Cruel Death by M. William Phelps Page B

“Hollywood kits.” With fake blood and special effects, the military made the scenes look as gruesome as possible.
    After a while, a SEAL became immune to the effects of the injuries and brutality of what he was involved in. Regarding battlefield triage injuries, “I was told to treat [injured soldiers] like machines . . . and I would be the mechanic and try to fix the problem,” BJ explained in court. A soldier would never look at it as his best friend lying there injured, fighting for his life. A corpsman took emotion out of it. He did the job and moved on to the next situation.
    And that was that.
    After a while, a soldier with his guts hanging out of the side of his body was not what a medic saw; he took himself out of the situation and understood that it was something he needed to fix, like a broken robot.
    Beyond the graphic Hollywood effects and cadavers BJ worked on during training, live beings were brought in, too. This was where things got really weird during training, BJ later said.
    “I worked on mainly goats, but also pigs.”
    As the training drew to completion, corpsmen were asked to take part in, as a final exam, a final training exercise (FTX). In BJ’s case, it was a “realistic [helicopter] crash scene with multiple casualties.” In this exercise, the trainers brought in several live goats and, as BJ explained it, “some were injured intentionally more than others.” Some were dead. Others were maimed and hurt beyond repair.
    It was BJ’s unit’s job to help save as many animals as they could.
    “But in the end,” BJ said, “they all died.”
    Another part of BJ’s training included serving on an EMT ambulance squad in New York City and a stint in an emergency room at a Manhattan hospital for one month, where he witnessed people die and people maimed and people in all sorts of real life-threatening situations.
    During BJ’s first three years in the military, he put up stellar performance numbers and records. Bar none. He had a reputation that few ever achieve, earning a good-conduct medal and expert marksmanship status with a rifle and .45-caliber pistol. According to his military record, his career was running swimmingly, but then things started to change for him when, he later said, “I met Erika.”
     
     
    Indeed, if you believe BJ’s version, once he hooked up with Erika, his military life quickly spiraled out of control, like a plane that had lost its wings. It had become unmanageable very rapidly, without him even realizing it.
    “BJ was not a violent person,” said one former friend who knew BJ before he met Erika. “I felt completely safe around him all the time—except for maybe when we got into a car and he was driving.” This woman, whose husband was a SEAL buddy of BJ’s, had spent four months alone with BJ in her home. He lived there. “BJ was just quiet and very shy with girls,” she said. “He would not even approach a girl in a bar. He’d ask me to approach the woman for him.”
    But then, Erika came around—and everything changed. Erika was so obsessed with BJ, said this same former friend, “that she asked me not to look at him, and definitely not talk to him.” BJ was ten minutes late coming home one day after taking off with a SEAL buddy to go look at guns. He was right down the street from the home. Erika came in and “freaked out. She let out this bloodcurdling scream and threw her frozen pizzas all over the kitchen floor.
    “‘Where is he? Where is he?’”
    Calm down. He was right around the corner.
    Erika called his cell phone. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m just down the street. You know where I am and what I’m doing. Relax.”
    She wouldn’t calm down.
    Come home, come home, come home. Right now.
    She called BJ at least fifteen times, her friend said, until he finally shut off his cell phone.
    BJ was soon faced with a choice: Erika or the SEALs?
    BJ’s parents had never met Erika, nor had they even heard of her when BJ called shortly