Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Captain Paul John McKay grew up in Adelaide, attended the University of Adelaide and graduated with a double degree in law and commerce while completing officer training at the Adelaide Universities Regiment. After graduating, he transferred to the Regular Army where he was allocated to infantry.
 
He deployed to Afghanistan with Combined Team Uruzgan 2 in 2011 and, after returning to Australia, struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder.
 
Paul took his own life by hypothermia at Saranac Lake, New York, January 2014, aged 31. Paul's service and sacrifice is commemorated on the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial.
 
A memorial cairn was built on Anzac Day in 2014 at the site of Paul's death on the path to Scarface Mountain, and a bench dedicated to Paul was also placed along the path later that year.
 
His parents also scattered his ashes on the mountain.

Suffering from the mental anguish of PTSD, Afghanistan veteran Paul McKay left Adelaide to die on Scarface Mountain. His death and its aftermath changed an American town.
On the second-to-last day of 2013, when the glow of Christmas had passed and there was nothing to do but settle in for months of unbroken winter, a stranger arrived in Saranac Lake, a 5400- person mountain town 70 miles shy of the Canadian border. Set amid the patchwork of forest preserves and villages, Saranac Lake is the self-appointed “Capital of the Adirondacks”, a one-time best small town of New York, and the place I come from.

The stranger was a 31-year-old infantry captain in the Royal Australian Regiment who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Afghanistan two years before.
He arrived at 6pm on the one bus that comes through town each day: an Adirondack Trailways coach that chugs slowly uphill from Albany, stopping in what seems like every town along the way.
To get to Albany, he’d taken a bus from New York City, and before that planes from San Francisco, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide, his hometown, more than 10,500 miles away. He was male-model good-looking – wholesome and tidy, with intelligent eyes, though he’d recently grown shockingly thin and had cut his brown hair so close it was nearly shaved.

He’d been a battle captain in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, just north of Kandahar, working as part of a NATO coalition force. But he had a medical review coming up in January and, his family would later tell the police, he feared he might be discharged.

The bus stopped in front of the shuttered Hotel Saranac, its six-storey bulk standing dark and silent over the town. From what police would later determine, the stranger probably walked down Main Street, past the fogged windows of bars, under the yellow face of the town hall clock tower, then traced the curve of Lake Flower back in the direction from which his bus had come. He might have stopped in a liquor store and the shopping plaza at the edge of town, then walked a little farther down the road toward neighbouring Lake Placid before turning around where the snowploughs do, at the crossing of the old railroad tracks.

Somewhere around nine, he returned to one of the last motels he’d passed, a two-storey Best Western, and asked the clerk how far the woods extended past the town. Hearing the answer – nine miles to Lake Placid – he said he’d stay the night. At 10, he emerged briefly to use the lobby computer.

The next morning, on New Year’s Eve, he bought a shovel and a decorative fleece blanket at the shopping plaza and set off on foot. People would later say they’d seen him pass, dressed in snow pants and a black winter parka, and carrying a large, brown backpack as he walked toward the crossing.

The snow was spotty due to a pre-Christmas thaw, but weather was coming. Weather was coming to the whole country, in fact, as a polar air mass descended from the Arctic.
The railroad tracks cut through a marshy area, continued through the smattering of houses that make up the hamlet of Ray Brook, and past the gates of the federal penitentiary. At noon, two guards on their lunch break saw a man in winter gear walking steadily east.

Just beyond the prison was the trail to Scarface Mountain. Broad but not tall, with no real view, Scarface isn’t majestic, but on the slope facing Saranac Lake there is a distinctive, rocky cliff – its eponymous scar. From the trailhead to the summit, it’s a 3.5- mile climb that takes around two hours in summer. In late December, it would have been slower going, the route covered by snow, crisscrossed with misleading animal trails, and slick with ice. At some point, the man walked off the trail and into the woods.

On a shoulder just below the scar, he stopped, and besides a cluster of mossy boulders laid down his pack, took out his shovel, and began to dig in the frozen earth. With what had to be a monumental effort, he cleared a narrow trench the length of a tall man’s body. In the rapidly cooling evening, he stopped to eat tinned beef stew. Perhaps just intending to rest, he covered himself with the thin moose-print fleece. One hundred feet ahead of him, the mountainside dropped off sharply. Beyond it, the sodium streetlights in town flicked on, glowing brown through the dampness that hangs in the air before a snow.

The snow came as predicted. Three days later, the news would hit the town paper: A young Australian named Paul McKay had gone missing in the North Country, last seen in Saranac Lake.
McKay’s father had traced an email his son had sent him back to the motel, and called the Saranac Lake police. In the email McKay said that everything was OK, but that he had some “housekeeping issues” to clarify. What followed was a two-page list, transferring all of his belongings, from his car to his Kindle he account, to his father and he authorised his tall parents to access his civilian email account. Inexplicably, he wrote about what would happen if his body was never found.

Saranac Lake’s police chief at the time, Bruce Nason, contacted McKay’s banks for statements, urgently explaining that he in might be missing in the wilderness, and that the temperatures were 15 below zero and dropping. As the police knocked on doors in search of clues, the ink froze in their pens, and the people they interviewed were aghast at the idea of anybody being out in that cold.
McKay’s bank records led to an ATM at a Greyhound terminal in Albany, where security footage revealed an image of him leaning on a counter as he bought his ticket using a fake name. When a family member went to his apartment in Canberra, they found his military dress uniform and medals laid out at neat right angles on his bed, his army sword to its side.
Just before McKay disappeared, his family learned, he’d created profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook. McKay hated social media.

On the LinkedIn page, he specified that he’d served in Afghanistan alongside soldiers from the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, based out of Fort Drum, New York, three hours west of Saranac Lake. And he noted that he was the battle captain on duty during “Bloody Saturday,” the “green-on-blue” attack of October 29, 2011, when an Afghan coalition member opened fire on a group of 12 Australian soldiers and three of their interpreters on their shared base in Uruzgan, killing four and severely wounding nine. The Facebook profile contained only photographs – McKay on training exercises, McKay as a tourist in Asia, McKay in his service dress uniform looking handsome, and, for his profile image, a shot taken from a distance: McKay sitting atop a mountain, facing away.
Many who heard about McKay’s disappearance inferred that he’s been present at the Bloody Saturday attack and had watched his colleagues die – that he had survivor’s guilt or felt he’d somehow failed to protect them.

But it wasn’t that simple, said two army colleagues who had been there. The attack had shaken every Australian in Uruzgan, they said, but McKay hadn’t been anywhere near the outpost where the Afghan soldier opened fire. The provenance of his PTSD was something more ambiguous.

McKay had grown up in Adelaide, attending the University of Adelaide, where he earned a double degree in law and commerce.He joined the Adelaide Universities Regiment of the Army Reserve in late 2004. While most reserve officers take two to three years to complete their training, McKay finished in just 13 months. He mapped out a glorious life plan: to excel in both the reserves and the law, to become a partner in a top firm by age 30, and to parlay that into a successful career in politics or business.His friends believed he would do it. McKay was an over-achiever – exceptionally disciplined and very smart, retaining facts so well that he suspected he had a photographic memory. In a country of sports fanatics, he played almost every game. “Many people have celebrities they look up to,” said his childhood friend Peter O’Leary. “I looked up to Paul.”

In 2009, McKay finished his law degree with honours and was admitted to the bar. And then, almost immediately, he quit.He shifted his focus to the military. In most circumstances, a reserve officer transferring to the regular army would be compelled to start anew, returning to military college for another 12 to 18 months. Only the most promising reservists were allowed to bypass the process, and at the time McKay applied, there were only two openings for direct transfers available. It surprised no one when he was chosen.

Saranac Lake seems to possess a sort of geographic anonymity, and the police were puzzled by the fact that McKay had even ended up there. “You don’t just end up here,” said my brother James, a police officer in town, who helped with the search. The police thought if they could figure out why McKay had come, it might help them get to him in time. They uploaded a missing person flyer onto Facebook, and within days the post was shared nearly 30,000 times. None of the leads panned out.

McKay’s friends in Australia began to write too, telling a common story of an intelligent and driven man who’d dropped progressively out of touch. They worried that McKay might not want to be found.People go missing every year, usually unprepared hikers or hunters who wander off the trail into the dark uniformity of the forest and can’t find their way back. More recently, rangers had seen a spike in the number of people who go into the woods not for recreation, but intending to do themselves harm. Nationally, suicide had become a leading cause of death in parks and open spaces. The pattern was striking enough in the Adirondacks that rangers had requested specialised training for approaching people in mental distress.But McKay’s disappearance seemed to move people in town far more than other cases had. The newspaper printed his boy-next-door photo, and, in this community full of English and Irish surnames, he could have been anyone’s brother or son. Locals wrote letters to the editor wondering whether McKay had somehow been drawn by Saranac Lake’s peaceful mountains, or its kindly small-town ways. They referred to him with odd formality, as “Captain McKay” or simply “the Australian soldier”, a sort of everyman wounded warrior.Uruzgan, Afghanistan, is mostly desert and jagged mountains cut through with lush stripes of valley – the Green Zone – where watermelons, pomegranates and wheat grow alongside the poppies. By April 2011, when McKay arrived, Australian military members were there primarily to mentor the fragile Afghan National Army and focus on Australia’s long-term plans for withdrawal.McKay was stationed at Tarin Kowt, the central headquarters of Combined Team Uruzgan, working in modular offices of reinforced metal. He was a battle captain in the command centre.

For at least nine months, he worked the night shift. His whole job, said one close colleague, was sitting in the command centre and waiting for something to happen. Most of the time nothing did, and the team would pass the hours reading or watching television. But when something did occur – an attack on a forward operating base, soldiers killed – McKay was charged with making decisions about the initial response. He was “like an orchestra conductor,” said another friend, co-ordinating air traffic controllers, specialists in charge of supplies and artillery, ground forces, and medevac helicopters. It was a high-stress job.

With his colleagues, McKay was full of self-doubt, constantly pulling them aside to discuss decisions he’d made the night before, never sure he’d made the right call.
Then came the Bloody Saturday attack at Sorkh Bed Forward Operating Base. McKay was in the command post, manning the morning operations, and helped direct the evacuation helicopters dispatched within moments to the base. Shortly after 8am, as 12 Australians and their Afghan interpreters walked across the compound, they came under sudden, heavy fire from a four-year veteran of the Afghan forces. Ten Australian soldiers, plus three translators, were shot. Days later, McKay would gather in an airport hangar with fellow servicemen and watch as three coffins draped with the Australian flag were loaded onto a military transport.

McKay’s response to the pressure and anxiety was to work harder. While other nightshift workers tried to unwind, he pored over every intelligence briefing and situation report he could find. He shut himself away and returned to his military history books, searching for parallels between the situation in Afghanistan and ancient battles as though it was a puzzle he could solve.
By this point he was working 12- to 16-hour days, operating on little or no sleep. But change was coming. His unit was set to return home in February. In the third week of January, however, something happened and after a medical evaluation, he was placed on a cas-evac – a medical casualty evacuation – and flown to a hospital in Brisbane.

When he returned to Adelaide, he saw his oldest childhood friend, Peter O’Leary, and told him he wasn’t the same anymore. He said he’d been pumped full of drugs and they were making him feel worse. He was put on a restricted medical status and posted to Canberra where he continued to work.

One night in March, he sent a group text to a number of friends, saying he’d shamed himself and his unit; he seemed to be saying goodbye. His friends made panicked calls to each other, and one alerted McKay’s commanding officer. The CO called McKay’s phone, McKay answered, and he ended up in the hospital. To a friend who visited him there, he lamented that his career plans were ruined: Why would the army want him now? It was hard to pinpoint why he felt he’d shamed his unit. While many in the Australian media, and even his friends, would later believe he blamed himself for the losses at Sorkh Bed, one US officer said there was nothing about McKay’s job that could conceivably leave him at fault.

Another snow came to Saranac Lake, followed by another thaw, eclipsing any hope that the search might be as easy as spotting a set of footprints leading off into the woods. McKay had been missing for five days when, on January 5, 2014, the Saranac Lake police briefed two forest rangers on the case. Ranger Scott van Laer, who lived just off the railroad tracks in Ray Brook, was appointed case section chief, setting the terms of the search. State Police helicopters were sent to hover overhead while rangers walked the tracks where McKay had last been seen.
Eric Olsen, who ran Saranac Lake’s veterans’ program, told the police McKay wouldn’t have stayed on the tracks but would have cut off at the first trail he’d seen.“Being a ‘man of action,’” Olsen explained, “McKay would try to move through his depression. He would not stop until he was out of the manic mood or otherwise incapacitated.” He would go to extremes. Olsen told the searchers to look up high. January 15 was Scott van Laer’s day off, but he had been mulling over an idea that he just couldn’t shake. Maybe McKay hadn’t followed the Scarface trail at all. Large-scale searches had been going on for five days, with upwards of 30 volunteers, largely regional veterans, working their way up and around the mountain. An Australian news crew had flown over to film the effort. Every day searchers went out in groups of 10, following assigned paths and marking off search blocks with string. They found surprisingly few clues: one day a sock, another the remains of a campfire, neither convincingly tied to McKay.Van Laer knew there was an ice floe on one side of the mountain covered so thickly with evergreens the searchers in police helicopters wouldn’t have been able to see through. He walked out his backyard, up into the woods, and worked his way toward the floe. “When I started out that day I didn’t believe I was going to find him; I thought there was no chance,” he recalls. At first he thought that he’d come upon an illegal hunting camp. “And then I got closer and I thought, ‘Oh. We’ve ended the search.’”

McKay’s body was lying on the ground next to a boulder, his hands in his pockets, just beside a shallow trench. His belongings were tucked between the rocks, and the shovel lay nearby. Staff at the complex in Ray Brook had become accustomed to the sound of helicopters moving back and forth over the mountain. But that afternoon, as they looked out their windows and saw a helicopter return bearing a litter, they knew Paul McKay had been found. The local coroner determined McKay’s death was a suicide, due to intentional hypothermia and emaciation. Saranac Lake Mayor Clyde Rabideau announced the news on Facebook that afternoon. Within hours, the post was liked and shared thousands of times. Locals wrote to express their sorrow, to say how they’d felt that they’d somehow known McKay. Australians commented in droves, thanking Saranac Lake for treating a stranger as one of their own. Others wrote with more bitterness: “RIP Paul, another soldier let down by the system.” A State Police escort was arranged to accompany McKay’s body to New York City, from where he was flown home. At 7:30 on the frigid morning of January 23, with thermometers hovering on 20 below, some two dozen locals lined the streets of Saranac Lake and Ray Brook to see him off.

The reception in Australia wasn’t as warm. There was no ceremony to welcome him home, as would have been the case if he’d died in combat. His name wouldn’t be engraved outside the Hall of Memory at Canberra’s Australian War Memorial so that visiting children could participate in the ritual of placing a plastic poppy alongside it.
At the funeral reception, McKay’s friends speculated over why he’d gone where he had. To his mother, a devout Anglican, it seemed that he was on a religious quest, like the biblical wise men, following a star he didn’t quite understand. Other friends thought it must have been the proximity of the 10th Mountain Division, which was in Afghanistan, or just the appeal of a completely foreign environment. Or maybe something as simple as a postcard he’d once seen or something he’d read in a book. 

What stuck with van Laer was the unmistakeable impression that McKay had wanted someone to look for him, and one day to be found. “But why would he want there to be a search?” he asked. To Australian veterans, the answer was obvious. Since 2000, estimates suggest that nearly three times as many active Australian soldiers and nearly five times as many veterans have committed suicide as have died fighting in Afghanistan. But before McKay, almost none had been nationally recognised. “He could have easily died in Australia,” said Troy Rodgers, a veterans’ assistance worker. “Obviously he had a clear thought in his mind that he’s going to do it and do it in a way that will make some noise.”

John Bale, CEO and co-founder of Soldier On, a national veterans’ support group based in Canberra, agreed. Before McKay’s death there had been a near blackout on news of the growing number of soldier suicides in Australia. It wasn’t so much that McKay changed the conversation, said Bale: “It didn’t exist in conversations before this. It does now.”
On April 25, 2014, Saranac Lake declared its first-ever observation of Anzac Day, and a procession of local and Australian authorities climbed up Scarface Mountain to where the forest rangers had constructed a small stone cairn and a wooden cross, to which one of them tied a poppy while another poured a can of Foster’s on the ground. McKay’s parents came that summer, bringing their son’s ashes to the mountain and scattering them above the cairn.

Why McKay did what he did will probably remain a mystery. Perhaps his unforgiving drive and perfectionism set him up to come apart in the face of the horrors he saw in Afghanistan. Perhaps he needed more help than he got reintegrating into society after serving in a war zone. Perhaps it’s wrong for a civilian like me to even speculate.
What does seem clear from the clues he left behind is that McKay struggled to operate under the weight of his experiences. Those who knew him best described their sense of no longer really knowing him.

One close Australian colleague visited Scarface and sent a note to McKay’s parents, along with a photo of the cross and the cairn in the shadow of the boulder. “It was a very quiet spot,” he wrote.

“Sadly I didn’t find Paul there. I think I lost him a long time ago.”

“He disappeared like he had disappeared off the face of the Earth,” recalled Reverend Brian Douglas, McKay’s pastor back in Canberra. “But really, he had disappeared before he actually left. He had gone to another place emotionally, which you couldn’t reach.”

Long before he ever set foot in Saranac Lake, Paul McKay was already gone.  

First published in Pacific Standard Magazine. 

Courtesy the SA Weekend Magazine July 2016

Writer - Kathryn Joyce