The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Texas law requires next of kin to identify a body that arrives from a hospital before cremation, but some sights can permanently disorder your mind, and the undertaker judged that Loyd’s body was one of them. When Ward got to the funeral home, she told him she could identify her daughter by the tiny dragon tattoo on Loyd’s ankle. But the undertaker advised her not to look at her daughter’s remains. He pushed a paper toward Ward, who signed it.

  The next day in Maiwand, a man on a motorcycle blew himself up in the bazaar, killing two American soldiers and sixteen Afghans, including an interpreter, and ripping open Jack Bauer’s stomach. Jack would spend the next six months in the hospital with a colostomy bag. It was the worst attack yet on the Americans in Maiwand, and after it happened, the soldiers of Comanche Company steered clear of the bazaar. The company commander decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

  7. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  The federal public defender came to see Don Ayala the day he landed in prison. Michael Nachmanoff had a throaty voice, a second-degree black belt in karate, and a keen ear for dramatic stories. The son of a distinguished Foreign Service officer, he had spent part of his childhood in London, where he’d watched Shakespeare plays incessantly and longed for a career on the stage. The courtroom had claimed him instead. He was fresh off a Supreme Court victory, and he knew the prosecutors and judges of the Eastern District of Virginia better than anyone else. Courtroom narratives didn’t get more dramatic than Ayala’s case, and Nachmanoff wanted to be personally involved. It was perhaps the most compelling human story he’d heard in his career as a defense lawyer.

  The Justice Department had initially charged Ayala with second-degree murder. If convicted, he could have faced life in prison. In early 2009, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter to escape the possibility of a life sentence and to get the thing over with as quickly as possible. A guilty plea meant acknowledging wrongdoing; Ayala knew he had broken the law, but “wrongdoing” wasn’t what he would have called it. Nevertheless, the plea significantly lessened the possibility of a long jail term. He flew back to New Orleans, a convicted felon, to await his sentencing.

  Victory in a legal case depends on which side tells the better story, and Nachmanoff had quickly discerned the nuance that made Ayala’s story so compelling. Ayala’s temperament was the opposite of what many people would have expected from a private security contractor freelancing in the lucrative world of wartime executive protection. He was no undisciplined cowboy. Instead, Nachmanoff thought, he had the biography of an old-school American hero who had been drawn back into service after September 11, protected senior American officials, and risked his life to guard the internationally anointed leaders of post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan. He had killed an Afghan whose hands were cuffed behind his back, but that Afghan had just set fire to Ayala’s teammate, a gentle young American woman. “Anyone possessing a shred of compassion would feel rage at the sight of this,” Ayala’s former Special Forces team commander wrote to the judge. “In this situation all sense of fairness is shattered, the rules of combat are broken.” In fact, the black plastic flex cuffs that had restrained the Afghan constituted the entirety of Ayala’s legal problem. Had he shot the man while he was running the case would probably never have come before a judge. Ayala’s Afghan victim had a name—Abdul Salam—and like Ayala, he had a history. But Nachmanoff’s strategy was masterful. In addition to telling his client’s life story in as much sympathetic detail as possible, he would do all he could to make the flex cuffs and the Afghan who had worn them disappear.

  Nachmanoff and his legal team collected forty-eight letters from people who knew Ayala, including veterans, police, business owners, even a corrections officer. The wife of one of Ayala’s fellow Karzai bodyguards wrote that after her husband had died of a heart attack in Afghanistan, Ayala had volunteered to escort his remains home and helped arrange his funeral. When Ayala learned that she’d pawned her jewelry to avoid being evicted, he’d sent money for rent and food. People wrote about how Ayala had opened his house in New Orleans’s Garden District to police and federal agents during Hurricane Katrina, offering them cold drinks, hot meals, and the first showers they’d had in days. A combat medic who had served with him in the Special Forces remembered Ayala as the guy who checked on everyone else, who gave you his water if you ran out and his last packet of instant coffee on a cold night. Yet Ayala was more than just a reliable friend. He had integrity, grit. Though he had known the medic for years, Ayala had refused to recommend him as a candidate for a State Department bodyguard detail because the man hadn’t performed well enough on the practical exercises.

  A childhood friend wrote that in forty-five years, he had never seen Ayala lose his temper. Friends told stories of his refusal to tangle with French Quarter drunks or racist guests at family gatherings, preferring civil conversation to a fight. Late one rainy night, a New Orleans police officer wrote, he had seen Ayala intervene to protect women at a bus stop from a large, threatening man. When Ayala asked the man to stop bothering the women, the man lunged at him. Instead of fighting back, Ayala “took a defensive stance and kept the man at a distance by shoving him away” until the police could get close enough to help.

  The most powerful letter came from Paula Loyd’s mother, who recalled Loyd’s emails home about the villages they had visited in Maiwand and the people they had talked to, about their attempts to better Afghan lives and to convince Afghans that America was looking out for them. “It is one of those horrible realities of life,” Patty Ward wrote, that a young woman “who was very highly regarded by many governments who worked with her, a talented, optimistic, extremely well-educated negotiator, who left a void that is impossible to fill, should be victimized by someone who had not the slightest notion of the terribleness of the act he was performing.” When Ayala learned that Loyd had been burned, he must have thought of all that he knew about her—the good she had done and would have continued to do on America’s behalf, her contributions to a more humane approach to conflict, the pleasure of her company, “the glory of her smile”—and responded instinctively. It made perfect sense to Ward. While she waited for the plane carrying her wounded daughter, a hospital chaplain had asked if Loyd’s attacker had been “dispatched.” On hearing that he had, the chaplain had bowed his head and thanked the Lord. Standing next to him, Ward had murmured: ‘Thank you, Don.’

  A person who commits the crime of voluntary manslaughter knows what he is doing, even if he acts out of passion. In the statement of fact that Ayala signed as a condition of his guilty plea, the prosecution and defense agreed that he had killed Abdul Salam intentionally “upon heat of passion and without malice,” and that his act “did not result from accident, mistake or other innocent reason.” And yet, not wanting to leave any room for doubt, Nachmanoff added another element to his defense. In preparation for his sentencing, Ayala spent two ten-hour days at his home in New Orleans talking with a human development and trauma specialist named Dr. Charles Figley. Figley taught at Tulane University’s Graduate School of Social Work and headed its Traumatology Institute and Psychosocial Stress Research Program. He had edited a book on combat trauma and advised the Navy and Marine Corps on combat stress–related injuries. Figley prepared a report based on his conversations with Ayala. It was filed under seal, and it became a linchpin of the defense strategy. In it, Figley sought to show that Ayala’s repeated exposure to violence over many years had led to a psychic breakdown that had caused him to kill Abdul Salam.

  In the upstairs study of his Garden District home, with his three Rhodesian ridgebacks dozing at his feet, Ayala had told Figley about his childhood in Whittier, a middle-class suburb east of Los Angeles. He was the third of five children born to a government meat inspector and a teacher’s aide, themselves the descendants of Mexican immigrants who had sweated in slaughterhouses, meatpacking plants, and factories for a shot at the American dream. Ayala and his brothers played baseball, football, and basketball
and shared a single bedroom, roughhousing like a pack of young dogs. They rushed through chores so they could play war in the backyard, hurling lemons plucked from a tree as grenades.

  It was an idyllic childhood. But in junior high, some kids pushed Ayala up against a locker and asked what neighborhood he came from. The school had kids from all over, and they were just beginning to understand the geography that would define them. Ayala was thirteen, thin and small, but he had grown up with brothers and he knew how to fight. He and his friends banded together, joining a neighborhood gang called Sunrise. Long before Ayala gained a reputation as a peacemaker, fighting had been the way he survived. He fought in school and on his own time, in organized bouts or just because. He fought at a roller rink, at a movie theater, on a busy street. Sometimes the gangs would organize baseball or football games that devolved into fistfights. He grew into Sunrise organically, until he was so far gone that his older brothers grew afraid to acknowledge him in the hallways at school. Meanwhile, his neighborhood roughened. There were drive-by shootings. Ayala pitched all through Little League and into high school and quarterbacked the football team. He was regarded as a leader in sports and on the streets, where he was sharp and watchful, a good fighter. He also liked to draw, and he was good at it. He became a sought-after tattoo artist, using ink-dipped needles filched from his friends’ mothers’ sewing baskets and sterilized with a lighted match.

  He started getting thrown out of school for fighting. He didn’t come home for days, and the more his mother nagged and yelled, the further he receded. His father set up chairs on the back lawn, sat him down, told him there would be consequences. His mother kicked him out of the house. He lived with classmates and their families. One friend, depressed and deep in drugs, tied a sheet around his neck and jumped out a window. Ayala, then seventeen, came home and found him. When the holidays rolled around, he would leave the home of whichever friend he was staying with so the family could celebrate together. He went to the movies or walked the streets alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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