Soldiers of Meth

Clad in desert fatigues and clutching M-16 rifles, four soldiers circle a wounded dog in the desert wasteland. Its hind legs are crushed. It has been slowly baking in the 120-degree heat. The men decide to rush its fate.

Backed by a dozen men and four Bradley tanks, the soldiers have blockaded a road to search suspicious vehicles a few miles outside the commandeered Tallil airstrip in southern Iraq. The men belong to the 41st Infantry Division, Bravo Company, a mechanized unit of 130 men from Fort Riley, Kansas. Their motto: straight and stalwart. The 41st has been on front lines from D-Day to Bosnia to the 1991 Gulf War.

It's March 2003, and the men are edgy. Operation Iraqi Freedom is days old. They've been in hostile territory for a few days, but the soldiers in Bravo Company have yet to field-test their electronic-scope M-16s with live rounds. This will kill two birds with one stone, figures a sergeant. Test the weapons. Put the mutt out of its misery. He orders the men to lock their scopes on the whimpering target. When the sergeant gives the order, they unload.

The dog explodes like a piñata.

In the squad is a private in his early twenties named Eric Colvin. From rural Papillion, Nebraska, Colvin is tall, with birdlike features. He's covered in macabre tattoos — his forearm boasts a fair-skinned archangel battling a black dragon. During the company's tour of Iraq, Colvin will develop a reputation as the company's crazy bastard. He'll watch a man burn alive and see a little girl's head get blown off. Part of his duty in the company is to raid corpses. He searches fresh kills and rummages through coffins to secure weapons. He talks about having nothing to come home to. His mom sold all of his belongings when he joined the Army.

Killing the dog also affects Colvin. Months later, the 41st Infantry Division moves south to the outskirts of the city of Hilla, running patrols through slums laced with insurgents. When they find a pair of sick puppies, Colvin figures he knows what to do.

What happens next is the first step in what will become the twisted legacy of Eric Colvin. The Pitch has pieced together that history from court documents; interviews with soldiers, their friends and families; and news reports from the Associated Press, the Manhattan Mercury and the Daily Union of Junction City. When Bravo returns to Fort Riley in July 2003, Colvin will become the central figure in a drug scheme that will divide his company. Soldiers will turn their own guns on one another.

"Let's put them out of their misery," he repeats constantly, trying to convince the others to kill them.

Finally, with a few soldiers looking on warily, Colvin gathers the pups. One by one, he snaps their necks.

Around 4 p.m. on June 9, 2004, two plainclothes police in an unmarked cruiser tail a blue 1996 Dodge pickup as it leaves a Target store in Manhattan, Kansas, 20 miles east of Fort Riley.

Minutes earlier, detectives Lucas Breault and Sonia Gregoire, both members of the Riley County Police Department's Proactive Crime Unit drug force, received a tip from the store's security guard: Two men had each just purchased two boxes of Sudafed, a cold medicine used to make methamphetamine.

Breault tails the truck as it turns left on Manhattan's main drag, Seth Childs Road. When the driver doesn't signal to change lanes, he flashes his cherries and pulls him over. Both men in the pickup are in their twenties. The driver, Bradley Nichols, works for Foot Locker. The passenger, Chris Brown, works at a nearby tire store. The car is registered to Aaron Stanley, a sergeant from Bravo.

Breault searches the vehicle. He finds the four boxes of Sudafed and a can of Presto lighting fluid, also a meth ingredient. Both men are detained while the officers issue a search warrant for Nichols' address, a prefab home the size of a double-wide on 114 Jeanette Street in Belvue. Secluded, low-rent and hemmed by cornfields, the house fits the textbook profile of a drug lab.

At nightfall the following day, half a dozen agents from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the Pottawatomie County Tactical Team, dressed in riot helmets and Kevlar vests, kick in Nichols' front door. Inside, they find a pipe, syringes and equipment for a small-time meth-cooking operation: tubing, hoses, lithium batteries, starter fluid, mason jars, isopropyl alcohol, funnels, gloves, coffee filters, scales and baggies. They find 5 grams of meth and 450 grams of pseudoephedrine (boiled-down Sudafed). They also find Bravo Company's Stanley cozying up with Nichols' sister, Adrienne Lynn.

The bust takes on some Cheaters-style drama when the cops learn that Lynn is married to another soldier in Fort Riley's 41st Infantry Division, Charlie Company. News that Stanley was caught with another guy's wife fosters distrust and bad blood among some men back in the barracks.

Stanley — his friends call him Stan — is a 23-year-old Bravo sergeant with an impeccable reputation. Though he claims to have once dealt small amounts of meth and coke in his hometown of Phoenix, Stanley is better known for keeping his hair high and tight, his uniform pressed and his bunk immaculate. He's a regular-army poster boy: "Hardworking, motivated and reliable," former Bravo Capt. Darin Thomson will say later. He aced physical training, read weapons manuals in his spare time and earned an invitation to Army Ranger school, which an illness forced him to miss. The drug task force that found him in the meth lab charges Stanley with six felony and two misdemeanor drug counts and holds him at the Pottawatomie County jail on $75,000 bond.