denver and the west
Boulder marine who went AWOL recounts journey
By Kevin Vaughan
The Denver Post
The Denver Post
Posted:10/11/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT

Lance Hering holds on to the awful images seared into his memory on the battlefields of Iraq — unwilling even after three years to discuss what he described as "atrocities" in anything but the vaguest of terms.

He holds back the details of the "acute mental disorder" that led Marine commanders to evacuate him to a military hospital, and specifics about the 28 months spent in hiding after he vanished in 2006.

Instead, he describes his feelings, and the sapping battle waged in his head as he was alternately repulsed by the actions of some of his comrades and completely understanding of why they occurred.

"This stuff happens, and it doesn't make any sense in any kind of a normal way," he told The Denver Post in his first comments about his three-year odyssey from confused, missing Marine to young man eager to figure out a new future.

"It's a really violent environment, and people go nuts, and people's friends die, and I sort of understand that, and I can empathize with it in a way," he said.

And yet, he said he could not stand the idea that one day he might commit the unthinkable.

In two interviews, he described his gradual migration, from a Marine expecting to experience clarity in combat to a warrior disillusioned with war.

And for the first time, he shed light on his state of mind on the August day in 2006 when he concocted an elaborate ruse with the help of a friend, boarded a Greyhound bus in Denver, and disappeared without much of a plan beyond getting away.

"If you ask me why, I think it was a combination of feeling so disconnected, of not being able to feel any happiness or joy, of feeling that something was fundamentally wrong, of not wanting to go back and be a part of the atrocities that occur in war," he said. "There's no space for not liking it over there."

Carrying hidden wounds

Some war wounds are obvious. Shattered legs. Bullet holes. Blood.

But others lurk in the mind, hidden.

In World War I, men who experienced mental problems were described as having "shell shock" and found themselves scoffed at as crazy, unstable or just plain chicken. By World War II, it was called "battle fatigue," and there was little help for it.

Today, the mental-health experts have a name for it: post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lance was not the first in his family to experience battle, and he was not the first to be singed emotionally by its flames. His father, Lloyd Hering, saw 15 months of combat in Vietnam, following in the footsteps of his own father.

"My father and my uncles were in World War II, and some of them came through it fine, and others carried damage with them the rest of their lives — and my uncle Walter was killed — and no one talked about it," Lloyd said.

He would not fully understand that until he began to comprehend the price he paid after spending 15 months as an Army infantryman in Vietnam. When his tour ended in January 1970, he stepped off a plane in Oakland, Calif., after dark and boarded a bus for San Francisco. Nearly 40 years later, he can picture the neon signs snapping by outside the bus window along the streets.

"Everything seemed so commercial and so shallow, and I kept asking myself, over and over, whether this was what all my friends died for," he said.

For a time he wanted to stay away from those he loved. He bounced through a few jobs. Eventually, he and his wife, Elynne, finished college and found work as schoolteachers.

But beneath the surface, his Vietnam experience smoldered. He carried what he described as a "terrific sadness" that manifested itself in explosive anger. His wife knew deep down that wasn't him — he hadn't been that way before he went off to war.

"There's no way I would have waited for that," she said.

His anger's effect on his family eventually grew to the point he could no longer ignore it.

"There was love, but there was also too much fear," he said.

Eventually, Elynne persuaded him to get help, and he underwent counseling. It made a dramatic difference — and continues to help him.

"I feel lucky that I had enough love from my family that I could start doing the work I needed to do — several decades after I should have been doing it," Lloyd said.

Unmet expectations

Lance was born in Saudi Arabia — his parents had taken teaching jobs there — and he spent the first five years of his life there. Elynne brought him and his brother to America when the tensions that led to the Gulf War erupted in 1990. Lloyd joined them for a year.

Lance attended kindergarten and first grade in Boulder, then after the Gulf War ended, his family returned to Saudi Arabia when he was 7.

His friends were young Arab boys. He was in Scouts with them, played soccer with them.

Lance was 13 and going into eighth grade when they came back to Boulder for good.

He graduated from Fairview High School in 2004, and later that year he enlisted in the Marine Corps, following his brother into military service. His older brother is still a military man — serving in the Army after a stint in the Air Force.

Lance scored a 99 on his aptitude test and probably could have had about any job in the corps. He picked the infantry.

"I didn't want to join the Marines to sit at a desk," he said.

It seemed to him that it would be a challenge, a chance to push himself, a place where the trash-talking baloney of the soccer field would be stripped away in the most serious environment, a place where he would be part of a group of people working together, trying to do the right thing.

"I thought, you know, probably when you're getting shot at you stop worrying about things that don't matter," he said. "It ended up being just as cliquish and separated as the rest of the world."

In 2006, Lance's unit, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, embarked on a seven-month tour in Iraq. As time went on, he found himself asking the same question over and over: "Why am I here?"

"At some point I was questioning it," he said. "And then at some point I came to the realization that it wasn't good, to me, and there wasn't purpose to it."

He experienced what he described as an overwhelming sadness, some of it brought on by witnessing atrocities committed against civilians.

He told The Post he did not see the incident involving the so-called Pendleton 8 — seven Marines and a Navy corpsman accused in the murder of an Iraqi man. All eight either pleaded guilty or were convicted of charges in the case. But he also was not surprised.

"I know that a lot of that did happen," he said.

He found no outlet for his sadness on the battlefront.

"You don't want a bunch of negative, depressed people in a combat environment," he said. "A big part of it is that verbalizing it wouldn't accomplish anything. It's not like you could go say, 'We keep doing all this awful stuff and seeing all this awful stuff and we're not accomplishing anything,' 'cause they're just going to tell you to keep doing it."

At times, he experienced violent thoughts about other Marines, and he worried about returning to combat with them. He felt intense pressure knowing the other guys in his unit questioned him. Is this guy going to back me up? Rat me out? Do something crazy?

A little more than five months into his tour, he suffered what was described in Marine Corps records an "acute mental disorder" and was evacuated to a military hospital in Germany. After two weeks of tests, he was sent back to the battlefield.

Then, in mid-August, his combat tour ended and he was granted 30 days' leave and went home to Colorado.

"What really struck me when I came back was how acutely empty everything felt when I got here," he said. "I was not happy to see my parents, or my girlfriend, or my other friends. I was not happy climbing. There was no joy in my life."

He was home about two weeks, and a visit with his brother loomed. But he said he feared that it would be like his other reunions. Empty. Joyless.

"I felt, basically, just extremely lost with myself," he said. "I don't know how to convey in words the despair of that feeling."

Early the morning of Aug. 30, 2006, Lance boarded a bus bound for Iowa. A high school buddy told authorities that he'd fallen and hit his head rock climbing, sparking a massive search.

Lance had no specific plan, wandering to the Pacific Northwest, where he spent time in Seattle living on the streets, then ended up in Port Angeles, Wash., out on the Olympic Peninsula. He lived for a time at a tree farm, where he called himself a name given to him by a girl he met: "Nine."

In 2008, he made contact with his parents, and his father, who gave up teaching after 20 years to become a commercial pilot, flew to Port Angeles. They planned to fly to Virginia to see a psychiatrist, then to Texas to meet with a military attorney, then to California. There, Lance was planning to turn himself in to the Marine Corps and face the consequences of his decision to disappear.

That plan was thwarted when Port Angeles police arrested Lance and his father on Nov. 16, 2008.

After he got to California, Lance told Marine Corps officials the "nature of what he saw" in Iraq, according to his military attorney, James Culp.

"War is ugly," said Culp, a former paratrooper.

Culp does not know whether an investigation was conducted, and Marine Corps public affairs officers in both California and Washington did not respond to The Post's requests to detail the military's response to assertions like Lance's.

It is likewise impossible to verify the things Lance saw. Maj. Kristen Lasica, however, pointed to a series of programs available to help Marines deal with emotional issues.

"There's myriad opportunities," Lasica said. "It's a priority."

Ultimately, the Marine Corps treated Lance with leniency, taking him to the lowest-level criminal proceeding in the military, fining him $1,166 and sentencing him to the 33 days he had already served behind bars. He also was given an "other than honorable" discharge.

Lance returned to Boulder to face a misdemeanor false-reporting charge that potentially had huge consequences — it could have voided a deferred sentence in a felony attempted-burglary case filed in 2004. That charge came after he and a friend climbed onto the roof of a building, tripping an alarm.

Last Monday, he pleaded guilty to the false- reporting charge and was put on probation for 18 months. If he stays out of trouble, the attempted-burglary charge will be wiped off his record.

"A new beginning"

Two days after Lance's legal case was concluded, Lloyd and Elynne Hering sat in a sun-splashed room in their Boulder home, sipped coffee and talked about their three-year journey.

"There's been a lot of pressure on him and on our family this whole time," Elynne said. "So now it's like a new beginning."

There is the time to revel in simple pleasures they have enjoyed in recent months, like the day their older son took Lloyd and Lance skydiving. Or the day Lance led Lloyd on a climb of the Flatirons.

"To do something challenging and dangerous under the tutelage of your own son is amazing," Lloyd said. "God, it was cool to be up there roped in and looking down 600 feet."

There is the hope that their family's experience might assist others who are hurting, might lead other veterans to get counseling, might encourage someone to lend a hand to a service member returning from war.

"Recognize the symptoms of PTSD and that the person is not the symptoms — the person is still there, and they need support and understanding," Elynne Hering said.

There is thanks, that the military is slowly recognizing the psychological toll of battle and taking steps to assuage it — and the realization that there is a long way to go.

And thanks to all the hundreds of people who searched for Lance when he was missing, and to the ones who said, "We're so glad he's alive," when it was determined that he had disappeared.

And especially, there is thanks that their son is back, with them, able to write a new future for himself.

Just a matter of time

During those 28 months on the run, Lance Hering knew deep inside it eventually would come to an end.

"I figured I would probably end up in jail at some point," he said.

During that time, he figured his biggest worry would be the Marines. It never occurred to him that Boulder County authorities might have organized a huge search, or that hundreds of volunteers would spend days in Eldorado Canyon, looking for a young man they did not know, a young man who had left town on his own under the guise of a hoax. That so many people tried to find him touched him deeply.

"Basically, it was a demonstration of caring," he said. ". . . How perfect to find out all that was going on at a time when I had basically lost faith in that.

"I still do think about stuff from time to time — usually when I'm talking about it. I don't feel stuck in PTSD at all. Obviously combat affected me. Obviously, it was much worse before. I feel much more grounded now."

Sitting in a booth at a Chinese restaurant, his sesame chicken finished, he contemplated his afternoon — writing a personal essay as part of a college application that was nearly due. His blond hair was short, though not quite Marine Corps short.

He was asked if he was happy, and he did not hesitate.

A big, toothy smile creased his face. He didn't need to speak.


False reports, an arrest and new hope

A timeline of the Lance Hering case

Aug. 22, 2004: Lance Hering enlists in the U.S. Marine Corps on a four-year commitment.

Aug. 30, 2006: Steve Powers tells authorities that Hering fell and hit his head in a climbing accident in Eldorado Canyon near Boulder. When sheriff's deputies respond, they find no sign of Hering and launch a massive search. At the time, Hering is home on leave after a combat tour in Iraq. The search ultimately costs Boulder County taxpayers more than $33,000.

Sept. 8, 2006: Boulder County authorities conclude the report of Hering's injury is a ruse and issue an arrest warrant for him and a ticket to Powers on charges of false reporting. Though the charge is a misdemeanor, it has potentially drastic implications for the two because they were both on deferred sentences for a felony attempted- burglary charge. That charge stemmed from a 2004 incident in which they climbed onto the roof of a Boulder building, tripping an alarm. A conviction on the misdemeanor could mean a felony conviction on the attempted-burglary charge.

Sept. 18, 2006: Hering is officially declared "away without leave" by the Marine Corps when he does not return to his unit.

Sept. 22, 2006: Boulder County authorities make public the existence of a surveillance tape showing Hering boarding a Greyhound bus in Denver around the time that Powers reported him missing.

Oct. 4, 2006: Powers tells the Boulder Daily Camera that Hering was terrified of other men in his unit and hinted that he knew about an incident in Iraq in which seven Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with killing an Iraqi man.

Jan. 23, 2007: Powers pleads guilty to false reporting, and his deferred sentence in the attempted-burglary case is revoked, leaving him with a felony conviction on his record. A judge orders Powers to pay the $33,000 search cost.

July 10, 2007: Boulder County investigators search Lloyd and Elynne Hering's home, looking for Hering. They find nothing.

May 11, 2008: Lance Hering makes contact with his parents, sending his mother an e-mail that reads: "Happy Mother's Day. I love you."

Nov. 16, 2008: Authorities in Port Angeles, Wash., arrest Lance and his father. Lloyd Hering says he was preparing to fly his son to Virginia to see a psychiatrist, to Texas to meet with an attorney, and then to Camp Pendleton to turn himself in.

Nov. 22, 2008: The U.S. Marine Corps takes custody of Hering.

Dec. 19, 2008: At a summary court-martial, a judicial officer fines Hering one-month's pay, $1,166, and sentences him to the 33 days he has spent behind bars on a charge of unauthorized absence. The Marine Corps gives him an "other than honorable" discharge.

March 26, 2009: Hering pays the remaining $30,705 owed for the cost of the search.

Oct. 5, 2009: Hering pleads guilty to false reporting, a misdemeanor, and is put on probation for 18 months. He is required to perform public service and continue mental-health treatment. If he stays out of trouble, the felony attempted- burglary charge will be dismissed April 5, 2011.

Ellie