BARDWELL, KY. — When Cody Alexander Morris returned from the war last fall, he carried home a burden -- a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder -- and a new way of playing with guns.
The gun game was called "Do You Trust Me?" Morris, 19, learned it from his Kentucky National Guard buddies in Iraq.
He taught the game to his roommates: best friend and fellow guardsman Casey Lee Hall, 18, and a 16-year-old cousin, Cory Adams. The young men would point unloaded handguns at each other's heads, ask "Do you trust me?" and pull the trigger.
Sometimes the guns came out while the teenagers drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and played violent video games. They called each other CWB, for "crazy white boy," and had those three words tattooed on their necks.
"It fit us pretty good," Morris said recently, "'cause we are crazy white boys. We were potheads -- we'd just drink and smoke . . . and play-fight."
But the carousing masked Morris' troubled state. His PTSD was so severe, his friends said, that he couldn't sleep. He had terrifying visions of people he had killed in combat.
Morris showed his friends horrific photos from Iraq -- "people with their heads blowed off . . . guts ripped out on barbed wire . . . bullet holes in every piece of body," said a friend, Dustin Newton.
Sometimes, friends said, Morris would show the photos and laugh.
At night, Morris slept with a loaded 9-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic handgun under his mattress. His mother bought the gun for him because he was two years shy of being able to buy it legally.
That gun was in Morris' hand when it went off on the night of Oct. 18, killing Hall with a perfectly placed shot between his eyes.
Cody Morris is small and nimble -- 5 foot 6 and 140 pounds. He refers to himself as "not a real smart guy." He has a severe learning disability and reads below the eighth-grade level. He failed fourth grade and repeated ninth grade before dropping out.
At 15, he was sent to a military-themed reform school for standing lookout while a friend robbed a store. He was 17 when he earned a GED.
Morris remembers a turbulent upbringing in Bardwell, where he lived in a trailer with a blended family. (He has a sister, two half-sisters, two half-brothers and three stepsisters.) One Christmas, he said, his stepfather smashed the gifts under the tree and wrote "slut" on a wall with Miracle Whip after a fight with Morris' mother.
