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him leave the war in Iraq behind as quickly as possible.
    â€œThere’s no way I can show you how much I appreciate your willingness to die for me,” she remembers telling the three. But she tried her best anyway, going so far as to hire in-room strippers for them through an ad in the Yellow Pages.
    â€œThey talked me into buying them suits and renting a stretch limo. These guys show up and they go out partying that night, these guys are pimped out, I’m spending so much money it’s stupid,” she says, laughing at the memory. “Those Marines swam down some drinks, just the three of them. The hotel called my room, ‘Do these Marines belong to you?’ as they’re stumbling down the hallways.”
    When the strippers showed up to the Marines’ room, Sandi says, the sound of partying was like its own war zone. Then around midnight there was a loud banging on the adjoining door.
    â€œThe door swings open and it’s Silly Billy, drunk and laughing, and he introduces us to them [the strippers] . . . I could’ve gone a lifetime without meeting them,” Sandi says.
    â€œHe says, ‘Mom, I’m going to need an extra twelve hundred dollars.’ ‘Dude,’ she remembers telling him, ‘you gotta be fucking shitting me.’ But I’m counting the money out, he’s dancing around, happy as can be.”
    The whole trip, she says, was indicative of the closeness of their relationship. He would always stay in touch with his mom even while he was in Iraq.
    â€œHe would hang out with the snipers at night,” Sandi says, “because they always had sat phones and he would make sure to try and call me almost every week. It would just be, ‘Hey, I’m fine, can’t talk long, love you. Bye.’
    â€œHe was through and through a mama’s boy. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t share with me,” she says. “Sometimes I had to tell him I just don’t want to know.”
    But Sandi says she began to sense something was wrong after William made a trip back east to see a woman he had met while doing presidential protection duty at Camp David. He had called her his fiancée and said he planned to marry her, but the relationship ended after his visit with her.
    â€œHe flies back there and doesn’t last twenty-four hours,” Sandi says. “He lost it. He calls me and tells me to find him a flight home. ‘I can’t close my eyes, I can’t sleep,’ he tells me, ‘what’s wrong with me?’ I think he knew he was so unstable he was going to end up hurting her.”
    The extent of his post-traumatic stress became clear to Sandi that summer after his discharge.
    â€œFourth of July was just horrible for him,” says Sandi. “Some neighbors had firecrackers they were setting off in the distance.”
    But for William that set off a circuit that couldn’t be grounded.
    â€œHe just starts twitching. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I told him, but he pushed me back and screamed, ‘You don’t know what’s going on in my brain, there’s no switch you can shut off what’s going on in here!’ He’s sweating and pacing, just the look in his eyes. It went on for thirty to forty-five minutes. I visibly see his pulse, two fifty to two sixty, he’s going to stroke out. How do I stop it? I need to get three octaves above him. That’s what Marines respond to. He’s looking for someone in authority to take control. Now we’re talking insanely loud, I’m screaming at him, ‘You need to bring it down!’ trying to use military phrases. I start screaming at him, ‘Marine, stand down! Marine, stand down! Marine, stand down!’ About the fifth time I did it, it had an effect.’ ”
    Wold stopped shouting and began to calm down, perhaps beginning to realize how much of the war had actually come home with