John Torres’s last day alive was a lot like all the other days he’d spent in the past eight months, serving on the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The 25-year-old army reservist, who worked an administrative job as a “load planner,” organizing supply movements, bought some DVDs, made and then canceled plans to get a massage, played video soccer with a buddy—Argentina versus Mexico—and talked about celebrating his friend’s birthday the next day with dinner.
John mourned the life he might have had with his girlfriend, Liz (his family asked that her last name not be used). “I always pictured her being my wife and mother to my kids,” read the note. It asked his mother to make sure Liz finished college.
In 1980, when Juan Torres was 18 and John’s mother, Susana Ferro, was 16, they came to the U.S. from the Argentine city of Cordoba. Already parents, they were searching for “wonderful opportunities, the American dream,” Juan tells me with a touch of sad irony. They settled in Houston, and that’s where Veronica and John grew up. Torres remembers his son as so goal-oriented that he’d sometimes have to tell him to relax.
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Shortly before he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2003, John became a U.S. citizen. But in Afghanistan his enthusiasm quickly waned. He told his family and closest friends that he’d stopped believing in the U.S. mission there, and he worried that when his hitch was up the army wouldn’t let him out. He feared they’d send him on to Iraq.
For months, says Juan, John’s death was “under investigation.” It wasn’t until more than a year later that the army told the family John had killed himself and turned over his suicide note.
Juan made it his mission to find out the real story and expose what he felt was a cover-up by the army. He became a fixture at antiwar protests, carrying a poster with John’s picture and the message, “The CID killed my son.” The CID is the army’s Criminal Investigation Department.
In May 2006, McCanna and Juan visited Bagram, where, McCanna says, base officials wouldn’t let him beyond a holding area near the main gate. (While he waited there, an Afghan youth kept asking him if he “needed anything.” He says he later learned kids like this sold heroin to American soldiers.)
