“I never want to go back to jail again.”
After his trial ended, Sam rekindled the closeness with his family that had been lacking during his later teens. “We always loved each other,” Steve said. “That had never been the problem. But now, we both appreciated each other, and became real buddies—not father and son buddies, but men buddies.”
Sam’s devotion to his parents was reflected in a tattoo across his chest: the words “Mom and Dad” in a heart surrounded by roses. But the fidelity extended to other close relatives. “If you were a family member, that was it,” said his cousin Leah. “You were automatically with him. And whatever your flaws were, he never saw them. You were his blood, and that was good enough for him.”
After his acquittal, Sam worked for a delivery service; security company; and pet store, cleaning and grooming dogs. But he didn’t see a career in any of those jobs. He’d grown up hearing his father and an uncle discuss the camaraderie they felt in the military, and a number of friends had enlisted and told Sam about the travel opportunities.
Over a two-year period, he gradually decided that the Army would be the best place for him.
“I’d love to say that he was motivated by patriotism,” Steve said. “That was part of it. But it was also the allure of travel and adventure. He wanted something new.”
Given his arrest record, though, he wasn’t automatically welcomed. For several months, he made weekly visits to a recruiter, who monitored Sam’s progress back in society, eventually determining that he possessed the type of character that the Army wanted.
Sam started basic combat training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, followed by advanced training at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, and jump school in Fort Benning, Georgia, gaining a new level of self-awareness with each step.
Prior to boot camp, Steve made his son a bet. If Sam could graduate, his father would do whatever the young man requested. Up until this point, Steve had never been tattooed, because his wife was not a particular fan of body art. But the first time that Sam came home on leave after finishing up at Fort Jackson, he took his father to a tattoo parlor and told Steve that it was time to get inked.
Steve chose a tattoo dedicated to his time as a U.S. Marine.
Raquel was the one member of the family who expressed caution about Sam’s entry into military service. “You’re an only child,” she said. “Do you think if you tell them that, they won’t send you to fight somewhere?”
Sam shook his head. “There’s no way, Mom. I’m not going to do that. We’re at war. I knew the consequences going in.”
Assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Sam spent a week at its base in Vicenza, Italy before being sent to Germany for four months of war training. One morning at the Conn Barracks, located in Schweinfurt—German for “pig ford”—in Bavaria’s Lower Franconia region, fellow soldier Theresa Glowicki was sitting in the backseat of a vehicle headed toward PT formation—a physical-training execise—when Sam entered and introduced himself. He was wearing jeans and a sleeveless white T-shirt under a leather jacket. “He was so new,” she recalled, “that he didn’t have a uniform yet.”
Theresa had been raised in Auburn, Michigan, a farming town with a population of just over two thousand. Like Sam, she joined the Army to travel, but she also hoped to earn money for her education. While Sam was learning generator repair, Theresa was a truck driver. Both knew that they were going to be deployed to Afghanistan and accepted that warfare came with the job. But Theresa was struggling in Germany. “Some units had like thirty or forty females,” she said. “But I got stuck in this one unit with five. That was really hard for me. I grew up with all these females, and then I was thrown in with all these men, and they were all trying to get with me. I cried every night.”
As soon as Sam learned about her situation, he vowed to make her time in Schweinfurt easier. He made her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and accompanied Theresa and her roommate, Helen, to their door each night, his mere presence sending a message that the two young women were to be left alone. Then, he’d stand outside and watch them enter, not leaving until he knew that they were safe inside. “He looked out for me like I was his little sister,” she said.
It would not be the last time that Sam would display this kind of courtesy to a fellow soldier. Remembered one Army friend, “Sam was the type of man who would give you the shirt off his back, and throw in his pants to lighten your mood.”
In 2007, Sam and Theresa were sent to Afghanistan. Stationed at Camp Keating, a remote outpost near the border with Pakistan, Sam was part of a team that included Americans and Afghans. Sam would often be dispatched to mountaintop observation posts, sometimes for as long as six weeks at a time, to watch for infiltrations by the Taliban, as well as maintain the generators in the wilderness. Because of the rugged terrain, supplies had to arrive by helicopter.
Time after time, Sam volunteered for the most dangerous assignments. “He did not like sitting there on the [base] … and not doing enough,” Theresa said. “He wanted to do the most he could while he was there. That’s how he looked at it.”
“He loved being in those dangerous situations,” said his close friend and squad leader, Larry “Gonzo” Gonzales. “He felt as though he had a purpose being out in combat and was real comfortable with it.”
His troop commander remembered Sam as a true warrior. Despite the harsh conditions, the commander noted, Sam thrived, operating independently while preserving a sense of humor and raising the standards of those serving alongside him.
At the same time, he maintained the suspicion of authority he’d exhibited in his teens. “He was pretty complicated,” said Miles Foltz, a friend from Camp Keating, who joined the Army after watching the Twin Towers fall on television in his English class at Butte College in Oroville, California. “He was opinionated and didn’t really get along with the upper chain of command. But he was very close to the lower enlisted guys, really loyal and dedicated. His guys, he’d do anything for them.”
Said one fellow soldier, “He had the heart of a lion and the soul of a saint.”
Located at the base of two steep mountains, Camp Keating was vulnerable to .50-caliber machine-gun and other heavy-gun fire. In the course of a typical day, Sam’s unit was subject to mortar and rocket attacks, as well as random “potshots” from smaller weapons. “When you’re in that kind of situation, getting attacked so often, it definitely brings everyone closer,” Miles said. “You learn to trust one another. I mean, everyone just knew that it was a shitty situation. There was no other way around it. There’s nothing we can do. We’re going to get shot at.”
Yet there were unexpected moments of repose. “We’d set up above the camp, a kilometer up the mountain,” Miles said. “And basically, we’d be scanning the mountain ranges as much as we could, trying to stop the enemy from attacking us. But when you’re up there together, away from everyone else, there’s also a relaxing kind of downtime.”
Supplies were transported by Russian pilots contracted by the U.S. military, who had no objection to delivering a bottle of vodka for a few extra dollars. One night, after Sam had been drinking and his instincts were not as sharp as usual, a mortar sailed directly toward him.
“Sam told me Miles pulled him down,” Steve said. “Sam always said Miles saved his life.”
At times, Miles, a cavalry scout, also helped Sam fix the generators. “My dad’s a contractor, so I know a little bit about that. We had these shitty generators that were leftover stock from Vietnam. That’s when I’d see Sam’s temper. He’d get pretty frustrated working on those generators.”
Even then, Miles frequently found an agitated Sam as entertaining as the guy who told jokes and good-naturedly teased his friends. “He was a big ox, basically Arnold Schwarzenegger without the accent. As his dad would call him, ‘a big, dumb galoot.’”
Insulated from the opposite sex, Sam wrote home and asked Steve to send him magazines “with pictures of girls.” Remembering the humor of his own time in the Marines, Steve instead mailed a Disney princess calendar.
Amidst the loneliness and the peril, Sam was developing a true sense of resolve. He posed for photos with his allies in the Afghan National Army, convinced that he was liberating them from an enemy who was keeping them mired in the primitive past. He handed out pens to children, believing that, as a member of the U.S. military, he was a vehicle toward helping them receive a modern education. “He was never as proud of what he was doing as when he was in that war zone,” Steve said. “He talked about really accomplishing something. As a parent, we’re always worried about our children. But I liked how the Army made him feel.”
Finally, Sam could relate to the pride that his father experienced when he wore the uniform. “We all have our love of country, especially after 9/11,” Steve said. “But now, he really understood what the concept meant. He never felt more like he was doing something than when he was in Afghanistan. And that’s when he really came to appreciate the military.”
But the U.S. Army could only counterbalance the Taliban for so long. In October 2009, insurgents attacked Camp Keating, killing eight American soldiers and wounding twenty-four. Although the Americans estimated that as many of one hundred of their enemies also died in the battle, momentum was on the side of the Taliban. The camp’s generator had been hit, forcing the Americans to battle at night in darkness. Strong winds fanned fires throughout the base until every building in the camp was engulfed, except one. As the fighting continued over the next several days, the Army abandoned the base. Whatever remained of the outpost was deliberately destroyed in order to prevent it from falling into Taliban hands.
But this was one fight that Sam missed. By that point, he’d been gone from the Afghan highlands for more than a year, forsaking the mud-caked houses, pothole-rutted roads and stalls selling grapes, pomegranates, and apricots for the strip malls, planned communities, and apparent safety of Orange County, California.