The next night he did the same thing.

The battalion joined the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, and in spring 2011, as Libya sank into civil war, the Marines were ordered aboard amphibious ships headed for the Libyan coast. On his last visit to Chicago, Siatta gave Volk his Afghan diary. He had thought of destroying it but decided to entrust it to her. She read the first page and stopped. They had a day and a half together before he shipped out, and she was emotionally stretched as it was. “I was hugging him, telling him I was going to kidnap him,” she said.

After he was gone, she started reading again. When she came to his account of the child shot through the head in Siatta’s first firefight, she felt panicked and stopped. For weeks she read his chronicle, section by section, again and again. No matter the kill-or-be-killed mentality Siatta had been reduced to, she could see him there, the grieving boy she had known since sixth grade.

Day 34 Lakari This entry has nothing to do with wat im doin here in afghanistan but it’s just been on my mind. I call this entry coffee and memories. When I was a small boy nothin more than 4 … I would wake up around 5 or so in the morning to watch my dad get ready for work. He would shave, brush his teeth and you no the usual. But when he was done with that he could get the Newspaper and drink his coffee. He would let me sip on his coffee and it would just be me and him. Now I didn’t really know my father to well because he died when I was so young but thoughs memories I have of him drinking coffee is wat keeps him alive in my mind. Now what made me think of thoughs memories of my dad Drinking coffee was here in afghanistan we stand a lot of posts and a lot of partrols, so usually were very tired and we drink a lot of coffee. Ever cup I drink I think of my dad so Ive been thinkin of him quit abit. and if I ever have kids, when Im getin ready for work I want them to sip on my coffee.

Volk wrote letters to him and mailed them to his ship, the U.S.S. Bataan. At first Siatta replied. But life as a Marine on the ship, with its claustrophobic berthing areas and dull routine, was mind-numbing. As sea time dragged on, he closed himself off. He stopped answering her letters.

The war in Libya did not require him to go ashore. The ships made port visits in Europe, where Siatta and his friends were given time off, much of which was spent binge-drinking. “Whenever we had free time, we all got lit up,” he told me. In February 2012, the battalion returned to Camp Lejeune. His time in the corps was soon up. He left the service unceremoniously and drove home to Illinois in a used Chevy he bought with his combat pay. He did not tell Volk he was back. She began dating another man.

Siatta sought an even quieter life than before. His family noticed his anger, his social withdrawal and what they now acknowledge as his alcoholism. He seethed at his mother for putting a welcome-home message on a sign at a local McDonald’s. “I don’t want anybody looking at me,” he told her. He seemed intent on near anonymity and on avoiding discussion of the war. “He wanted no one to know that he had been there,” she testified at his trial. “He didn’t want anyone saying, ‘Thank you for your service.’ He wanted nothing. He wanted to be left alone.”

Siatta spent more than a year living in his mother’s home. He did not contact Volk and assumed she had moved on. For months, he was listless. “How did you spend your time?” one of his lawyers asked at trial. “I didn’t,” Siatta replied. “I would say I probably sat in my room, nothing.” Inside his bedroom, his mother said, he drank and played video games. She would rest on a couch near his door, listening through the night. “I used to hear him hitting the wall,” she said.

As a teenager Siatta had cut the lawn of Larry Stonitsch, a former Marine who owned Rovanco Piping Systems, a manufacturer of insulated pipe in Joliet. Now Stonitsch offered him a job at the factory. Siatta was reliable and quiet and did not talk about his combat service. Stonitsch understood. “I had a stepdad who was in the Battle of the Bulge and never was right after that, after the things he saw and did,” he told me. “He drank too much. So I have some empathy for that.”

Outside Rovanco, Siatta was barely functioning. He shrank his social world ever smaller, to the point of skipping family gatherings. In 2013, convinced her son had stagnated, Maureen suggested he consider college. He was eligible for G.I. Bill benefits, she told him, and should take them. “Here is where my guilt comes in, because I am the one who talked him into going to school,” Maureen said. “I kind of wonder, if he had stayed here, if we would have figured out that he needed services, and he would have gotten treatment.”