The men of Company B patrolled dusty streets lined with high cement walls behind which lurked both curious children and dangerous snipers. Davis took his usual place in their snaky single file, third of seven, as they looked for "suspicious shit," especially weapons and fedayeen, the elite Iraqi fighters. Nearly every day the platoon would find weapons caches -- a crate of 20 rifles lying in an alleyway, a box of grenades under a tree. In a school gymnasium they found machine guns neatly stacked from floor to ceiling.

The Iraqi leadership "left hoping the people would take up arms," says a soldier who was there. "It's a damn good thing they didn't, or a lot more of us would be dead."

Going from house to house presented temptations for the Americans, especially when the homes belonged to Saddam's family or members of his regime. Some men took small weapons, knives, night-vision goggles, silver, gold, cash, jewels -- whatever they could find and fit in their pockets.

One day at a crowded corner near a marketplace, Davis's squad approached a cluster of older Iraqis and asked, "Fedayeen? Fedayeen?" A frail white-haired man wearing a turban spoke English, and he began to reveal the location of a fedayeen group nearby. Before he could finish, a young man in Western clothes ran over and berated him in Arabic, struck the man as if to silence him, then took off running in the opposite direction. "We shot that idiot in the leg," Duncan recalls, "then dragged him back to the Bradley," where he was hog-tied and thrown in the hatch. "Can you imagine looking up in that dark, tight space and all you see are seven American soldiers staring down at you?" The entire squad "waled on him pretty good," kicking and smashing him on the floor of the Bradley. They dropped him, still hog-tied, at a meeting point for military intelligence to pick up. As the prisoner lay there Davis poked him, pretending to be a medic. "Does this hurt here?" Davis asked. "Yes, yes, it hurts," said the Iraqi. "What about here? Does this hurt? How about here? Here? Here?" One soldier recalls, "He kept poking that guy." He laughs at the recollection. "Yeah, Richard was an idiot."

As conditions worsened, Davis "started isolating himself from the platoon," says one soldier who knew him, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "It wasn't like we hated him or anything -- he just became a loner." He was always running off somewhere. Recalls Pruitt, "You could never find him when you needed to, because he never hung around. He always went out looking for stuff."

Davis's solo raids were annoying, but ever the resourceful soldier, he always returned with useful items -- hoses and clamps to improvise a shower system, Iraqi flags, swords, AK-47s. One day, searching an underground palace, Davis found a bathroom richly appointed with pink-marble sinks, a solid-gold toilet and a silver tissue box encrusted with jewels. "He said he wanted to try to take the toilet," recalls his friend Sergeant Linda, "but the captain came along and said no." Davis took the jeweled tissue box instead. Duncan recalls his reaction: "Whoa! That's nice. Where'd you get it?" Davis squirreled his souvenir away; it was the last time anyone reported seeing it.

On May 5 Richard Davis called home and spoke to his father for half an hour. He was in a good mood, Lanny recalls, because he believed he'd be coming home soon. "He was looking forward to working on his car."

Fifteen days later something had clearly gone wrong. Davis borrowed a cell phone from a reservist. The excitement that had characterized his early calls home was now gone, replaced by terror and anguish. "Dad, you gotta get me out of here," Richard said. He was crying. Lanny said he couldn't do that. "If I had, Richard would never have forgiven me. I figured he was going to have to work it through." But the call haunts Lanny; he would hear it in his head over and over and try to discern in his son's jumbled plea the exact nature of his distress. "He said he was afraid of everybody, that he couldn't trust nobody. I don't know if he was talking about the Iraqis or his own people, but he was scared."

Six weeks passed, and finally, during the first week of July 2003, the men of B Company were sent back to Kuwait to be decommissioned en route to the States. They weren't treated to a welcoming reception. "When we got back to Kuwait," says Duncan, "we all walked into the chow hall together, with our dirty uniforms, looking all banged up. It was like a movie. Everybody stopped eating and stared. Nobody would talk to us. They were told to stay away from us. They said we were crazy murderers and rapists." Duncan pauses and looks at his hands. "Well, I can see the murder part, seeing as how we did kill a lot of people."

The men were supposed to relax in the relative safety of the rear camp in Kuwait and "get out of God mode, where we could kill anyone," one soldier recalls. But the hot tents and close quarters, combined with the sudden absence of an enemy toward which they could channel their aggression, had the opposite effect, and the men took to fighting among themselves. "Everyone fought in the desert," says one soldier. "People were getting into it all the time. It was a pretty bad scene."

According to Lanny, Richard confided in a friend in Kuwait, a medic named Edward Wolf. "Don't mention this to anyone," Davis pleaded before showing Wolf his hand. It had been deeply punctured by a knife, the wound still open. Wolf applied a bandage. Richard told Wolf -- according to Lanny, who had spoken with Army investigators -- that the stabbing had been "a gang-related ritual" he'd suffered at the hands of two fellow soldiers in his platoon: Alberto Martinez, 23, a father of two from Oceanside, California, and Mario Navarrete, 24, of San Juan, Puerto Rico -- buddies who were always seen together. The two were thought of as reliable and levelheaded soldiers, but Martinez had a reputation as a gangbanger.

"He bragged about having greased people before joining the military," says a B Company soldier. Greg Pruitt recalls an incident in Iraq that took place when he and Martinez returned to the makeshift base after guarding a shopping mall. Martinez was lewdly rocking his hips, Pruitt says, and holding his hands as if he were grabbing a woman's waist.

"I know you did something, or you wouldn't be smiling," Pruitt said. Martinez hesitated, then responded that he and Navarrete had just "fucked two Iraqi girls" in the shopping center. "I bet you didn't use a condom," Pruitt said. Martinez said he had, but Pruitt didn't believe him. He did not think much about this conversation until many months later.

Fort Benning

B Company reassembled at Fort Benning, its home post, bound on one side by Victory Drive, a six-lane wasteland of used-car lots, tattoo parlors and strip clubs near the small town of Columbus. Later, those who knew Richard Davis and Jacob Burgoyne would remark that it was strange these men didn't head their separate ways once they returned, for they disliked each other from the instant they met. They had a lot in common -- both were raised by idealized soldier fathers and had grown up in the shadows of their fathers' exploits -- but perhaps they were too similar to be friends. When they met at Fort Benning in early January 2002, each was busy proving to his drinking buddies that he was capable of screwing around with the military's restrictions. Davis climbed a balcony railing, leaped to a narrow ledge and playacted a suicide. "I can't take it anymore," he shouted, laughing. "I'm going to end it."

Burgoyne, who had struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts, was not amused. He told Davis to get the hell down or he'd "smoke his ass." Davis laughed, jumped down from the railing, got right in Burgoyne's face and laughed again, and he continued to laugh as Burgoyne grew livid and then sucker punched him.

Burgoyne is over six feet tall, thick in the chest and back with a boxer's rounded shoulders. In fact, brawling was his specialty: He fought at every opportunity, never lost and once punched a fellow soldier so hard the man fell into a coma. "Burgoyne was a friend of mine," one soldier says, "but he was pretty erratic. He could flip on you quick, so you tried to stay on his good side."

"Everyone was afraid of Burgoyne," Linda says. "But Richard wasn't."

Davis and Burgoyne were assigned to live across from each other and share a bathroom in Fort Benning's dormitory-style living quarters. Burgoyne had flown back from Kuwait two days before Davis. He'd come home a deeply troubled man, having attempted suicide on July 5 while in Kuwait. Army medical records uncovered by United Press International show that Burgoyne had expressed "homicidal and suicidal" thinking and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Patient views his role in killing enemy soldiers in a poor light, inquiring if he should feel like a murderer," according to a hospital note written in Kuwait on July 7. Army counselors ordered that Burgoyne be kept under watch at all times and not be allowed near a weapon. Back at Fort Benning, though, a different conclusion was reached. After a 40-minute interview in which Burgoyne said he was feeling better, he was released to do as he pleased, which included going out drinking at a strip club with Davis, Navarrete, Woodcoff and Martinez.

Part II: Found

By mid-August, back in St. Charles, Missouri, Lanny and Remy were growing frantic; an entire month had passed without any word from their son. Lanny abandoned his gravel-hauling business to devote himself to the search. The first step, he knew, was critical: convincing the military to list his son as a missing person rather than AWOL. The distinction is an important one. Missing-persons cases are investigated -- they are entered into a national database that distributes information to police departments across the country -- whereas AWOL cases are not. The Army doesn't chase AWOL soldiers. After dozens of phone calls, Lanny, exasperated, told his wife, "I think I better go down there, because they're not giving me any information whatsoever on the phone."

If I surprise them, maybe they won't give me a line of crap, Lanny thought to himself on the afternoon of August 19, 2003 as he got into his truck and headed east. All he wanted, he kept telling himself, was a level playing field. "Fair is fair," he likes to say. "I'm not looking for special treatment because I'm a veteran, but I don't like it when people treat me like they don't have to bother. Hell, I'm educated. I'm not dumb. Some people act like because you were in the military you're stupid."

Lanny had grown up dirt poor, the son of a sharecropper, living in a rickety shack on the Arkansas plains, eating peanuts out of the ground, hunting and fishing for food. He was one of 10 kids, four of whom joined the military. The Army helped him climb into the middle class, but the journey left him sensitive to inequality. He spoke out often, his demands for fairness articulated in a hoarse and scratchy voice, a condition resulting from an encounter with a Viet Cong soldier who jammed a rifle butt into Lanny's trachea, crushing his vocal cords. Lanny shot the man at close range, killing him.

At the Fort Benning checkpoint Lanny flashed his retired-military ID and was waved through. He tracked down First Sergeant Sabala, his son's superior officer, but got nowhere. He asked Sabala for someone who might have been "close with his son," but the sergeant told him, "Richard was a loner. No one really knew him. He kept to himself, so I don't think there's anyone here who could tell you much. I myself hardly knew him. I was pretty new to this platoon. We're doing all we can to find him, though."

At these words, Lanny boiled over. "I don't know what you're trying to pull, First Sergeant, but I'm retired military police -- I know the situations. If my son was the worst guy in the battalion, he would be known as the worst guy in the battalion, but he would be known."

Lanny stayed in a hotel room near Fort Benning and spent the next three days canvassing every authority and every department at the post. He slammed into one bureaucratic brick wall after another. He asked to see if his son's bank account had been tapped, and no one called him back. He went to the personnel office to see his son's effects, looking "for simple things...maybe evidence of what happened to him or where he might have went." The presiding officer told him it would be an invasion of privacy. "Well, I am his father," Lanny replied. "I'm not going to take anything." Increasingly frustrated, Lanny went "off-post" to the Columbus police station, where he tried to file a missing-persons report. The desk officer was sympathetic but told him that only the military handles military-related issues.

Lanny drove home in a state of deep despair. Groping for a plausible explanation, he surmised that Richard might have developed post-traumatic stress disorder, from which Lanny himself has suffered since Vietnam. "Maybe he had a touch of amnesia or a blackout or something and just kind of wandered away," he told his wife. This was a thin theory, Lanny knew, but at least it was somewhat optimistic and comforting. In his gut, however, he felt that the truth was far worse. As he steered his pickup onto the highway, back toward Missouri, one conclusion kept pushing the others aside: Richard is probably dead.

On September 8 Lanny called his congressman, Kenny Hulshof, and got results. The congressman contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, demanding that the Department of Defense investigate the disappearance of Richard Davis. By September 16 an inquiry had been launched. Army detectives began interviewing the men in Davis's platoon.

The men of B Company stonewalled. Nobody knew where Davis was. But when detectives began to cross-examine them more seriously, threatening jail time if the men withheld information, there was a break in the case. A single soldier came forward and repeated the rumor he had been hearing for weeks: Four men -- Burgoyne, Martinez, Navarrete and Woodcoff -- had left Davis lying in the woods near the 4400 block of Milgen Road.