and former Iraq-based State Department political officer.

Taking advantage of the weather as a military tactic isn't new of course. Hundreds of campaigns and battlesÌęwereÌędetermined by severe conditions—from Napoleon’s march on Moscow in 1812, in which his massive army was badly weakenedÌęby the cold and ice before itÌęreached the czar’s gates, to the Spanish Armada, which was largely sunk in a storm on its way to invade England in 1588. But in thisÌęera of advanced weaponry and hugely improved communications,Ìęmany thought rain and sun had lost their capacity to affect wars.ÌęThe violence in Syria and Iraq, where death tolls are soaring and new horrors appear daily, shows we remain as primeval as ever.

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Can gear—and the consumerism that drives its saleÌęand development—saveÌęthe world? That’s what the Army Rangers behind think, andÌęthey’re opening factories in war zones in an attempt to prove it. The goal: spread peace through economic opportunity and education.Ìę

Early last year, I met a couple of rangers in a bar. Five minutes into a conversation about the chaos in the Middle East, one of them scooted in real close, looked me in the eye, and said, “Weird knows weird.ÌęWes, you and I are going to be friends.”Ìę

At that point, I was pretty convinced that Griff was going to murder me, possibly to create some sort of hat. But fast forward less than twelve months,Ìęand I’ve visited him up in Seattle three times, crashed on his couch for a total of two weeks, , , and even bought his wife niceÌęflowers for her birthday. (Actually, that was probably the closest he ever came to killing me.)Ìę

The story I wrote about Combat Flip FlopsÌęlast year, back when IndefinitelyWild was still aÌępart of Gizmodo, was probably my favorite of the year. Curious why a couple of crazy guys think flip flops and sarongs can defeat terrorism? .Ìę

What makes these guys neat is that they’re not a couple of bleeding-heart eggheads. They’re normal dudes from Middle AmericaÌęwho joined the military out of patriotism, went through hell to make it toÌęthe elite ranks of the rangers, killed a bunch of people they thought were our enemies, then realized that, in order to fulfill their mission of defeating terrorism, killing was counterproductive. Their experience in IraqÌęand Afghanistan (and,Ìęsince then, around the world), taught them that it’s economic opportunity and education (especially for women) that can effect long-term, positive change in war zones.Ìę

And they’re putting their money where their mouths are, selling everything and maxing out their credit cards to open factoriesÌęand employ womenÌęand enrollÌęthem in school in countriesÌęlike Afghanistan. In an effort to make the numbers work, Griff even moved out of the nice, brand-new home he built for his family. HeÌęnow lives with them in aÌęmodest, rented house across the street.

The plan'sÌęworking. Last year, they donated over 60Ìęyears of schooling to women in Afghanistan and cleared 1,533 square meters of land mines in Laos.Ìę

Now, they have a chance to do much more. On Friday night, they’ll appear on ABC’s Shark Tank TV showÌęand ask the panel of angel investors for the ability to scale their business. You should tune in to watch:ÌęGriff and Lee are always entertaining. It’s also something our readers helped make happen, as the show’s producers first heard about Combat Flip FlopsÌęon IndefinitelyWild.Ìę“We want to promote peace through business, not bullets,” saysÌęGriff.

Their episode airsÌęFebruary 5Ìęat 9 p.m.ÌęET.ÌęÌę

The post Can Flip Flops Save the World? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I don't mean to pick a fight here, but Arabs are lousy drivers.

ïżŒïżŒïżŒIt's not a religious thing: Sunnis, Shiites, Maronite Catholics, Greek and Syrian Orthodox, the Druze and the Alawites—they're all equally bad. I actually met a guy in Beirut who owned a driving school. I laughed so hard beer came out my nose.

When my taxi first exploded from Lebanon into Syria, I wasn't laughing anymore. On the Lebanese side of the border I'd grabbed a mandatory-yellow Plymouth Gran Fury, an early-1970s behemoth with tassels hanging from every surface. The backseat was covered in shag and big enough for a dance party. The dash was equipped with a miniature fan, a verse from the Koran, and a framed picture of Syrian president-for-life Bashar al-Assad. The hood ornament had been pirated from a Cadillac El Dorado. Pimp my ride, Baathist edition.

I'd been counting on clearing customs with a tourist visa and a smile, but the camouflage-clad Syrian border guard wasn't buying. When he noticed the unusually large camera beside me on the seat—it more or less screamed “journalist”—he started yelling. I chuckled. He pointed an accusing finger. I made smiley faces. He thundered. But meanwhile the queue of cars behind us was growing, and in loud revolt. Harassed by the dunning of a dozen air horns and goaded by indignant drivers, the guard abruptly waved us through. The Gran Fury rocketed toward Damascus, one in a clot of cabs and cars unleashed all at once.

A true muscle car, the Fury had every advantage on a wide-open, curving expressway. We easily overtook a 1950s Nash Rambler, swerved around an overloaded minivan, and nipped past a Dodge Dart. As we topped 75 miles an hour, a titanium-silver fuel-injected 2005 Mercedes breezed past. Undaunted, my driver gunned it to 87. I was watching the speedometer because the Fury's seat belts had gone the way of the original eight-track.

Fifteen minutes, total, and Damascus came into sight. That was all it took to see the enemy capital in the distance. Fifteen minutes and you were further into the mystery of Syria than the United Nations was at the time. The UN is investigating Syrian officials for their widely assumed complicity in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of neighboring Lebanon, in a Beirut car bombing last February. Just 15 minutes and you were closer than Saint Paul was when he was knocked off his horse. Fifteen minutes and you were as close as Muhammad supposedly ever came. Arriving with his armies in A.D. 630, he compared the first sight of Damascus to a glimpse of paradise, but he only saw the city from afar, at night, and never entered its gates.

Another 15 minutes across a dust bowl and we roared into the city and screeched into the central taxi yard so hot you'd think an Israeli tank column was on our tail.

In automobiles and other ways, Damascus, like Havana, can look like the city the world forgot. It is arguably the oldest living settlement in the world, inhabited for almost 10,000 years, yet now best known as a capital of tyranny, headquarters of a military regime isolated by international opprobrium and feared by its own people. Syria is your friendly neighborhood thug, its government a milder variant of the same Baath Party (secular, socialist, and sadistic) that held Saddam's Iraq in its grip. With the latter regime deposed, Syria has taken over the role of rogue state: accused of “support for terrorism,” “false statements,” and “interference in the affairs of its neighbors” (Condoleezza Rice); “helper and enabler” of terrorists (George W. Bush); “one of the major supporters of terrorism” (the Pentagon).

[quote]“The oldest living settlement in the world, Syria is still better known for tyranny and ethnic chaos than 10,000 years of culture. The country is Axis of Evil, Junior Division, while its people are even sweeter villains.”[/quote]

Axis of evil, junior division. But if Syria's government has been cast as the black hat in international affairs, the Syrians themselves make the sweetest of villains. The population of 18 million is about 70 percent Sunni Muslim but is controlled by the Alawites, a small Shiite offshoot—comprising roughly 12 percent of Syrians, including the Assad family—that deifies Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. Fearful of the Sunni majority, the Alawites keep a lock on military and security posts, and defend their secular regime tooth and nail: When dictator Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, after a nearly 30-year rule of defeat and stagnation, the constitution was literally rewritten overnight to elevate his 34-year-old son Bashar. Things began to look up when Assad the younger, an ophthalmologist trained in England, took over. Cell phones were made legal, then satellite dishes, which now crowd the skyline of the capital, challenging the monopoly on information. Tourism has grown 5 percent a year, with Europeans and even American Chris- tians drawn to a breathtaking stockpile of Greco-Roman-Byzantine-Crusader ruins, religious shrines, and social graces drawn from the golden age of Islamic civilization.

But the pleasures of Syria (uncountable historical treasures, sympathetic people, sublime food) come with drawbacks (blistering deserts, Mad Max roads, a murderous police state). Bashar's sham election earned him 92.79 percent of the vote, security forces killed at least two dozen Kurdish demonstrators in March 2004, and you can still find the leader of the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise-ship hijacking in the Damascus phone book. A year ago, the Syrian government dramatically enhanced its reputation for stupidity by allegedly sponsoring the assassination of Hariri, one of its sharpest critics. The massive car bomb that killed the former prime minister backfired: Street protests erupted throughout Lebanon, Muslims and Christians marching together in what became known as the Cedar Revolution. By last April the demonstrations had forced out the 20,000 Syrian troops that had occupied Lebanon since 1976. Humiliated, the last Baathist army of conquest retreated to Damascus.

Confused, defensive, under investigation, the Syrian government began to look shaky. Days before my arrival last fall, the New York Times advised that . Most fatefully for its future, Syria has become a kind of small-scale Cambodia to Iraq's Vietnam, a transit route and sanctuary for the insurgency next door. The foreign jihadis who slip over the 376-mile border are only a tiny minority in Iraq, but they have drawn Washington's wrath onto Damascus. In October, a White House meeting mapped a range of options for punishing Syria. Increased economic sanctions. Delta Force missions. Or simply the continued initiative to keep Bashar off balance—”rattling the cage.” In November, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered CentCom, the U.S. Central Command, to , the precursor to a war plan.

Only the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that, squeezed between Iraq and a hard place, Syria is in for a bumpy ride. Like Cuba in 1957, this twilight shall not come again. And so, to the tune of the saber rattling, I went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.

Everything in Damascus is fabulously, incomprehensibly filthy, coated in talcum-fine desert grit. It is a city of more than a million, with an outermost layer of cement plants and car dealerships, the dry skin shed by a snake. Inside that husk is a noir new city, a wilderness of empty architectural gestures, never-finished towers of rebar, and abstract avenues that lead to theoretical traffic circles. Orwell designed this Damascus: The Ministry of Information prevents anyone from having information, the Ministry of Economy and Trade strangles the economy, and the Ministry of the Interior meddles in other country's affairs. Every car, shop, and house carries a painting, photo, or decal of President al-Assad—Hafez or Bashar, take your pick.

At dusk, this new city drops its shutters, leaving scattered pockets of seedy nightlife—vinyl “superclubs” that open at midnight, stocked with expensive liquor and Ukrainian dancers. But in the mornings, a better Damascus emerges, the Old City. Still girded with an oval of Roman walls pierced with nine gates, this ancient Damascus is packed with sweet shops, antique dealers, minarets, and, at its heart, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque, where the relics of many religions slumber side by side.

[quote]“Only the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that, squeezed between Iraq and a hard place, Syria is in for a bumpy ride. I went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.”[/quote]

On my first morning in town, the mosque was crowded with busloads of Shiites from Iran and Iraq. The black-clad women and weeping men moaned and beat themselves at the shrine of their great martyr, Hussein, whose death 1,300 years ago begat the long, passionate drama that is Shiism. But the mosque offered dreams for the faithful of all stripes: Greek lettering on the foundation stones, from when it was a Christian cathedral; the remains of a third-century Roman temple; and, in the main prayer hall, a marble-clad catafalque said to contain the head of John the Baptist, who was executed by Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, around A.D. 30. Some Shiites got the wrong idea and fell to their knees, mistakenly crying out, “Hussein! Hussein!”

You can't throw an egg in the Old City without hitting a monotheist. In the Christian quarter, I ran into a group of 36 Spanish Catholics walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul. Paul had been blinded (and unhorsed) outside the city by a “light from heaven,” and the Spaniards were now taking literally the injunction he'd received in Acts 9:11, to “arise and go into the street called Straight.” Today the Via Recta has finned Cadillacs on it, but you can still see the Roman arch Paul would have passed under. The pilgrims had just come from the Old City wall where, wanted by the authorities, the fugitive evangelist had escaped in a basket lowered on ropes.

“It's a revelation to finally know what they knew,” Juan Botey, a quiet, lean, gray-haired Catalan from Barcelona, explained. “To see the places they stood.”

The Spaniards were almost silent as we marched down to the arched basement where Paul had been cured—well, more or less the place, since the location of these spots changes every few centuries. Like the Shiites, though, the Catholics had enough wonder to overcome navigational difficulties, and they launched into a mass in their soft Catalan dialect, not too far from the Latin that Paul would have heard in his day.

On the way back through the Muslim quarter, lost in a maze of alleys, I passed a few coffee shops stocked with European hipsters smoking hubble-bubble pipes and stumbled onto a converted old mansion, the headquarters of the Syrian Environmental Association (SEA). They were holding an open house, showing off art projects made from recycled materialsÌęand handing out “Don't Mess with Damascus” brochures. The chairwoman, a former director of Kalamoun University named Dr. Warka Barmada, quickly admitted that there isn't much of an environmental movement in Syria. She pointed to the Barada River, once a mountain stream sparkling through Damascus. If Paul were baptized there today, he'd come up with a plastic bag on his head and a bad rash: The Barada is a putrid trickle down a garbage-laced culvert.

Beyond the city, problems are legion. Logging in the northwest hill country. Desertification. Uncontrolled pollution by unaccountable industries. (But few petroleum spills—sadly for Syria's sputtering economy, this is one Middle East sand trap with little oil.) President al-Assad has set up a few tiny nature reserves, and a population of endangered oryx has been restored in the desert; other than that, Barmada said, little has been done “that I'm aware of.”

“I'm not talking politics,” she quickly cautioned. Syrians can only talk about what she called “politics with a small p,” meaning issues of daily competence, the performance of government services. “We want to change from within,” she added, “not by opposition.”

But environmentalism can't help but carry a whiff of the capital P. The SEA, Friends of Damascus, and two other green groups are some of the only nongovernmental organizations in Syria. Aside from the dismal national soccer team, just about the only thing it is legal to complain about is the environment. Where else can young idealists go, if not to Dr. Barmada?

Syrians are largely indifferent to things like pollution, she said. “Since we have been a socialist country for a long time, people got used to saying the state will take care of every problem.” But attitudes were changing, she pointed out, “now that we are going through a transition.” She meant the vague changes Bashar had promised: economic reforms, the arrival of the Internet, even free speech. Little of it has come true.

[quote]“I learned three things in Damascus: The enemy has terrible taste in music. The Syrians probably invented food. And Muhammad had a point: At night, the grit disappears and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here.”[/quote]

Transition is a Syrian euphemism. A transition to something unspecified, a world after. After Bashar? After a cruise-missile strike? A civil war? The country was a cipher to its own people. Meanwhile, the Baath elite partied in the thumping nightclubs of Bab Touma, just inside the Roman wall. No-neck men in black suits and T-shirts manned the doors there, whisking in lanky honeys in tight jeans. I spent an hour one night spying from a rooftop restaurant as military officers caroused in the beer garden below. While demolishing ranks of stuffed grape leaves, grilled peppers, and 2004 Lebanese petit verdot, I learned three things. First, the enemy has terrible taste in music. Second, Syrians probably invented food. And third, Muhammad had a point: At night, under a cold moon, all the grit disappears, and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here.

Clashes on the Iraq border, foreign jihadis trickling eastward, U.S. Special Forces allegedly conducting covert incursions inside Syria itself: It seemed like a fine time for a road trip.

I had a guide in mind. In 1909, before he was “of Arabia” and when Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire, 21-year-old T.E. Lawrence had set out in similar circumstances—instability, banditry, and halting Arabic—to write his Oxford thesis on the Crusader castles scattered along Syria's coast. For two months he mapped the dozens of visually linked keeps and signal towers built by the European invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, sleeping in Arab houses and walking huge swaths of the Nusayriyah Mountains with a sketchbook, a pistol, and a Boy Scout shirt tailored by his mother with extra pockets. Except for the pistol and shirt, I was good to go.

Reaching the first and greatest of these castles, Krak des Chevaliers, was a three-hour drive on good roads and the edge of death. I'd quickly learned to pick older, feebler taxis, but the rounded Renault was still squeezed from both sides by trucks going 70 as grinning motorcyclists and panicked donkeys wove crosswise through the mix. Occasional interlopers shot at us headlong, down the wrong side of the divided highway. The bleak landscape was interrupted only by giant statues of the late dictator, Hafez al-Assad, and a road sign that read THANK YOU FOR VISITING HAMA. Hama is where dear old Hafez used tanks to kill at least 10,000 of his citizens while crushing a 1982 rebellion.

Tucked up inside a pass, controlling the high ground, was Krak des Chevaliers, Castle of the Knights, a staggering work of medieval ambition with exquisitely preserved double-curtain walls, towers, battlements, and, yes, a spot for dumping boiling oil on the enemy. Lawrence said it was better than any castle in Europe. From the top of a tower once occupied by Richard the Lionheart, I could see, a dozen miles to the northwest, a small fortress clearly visible against the sky, the next link in the Christian war machine that held much of this coast for close to two centuries.

The Lawrence trail led me to the quiet seaside town of Tartus, where sidewalk cafés gave off clouds of sweet apple tobacco under a full moon. The Crusader fort here had a good restaurant inside the walls. The next day I ran north in a rusted Mercedes 300D. The big Crusader fortress at Marqab, made of black basalt, loomed over the narrow coastal plain like a thundercloud, but the coast itself, a lost bit of Mediterranean Riviera that Lawrence had loved, was now a trash-strewn eyesore, decorated with absurdly huge cement plants and terminals for Syria's tiny oil industry. Even on the isle of Arwad, where a small castle marked the Europeans' last foothold in the East, nobody had gotten Dr. Barmada's memo. Scrap metal and oil slicks ruined the crashing of deep-blue waves.

Lawrence led me on. In Latakia, the country's main port, neon lit up the busiest nightlife north of Beirut. Home to the fiercely secular Alawite leadership, Latakia was the least conservative place in Syria, a small city with as many bars and restaurants as Damascus. The hotels were taken up with spectacular weddings, floral atrocities conducted to blaring pop music and live video feeds. Alcohol was everywhere, women went around in short skirts, and just once, at the beach the next day, I saw that rarest of all things, the Arab bikini.

Above the city, the last green juniper forests of Syria concealed another incomprehensible, absurdly grand castle, Qalat Saladin. My cheery Latakian driver screeched his Lada right to the edge of an overhang to show me why: Ringing a tiny mountaintop, the fortress was surrounded by steep ravines on three sides. The Crusaders had hewed out the rock on the fourth side to make an unassailable edifice. But in 1188, they'd been blasted out in just two days by the great Islamic general Saladin.

While standing there, imagining the giant catapults that had shattered the walls, I was nosed off the road by a minivan that disgorged 15 Dutch tourists. We glared at each other. Syria is like Turkey in the sixties: People expect to have a ruin all to themselves, thank you.

Their local guide broke into a grin when he learned where I was from.

“You see?” he said, turning to his Dutch clients. “There is no terrorism in Syria. Even the American is alive.”

“It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train…” It isn't often remembered how Agatha Christie's most famous book begins, but it was Syria that put the “Orient” in Murder on the Orient Express, and Aleppo, the great highland city of the north, where her sleuth, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, waited for his train. Christie was writing what she knew: Married to an archaeologist, she spent much of the 1930s living in a mud-brick house at a remote dig site outside Aleppo, typing furiously.

The UN had just sent its own Hercule Poirot into Syria to solve a case, namely, the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut. The detective this time was Detlev Mehlis, a former prosecutor from Germany who, like Poirot on the Orient Express, had to sort through a rapidly expanding array of evidence that pointed him to the inescapable conclusion that, just like on the Orient Express, not only had almost everyone been involved but almost everyone was going to get away with it.

Who were the six men who shadowed the prime minister's convoy in Beirut? (They flew away 90 minutes after the bombing.) Who bought the six cell phones they used? (A Lebanese from a pro-Syria party.) Who drove the white Mitsubishi van into Lebanon? (A Syrian colonel.) Where was the van stored before being loaded with more than 2,200 pounds of TNT? (At a Syrian military base.) Which Syrian officials were present at the meeting last February where the crime was green-lighted? (The president's brother Maher and his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat.)

For his own protection, Mehlis was stashed in a “secret location” outside Damascus—a red-roofed hospitality complex in the first range of hills, clearly visible from any Gran Fury crossing the border. Not long after he left, one of the suspects he'd interrogated, Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan, blew his own brains out. (Or was it murder?) Now the case had everything, even a smoking gun.

Like Poirot, I greeted the dawn on a train platform in Aleppo, having made the early run up from Latakia. The train was less Orient Express than early Brezhnev, and the Aleppo station had been improved with murals of Baathist astronauts and victorious Syrian armies. Despite the murals, Aleppo has changed at a glacial pace over the past 6,000 years. Recent big events have included a sacking by the Tartars, in 1260. They pulled down the glorious 11th-century hammam—marauders disdain bathing—but it was rebuilt, and a scalding trip through the steam room, a vicious pummeling, and a cold orange soda set me back $5.

I wandered Aleppo's enormous Armenian quarter, packed with ancient churches and vendors of delicate sweets. (They also have the head of John the Baptist's father, in case you didn't get your fill in Damascus.) There were miraculous and medieval sights around every corner—soccer-playing imams in one place and, down the next alley, cheery children hammering metal inside a Dickensian workshop. Like any police state, Syria has little crime, so the only danger I faced in the souk, the huge covered marketplace, was being run down by a donkey messenger. Crumbling but alive, too poor to be ruined by progress, decorated with old cars and European tourists, Aleppo is a desert flower that persists only in the adverse conditions of geopolitical hostility and a moribund dictatorship.

In the 1950s and '60s, a misguided attempt at modernization bulldozed some wide avenues through these old neighborhoods to make way for a few featureless plazas and office towers. Only a nitpicker of satanic proportions would obsess on how these few alterations had ruined the city, but there was such a man: Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks. A student of urban planning in Hamburg, Atta had come to Aleppo to write his college thesis. The young Egyptian loathed the way that a Le Corbusier grid had been superimposed on the crazed streets of Aleppo, which he viewed as a pure and organic expression of Islamic social relations. He left in 1994, nurturing a seed of hatred for Western architecture.Ìę

I poured gin and tonic on Atta's soul in the bar at Baron's Hotel, a symbol of everything he hated—grandly European, frankly colonial, a faded headquarters for Western cultural subversion. Christie lodged here in the 1930s; on the wall was a bill from April 1, 1914, made out to “Monsieur Laurence”:

[blockquote]4 jour pension menu a repas limonato

32 piastres 3 piastres 2 piastres.[/blockquote]

T. E. had walked much of the distance I'd just covered, arriving in Aleppo to discover himself reported dead in a local newspaper. He got over it: “Aleppo is all compact of colour, and sense of line,” he wrote in a letter home. “You inhale Orient in lungloads, and glut your appetite with silks and dyed fantasies of clothes.” The days were easy to fill as he had, roaming widely in the surrounding hills, consuming an endless buffet of ruins, civilizations piled atop one another. At the Dead Cities, a whole archipelago of old Roman towns, I met shepherd boys with the names of Christian emperors, and a Dutch archaeologist in a thrilled state of despair. Like Lawrence, like Atta, she was here for her thesis, trying to do six months of research on a one-month visa. Snooping where I shouldn't have, in fading light, I slipped and slid into a dank tomb. It was filled with cobwebs, a broken sarcophagus, and 1,500-year-old bones.

I shot out of that hole so fast, the shepherds were still laughing 10 minutes later.Ìę

Lawrence left Syria a student and returned a conqueror, at the head of the Arab Revolt in World War I. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Syria and Lebanon became French mandates, and since both attained independence in the 1940s, the two countries have been entangled in a bitter dance, partners in a bad marriage, each defined by the other. Syria has the plains, Lebanon the mountains; Syria the quiet uniformity of a terrorized population, Lebanon the raucous politics of balkanized factions ready to slit one another's throats. Syria, with its impoverished millions, has the big battalions; little Lebanon, with just under four million people, has the capitalism, the ski resorts, the wine, and the forests. Whatever happens to Damascus will also, most likely, happen to Beirut. So I took a detour.

The man who did the most to instigate the still unfolding divorce between Syria and Lebanon was Walid Jumblatt, clan chieftain and warlord of the Druze, an esoteric Islamic sect scattered through Syria, Israel, and especially southern Lebanon. I found the warlord at sunset in his fortified château in the Druze stronghold of Moukhtara, in the high, stony Shouf Mountains, an hour from the Syrian border. Druze guards with pistols frisked me with practiced ease as Jumblatt waited, talking on his cell phone. In his late fifties, he wore faded jeans and a collar-length fringe of long ringlets that tumbled down from his chrome dome. Surely he is the only warlord in the world who dresses like Frank Zappa, parties with Joe Cocker, and looks like Mr. Magoo.

[quote]“My Druze warlord host claimed not know who killed Prime Minister Hariri, even though the crimes were ongoing: Since Hariri's death, a dozen Lebanese critics of Syria had been dispatched, one by one, with blocks of plastic explosives.”[/quote]

The Druze were perhaps the only political winners in Lebanon's 15-year civil war. Just to review, Christians and Muslims slaughtered each other (1975), the Syrians invaded with 40,000 men ('76), the Sunnis and Shiites fought each other (throughout), the Israelis invaded ('78), there was a depraved free-for-all ('79–'81), followed by a Beirut bombing of U.S. Marines ('83), the return of the Israelis ('84), and daily-shifting alliances and all-out wars between the Druze, Shiites, and Sunnis, with endless rounds of backstabbing among the Palestinians, Christians, Druze, French, and Americans. The two things to remember are that everybody ran out of ammunition in 1990, and that 1975 is now the name of a chic Beirut nightclub with fake bullet holes and sandbags for chairs.

Since the friend of my enemy's enemy is the enemy of my friend's friend, Jumblatt combined the battlefield prowess of the Druze with a fleet sense for when to abandon an alliance. A longtime ally of the Syrians, he'd been the loudest in calling for their ouster, even before the Hariri assassination, and had ridden the 2005 Cedar Revolution to a position as one of the most powerful men in Parliament.

Jumblatt led me inside to sofas in his vaulted office, where we were joined by his five-month-old puppy, a sharpei named Oscar who gnawed on a coffee table. Following a time-honored Druze doctrine of takia, or protective dissimulation, my host pretended he didn't know who killed Prime Minister Hariri.

“Except rumors, I have no idea,” he said, not bothering to conceal a wry smile. “In Lebanon you can hear all kinds of gossip. Lebanese people know everything.” He did blame the Syrian government for decades of crude political manipulation. The crimes were ongoing: Since Hariri's death, a dozen Lebanese critics of Syria had been dispatched, one by one, with blocks of plastic explosives. The latest attack had occurred just two nights earlier: Not long after a popular journalist had attacked Syria on television, she turned the key on her Land Rover and it blew up.

Ìę

Jumblatt's office was a temple to warlord kitsch. A onetime client of the Soviets, he had a fabulous collection of their dress uniforms and vast canvases depicting the Red Army, along with velvet cases of Soviet, Lebanese, and Ottoman military insignia and medals. Since his father and grandfather were both assassinated, Jumblatt also kept a rack of six beautiful sniper rifles—and an artillery-spotting scope aimed over the valley below. When he stepped out to take a call, I inspected the vertical file folders on his desk. They were stuffed with pistols. Five semi-automatics, each sitting on a stack of five clips.

As the firepower hinted, Jumblatt was pessimistic. “The new Lebanon will be like the old Lebanon,” he warned. “Same old troubles. We will see. It depends on American policy.” He feared that the “neocon disaster” in Iraq would spill over into Syria. Any collapse would affect vulnerable, poorly balanced Lebanon.

Jumblatt led me back outside, past a huge marble sarcophagus. “Roman,” he said. “I got this in the time of looting, the eighties. I paid $10,000. Very cheap.” During the civil war, when half the antiquities in Lebanon were being sold abroad, Jumblatt had bought a priceless array of mosaics, which were now on display at an Ottoman palace across the valley. Joe Cocker played a good show there a few years ago, the warlord noted with satisfaction.

As we said goodbye, Jumblatt urged me not to miss Lebanon's famous cedar forests. King Solomon's temple was made from these strong, fragrant trees. There were only two stands of the old-growth giants left, one right here in the al-Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve.

Like his father, Jumblatt had ordered the Druze to plant cedars, three million young trees now growing inside special reserves up and down the mountain range. Although the cedars grow slowly, they can drive their roots down through the cracks in solid rock. Any man who plants three million trees can't be a total pessimist.

The next morning, a Druze park ranger named Hassam Ghanim took me up to 6,500 feet, and we entered the al-Shouf reserve. Ghanim led me to an impressively gnarled cedar, black with age, with two trunks rising in a V. “One thousand eight hundred years,” he said, “if you like and you love.”

I liked and I loved. The tree was my size when Muhammad preached, the height of a house when Byzantium fell and the Ottomans arrived. It had ridden out the civil war because the Shouf Mountains were a no-go zone, the scene of brutal massacres. Wild boar, porcupines, foxes, even wolves had endured here for the same reason.

Ghanim claimed, doubtfully, that this was the “oldmost tree” in Lebanon, but there was a rival stand of cedars in the north, and I wandered that way, hoping to find some enduring lesson in the old giants' survival. This meant heading up the Bekaa Valley, whose southern reaches were a stronghold of the radical anti-Western party Hezbollah. Syrian occupation of Lebanon had run deepest in the northern Bekaa, but now Lebanese soldiers controlled the checkpoints, waving amiably beneath murals of Kalashnikov-toting Shiite martyrs. Despite the Islamist atmosphere, the Bekaa is home to Lebanon's excellent wine industry, and I had a quick snort in the tasting rooms at Château Kasara. A mixed group of Finnish, French, Irish, and Austrian tourists was over from Beirut, wandering the cool cellars and comparing notes. (Hints of sectarian feuding, with lingering aftertaste of summary execution.)

Slurring what little Arabic I could now speak, I negotiated a taxi fare to the Qadisha Gorge—UNESCO World Heritage Site, holy land of the Maronite Catholics, and heartland of Lebanon's crazed Christian militias. The towns were festooned with huge posters of war criminals, but the gorge itself was Lord of the Rings territory: sheer cliffs decorated with waterfalls and vast Catholic cathedrals skewered in God beams of light. We finally topped out at the Cedars of Lebanon, one of five ski resorts in the country. Here was the last big stand—just a few acres—of old-growth cedars, some of them having lived 2,000 years. The dense canopy of evergreen branches created a green sky.

Ìę

I should have quit right there, but instead I made an impulsive and foolish dash the next morning up Lebanon's tallest peak, 10,131-foot Qurnat as Sawda, just behind the ski resort. Equipped with some croissants I'd stolen from the hotel breakfast, I hiked uphill for three hours, but was ultimately turned back by dense fog at about 9,000 feet. Using a compass, I navigated my way back to the top of the ski lift. It was off-season, but three construction workers built a trash fire to warm me up.

“USA good!” they shouted. “Bush good!” They were Christians. Anyone who bombed Muslims was “OK!” with them. This included Israel (“Very good!”) and Ariel Sharon (“Number one!”). They danced around the fire, shouting out their idiot ski-bum agenda for the future. “Drinks good,” they screamed. “Girls good! Marijuana good! Bomb all Muslims!”

Back in Damascus, the veneer didn't seem ready to crack. At a glossy restaurant row full of the Syrian elite, men jockeyed BMWs and Porsches in the valet lots, and Syrian valley girls chatted on their cell phones and ordered sushi as tropical fish swam beneath their feet. Well-educated people told me that, honestly, no Syrians were fighting in Iraq. (Sixty-six have been captured on the battlefield.) No Syrians had been involved in the assassination in Lebanon. (According to Detlev Mehlis, at least six Syrian officials were aware in advance.) President Bashar al-Assad was a farsighted leader, a lovely man. If I knew him for two minutes I would love him. Israel was behind it all.

[quote]“The Syrians are trying to close their 376-mile border, putting up a berm to stop vehicles and pleading for night-vision equipment to track illegal crossings. But it's too late: America is already here.”[/quote]

Meanwhile, the country held its breath. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the great Umayyad Mosque, black cars disgorged “regime elements”: colonels, generals, and secret policemen in tracksuits and dark glasses. Shiites and Sunnis pushed up against each other, crowded by Christians and Kurds. Even a congenitalÌęatheist could be swept up in the riptide of faith. On my last afternoon in Damascus, I followed a stream of Iraqi Shiite pilgrims through the streets of the Old City to the tomb of Raquaya, the daughter of Ali. Five hundred people were trying to enter, and 200 to leave, and the alley changed in an instant from absurdly crowded to dangerously panicked. Amid screaming, shoving, wailing, and angry chants, an elderly woman was knocked down and trampled under a sea of black chadors. Frightened children were passed over the heads of the crowd, surfing the high emotions of a Shiite Lollapalooza. We were on the verge of another ritual, the holy stampede. I fought my way out of the crowd with a new appreciation for the enormous, devotional suffering at the heart of Shiism.

Out in the vast eastern deserts, new defeats await. At the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a sleepy guard waved me into the Temple of Bel when I appeared at first light, too early for the posted hours. “OK,” he said wearily, “you can look.” A once prosperous stop on the Silk Road, Palmyra may possess the greatest array of antiquities in all of the Middle East, which is really saying something. Colonnaded avenues led for three miles through temples, courts, senates, and bathhouses, ending finally, fittingly, in mortuary towers that ran into the far desert.

The futility of empire, the dusty brevity of human ambition, came crashing home, punctuated by the roar of Syrian MiGs passing overhead on their dawn patrol. Iraq was about 80 miles away. The Syrians are trying to close the border, putting up a berm to stop vehicles and pleading for night-vision equipment to track illegal crossings. But it is too late: America is already here. Army Rangers have already had bloody incidents of “friction” with Syrian patrols, and undercover commandos—”special-mission units,” in Pentagon parlance— have reportedly been sent in to stalk the safe houses of the Iraq insurgency. Like the past, the future is now.

Walking out of Palmyra at 7:15 in the sun-bright morning, I ran smack into the same Dutch tour group. Same minivan, same tour guide. “You see?” I told him. “The American is still alive.”

I left Palmyra in a powder-blue Mercedes with the voluptuous curves of the 1950s. For an hour we paralleled the invisible border, nothing but dust between here and the war. A traffic sign with a huge arrow pointed left: BAGHDAD, it read. I went right.

As we raced for Damascus, straight as an arrow, a huge chocolate-brown hawk dropped into formation beside the car. The bird coasted above the roadside ditch at 60 miles an hour, barely moving a feather, grazing the top of the weeds, head down, hunting.

The post Syria, as the World Closed In appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Vern and DonelleÌęKersey aren’t the type of parents satisfied with hauling their kids to aÌęnational park and pitching a tent beneath the floodlights of someone’s motor home. Native Montanans both, when they go to the great outdoors they get all the way there. In the summer of 2010, when Vern’s only week of vacation was pushed into September, the couple were not cowed by the threat of early snow. Along with their two youngest kids, 16-year-old Shelby and 11-year-old Trevor, they set out to hike 30 miles to the , one of the most magnificent and remote features in the country, a 1,000-foot-high, 26-mile-long spine splitting the Rockies of western Montana.

The —known in these parts as the Bob—is 30 miles wide by 80 miles tall, accessible only by foot and horse (and, in dire circumstances, plane), population zero during winter, then inhabited July through September by five fire lookouts perched like lightning rods on isolated vantage points. At night the lookouts find their only human conversation over the airwaves, their tiny voices crackling in static beneath black skies and swirls of clouds close enough to touch.Ìę

The Kerseys bought mummy bags, raingear, and overnight packs, as well as a four-person tent, rain tarp, lightweight stove, and water filter. They weighed out nine days’ worth of freeze-dried food. The Bob is one of the few places in the lower 48 with a robust population of grizzly bears, so the Kerseys packed pepper spray and a 9mm handgun. With no cell coverage, a minor injury like a sprained ankle or hypothermia could be serious.Ìę

And that’s why it was strange when, on the fifth evening, shortly after setting up camp and heading off to collect wood, Vern and Trevor came across a man who looked simply unprepared. He wore army fatigues with a nylon poncho over his backpack. He knelt on the trail, filling a plastic milk jug where water trickled through the rocks, pouring it straight into his mouth. The men exchanged hellos. Vern sensed that the stranger wanted to be left alone, so he kept moving, but just to be safe, as the man entered the Kerseys’ camp, where Donelle and Shelby were firing up the stove, Vern lingered on the rocks and listened.

“How you doing?” Donelle sang out. She was vivacious and fit, with a hint of country in her throaty voice.

The man smiled and made a motion to the holster on his hip. “Just to let you know, ma’am, I’m packin’. ”

Big man! Donelle thought to herself. Her own 9mm lay on the log in plain view. But as she studied the man’s face, he looked less dangerous than hungry, thin in the cheeks, maybe as young as her 22-year-old son.Ìę

“How long you been on the trail?” she asked.

“Thirteen days.”

“Wow!” she said. “Where did you start?”

He told her he’d walked from , then spent three days at a lake.ÌęHungry Horse was at least 100 miles away, a tiny town on the northern edge of the wilderness. She asked the man where he was headed.Ìę

“I’m just going to follow the Wall,” he said.Ìę

Donelle felt her maternal instinct kick in. This is not right. “There’s no trail along the Wall,” she said, showing him on her map where the trail diverged. “And once you get a little down the trail, there’s no camping or fires allowed for four miles.”Ìę

The man just nodded.Ìę

“There’s plenty of good places around here,” she said, making a welcoming gesture.Ìę

“I’m going to keep going.”

“But it’s almost dark.”

“I’ll just curl up under a tree,” he said with a smile.Ìę

“We’re going to cook dinner,” Donelle said. “We brought way more food than we can eat.”

“I’m fine.”

“We really don’t want to carry it all out with us.”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said.Ìę

The man bade them goodbye, and mother and daughter watched him disappear down the trail.Ìę

“What if he’s some kind of psycho who’s going to come back and kill us?” said Shelby.

“Nah,” said Donelle. “He just has some things on his mind he’s trying to work out.”

The next morning a storm blew in, icy rain that soon turned to snow. The Kerseys broke camp and trudged out, chilled to the bone even in their new jackets and fleece. Vern built a fire at lunch. The next day the storm was worse, and the waterlogged family still hadn’t reached the trailhead. They spent the seventh night shivering in the tent. Donelle hoped the stranger in his cottonÌęfatigues and surplus poncho had found a place to stay dry.

OnÌęAugust 17, 2010, 30-year-old veteran NoahÌęPippin arrived at his parents’ home outside Traverse City, in northern Michigan, for a weeklong visit. Earlier that summer, after nearly three years as an officer with the Los Angeles police department, Noah had quit his job and told his parents,ÌęMichael and Rosalie, both 60, that he planned to redeploy with the military. He said he was going toÌęvacate his L.A. apartment, haul his possessions to Goodwill, and live out of his car at the National Guard Armory until he could transfer to a unit that was deploying toÌęAfghanistan or Kosovo.Ìę

It was an abrupt decision, but not out of character. Noah was already a veteran of three fierce combat tours in Iraq as aÌęMarine and had always seemed most at home among the strict regulations of military life. Many vets can’t tolerate the tedium of aÌęcivilian existence, and servicemen routinely discard theirÌępossessions before tours, then buy new stuff when they return. Nor did it seem strange to Noah’s parents that he planned to live out of his car. In 2007, after his honorable discharge, Noah had lived in his Buick sedan in a rest area on the freeway near CampÌęPendleton,ÌęCalifornia, while he covered shifts at Lowe’s and gathered letters of recommendation for jobs. No big deal. Rosalie and Mike were thrilled that they had convinced their eldest son to rent a truck and haul his belongings to their house near Lake Michigan. They were doubly thrilled when Noah arrived a dayÌęearly. He and his dad and his brother Josiah, 29, unloaded the boxes into the basement. Then Noah announced that he would spend that night in a motel.

“It was just plain weird,” said Rosalie, “the beginning of some weird things we did not understand.” But like family often does, the Pippins found ways to explain their son’sÌębehavior. Noah Pippin had always lived by his own code—of duty, structure, and minimal possessions and attachments. He did not date and had never had a girlfriend or, for that matter, a boyfriend. Noah’s father likened the code to that of a samurai warrior. And so it was on this visit. Noah’s plan had been toÌęarrive on August 18, and he meant to stick to it.

Despite the curious beginning, it was a wonderful week. The family took their fishing boat and puttered around the lake. (The youngest of the three brothers, Caleb, 27, lives in Texas and wasn’t there.) Noah’s weight had ballooned the previous year after a knee injury, and Rosalie was so pleased to see him back in good physical shape, smiling and basking in the northern summer sun. She forgave him for listening to his iPodÌęinstead of chatting. “Listen to this!” he said, placing the buds on his mother’s ears. Wagner’s Ring cycle, as usual.Ìę

Eight days after he arrived, Noah hoisted his backpack into a taxi. Mike and Rosalie had offered to drive him to the car-rentalÌęoffice, but he refused. The date was August 25, and he was due in San Diego for National Guard drill on September 10. He did not mention any plans for the drive home. His parents encouraged him to make a vacation of it. The cabdriver snapped a picture of the family, in which Noah looked intensely serene, his arms draped over the shoulders of his mother and brother. They hugged him goodbye and off he went. Minutes laterÌęJosiah found Noah’s watch—an expensive Swiss Army model—and Rosalie called her son’s cell. “Just give it to Josiah,” he said.Ìę

For the next few weeks they heard nothing, but that wasn’t unusual. On September 11, 2010—four days before the Kerseys encountered the stranger at the base of the Chinese Wall—the Pippins’ phone rang. It was the sergeant from the . Noah hadn’t shown up for drill in San Diego. He was AWOL. Did they have any idea where he was?

The Pippins were alarmed.ÌęGiven their son’s strict adherence to his moral code, a scenario in which Noah had intentionally shirked his military duty was nearly inconceivable. After several calls to his phone went straight to voice mail, they began to investigate, discovering that they knew far less about their son than they had imagined.

From the car-rental agency, the Pippins learned that Noah had returned theÌęvehicle just two days after his departure—not in San Diego but at the airport in Kalispell, Montana, more than 1,000 miles shy of his stated destination. Noah had never been to the state or even mentioned it. His phone records showed that on August 30 he had called aÌępizza parlor near Kalispell. The final call, placed on August 31 at 10:45 A.M., was to a different area code and had lasted four minutes. Mike dialed the number and explained to the man who answered that he was looking for his missing son.Ìę

“Dad,” said the other voice. “This is your son Caleb.”

Caleb’s own phone bill confirmed that he had received the call—although his records indicated only two minutes. Caleb had no recollection of it. He sometimes works nights and sleeps during the day, and he remembered a call from Noah that woke him up, but he couldn’t be sure it was on the day in question.

That fall, Mike Pippin flew to Kalispell, met with Flathead County detective Pat Walsh, and posted homemade signs around town featuring a color photocopy of a family photo with the handwritten words Missing Veteran and an arrow pointing to Noah. After the Kalispell news aired a story about the disappearance, a hunter named Bob Schall called in. He and his buddies had seen Pippin near the Chinese Wall on September 15 and offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted, and a hot meal, which he declined. Pippin had walked into their camp late that afternoon, a few hours before he met the Kerseys. His bearing was military: “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” The menÌętalked firearms. WhenÌęPippinÌęrevealed that he was carrying only a .38, a tiny five-shot revolver with a two-inchÌębarrel, Bob Schall let out a hoot. “Well, son, if you comeÌęacrost a griz, youÌębetter save the last bullet for yourself!”

With Schall’s help, Detective Walsh tracked down others who’d seen him. Earlier that same day, a backcountry ranger with the U.S. Forest Service named Kraig Lange had been leading a string of horses up a set of switchbacks near the Wall, on a section of the Continental Divide Trail, which runs from Canada to Mexico, when he came across a man sleeping smack-dab in the rut of the trail. Lange asked him to move aside. “Yes, sir,” said Pippin. “I’ll take care of it right away, sir.”Ìę

Surveying the small pack and spartan gear—Lange remembers Pippin wrapped in a poncho or bivy sack, perhaps without even a pad—the ranger asked if Pippin was a through-hiker. “What’s that?” said Noah.Ìę

“It was pretty weird,” said Lange, who has worked 29 years in the Bob. “I’ve never seen anyone sleep in the trail.” Still, Lange felt no reason to be concerned. “He seemed to be very fit,” Lange said. “Not malnourished or at the end of his rope.” After they passed, Lange and another ranger speculated that they’d just met some sort of “Special Forces kid.”

The Pippins set up a Facebook page called A woman called from Missoula to report seeing a homeless man in fatigues who looked just like Noah. A Missoula cop questioned a look-alike on the sidewalk, but when the man stood up he was six foot three—three inches taller thanÌęPippin. The case had gone cold.

The following summer, his photo appeared on the cover of the weekly newspaper in Missoula, where I live, 80 miles southwest of the Chinese Wall. The mystery was irresistible. I picked up the phone and called Mike Pippin.

Back in TraverseÌęCity, the Pippins had spent the long winter looking for clues at home. Noah was a methodical man, and in the wastebasket of the guest bedroom his parents found evidence of his planning: an instruction manual for a GPS unit, a package for a waterproof carrying case for the device, a sales tag for a Gore-Tex rain jacket, and a plastic bag from a new pair of Magnum-brand “Professional Boots for Tactical Operations.”

Mike and Rosalie sifted through Noah’s boxes in their basement. They discovered pamphlets about Montana hiking trails that had been mailed to his home in Los Angeles. In his notebook, printed in neat block letters, they found this:

SOUTH FROM HUNGRY HORSE ALONG THE EASTERN EDGE OF THE FLATHEAD RESEVOIR TO THE SPOTTED BEAR RIVER. THEN EAST ON SPOTTED BEAR RIVER (TRAVELING ON IT’S NORTHERN BANK) UNTIL BLUE LAKE(S) IS REACHED.

Here was the first confirmation that Noah had not just wandered into the woods but had plotted his hike for weeks, possibly months. On the next page he had written:

WATCH
BINOS
X2 PONCHOS
GPS
COMPASS
X5 HONEY BOTTLES
WATER
BEEF JERKY
FLOTATION DEVICES

A serious wilderness expedition. But it raised questions. How long did Noah expect to survive the Bob Marshall in September on just jerky and honey? And what was he planning to do with flotation devices? Did he mean a personal flotation device—a life jacket? Why would he need more than one? More puzzling was his destination. Blue Lakes is a nondescript waypoint about 20 miles northwest of the Chinese Wall and would notÌępresent itself to someone browsing a guidebook or Googling “hike Bob Marshall” or “isolated wilderness Montana.” Probably the only way Noah could have learned of the existence of Blue Lakes was if somebody had told him about it. But who?

Other discoveries were just as ambiguous. Another to-do list, scrawled on scratch paper in the wastebasket,Ìę included “Return vehicle to Toyota Financial.” But Noah had not returned the 2002 Corolla that he still owed a couple thousand dollars on—and which he planned to live in. Instead, he left it in the lot of a LosÌęAngeles shopping mall, where it was promptly impounded and auctioned. The list also included “Close email account(s).” When he was in Iraq, Noah had regularly written his parents from hisÌęYahoo account. If he had beenÌęplanning to deploy again, why close it?

Months after the disappearance, the Pippins and Detective Walsh were asking the same two questions: Why had Noah walked into the Bob? And where was he now? The simplest explanation was that he had gone hiking, only to be overcome by the elements, a fall, a bear, freezing, or starving. But that didn’t explain why he had concealed his plans from his family.Ìę

Suicide was a possibility—especially given Pippin’s recent military service. While only 1 percent of Americans have served, recent studies have shown that vets account for 20 percent of the suicides in the U.S. According to his parents, Noah had seemed preoccupied when they last saw him. He had canceled his accounts on and and (a video-game site) and given his mother his Kindle, with its 80 nonfiction books—ranging from de Tocqueville to Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein to Nietzsche—saying, “I won’t need this anymore.” It had not struckÌęRosalie as strange; Noah often gave her his gadgets when he upgraded. But in retrospect his words were ominous. Still, his final known actions did not indicate suicide: Why would a man wanting to die buy all-new gear and plot a hundred-mile hike?

Maybe, then, Noah was still alive. Perhaps he had faked a disappearance and wasÌęliving a new life, on the streets or in a different country or under a new identity, free of debt and military obligations or some other secret burden he could not share with his family. He was equipped to travel and had last been seen within walking distance of theÌęCanadian border. The Pippins, like any family, clung to this hope, wondering if he had just decided to check out for a while and think things over. His brother Josiah imagined Noah alive and well, and told me, “It will be amusing to hear his reaction to all of this.”

The Pippin home was once a cafĂ© and boardinghouse for a railroad depot andÌęvillage that were swept away by aÌętornado half a century ago. When I visited lastÌęOctober, a homemade sign on the lawn read EGGS $3 DOZ. With a hand-cranked coffee grinder and a woodstove, the house had that comforting smell of plank floors and the old-timey ticktock and hourly yodels of a cuckoo clock. Even with the computers and faxÌęmachine, the Pippin home resembled the 1800s as much as the 21st century.

In 1988, after stints in Memphis and Berkeley, the Pippins moved to northern Michigan, where Mike landed a job as a pension adviser. They are devout Christians, and Rosalie said the move was partly a retreat from the chaotic and corrupt world around them. “We wanted more control over our children’s exposure to people,” she told me. “When you see badÌęinfluences, you think: Let’s not take them into our home.” Both Mike and Rosalie had grown up with the television always on. TheyÌęwanted their boys to be outdoors, climbing trees. They required Noah and his brothers to clean the chicken pens and collect the eggs.Ìę

The Pippins created a sheltered haven. Noah was a hardworking kid who tromped miles though the forest to the golf course where he was a groundskeeper. He never so much as sampled a joint. But for Noah, the pastoral idyll was mostly a proving ground for his real passion: the worlds he created in his imagination. With his brothers and friends, the woods became fantastic battlefields for ninjas, warriors, commandos, and space creatures. At night the boys played long games of cover and concealment, searching for one another with flashlights.

Soon enough, Noah discovered theÌędreaded television and video games. “I had everything at my place he wasn’t allowed at his,” remembers Patrick McDonnell, one of his closest childhood friends. “Cable TV, video games out the wazoo, freedom of expression, swear words. It was his escape into the world he’d often read about but wanted to experience. He’d spend all weekend at my house, glued to the television in my room, channel surfing and soaking everything in like a sponge.”

A big kid, Noah played on the high school football team, but by then he was mining the experience for irony. While he liked the discipline and physical training, what he seemed to relish most—to boast about—was the fact that, in his two years on the squad, the team didn’t win a single game.Ìę

In 1998, Noah went off to , a three-hour drive fromÌęTraverse City. He changed his major fromÌęjournalism to philosophy. Noah hadÌęchosen to be baptized when he was 18, but now,ÌęcitingÌęNietzsche and Richard Dawkins, he declared first that God did not exist and then, putting a finer point on it, argued that because the existence of God could never be scientifically proven one way or the other, it wasn’t worth debating. Unlike his Christian parents, who tried repeatedly to bring him back to God, Noah was a Man of Reason. After two years, he transferred to for prelaw, a move that his father now thinks was a mistake. “He just didn’t fit in,” said Mike Pippin. “Noah would like to go running—in a snowstorm—and then he’d come back to the dorms and everyone was sitting there smoking pot.” Noah’s grades declined, and in the summer of 2002 he left college without a degree.

Pippin was inducted into the on January 22, 2003, just as theÌęnation was preparing for war in Iraq. He joined less for political or patriotic reasons than for the discipline, strength, and adventure it promised, and—above all—the honor. It was a word Noah used often, one he applied not just to his heroes from war memoirs and science fiction but also to the authors—Plato, Darwin, Adam Smith—whose strict adherence to truth had altered the course of civilization.Ìę

“In a very Aristotelian sense, he tried to have a good habit,” said fellow Marine Aaron Nickols, who described Pippin as principled, deliberate, and intentional. Aristotle tells us that we are what we repeatedly do, and therefore excellence is not an act but a habit. “He never wavered from what he believed,” said Nickols. “At all.”

Noah shipped to Iraq in 2004. There, in the presence of his fellow Marines, he seemed embarrassed by his doting parents, letting their care packages sit unopened while his comrades jealously imagined the home-baked brownies and local dried fruits inside. In his two tours in Fallujah and one inÌęRamadi, Noah saw some of the worst fighting of the war, but he didn’t speak much about it to his parents. During the 30-day leave between his first and second tours, he didn’t evenÌęvisit home, choosing to remain in the barracks reading and gaming.Ìę

Although aloof, he could be tender with his mother, addressing her as Mutti andÌęMadame Le Goose. From Fallujah he sent chattyÌęe-mails about care packages (“I gobbled the cherries right up!”), about the family getting a new animal (“A FREAKING COW???!!! 
 LOL! Ohhhh man, I thought we had trouble with the chickens”), and about their mutual struggle to maintain their weight.Ìę

On September 29, 2006, during his final tour, Noah was almost killed. While he was manning the turret of a Humvee patrolling Fallujah, an SUV sped out of an alley. “Truck in convoy!” came the warning on the radio, but Noah and his team never even saw it. The SUV detonated, and the Humvee erupted in flame, lifted on two wheels, then somehow managed to land flat. The men were knocked unconscious but quickly came to and leaped from the burning wreckage. Noah was confined to the camp for medical observation but returned to work within 24 hours. “It was just a matter of time in my line of work,” he wrote to his father. “I’ve made a full recovery except for my hearing which is pretty much shot. 
 Please don’t tell mom cause I know she’ll just make trouble for me!”

Mom learned soon enough. “Noah, God saved your life in this last blast and those of your buddies,” she wrote. “For the last 4 years, your Dad and I have been asking Him to save your life until your surrender to him. Oh Noah, turn away from your life of self-will!”

But Noah did not surrender. His rejection of his parents’ religion bordered on defiance. The dog tags he wore in combat were stamped just below his name and blood type with the word ATHEIST. During one visit home, he told his parents that he had employed the services of prostitutes. He also showed them photos of dozens of Iraqi corpses, the results of his efforts as a mortarman. One night his father told him how they had looked up at the moon above Michigan and realized that Noah had seen the same moon from Iraq, and they wondered what their son was thinking. “The only thing I thought about was that there are people out there who are trying to kill me,” Noah laughed, dismissing the chance to confide any more.

“Ever since he was a teenager, he justÌęnever liked what we put out on the buffet,” said Mike Pippin. “He did not accept our belief that Jesus is the Messiah. It just wasn’t for him. I think it’s obvious in retrospect that he is well suited to be a soldier or a policeman, and I wasn’t that kind of person myself and I found it difficult to recognize.”Ìę

When I visited the Pippins, 14 monthsÌęafter their son’s disappearance, they were beginning to accept the possibility that Noah was dead and were combing their memories of his last visit for clues about his emotional state and intentions. As a child he had been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated with Ritalin, and during his visit it had seemed to Rosalie that his symptoms were returning. As he sat at the dining room table, Rosalie mentioned a new book about the condition, which she suffered from as well. The author proposed that people with attention deficits wereÌęgifted in ways not always appreciated by society.

“Being this way is not an advantage,” he snapped at her. “I’m defective.”

“He was just so hard on himself,” said Rosalie. Three days before his departure, at a party at Good Harbor Beach, she tried to spring Noah from his shell by introducing him to a family friend—also a Marine, also a vet. The men debated religion until Noah cut it short. Later he complained that discourse with the Marine had been like wrestling a beanbag. Any time Noah won a decisive point, the man rehashed the same emotional appeal. He inserted his headphones, oriented his lawn chair toward the sunset, and returned to his hardcover, .

Noah simply hadn’t been himself that week. “Normally, he would have laid on the couch and I would have scratched his back and he’d tell me the things deep in his heart,” said Rosalie. “But this time we just never got to it. He just didn’t open up.”

Phone and credit card records subpoenaed by Detective Walsh reveal the activities of Noah Pippin’s final week in civilization.ÌęAfter leaving his parents’ house midmorning on August 25, Pippin ate the next day at a diner in Moorhead, Minnesota, nearly 800 miles away. Late that night, he called aÌęmotel in Hungry Horse. The following day he dropped off the car at the Kalispell airport, another 1,000 miles to the west. A taxi shuttled him from the airport to Hungry Horse, a settlement of 934 souls on the Flathead River.Ìę

For Walsh, a Flathead native and a veteran detective whose father had once been county sheriff, the records presented as many questions as the clues at his parents’ house did. Flanked by such jewels as , , and , Hungry Horse is not a destination but a waypoint, offering little more than two gas stations, two diners, and two motels. Why, after such a deliberate drive west, didÌęPippin spend five days there? He took meals at the , a tourist magnet that hawks huckleberry jams, pies, syrup, soaps, lotions, and saltwater taffy. He bought groceries—not expedition provisions but casual fare: sandwiches, apples, roast chicken, a couple of cans of Coke Zero. By all accounts Pippin hardly ever drank, yet in three days he bought a bottle of red wine, a bottle of white, a corkscrew, two cans of hard lemonade, and a premixed screwdriver. He placed calls to three credit card companies.ÌęPippin purchased food in Hungry Horse each dayÌębetween August 27 and 31, but he didn’t check into the until the 29th. Where had he spent the first two nights? Detective Walsh canvassed the other motels, with no luck.Ìę

On the morning of August 31, Pippin left without checking out, leaving behind three pairs of pants, a laptop case, a sheet of camouflage netting, and car chargers for his cell phone and laptop. His computer has not been found. From the menu at , where the most expensive breakfast item is $9.95, he racked up a bill of $23. Was Noah withÌęanother person? Walsh couldn’t find any waitresses who remembered him. At 10:45 A.M., Noah placed the lost call to his brother. And there the paper trail ends. After that, if what he told the Kerseys is true, he walked 64 miles on a dirt road to the Spotted Bear trailhead, then another 30 miles to the Chinese Wall, where he was last seen 15 days later.Ìę

Through the long winter and into the spring of 2011, as authorities waited for snowmelt to allow a search, a few clues trickled in. Then, in August, a Boy Scout troop discovered a shirt stuffed into a tiny creek, just a few miles south of where Pippin was last seen. Three weeks later I boarded a Chinook helicopter at dawn, along with 20 members of the Lewis and Clark County search-and-rescue team, the sheriff himself, three deputies, oneÌęranger, one TV reporter, and a cadaver dog. Rosalie Pippin had posted on Facebook, “The sheriff asked us to ask any praying people to pray for him and the team 4 things: wisdom, discernment, guidance, and for A MIRACLE!”

We flew low beneath the rain clouds, meandered between the forested flanks of Moose Creek, then topped over a grassy ridge and saw it—the Chinese Wall—cresting overhead like a tsunami. We found the shirtÌęwithin an hour and called for the dog, whoÌęarrived with her handler, a man with a potbelly and a gray walrus mustache. Heavy snow was falling. The dog sniffed the fabric without interest and lapped water from the stream. “If sheeda got a scent of cadaver, sheeda lay down, or sat,” the handler said mournfully. A deputy extracted the shirt. It could have been there for years, having grown a pelt of green moss. By now three inches of snow covered the forest floor, wildflowers bending beneath the load. “That’s what the good Lord sent,” said Sheriff Dutton, “so we can know what Noah went through.”Ìę

The next morning was sunny, and we broke into teams and combed the forest and boulder fields. “Thousands of hidey-holes out there,” said someone. If Pippin were injured or hypothermic or starved—orÌęsuicidal—he could have crawled into any one of them and died. Then again, if he’d walked 15 daysÌędebating whether or not life was worthÌęliving, this place—if anything—might have convinced him that it was. I belly-crawled into a cave and probed its corners with my flashlight. Maybe he was sitting on a beach in Zihuatanejo.

The foul weather prevented the searchers from reaching the spot where the trail left the wall, and ultimately the shirt could not be identified as Pippin’s. Bones pulled from caves were animal.Ìę

In October, a few weeks before the search team could launch a second mission, theÌęPippins dropped a bombshell.Ìę

“We’ve asked the searchers to stand down,” Mike told me. “We can’t for theÌęmoment tell you anything more about it, which is the same thing we told the deputies. We’re going to investigate it ourselves and find out if it’s actually credible. We’ve got information that Noah may be alive.”

In April 2004, Noah Pippin andÌęCharlie Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines,Ìęarrived in Fallujah just days after insurgentsÌęambushed four American contractors, mutilated and burned their bodies, and dangled them from the Euphrates Bridge. The Marines fought a month of intense urban warfare. “It was gruesome,” said Major David Denial, Pippin’s platoon commander. “You’d kill people, and the dogs would come eat them at night.”Ìę

By all accounts, Noah Pippin was a good Marine. “He was very quiet and always could be relied on to get the job done,” said Gunnery Sergeant Tracy Reddish, who years after retiring is still called Gunny Reddish by his men. Trying to piece together Pippin’s life in L.A. and at Camp Pendleton, I’d flown to California to meet with Reddish and other members of his platoon.ÌęWhether charging an enemy position or scrubbing the toilet, Pippin never questioned an order. He was so averse to getting in trouble that when the men went out for beers in Oceanside in civvies, and were required to wear a flat-bottomed shirt or tuck their tails, Pippin did both.Ìę

Pippin’s respect for rank approached meekness. One time a senior Marine throttled Pippin with a leghold until his face was bright pink, and as the others hollered for Pippin to fight back, he gasped that he wouldn’t strike a corporal. His buddies determined that at 220 pounds he resembled a huge panda, and called him Man Panda. When Pippin revealed a fanatical love for Imperials, the cinnamon candies in MREs, his nickname evolved to Manda, the Elite Imperial Guard.

Although his gentleness invited teasing, it also won respect and affection. AdamÌęPadavic joined the Corps when he was just 19, a kid from a small town in Illinois whoÌęwanted to be a cop like his mentor, and he remembers Noah as one of the only senior Marines who didn’t scream at the rookies or even raise his voice. “If you had a problem, you could go talk to him,” said Andrew Chavez, another grunt from Charlie Company. “He treated us like a big brother, looking out for us. He’d notice if someone was getting upset, and he’d say, ‘Calm down, it will be fine.’ ” Noah never drank, smoke, or chewed. In his free time at Pendleton, always struggling to maintain his weight, he would sometimes pack his gear and hike solo through the hills.Ìę

In February 2005, Pippin arrived for his second tour with Charlie 1/5, in Ramadi,Ìęanother insurgent stronghold 77 miles west of Baghdad. The 215 men were housed in bunks at Camp Snake Pit, a long brownÌęstucco barracks. Their mission was to drive convoys into the hostile city and capture or kill suspected terrorists. “Every house was considered unfriendly,” said Reddish. “We went in with arms loaded, took over the house, made sure nobody was a threat, moved them all to one room, broke down as soon as possible, and got out of there.”Ìę

Sometimes they found bad guys with guns and bombs, sometimes women and children huddled and wailing. Each day, Noah and his fellow Marines loaded into Humvees and trucks and motored toward town, knowing that at any second they could be blown sky-high. Charlie Company would eventually hit 38 improvised explosive devices. “Ramadi was like the Wild, Wild West,” said Reddish. “There was a shootout damn nearÌęevery day.” The Marines were required to haul theÌęcorpses of insurgents they had killed intoÌęvehicles for transport to a base, to be identified and then handed over to Iraqi authorities. “Noah was straight-faced,” says Padavic. “He didn’t share emotions. He didn’t talk about killing or how many he’d killed.”

The Marine whom Noah admired most was Matthew Trigo, who had proven himself an exceptional warrior in his first two tours. The letter of commendation for his Bronze Star reads like a Hollywood script. Trigo takes out three enemy vehicles with his Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher. Trigo rushes into gunfire and digs a position with his foldingÌęshovel, then decimates the enemy. Trigo loads a single round into his machine gun and from 750 yards kills the driver of a moving car. But Trigo takes no credit for running into gunfire to drag his brothers to safety. “They were lifted by the Holy Spirit,” he told me. “I was just an ambassador. Best case: I save you. Worst case: I’m with my Father in Heaven.” A wall of muscle with a kind face and thin-rimmed eyeglasses, Trigo is a master of nine martial arts disciplines and was something like Charlie Company’s resident mystic. When he learned that Noah was estranged from his Christian upbringing, Trigo tried to coax him back into the flock.

“Bring on your Nietzsche,” Trigo toldÌęPippin. “Give it your best shot. I’m just a Neanderthal Marine, but I’ve got truth and light on my side.”

“You’re my hero,” Noah told Trigo. “I want to be like you.”

“You can’t be nice to me and then hard on yourself,” said Trigo. Like Pippin’s family, Trigo had noticed Noah’s tendency to be self-critical. “I’ve lied, I’ve cheated. I kill men. I’m no better than you. Anything that’s awesome about me isÌęawesome about you.”

Although most men in the platoon were not practicing Christians, Trigo led them in prayer. “Lord, unharden Noah’s heart. No man can hear the prophecy and be unchanged. Intellect without love is educated barbarism.” When I asked if his brother Marines resented his preaching, Trigo seemed surprised.

“They love me,” he said. “They love me.”

Of all the war stories told by Pippin’sÌęfellow Marines, none was more devastating than what happened on June 16, 2005. It was about 115 degrees, and Adam Padavic climbed aboard his Humvee, lead vehicle, rear right seat, same as always. He had carved hisÌęinitials on the steel bench with his pocketknife. Erik Heldt was up in the turret. As the engines roared, John Maloney opened the door. Maloney was Charlie Company’s veteran captain, and the men loved him. “The best man I ever knew in my life,” said Reddish. He was what Marines called a mustang—a grunt who’d risen to officer by proving himself. He wasn’t some ROTC boy who arrived in Iraq with a textbook, thinking he could tell combat vets what to do. “The best CO we ever had,” Padavic told me one day at his apartment in Los Angeles. “He really loved us.”

That morning, Maloney sent Padavic toÌęanother rig. “I’m riding here today,” he said.

They made enemy contact at the first house they stopped at. They were out of the vehicles, up on a rooftop, taking fire, returning it. Then back to the convoy to pick up the Army engineers. On the way back to camp, there was an explosion. The men leaped from the vehicles and broke into a house, blasted through the windows, emptying their magazines into the streets, hot brass shells flying into their faces. “Fucking chaos,” saysÌęPadavic. Suddenly Gunny Reddish appeared: “Where are the body bags?” Padavic didn’t understand. Why did they need body bags for these guys? “It’s not for them. Maloney’s been hit.” An IED had ripped open the fuel tank, the Humvee exploding and flipping in a storm of flame. When the fighting subsided, Reddish ordered his men away and brought in another platoon to hoist up the wreckage to find Heldt. He wanted his men to remember their brothers as they were in life.

As Padavic told me this story, he asked if I minded stepping outside with him so he could smoke. “I get kind of emotional,” he said. We stood beneath the eucalyptus trees and hazy L.A. sunshine. He stubbed his cigarette and tossed the butt. “Cap Maloney was a big guy,” he said, his voice cracking. He held his hands apart as if he were measuring a fish. “His body bag was only this big.”

That afternoon, Camp Snake Pit wasÌęmiserable. Maloney and Heldt were dead, and three others were critically burned.ÌęGunny Reddish remembers Pippin andÌęPadavic sitting on the porch, a look of shock and grief on their faces. Reddish didn’t see the good in sitting around and moaning about it all day. What was done was done. They needed to take their minds off it. “Get your gear,” he ordered. “We’re goingÌęafter the bad guys.”

Noah Pippin was the first man on the truck.Ìę

As I waited to hearÌęfrom the Pippins last fall about the mysterious development, I traveled around Montana tracing Noah’s known whereabouts. Those who had seen him last were struck with a similar impression that he was saddled with a great emotional burden. I spoke with Bob Schall, who arrived at my Missoula home in jeans, a snap-button dress shirt, and a weathered Stetson. He recalled that after Pippin drained his coffee and walked off, Schall said to his friend, “That boy’s got some problems.” A few hours later, as the embers burned red, his friend turned to him and said, “You’re right.”

Schall figured the Marine had been through a divorce or something like that and was wandering the woods to clear his head. “That’s what I did after my divorces,” said Schall. “All of them!”Ìę

I drove to Hungry Horse from Missoula. It was a crisp fall day, cottonwoods bursting yellow on the banks of the river. At the Mini Golden Inns, Noah’s last stop, the proprietor, Kodye VanSickle, showed me Room 59, where the aquamarine carpets and blond furnishings and framed watercolors delivered on the marquee’s promise of Squeaky Clean Rooms. VanSickle was a delicate woman with gray hair, glasses, and sparkling eyes.Ìę

“He looked like he was carrying way too much,” she told me. “His exterior being was silent, like he could not express it to anyone.”

“What was on the interior?” I said.

“He was suffering,” she said. “The kind you have to do alone. He was searching for that connection that feels whole. I saw a dark shadow over his being.”

“Do you think he’s alive?”

She paused as if communicating with the ether.

“I’m not feeling that at all.” She cupped her breast. “I have a prayer heart—he’s in there. He’s one I wish hadn’t gotten away.”

She looked me in the eyes. “You were meant to be here, too.” Ms. VanSickle placed a medallion in my palm. Saint Jude. “The saint of impossible causes,” she told me. “You’re going to need this.”

From Hungry Horse I crossed theÌęRockies to Great Falls and looked up the Kerseys. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about him,” Donelle told me as we sat in theirÌęliving room more than a year after theirÌęencounter. “If I would have known that I was the last person to see him, maybe I could have convinced him to stay.” Vern Kersey has had a recurring dream in which he is searching for Noah in the woods.ÌęFinally he comes upon a tiny ramshackle cabin. He pushes open the door. Hunched over a rickety table, eyes hollow and face drawn in emaciation, like a ghost, is Noah Pippin.

It wasn’t until late October that Noah’s parents filled me in about their new development. They had received a phone call from a man named Miguel who told them he had read about Noah’s disappearance online. He said he had a niece who tended bar at the Loco Gringo in Tijuana. She had a boyfriend, a big American with a shaved head who looked just like the pictures Miguel had seen of Noah. Miguel said he had a friend named Carlos from the National Guard who had helped buy the man a fake passport. Miguel wanted to know if it could be Noah, and if so, was it safe for his niece to be dating this man. Was he a killer? Rosalie said that her son was not dangerous. Miguel said he would call back.Ìę

A month later, a credit card company called looking for Noah. Rosalie explained that he had been missing for more than a year. The agent said, “Well, someone’s been using this card.” The account had been opened at a department store in Iowa onÌęAugust 15, 2010, two days before Noah arrived at his parents’ house in Michigan. Someone had been making purchases with the card—and paying it off—as recently as March 2011. The Pippins asked to see the statements but, maddeningly, were told that only Noah himself could request information about his account.Ìę

The Pippins were cautious but elated.ÌęRegaining hope that Noah was alive, the family was determined to respect his privacy, which was why they decided to investigate the lead themselves instead of going to the police. Mike Pippin canceled his upcoming trip to canvass small towns in Montana and planned a visit to San Diego instead. For the first time in a year, the Pippins believed they were within reach of finding their son.Ìę

Noah Pippin returned from Iraq in 2007 to a nation that was largely indifferent. “America is not at war,” said Gunny Reddish. “America is at the mall.” When the war began in 2003, 74 percent of Americans believed it was worth fighting. By the time NoahÌęreturned, that number had dropped to 33 percent, where it has remained ever since. An Iraq vet can surmise that two of three people he encounters don’t consider his sacrifice worth the trouble.Ìę

“You come back to this oblivion,” says Reddish, “and people don’t even care that you’re in a bad way, that your friends had to be identified from a dog tag in their boots. They say, ‘You did a great job. Now, how much money do you owe me this month?’ ”

A few weeks before his discharge, in March 2007, Noah visited home, and his parents threw him a 27th birthday party. Noah “has learned that he is more anxious than most in social situations and has a tendency toward paranoia and obsessive thinking,” Rosalie wrote to a friend at the time. “Yesterday he described to Josiah that his ‘demons’ areÌębeginning to come back (i.e. depression,Ìęanger, anxiety, etc.) and he lightly told Josiah it’s time for him to leave.”Ìę

“He looked war weary, subdued and overall just tired, like many vets I’ve seen since,” wrote his friend Patrick McDonnell, who was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. “It may have been a combination of his experiences overseas and the amount of growing up since we last saw one another, but I could tell at least a little part of my childhood friend wasn’t there in his eyes anymore.”

When Noah returned to Pendleton, his closest buddies had been discharged. “The Marines are allowing him to stay in the barracks until April 21 but he does not know what he’s going to do after that date,” Rosalie wrote to a military support group. “Does anyone in your group have experience with how to help a son transition to civilian life?”

Noah left the Marine Corps with very little savings. After living in his car for six months, he was hired by the LAPD. His training salary didn’t cover all the gear and uniforms, and the California National Guard was offering a hefty incentive. For a Marine, the National Guard was a step down, but he needed the money. “I ended up joining the army (lol),” he wrote to Marine Andrew Chavez, “and they gave me a 20,000 dollar bonus in ’07 for going into the National Guard (lol) as an infantryman.”Ìę

While he waited for the payment, Noah lived in his car in the alleys near the police training center. With his military background, he was made a squad leader. But the honor only caused more anxiety: it was stressful enough to arrive an hour early to use the shower. The cadets teased him because sometimes he smelled like a homeless man; they didn’tÌęrealize he actually was one.Ìę

Eventually, Noah rented a single bedroom in the back of an old house on the southern fringe of Koreatown, on a barred-window stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard, one of the city’s busiest arteries. The landlord lived in front and spoke no English. Noah shared a bathroom and kitchen down the hall with some other cops. He furnished his room with an air mattress, a single chair, a television, and a small table for his laptop. There was no closet, and his few possessions were scattered in boxes on the floor. For the first year or so he ate out or ordered in, until his parents shipped him a Crock-Pot from the Sears catalog.Ìę

As a probationaryÌęofficer, Noah wasÌęassigned to the crime-ridden Southeast District. Figueroa Street is dotted with storefront churches, payday-loan merchants, places to send money south of the border, and ratty motels. At night it’s populated by streetwalkers and crack dealers.Ìę

Noah felt like he was arresting people for the same misdemeanors day in and day out, only to see them resurface a few days later. Instead of fixing a busted system, he was enabling it. Noah complained that some of the officers who trained him were lazy. They would respond to a call at the end of their shift, and if the senior officer didn’t want to do the paperwork, he would tell the citizen to file it in person at the station. “Noah is a black-and-white guy,” said his father, “but the LAPD was gray.”Ìę

Although he expressed his unease to his family, Pippin’s code of honor prevented him from publicly speaking ill of hisÌęfellow officers. “In Noah’s background and way of thinking, he still owed loyalty to his peers noÌęmatter what they did wrong or how those thingsÌęaffected him,” said his brotherÌęCaleb. “That’s an idea and pressure that was placed on him mostly due to his military background.”

Just a few months into his rookie year, Noah was called up by the National Guard to deploy to Kosovo, but he tore his ACL during a training exercise. After surgery, the Army paid for a physical rehabilitation program in LosÌęAngeles and gave him a desk job in a downtown skyscraper, in the securityÌęoffice of the . His boss, Jeffrey Koontz, is an avuncular, bald-headed man who patrols his windowless cubicle in combat fatigues and fields phone calls by punching the speaker button and hollering,Ìę“Sergeant Major!” When Pippin arrived for his first day on the job—also bald, also inÌęfatigues—everyone joked that SergeantÌęMajor had hired his own son.Ìę

“I’d be proud to have Noah as a son,” said Koontz. He remembers Pippin as quiet, earnest, and unfailingly polite. “We had some great conversations,” says Koontz. “He was a really deep thinker, very analytical, not a typical cop.”Ìę

Noah commuted in camo in his Corolla, up Crenshaw and across Wilshire. By parking in the five-story garage, it was possible for him to spend a day at work without ever going outside, or for that matter looking out a window. He arrived with his PT bag and worked out in the building’s gym. Sergeant Major often invited Pippin to lunch, but Noah declined, typically eating from a brown bag by himself in the break room. He never talked about the war; Koontz never even knew he’d been in Iraq. A woman in the office found the stoic GI dreamy and would alter her route to linger at his desk, but he never so much as asked for her phone number.Ìę

Near the end of 2009, when Noah left the skyscraper, Sergeant Major offered him a permanent job. For several months he left follow-up messages, but Pippin never called back.Ìę

Noah Pippin never sought treatment for, nor was he diagnosed with, post-traumatic stress disorder. He once told his parents that he was worried that any sort of medical treatment—even for the hearing loss he suffered—might rule out future jobs in the military or law enforcement. Nonetheless, Pippin’s behavior after returning from Iraq appears to fit the symptoms, which often include the reexperiencing of combat, avoiding intimacy, and withdrawing from friends and family. Once during training for night-combat operations with the LAPD, in which he and his fellow cadets had to identify paper pop-ups as either threats (a man with a gun) or civilians (a woman with a baby), Pippin screamed “Contact front!” and in a barrage of cursing emptied his magazine at the target. In an exercise where cadets practiced arresting one another, Pippin discovered a gun on his “suspect” and knocked the handcuffed man face-first onto the ground. He was reprimanded but deemed fit to continue his training. I asked an LAPD spokesman if Officer Pippin had ever been evaluated for mental health issues, and he told me that such personnel records were confidential. Pippin’s commander at the National Guard said that Pippin and all guardsmen were regularly evaluated for physical and mental health.Ìę

Diagnosed or not, the war has taken its toll on the men of Charlie 1/5. During my visit with Gunny Reddish, he told me that seven years after Ramadi he still gets phone calls, sometimes in the middle of the night, from young men—scared, drunk, about to do something stupid. He starts out gently, telling them to put down the bottle, take a deep breath, calm down. If that doesn’t work, he reverts to drill sergeant, tells them to shut the fuck up right now or he’s driving halfway up the state of California to put his boot in their ass.Ìę

Pippin never made such calls to Reddish or any of his other Marines. Indeed, several living in the L.A. area had not even known that he was close by. Pippin told his mother that some of his Marine buddies would get together, but because he’d gained so much weight after his injury, he was embarrassed to meet them. He becameÌęisolated. Noah did not keep in touch with his classmates from the academy, nor did he become close toÌęofficers from the Southeast Precinct.

When Pippin wasn’t at work or the gym, he was at home, reading books, playing video games, and sinking deeper into his own mind. When I learned from his brother Josiah that Noah used the online moniker “benx6444,” I searched and found a longÌęrecord of his writings and activities—perhaps the most revealing history of a man who kept largely to himself. He logged hundreds of hours gaming, his favorites being (106 hours), (89 hours), and (68 hours).

The site he apparently visited most was the , a forum dedicated to “the paranormal, fringeÌęscience, and controversial claims from a scientific point of view.” In the year leading up to his disappearance, Noah posted there 2,774 times. He indulged his passion for speculation and history and philosophy: “You wake up on a stretch of beach outside of Rome [in 10 B.C.] How do you earn your living? What could you contribute? Build? Manufacture? What would be the easiest profession to take on/make to become rich?”

On a site dedicated to the Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises, Noah split the sort of hairs generally reserved for graduate seminars:

Is there really a contradiction here between what Mises says about the impossibility of planning an economy due, in large part, to the unpredictable nature of human action and Mises’s seeming implicit assertion that he has, according to the reviewer, “a tool for distinguishing one event from another, and for judging when they are the same.”Ìę

In the Skeptics’ forum, Noah showed increasing cynicism toward his profession. He quipped, “Cops = glorified janitors.” In a thread offering the glibÌęcareer advice “ROTCÌę> Full ScholarshipÌę> JobÌę> $$$$Ìę> Live somewhere elseÌę> Shoot people,” benx amended the final line toÌę“Order other people to shoot people.” To a young man seekingÌęadvice on love, benx replied, “It doesn’t exist.”

Pippin’s online writings reveal a man slipping into the rabbit hole of his own mind. Instead of tackling the big questions, Pippin wove ever more complicated defenses of the smallest points. On , he employed his rhetorical gifts to savage a review of a video game:Ìę

Joe Dobson’s whiny review of ‘Army of Two’ isn’t so much about the game as it is about his POLITICAL VIEWS on a subject and how he feels the game treats his political views. 
 Dobson can’t handle someone else’s perspective, or an interesting dialogue about the effectiveness of State Militarys vs Private ones. He’s already made up his mind, and anyone attempting to even talk about this issue without his stamp of approval, or who isn’t in lockstep with him get’s their game shutdown. What a clown.

In November 2009, Pippin bought an expensive hunting rifle. Taking it to a shooting range was one of the few activities he remained passionate about. “It’s so freakin’ cool!” he wrote. “It’s not like ordering a burger at McDonalds or buying furniture. When you walk into a firing range, you suddenly become aware that your fellow Man is there with you. It’s kinda scary until you look left and right and see that 
 it’s cool, ya know? You can trust each other.”

He wrote that after mastering his rifle at the range, he might like to try hunting big game like bear, elk, and deer. AnotherÌęposter mentioned that hunting black bear wasÌęillegal in Montana. Sometime thereafter, Pippin requested the hiking pamphlets for and the adjacent . This was the closest link I found between Pippin and the Bob Marshall. But as for the rifle, instead of carrying it into the woods, Pippin left it in the basement of his parents’ house.Ìę

Miguel called againÌęin October. He told the Pippins that Carlos’s cousin, anÌęillegal immigrant, and Noah were holed up at a cheap motel in El Cajon, a San Diego suburb. He said that Noah was holding a job in the States, crossing the border to see his girlfriend. Miguel said that one day, while theÌęillegal roommate was at work, Noah invited his buddies over for a party. When the cousin returned, everything had been stolen. Since he was illegal, he couldn’t call the police. He was a real hardworking guy, said Miguel, just trying to get ahead, to support his family back in Mexico, and it was a real shame that because of Noah he’d lost everything.Ìę

The Pippins grew suspicious and asked Miguel for his phone number, but heÌędeclined. They asked if he had a Facebook page, and he said yes. They saw that it had been created that same day. The photo of Miguel was one easily available online. Feeling like they were in over their heads, the Pippins finally revealed their conversations toÌęDetective Walsh, who told them without hesitation that the calls were part of a common scam used to shake down families of missing persons. “I see this kind of thing every day,” he said. The phone calls from Miguel ceased.

Walsh also subpoenaed the credit cardÌęrecords. He didn’t give much credence to the theory that Pippin was alive and shopping. More likely, someone had foundÌęNoah’sÌęwallet and had been using the card. As it turned out, the hope offered by the credit card agent was false; what appeared to be recent activity was actually just paperwork blips caused by the transfer of Noah’s account from one bank to another.

Then, just as the case seemed to turn cold once again, another witness came forward. In October, Steven Pierce was driving near his home in Kalispell when he heard theÌęstory on the radio about the missing Marine. By then, a year had passed since his hunting trip in the Bob. Noah—that biblical name—rang a bell. Pierce called Detective Walsh.Ìę

On the evening of September 12, 2010, three days before Noah had last been seen by the Kerseys, Pierce had hauled his trailer along the 64 miles of dirt road from Hungry Horse to the campground at Beaver Creek on the Spotted Bear River. He led the horses off the trailer and fed them some hay. He noticed the man at the adjacent site with no vehicle and said hello.Ìę

Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry Horse. Seeing the fatigues, Pierce asked if he was military, and Noah told him he was a vet.Ìę

“You been over in Iraq?”

“Got back a little while ago.”

“I was in Vietnam,” said Pierce, hoping to break the ice. “Navy.”

Noah didn’t answer.Ìę

“If you’re going hiking in these parts, you need a gun,” said Pierce. “Do you have one?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Just a .38.”

“That ain’t much to stuff in the face of a grizzly when he’s chewing on your foot.”

“It’s all I got.”

“Where you from?”

“Southern California.”

Pierce surveyed Noah’s camp: a one-man bivy tent, a lightweight sleeping bag, a hunting knife, a small backpack, a plastic jug. It appeared to be all his worldly possessions. No provisions that Pierce could see.Ìę

“You’re obviously not a hunter,” said Pierce. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

Pippin admitted that he’d had someÌęfinancial problems. The only way to get out from under them, he said, had been to join theÌęNational Guard for the signing bonus—which he’d already spent—and now he was locked into more duty. He told the hunter he didn’t want to go back to Iraq or Afghanistan. He was adamant about it.Ìę

This was a drastic break from what he had told everyone else. Like so much in the case of Noah Pippin, it just doesn’t add up. If his financial problems were paramount, his parents, who had often encouraged him to finish college with the GI Bill, would have helped him make the transition. If his chief concern was avoiding a fourth tour, simply remaining in his Guard unit would have afforded him more than a year to figure out a solution. Maybe he felt that he had checkmated himself: by quitting his job, he had no choice but to redeploy, but now 12 days alone in the woods had brought the fatal clarity that he couldn’t go back to combat, and neither could he face the shame of having failed to report.Ìę

Two things are clear. First, the date was September 12, a full two days after he was legally required to report for drill, a fact that surely weighed heavily on a Marine who valued honor above all. The man who found sanctuary in the rules had, for the first time, broken them. Raised in black and white, saved or damned, he could not help but consider himself one of the defective. Second, as he grappled with these life-and-death decisions, he did so without the parents, brothers, and Marines who loved him.Ìę

The two war veterans regarded oneÌęanother at that campground picnic table.Ìę

“Are you AWOL right now?” said Pierce.Ìę

Noah wouldn’t face him.

Pierce asked again.

“Yes, I’m AWOL.”

“That’s not good, son,” said Pierce.Ìę“Marines don’t do that shit. We don’t cop out on our country.”

Noah turned his back and said, “I’m going to bed now.”

“There’s bad weather coming,” said Pierce. “You gonna be all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know the trails out here?”

“Yes, sir.”

Pierce returned to his truck and brought Noah a couple of granola bars and an old map. When he set out on the trail in the morning, he didn’t notice whether or not Pippin was still there.Ìę

Where is Saint Jude when we need him? Kodye VanSickle at the Mini Golden Inns prays the novena to the patron saint of lost causes, of cases despaired of. As of February, Pippin’s whereabouts were still a mystery. Beset by nightmares, Vern Kersey has volunteered himself for the next search mission, sure he could lead them to the right spot. Detective Walsh retired before solving the case, but during his final month as a police officer he went hunting, and of all the grounds he could have chosen, he picked the Spotted BearÌęRiver, where he retraced Noah’s path; he saw a couple of bucks but didn’t take a shot.ÌęGunny Reddish isÌęretired, too, and when he fields those midnight phone calls from his men, he’s glad he spared them the horror of what lay beneath that incinerated wreck in Ramadi, a vision he’s never been able to shake. When I left the Pippins inÌęNovember, they prayed with me, asking for an end to this, hoping that if Noah is alive he might contact them. The war is officially over now, but it wanders our woods, haunts our dreams, andÌęoccupies our prayers.Ìę

On a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, back in October, I got a call from Matthew Trigo. I drove north three hours through the high desert and found him in a spacious home with a green lawn, kids on bikes, afternoon sunshine on the streets. While we talked in his backyard, the distant sun dropping slowly as the hours eased by, his three children crawled onto his lap and he twirled them with his Popeye arms as if they were kittens. Trigo told me he is on disability for his wounds, has trouble holding a job, and doesn’t use the phone much. “I’m a believer in being completely present in the moment,” he said. If a call distracts him from his children, he ignores it.Ìę

“I wish I was still there,” he told me. “When you hear another friend is dead, you think: I should be there.” I asked how he reconciled the demands of war with the tenets of his faith: Thou shall not kill and Turn the other cheek. He spoke of the Old Testament warriors, of David slaying Goliath, of Samson destroying a thousand enemies with the jawbone of a donkey. “I’m a hypocrite and a sinner,” said Trigo. “But we are redeemed by the blood of Christ.”

Across this landscape of believers, Pippin’s knell rings in biblical tones. His Father created a Garden, but Noah Pippin walked out of it, then found the fallen world impossible. While Trigo is able to navigate the jagged terrain between Camp Snake Pit and here, Pippin has not found his way home. Trigo told me that the last he heard from Noah was a few years back, when Trigo agreed to serve as a reference for the police job. He and Noah were messaging, Trigo’s wife doing the actual typing, and Noah tapped in the same lines he used in Iraq. “You’re my hero,” Noah wrote. “I want to be like you.”

“He was searching for peace,” Trigo speculated, “and couldn’t find it, so he went to wilderness, where there is nothing to rebel against. You can’t rebel against nature.”

I asked Trigo if the police department had ever called him.

“No, they did not,” he told me. “I was waiting for them. I had a lot of good things to say about him.”

If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of Noah Pippin, please contact the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Office at 406-447-8293.

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