Before I left California, I drove to Camp Pendleton and met with Lieutenant Colonel Colby Vokey, a nineteen-year veteran and the Marine Corps' chief defense lawyer in the western United States. Gamal, Matt, and Justin had all been represented by lawyers under Vokey's command, but Vokey was most familiar with Gamal's and Matt's cases.

Every Marine in trouble passes through Pendleton's legal offices—Marines facing court-martial, nonjudicial punishment, involuntary-separation proceedings, and Boards of Inquiry. Many of them were good Marines until they were broken and committed misconduct. "We've had case after case after case," Vokey said. "It just kind of eats at you."

In the Corps, when a Marine gets in trouble, "we hammer the snot out of the guy," Vokey said. "That's just the way we are. We just hammer 'em, hammer 'em, hammer 'em." Good discipline and order? Of course, that's necessary in a fighting force, he said, but something's very wrong with a system that kicks mentally injured Marines to the curb. "And that's based on the fact that they were fine when they went to Iraq and Afghanistan. We broke them. This is what combat did to them, and I think we should feel some responsibility for what happens to them in the long run."

Though Matt's misconduct case was unrelated to combat stress, it infuriated Vokey. "I thought it was the harshest result of any of these cases I've ever seen. Here's a guy who had almost eighteen years in the Marine Corps, and he still got out of here with losing everything? I was—" Vokey slapped the desk hard with his open hand. "I don't think the guy deserved to lose his retirement benefits, and he did. He lost everything. Utter and complete bullshit."

Vokey was close to Gamal, and he constantly comes across people who don't believe PTSD had anything to do with Gamal "screwing an enlisted," as Vokey put it. "His misconduct, is it related to PTSD?" Vokey asked. "I don't know. And I'm not trying to tell you it is. His career was dead. Everybody knew that. He was never going to be promoted again. But they were trying to hang him." Vokey met with the general at Pendleton to discuss Gamal's case, telling him that Gamal knew his Marine Corps career was over, "but let's just settle this so he can have a general discharge so that he's not cut off from his benefits. Because this is a guy who needs it." The general was unmoved.

Before I left, Vokey asked me how the three men were doing. "Not so good," I said.

He shook his head. "If we broke 'em, we should fix 'em," he said.

A few months after I left Temecula, Gamal asked Matt to move his things out of the house, and then he cut both Matt and Justin off, refusing to answer any of their phone calls. "I love them, but whenever I look at their faces, I see their military and medical records, and I just can't deal," he told me. Matt continued to keep an eye on Gamal, though. He had a routine: "I pull into his driveway, he knows the minute I pull in that I'm there, and then I turn the radio on and wait. If the garage doors open, I'm over the Chinese wall. If they don't open, I leave."

Justin drove a friend's truck into a cement pillar in July but didn't manage to kill himself. In August, he called me at 1 a.m.—he was drunk, armed with a knife, and the police were outside the house. "Honestly, Kathy, I'm not a bad guy, but if they come through the door, I'm done," he said. Then he was shouting that the cops were inside, moving toward his room. "I can't, Kathy, I can't, I can't!" he screamed, and the phone went dead. Later I found out the police broke down the door, hit him with Tasers, and carted him off to Paradise Valley hospital. Being Justin, he was abashed that the police had taken him down with one zap. He thought a Marine should be tougher than that.