Fighting in the war flipped Daniel's political beliefs. "I came back very anti-Bush. I used to be a Republican before I joined the military. Not any more." His experiences on the ground, he says, convinced him he'd been lied to. The Iraqis "are a defeated people," he says, not a threat to America. "It's a third-world country. These people walk around with no shoes, nothing. These guys are working for a dollar a day. The military would pay the village people to come on base and build sandbags so that they can be more comfortable in their tents and pay them a dollar a day, and these guys will work making seven dollars a week just to feed their family."

Watching the construction of permanent barracks on bases in Iraq convinced Daniel that the real goal of the war was control. "Iraq is the center of the Middle East. If you control the center, you control the whole Middle East. You control all the profits that you get from there," he says about the oil reserves.

Back from leave, Daniel, who was awarded eight decorations for valor, was in for some surprises. "We go back to Camp Lejeune and we get a new CO [commanding officer] who's never been to Iraq, who doesn't have nearly as many ribbons as I do," says Daniel. "He goes, 'Get prepared to go back to Iraq in January!' This was October. We just got back. All of our jaws just dropped. He goes, 'But go home and have fun for about three weeks.'" As Daniel recounts this announcement of a third tour of duty in the Middle East in as many years, his stutter becomes much more pronounced. "I felt like a weight just got put on my chest. I couldn't breathe. Panic attacks. I can't believe this is going to happen. Everybody felt the same way. A couple of people didn't come back from leave. They decided to stay home."

Daniel looked forward to going home to California, but he realized, "I couldn't enjoy my leave because I knew I was going straight back to that hellhole I just left. "They were trying to train us to go back," he continues. "We were well seasoned. We had to listen to these guys who had never been over there. We all thought, 'These dumb-asses are going to get us killed.' Some of these guys, they didn't know how to tie their shoes. They came back from recruiting duty wanting to get all gung ho. They were like, 'Yeah! We're going to go fight a war!' We had already been over there and seen what's happened."

This veteran of some of the worst fighting in the Iraq War, now a lance corporal and faced with a third tour of duty in the war zone, asked to see a counselor of some type, "because my head was not right." Nothing happened. He told his first sergeant that he was a conscientious objector, and he says the sergeant responded: "Get those words out of your mouth right now." Daniel was trying everything he could think of to avoid shipping out to Iraq again, and couldn't see a way out.

So he made a fateful decision.

"I was pretty frustrated," he explains. "I wanted them to listen to me, so I decided to do something where I would stand out and get everybody's attention. I knew by doing this I would not have to go back to Iraq and harm any more people. I decided to take drugs that Friday, knowing I had a piss test on Monday. I did drugs. I did the urinalysis test on Monday. Went home for a Christmas break on Friday." Back on base after the holidays, Daniel was told he had "popped," failed the drug test.

Daniel picked cocaine as his drug of choice, convinced that if he only smoked marijuana the Marines would just slap his hand and send him packing for Iraq. He says it was the first time he had used cocaine. "I knew that if I did that they would listen to me." He finally was awarded a meeting with the battalion's commanding officer and was told that as long as he trained a replacement radio operator, he would be discharged "in a timely manner."