Pfc. puts life in shambles by taking war spoils

Pfc. puts life in shambles by taking war spoils

By Billy Cox - Special to the Times

Posted : Saturday Jul 5, 2008 7:26:12 EDT

SARASOTA, Fla. -- After nearly three weeks of desert combat and enough death to jangle his brain for a lifetime, Pfc. Earl Coffey arrived in Baghdad in April 2003 thinking he had discovered an oasis.

It was Palace Row, one of the most exclusive tracts of real estate in Iraq, and not even major bomb damage could dim the luster of a tyrant's decadence. Coffey was among the first U.S. troops to secure Saddam Hussein's inner sanctum, the postwar "Green Zone" now hosting diplomats and government authorities. Its allure was intoxicating.

Coffey recalled his awe at seeing gold-rimmed toilet seats, 30-foot wide chandeliers, and Swarovski crystal collections. Over the next few days, he sampled one revelation after another: the Dom Perignon champagne, the Monte Cristo Cuban cigars, even the lion's roar of captive pet carnivores.

He watched as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle rammed and collapsed the wall of a windowless bunker just outside Saddam's palace. The building concealed bundles of U.S. currency stacked floor-to-ceiling and wrapped in binding that read "Bank of America."

To a man who had grown up in the bleak shadows of Kentucky's coal mines, staring down all that money "was like hitting the lottery," Coffey said.

His career was about to drown in a flood of American dollars.

The family business

Today, adrift and troubled in Sarasota, the 34-year-old is worlds away from what he once was -- a trained sniper who took his first shot with a .22-caliber rifle his father gave him when he was 7 or 8 years old in rural Harlan County. At first, he practiced on tin can lids nailed to a fence post 80 yards away. When that got too easy, he began targeting the nails. And other things.



Struggling back home

Homeless, jobless, struggling with drugs, delinquent on child support payments, and spinning in the revolving door of Sarasota courtrooms and jail cells, Earl Coffey said he is hamstrung by civilian life.

And, in an echo of the post-traumatic stress disorder that contributed to the recent death of 24-year-old Marine Eric Hall in nearby Charlotte County, Fla., Coffey claims the combat flashbacks from the invasion have debilitated him.

"Fighting war's not hard; living with it afterwards is hard," said Coffey, who maintains a military-tight haircut. "It keeps coming back on you. For a long time, I was afraid to go to sleep because I knew what I'd see. You get exhausted by the flashbacks and you feel like you're in a trance all the time, like a zombie, like you're just existing."

Ineligible for Veterans Affairs assistance because of his bad-conduct discharge, Coffey said he turned to Oxycontin, a narcotic he purchased illegally on the streets, to dull the jagged edges of memory.

He said he got "a little carried away," completed detox through the Salvation Army, and insists he is drug-free today. But neither his father nor his wife believe it.