Walking Toward Peace. Cindy Ross

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       CHAPTER 3

      ADAM BAUTZ

      US MARINE CORPS, 2004 – 2008

      TRUDGING UP THE RED SANDSTONE slopes in the Nevada desert, I kept my eyes on the “AT” symbol tattooed on my guide’s right calf. Surrounding the symbol was the motto “It’s not about the miles, it’s about the smiles.” Adam Bautz’s left calf has a tattoo of a Marine walking away with a machine gun on his shoulders. The last time I’d seen him, he was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania with fellow Marine Tommy Gathman. His blank right calf had yet to earn its AT stamp. Although he cannot easily see the tats himself, their very presence helps Adam provoke conversation with his hiking clients and establish connections.

      Here in the Valley of Fire northeast of Las Vegas, Adam is home. He knows it intimately, all forty-six thousand acres of it. He taught himself the area’s natural history and can share all kinds of interesting facts about the wildflowers and animals with his hiking comrades. Since 2017, Outdoor Travel Tours, Adam’s tour company, has led folks into the desert so they can fall in love with it too. “This is the most amazing place I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “It consumes me. There are arches, natural holes, and petroglyphs, and all are easily accessible. There are lizards, flowering cacti, and Gila monsters. Four thousand years ago, Native Americans roamed this very land.”

      As we hiked into the dazzling Nevada desert, Adam recited the Marine machine gunner description, which he had memorized and recited countless times in his head while deployed to Iraq: “A machine gunner is to provide a heavy volume of close, continuous, accurate support of fire to suppress and destroy all enemy personnel out of small arm’s capability.” Adam had carried this knowledge on a card in his shirt pocket along with a notebook that contained everything he needed to know as a machine gunner. He could disassemble and reassemble his machine gun in three minutes. He took his job seriously.

      Toward the end of Adam’s first deployment, an IED blew up a truck carrying three of his comrades, one of whom was a fellow machine gunner. “Why not me?” Adam wondered. “It so easily could have been me.” There was little time to grieve, and they had to continue going out on the next patrol. “We would come back from a patrol and there would be empty beds.” Adam constantly thought he would be next, incessantly fearing his own death. “Imagine going out every day, knowing people are trying to kill you,” he said. “That’s a horrible fucking feeling, just waiting to possibly blow up and die.”

      When Adam got out of the military, certain noises and smells brought him back to the war. “I fell into a deep hole and became a fat bastard. Pair that self-image with my PTSD and it was really hard.” To cope, his mind would return to his boyhood stomping grounds on his grandfather’s sixhundred-acre wilderness property in Maine. There he had enjoyed his favorite activities of hunting, kayaking, mountain biking, and hiking. He remembered what his grandfather taught him: there is peace and hope in the natural world.

      ADAM EVENTUALLY MOVED TO LAS VEGAS AND LANDED A JOB DRIVING AN armored truck for Brink’s security. In a single casino stop, he picked up $14 million, mostly money that people had lost. It was then that he realized he did not have to sacrifice happiness for a paycheck, so at his father’s suggestion, he became a desert guide for a tour company. One of the companies he worked for was Bullets and Burgers, an outfit for which he guided novices into the desert where they got to shoot machine guns. Then Adam got a phone call from a Marine brother, Tom Gathman.

      In Iraq, Adam’s machine gun squad had been attached to Tom’s rifleman squad, part of the First Platoon. They had lived in the same bunkroom for seven months and quickly became friends. When Tom called to ask Adam if he wanted to quit his job as a tour guide and join him on an Appalachian Trail thru-hike the next year, Adam said, “Hell, yes.” Adam knew he wanted to travel, to experience freedom again. “As a Marine, we fought for freedom,” he said, “but I did not have it and I wanted it.”

      Prior to joining the Marines, both men had a tendency to get into trouble with the law and both had pending misdemeanor charges. Enlisting in the Marines, however, cleared their records and put them on a more sustainable path. In that sense, the Corps saved their lives. “I didn’t enlist in the Marines for the country,” Adam said. “I needed direction and discipline in my life. The majority of us were kids who didn’t know what we were signing up for at the time. My mission was to stay alive and keep the others next to me alive.” There are many reasons to join the military but, perhaps surprisingly, service to your country is not always number one. According to exhaustive surveys conducted by the global-policy think tank, the RAND Corporation, which offers research and analysis to the US Armed Forces, the overwhelming majority of servicemen and servicewomen cite economic reasons for enlisting. Military service seems to be a job first and a calling second. Some are attracted to benefits like the GI Bill, and others—like Adam and Tommy—are seeking direction in their lives or merely want to get out of Dodge.

      I MET ADAM AND TOMMY THE WINTER BEFORE THEY BEGAN THEIR THRU-HIKE. Tom hails from a small town in Pennsylvania, not far from my home, so I invited the men down for dinner to СКАЧАТЬ