By MARK JOHNSON
markjohnson@journalsentinel.com
Posted: July 22, 2006

CHAPTER 1: THE STRANGER

He was a hero once, plaque in hand, a bronze medal pinned to his chest for his part in saving the lives of 180 shipmates. But over the years, the wooden plaque dried and cracked until duct tape was all that held it together.

And now: He's just robbed a credit union in the town of Red Wing, Minn. He is fleeing. On a mountain bike.

He pedals furiously, steering with his right arm, cradling $70,000 in his left. The Colt .45 rests inside his jacket, a bullet waiting in the chamber. His hazel eyes stare intently from a black-knit hunting mask.

All he feels is numb.

Around him, things move in slow motion. Bundles of currency slip from his arm; a trail forms.

The bike plunges down a steep culvert, crashing onto a service road. He flies over the handlebars. The .45 clatters onto the blacktop in front of the Red Wing Mall, unnoticed. Money spills everywhere, bundles of hundreds, fifties and twenties.

He grabs what he can, abandons almost $60,000 and gets back on the bicycle.

Fifty yards more, then he drops the damaged bike. He runs past a small apartment complex through grass and weeds, right to the edge of the Mississippi River - and jumps in.

He scoops mud and weeds on top of his head - the old instinct for camouflage - then crouches in the river as a police cruiser screeches to a stop 40 feet away. The officer steps outside, glances around, drives off quickly.

The robber swims a few hundred yards to a place on the riverbank where he has left an air tank. He strips off his clothes, revealing an unusual outfit: scuba gear.

He is 37 years old, from Hager City, Wis., five miles to the north. Vast bodies of water have always stirred his imagination, from the moment he picked up Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" as a boy to the moment he entered Navy SEAL training as a young man.

Now, on the morning of May 3, 2001, he slips back into the dark, flooded Mississippi with the remains of the credit union money - $10,550 - stuffed inside his wet suit. Through floating soda bottles and scavenging birds, he glides toward the second leg of his mission.

Water seeps into the wet suit. A chill runs through him.

He's been trained to endure physical discomfort. It's the mental pain he cannot handle.

As he swims, he pulls the hunter's mask from his head, and it floats away and vanishes.

More than five years later, the robber's name, Mark William Samples, is a matter of court record. But the man inside the wet suit that day remains a stupefying mystery to his shipmates, friends and family.

"He was a stranger to himself," his mother says.

Ruth Samples has trouble picturing her oldest son in the weeks before the robbery, when the nightmares and paranoia kept driving him into the basement to sleep apart from the wife he loved. He would lock the door and lie down with a gun under his pillow. All this, she learned after the robbery.

She remembers a different Mark.

The happy, gentle boy who raced horses.

The sailor who saved his ship but never seemed comfortable with the awards given him.

The man whose military toughness melted in the presence of his 2-year-old son.

"That wasn't Mark that robbed that bank," Ruth Samples insists. "He wasn't there inside that brain."

How did the hero of May 1987 become the robber of May 2001?

And does his story carry a cautionary lesson as thousands of Americans return from combat, some of them heroes, too?

From an early age, Mark Samples embraced endurance - the last kid to come inside on winter nights, the one begging the others to stay out just a little longer as darkness settled over the farm near St. Albans, W.Va.

He loved to compete. Barely a teenager, he paddled in canoe marathons. He ran cross country.

Born on Sept. 5, 1963, Samples was the oldest of three children; his parents adopted five more over the years and hosted dozens of foster children.

They lived on a tobacco farm in hilly country where Samples learned to ride and race his horse, Georgie Girl, a spirited Arabian. His father, an electrical contractor, took him camping and deer and turkey hunting in the Appalachians. At home, they watched the Vietnam War each night on television, and Samples imagined being a soldier.

The boy, quiet like his father, craved adventure.

The Jules Verne deep-sea classic led, oddly enough, to the Sears catalog. Samples lingered over ads for scuba gear.

Growing up in a state known for mountains and coal mining, he dreamed of oceans and scuba diving. As he saw it, deep waters were among the planet's last unknown places.

In his final year of high school, Samples worked at a Ponderosa restaurant to save money for lessons at a dive shop in Charleston, W.Va. Scuba diving gave Samples an idea of what he might do with his life.

He wanted to be a Navy SEAL. Members of this elite group endured rigorous training and were regarded as America's special forces of the sea.

Samples, an above-average but never straight-A student, graduated from high school in 1981. Before going into the military, he worked for a hospital in Charleston, W.Va., as a lab assistant, drawing blood.

He liked the hospital atmosphere, but performing the same task day after day did little to satisfy his craving for adventure. By 1984, he was ready to begin the rugged climb to Navy SEAL.

He joined the Navy and became a gunner's mate, trained to operate a missile launcher. In 1985, having completed training, he was sent to the USS Stark, a 445-foot frigate with a small, close crew of around 200.

Samples missed the farm in West Virginia and his family. But the ship quickly became home. He grew especially close to a group of a half-dozen sailors, most of whom worked with him on the ship's weapons systems.

When the Stark was at home at Naval Station Mayport near Jacksonville, Fla., they took target practice together at the gun range and socialized with wives and girlfriends at bars and restaurants. They enjoyed paint ball, barbecues and touch football.

The sailors grew closer still when the Stark sailed to Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. Samples and the shipmates stood watches together. During the four- to six-hour shifts, they talked about their mothers and fathers, girlfriends and wives back home. They talked about where they grew up and what they wanted to do with their lives.

Friends considered Samples quiet, easygoing and, at times, humorous. If he stood out at all, it was for his scuba diving and fitness. He had trained to become the ship's search and rescue swimmer, the man trusted to perform difficult rescues at sea. Many of the men knew of his ambition to join the SEALs.

Shipmate Chuck Stephenson remembers Sundays when the other sailors were relaxing by the ship's fantail, the area at the stern where helicopters land. They would watch Samples pace the deck, a 50-pound block of wood on his shoulders, pausing to perform squats - he'd seen this on a SEALs training tape. Samples spent hours on the ship's rowing machine, not just working out, but driving himself to beat the machine records.

In February 1987, the Stark left Mayport to protect oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The Iran-Iraq War, then dragging through its seventh year, was imperiling the flow of oil. Tankers had been attacked.

Samples and the other sailors knew they were heading into potentially dangerous waters. During a previous deployment to the gulf, some of the men had rescued the survivors of a crippled tanker. This time, although the sailors discussed the risks, no one seemed especially worried.

On May 17, 1987, the ship set out on a routine patrol. Samples was aboard, savoring memories from the weekend he and his shipmates had just spent in Bahrain.

The years aboard the Stark had been good to him.

"He loved it at first," his cousin Keith Scott said. "He made a lot of friends. He saw the world."

It was, Scott recalled, "the last time I remember him being the truly happy Mark I grew up with."

In the Mississippi, he drifts for hours along the surface, past logs and plastic bags, snakes and dead fish. The river, well past flood stage, is dark brown, foaming and wild. Swimming in this place feels surreal but exhilarating. He is on a mission.

The money in his wet suit is for his wife and son.

The bullet in the .45 is for himself.

He hasn't realized that the gun is no longer with him; the president of the Red Wing Credit Union has already discovered it lying in the street near a pile of money.

Four hours pass. Five. Six. As his body glides downriver, his mind returns to a long-running debate.

He knows the reasons for killing himself: nightmares of a burning ship, paranoid delusions that his wife is poisoning him, a crumbling mind that imagines he must kill her first.

Is there any reason not to turn the gun on himself?

He arrives at one argument for life. Christopher. His son.

The numbness begins to lift. He thinks: I robbed a bank. He cannot believe he's done this; the idea fills him with fear and confusion. His mind pinballs back and forth between options. Turn himself in? Kill himself?

He sheds his tank, regulator and weight belt, $3,000 worth of equipment, and lets them sink to the bottom of the Mississippi.

After 7-1/2 hours in the river, he walks out shivering. He is just outside of Red Wing, staring at a pile of wood near a boat storage area.

There, beneath an old log on the riverbank, he hides the credit union money, wrapped inside his mountain climbing jacket.

CHAPTER 2: THE HERO

A half moon rose over the Persian Gulf, and Mark Samples stood watch aboard the USS Stark, manning a .50-caliber gun. He was there to protect the ship from a small boat attack, but no one was expecting trouble. The gun was unloaded, the ammunition stored in a nearby locker.

Forty feet beneath him, the water was calm, barely a ripple. On nights like this, May 17, 1987, the gulf seemed as gentle as a big pond.

Samples and a young lookout were discussing their weekends in Bahrain. For Samples, the highlight had been the evening he and some shipmates spent at an Italian restaurant, dining and drinking great quantities of Lambrusco, a sparkling wine.

After a while, the two sailors fell silent. Samples, 23, sat staring at the stars and listening to the rumble of the gas turbine engines. It was 9:09 p.m.

Suddenly, shouts. The lookout's words were unclear. One caught Samples' attention: flare.

He stood up. In the sky, he could see a prick of light.

He strained to see if it was moving. In seconds, the ball of light grew much bigger and much closer, and just as its movement registered in his brain, an accompanying roar erupted in his ears and his knees buckled. The ship shook violently.

He returned to his feet and saw a second ball of light on the horizon, closing low and fast. Ten feet above the water, 600 mph.

A voice over the loudspeaker: "Inbound missile! Port side!"

Samples had just enough time to think: I'm going to die.

Then the roar. A deafening blast - so loud he imagined two trains colliding at full speed, metal on metal.

The first Exocet missile had punched through the hull beneath Samples without detonating, spreading 300 pounds of rocket fuel. Just 30 seconds later, missile No. 2 hit and detonated, igniting the fuel.

Flames shot up over the side of the ship. Shrapnel zipped through the air. Dense black smoke and an oily diesel smell engulfed the Stark.

Shouts. Boots rushing onto the bridge. The insistent horn calling men to combat stations.

With each wave of flame rising over the ship, Samples felt a flash of heat over his body, as if he'd opened an immense oven. He backed away. Then he saw what the flames were reaching: four shoulder-fired Stinger Missiles.

Samples shouted down to the captain: The Stingers are in the fire. They have to be moved!

Throw them over the side.

Samples and the lookout worked quickly, heaving the 35-pound missiles into the gulf. All around him, one crisis overlapped another.

Up above, the men could hear planes and see their dark outlines. They had no way of knowing the planes were friendlies, Saudi F-14s sent to protect the crippled ship. Fearful shouts filled the air.

"Incoming! Incoming!"

"They're coming back!"

Down below, Samples' friend Bill Morandi, a stocky fire controlman, scrambled to escape the water and black smoke pouring into the berthing area where he'd been sleeping. Unable to get through the smoke to the main hatch or open the escape hatch, Morandi eventually stumbled through an opening, dropped 10 feet and found himself in the warm waters of the gulf, staring up as the Stark drifted away over the horizon. He had fallen through a hole gouged by one of the missiles.

For the next 12 hours until they were rescued, Morandi and four shipmates treaded water in the gulf, watching for ships and jabbing at passing sharks with the lights on their life rings.

On board the ship, men struggled to fight the fire. No water was coming through the hoses on the port side. The missiles had severed a water main.

The attack had also knocked out the Stark's gyrocompass, a directional tool essential to the ship's navigation and weapons systems.

Samples grabbed breathing equipment and went onto the bridge. For the next 30 minutes, he used an ordinary compass for direction and worked with the men in engineering to steer the ship. The ship's wheel, with its crosshair shape, looked comically small, the size of a coffee-cup lid.

More shouts. A new crisis. The missile launcher was smoking. Heat threatened the ship's 40 missiles, including four Harpoons, each roughly 15 feet long and more than 1,400 pounds.

If just one of the 40 missiles blew, it would set off the others.

They would blast the Stark to rubble.

Samples found Lt. Art Conklin, the ship's damage control assistant, and explained the threat. As a gunner's mate, Samples believed the missiles were his responsibility.

"I'm taking care of it," he told Conklin.

When he reached the magazine, where the ammunition was stored, the Harpoons were literally cooking, their white paint peeling from the heat. The steel walls of the tight, cylindrical room glowed red.

Samples hooked up a pump and began spraying water from the gulf onto the 40 missiles. At times, he sat astride the fins of the missiles. As water hit searing metal, blasts of steam blew back in his face.

An hour into the job, Samples was ordered below deck to check on a blocked door impeding the men fighting the fire. Taking a breathing apparatus, he opened a hatch and descended a ladder through a narrow passage to the ship's lowest level. The blast had forced twisted metal up against the door. It would not budge.

The damage control assistant had asked Samples also to check the progress of the fire. He crossed to the port side of the ship and began heading toward the back. Wires dangled from the ceiling and shocked him. The ship was starting to list as water rushed in. He struggled to keep his balance.

It was hard to see through the smoke, and he tripped over the lip of a doorway. He landed on something that did not feel like the floor. Smoke cleared and he saw that he had fallen onto the bodies of his shipmates, his friends. He checked the bodies for breath or a pulse but found none.

Covered in soot, Samples sat down among them and wept. He asked himself over and over: Why didn't I come earlier?

After a few minutes, he rose and began walking and crawling back the way he had come. In a passageway, he found the body of his best friend, Christopher DeAngelis.

DeAngelis, a tall, friendly young man from a military family in New Jersey, had been in the electronics room when he was hit by shrapnel. He'd managed to crawl a short distance before he died. He was 23 - Samples' age.

Samples had known all of the dead, but he'd lived with DeAngelis. They'd shared interests in guns and motorcycles. He had been there when DeAngelis met his future wife; he'd stood with him as an usher at the wedding.

Seeing him now, Samples went numb.

When he returned to the damage control assistant, he described the blocked door and fire. He said nothing about the bodies.

Then Samples went back to the magazine and resumed hosing the Harpoon missiles. There, amid waves of heat and a smell like burning plastic, he fought for the next 16 hours to keep the missiles from exploding. Since breathing equipment was limited and needed most by those fighting the fire, Samples made do with a wet T-shirt pressed over his mouth to filter the smoke.

As he worked, he pictured the faces of his friends and wondered:

How many were dead, how many alive?

CHAPTER 3: THE SURVIVOR

Mark Samples let his body sink into the cot. For 16 hours straight, as fire raged aboard the USS Stark, he had hosed down missiles so hot the paint peeled.

The fire, ignited by an Iraqi attack on May 17, 1987, melted aluminum and scorched the walls of the missile magazine where Samples worked until they glowed red. Had the heat detonated just one of the dozens of missiles, the blast would have set off a chain reaction, killing Samples and blowing the entire ship to steel shards.

In the end, though, he and the surviving sailors saved the Stark.

Thirty-seven shipmates lay dead; Samples had discovered many of their bodies.

Now, as he rested on another ship in the gulf, the USS LaSalle, his throat burned. His head throbbed with the worst headache of his life. The 23-year-old sailor curled up on the cot and wept until he drifted into a fitful sleep.

The next day he was back on the Stark. Aboard the crippled ship, men stood watches and fought the fires that flared anew. It was several days before the fires finally went out and they could focus on the grim cleanup.

A chaplain told the survivors they had to work hard and be strong because that's what their fallen comrades would have wanted.

The sailors were pressed into sweeping away the charred body parts of their shipmates and scrubbing their blood stains off the walls. The burned smell of the bodies, as overpowering as ammonia, hovered over the sailors as they worked, clinging to their clothes and seeping into their nostrils.

Years later, Chuck Stephenson, an electronic warfare technician on the Stark, described the cleanup: "It's one thing to pick up the body parts of people you don't know. It's another thing to pick up bits and pieces of people you did know."

Know was an understatement.

"We lived together. We breathed. We ate. We played. We talked. It was not an extended family. This was our family," Stephenson said. "Our wives and children were almost our extended family."

Steve Hales, a junior officer, recalled a bloody handprint that the cleanup crew kept avoiding. Eventually, he forced himself to wipe away the stain.

"You just sit there wondering, 'Whose blood is that?' " Hales said.

After they scrubbed off the blood, the men repainted.

Some of the survivors refused to go back aboard the Stark.

Not Samples. He cleaned and painted over the stains, "like it didn't happen and it was over," he said. He banished the attack from his mind - as much as he could.

According to the journal Military Medicine, the Navy sent a stress management team to Bahrain within 36 hours of the disaster: two psychiatrists, two psychiatric technicians, a medical officer, social worker and a chaplain. Years later, though, a number of the Stark sailors, including Samples, would insist they were never told counselors were available to them.

Other sailors do remember the counselors but feared that speaking with them would effectively end any hope for advancement in the military. The Military Medicine article two years after the attack noted, "Those enlisted who were expressing symptoms tended to be labeled as weak or sick."

Samples and a few shipmates found their own way of coping. They went drinking in Bahrain - often.

The sailors were no more comfortable with a second team the military sent to the ship: investigators. Samples dreaded reliving the attack in front of men looking to lay blame. He spoke to them only because he had to.

Their formal report a month after the attack recommended disciplinary proceedings against three officers, including the captain. Although the report didn't name Samples, it noted that the sailor manning the .50-caliber gun "was lying down." The charge - untrue, according to Samples - incensed him even as it fed his survivor's guilt.

Adding to the mixed messages, the military rewarded Samples for his performance with the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism, the highest medal given in peacetime. Nine other sailors received the award, including two of the men who would face disciplinary proceedings. At the ceremony, Samples stood soldier-straight, but inside he felt only guilt. He blamed himself for not having arrived sooner and done more to save his shipmates trapped on the port side.

The medal made him feel he had benefited from something bad.

When he flew back to West Virginia on leave more than a month after the attack, he asked for a quiet, low-key homecoming. Instead, he arrived at tiny Yeager Airport in Charleston to "Welcome Home" signs, flashing cameras and a pack of reporters. He told them all he felt guilty for surviving - "I lost a lot of friends."

On Aug. 5, the USS Stark had its homecoming at Naval Station Mayport in Florida.

Just five days later, a woman and her 3-year-old daughter were found bludgeoned to death with a hammer in nearby Jacksonville; they had been killed by Walter Thomas Taylor Jr., a sailor on leave from the Stark.

In two trials over the next eight years, Taylor's lawyers would fail to convince juries that his ordeal on the Stark had made him insane at the time of the murders. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Meanwhile, Samples was rewarded with his dream assignment: Navy SEAL training. He was sent to San Diego.

The SEAL officers knew what he'd done on the Stark, and they singled him out both in training and off duty. During training, they needed to yell at someone. They knew he could take it.

In bars, the same officers would buy him drinks and ask about the attack. He never went into detail. He grew adept at changing the subject or waving his hand to ward off questions.

While training, Samples received another honor for heroism aboard the Stark, the Vanguard Award, given out each year to just one member from each branch of the military. His mother and sister flew to San Antonio for the presentation.

Samples stood atop the stage in a large convention room, the applause resounding in his ears. He thought: How can they be applauding? I failed them.

Ruth Samples thought it curious that while the audience was still clapping, her son walked off the stage. The next time she found him, he said he'd gone off to down a couple of beers.

That night he got very drunk and wound up back in his hotel room with a young woman he'd met at the bar. The liaison ended abruptly when he broke down crying - "It just all came pouring out." The young woman left.

For 10 months, Samples stayed with the SEALs, surviving "Hell Week," a period of almost no sleep, in which small teams race about carrying 350-pound rafts from one task to another. He craved such physical challenges.

Physically, he was solid, though a fractured foot prolonged his training.

Mentally, something was wrong. He married a local woman who worked at a fast-food restaurant on the base, "a mistake" that ended quickly in divorce. He remained distant from comrades in SEAL training, developing none of the close friendships he'd enjoyed on the Stark. He loved his country but found himself caring much less about his service to it.

Samples read a report about the Stark, suggesting that the ship had been caught in the middle of behind-the-scenes distrust and hostility between Saddam Hussein and U.S. leaders. He concluded that Christopher DeAngelis and his friends had died because "big boys were playing games with people's lives." The more he thought about it, even the SEALs, with their elite training, were only "pawns in a game."

His commitment to the Navy was winding down. He was asked to extend it four years.

Instead, he decided he'd had enough. He would never be a SEAL.

He left with an odd memory from the elite force. One evening over drinks, a fellow trainee was talking about scuba diving and joked that it would be a unique way to rob a bank. You could escape by scuba diving.

Everyone at the table laughed.

Samples was assigned to serve out the rest of his stint in the Navy aboard the USS McClusky, another frigate that was subsequently sent to the Persian Gulf. This trip passed uneventfully.

In April 1990, he received his honorable discharge from the Navy and returned to West Virginia to the hospital where he'd worked after high school.

One month later, on May 5, one of his former shipmates from the Stark, Timothy Porter, hanged himself in a Veterans Affairs hospital.

Porter's family called him the attack's 38th victim.

Samples would not learn of Porter's death for several years, but when he did, the news forced an uncomfortable moment of self-awareness. Samples had known him well - a bright, friendly, funny man.

"Because I knew him, I knew why. I knew it was about the Stark," Samples said. "And momentarily I admitted to myself that 'Gee, I'm not the only one who's hurting inside.'

"And then I just shook it off and went on, and buried it with everything else."

He assumed his memories from the Stark would stay buried.

CHAPTER 4: THE HUSBAND

Almost four years had passed since Mark Samples fell onto the dead bodies of his shipmates aboard the USS Stark, then helped with the cleanup operation that scrubbed away their blood. Now he was climbing snow-capped Mount Rainier in Washington. Pushing his body through marathons and triathlons.

On the country roads and trails of his native West Virginia, his legs clicked off mile after mile, day after day, while his mind floated along on a runner's high. All those miles were like an IV, pumping medicine - "better than Prozac," he would later say. Endurance gave him power and control.

But he could not control his mind.

Some days he'd be driving and catch a whiff of diesel through the open window and it smelled exactly like the fire on the Stark. The smell put him back aboard the burning frigate, his chest tight, frantic.

At night, dreams transported him to the Stark. He would wake up screaming.

Some shipmates were struggling, too. Peter Trunzo, a close friend, was kept aboard the Stark for 18 months after the attack, working amid the lingering smell of burned bodies until the stress and misery drove him to a psychiatric ward. About the same time Porter hanged himself, Stephenson, the electronic warfare technician, made the first of his two suicide attempts. Others were drinking, going through divorces and multiple jobs, struggling with survivor's guilt.

It was years before Samples knew any of this. He had cut himself off from his former shipmates.

In the summer of 1991, accompanied by his younger brother, Thomas, and a friend, he set out on a 2,400-mile bicycle trip from his home in West Virginia to his sister's home in Spokane, Wash. Their route took them into western Wisconsin on Highway 35, past Fountain City and Alma and on into Pepin.

In Pepin, they stopped to buy Gatorade at a Quick Trip. A few young women buying gas noticed the bicycles and asked the men where they were going. Samples flirted with them and asked about local campgrounds where they might stay the night.

That evening, the women stopped by their campsite and Samples struck up a conversation with one: Jennifer Bjork, a former homecoming queen 12 years his junior. She had long, blond hair and blue eyes. They talked late into the night about their families and the places Samples had visited. They drove together to the beach in Pepin.

By morning, he was in love.

After a few days, Thomas Samples resumed the trek to Spokane - without his brother. Mark Samples stayed in Pepin for two weeks to be with Jennifer. His attention flattered her. By Christmas, he had moved to Wisconsin.

On July 31, 1993, two years after their chance first meeting, Mark and Jennifer married at a large ceremony in Pepin.

When Samples' young bride looked at him, she saw an adventurer who climbed mountains, camped and went scuba diving. She saw a caring family man. He was a hero - with the medal to prove it.

She seldom mentioned the award, though, and Samples liked that. What he hadn't told her, what he told no one, was the full story of how he got it.

In their first year of marriage, two things happened that would prove fateful: The couple's apartment in Eau Claire was robbed, and Mark Samples suffered a serious back injury while training in the Naval Reserves.

Lost in the robbery were jewelry, electronics and a couple of weapons. One of the items Samples listed as stolen was his Colt .45 pistol. He'd found the pistol case empty.

But a few weeks after he made the police and insurance reports, he discovered the .45 under his mattress. He never corrected the reports.

The back injury led to surgery in 1995 to remove part of a bulging disc, and it spelled the end of his mountain-climbing, marathoning lifestyle. He could not bend properly. Veterans Affairs deemed him 50% disabled.

After surgery he went on heavy pain medication.

One night, as his wife watched, he had what he called a "waking vision." He saw himself on the Stark.

His body trembled. He broke into a heavy sweat. He cried out.

"I actually saw (it), I felt like I was there," he said.

The nightmares, which had started within weeks of the attack, were growing more frequent eight years later. Always there was a fire. Smoke. People screaming for help.

Always, he could not reach them.

In the morning, Samples never mentioned the dreams or sought help.

While his wife pursued her career as a special education teacher, he went back to school to study computer science. But he lost momentum for school just as he had for SEAL training. He would start classes motivated, then fall into a malaise, an overpowering sense that nothing mattered. Incompletes and withdrawals blotted his college transcript.

At home, he grew quieter. He withdrew from his wife. He made no friends.

Then, on Aug. 27, 1999, his dark mood lifted.

He stood in the delivery room of the Red Wing, Minn., hospital, watching his wife give birth to their son. He would never forget the way the baby emerged, eyes wide open.

The parents named him Christopher, after Christopher DeAngelis, Samples' best friend aboard the Stark and one of the men he found dead hours after the attack.

The year his son was born, Samples finally saw his old Stark shipmates again, attending a mini-reunion in Florida after one of them tracked him down.

He also decided to seek help at the VA hospital in Minneapolis. He worried that the nightmares, the stalled college career and, most of all, the withdrawal from those he loved would deprive Christopher of the father he deserved.

In March 2000, he was diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and began seeing psychotherapist Charles Peterson. In his first session, Samples broke down. He felt as if he were emerging from a bad dream. Peterson would later describe his patient as "barely functional" and "feeling as if he were on the edge of losing it all."

Samples began taking Prozac.

In therapy sessions, he did admit to having suicidal thoughts but would not take his psychotherapist into the darkest place in his memory, the room where he found the bodies of his Stark shipmates.

When patients are suicidal, psychotherapists look for things that will help them hang on to life. In Samples' case, there were two: his wife and his son.

He adored Christopher, loved him with the kind of love that borders on obsession. When he looked at Christopher's baby pictures, he saw how closely they resembled his own. And he wanted to live, if not for himself, then for his son.

From the VA hospital, Samples learned he had a second health problem. He had contracted hepatitis C while in the Navy, possibly from a tattoo. Spread through blood, hepatitis C virus often leads to chronic liver disease, is the leading cause of liver transplants and kills from 1% to 5% of those infected.

Samples took the diagnosis seriously. In September 2000, he was admitted into a clinical trial for a therapy called Rebetron, which included three-times-a-week injections of the drug interferon. Side effects of interferon include depression and, in 1% of adults, suicidal thoughts. Some even experience homicidal thoughts.

Samples started on the drug despite the opinion of a research nurse at the VA who called him a "questionable" candidate for the study because of his depression and low level of hepatitis C.

In fact, the VA's own study criteria appeared to exclude him. For each participant, researchers were required to know the specific hepatitis C genotype because there are six types of the disease; with Samples, there was too little virus in his blood to make a determination. Also, participants were not supposed to have a pre-existing psychiatric condition, especially anything worse than "mild" depression.

Nonetheless, those working on the study determined that his mental health problems were not sufficiently severe to disqualify him. VA spokesman Paul Sherbo said the department would not respond to questions about Samples' care "due to the veteran's current circumstances and the legal issues surrounding the case."

Soon after starting on interferon, Samples felt sick to his stomach. He suffered chills and fatigue. He dropped classes.

Most disturbing, though, was the conclusion Samples reached about the cause of his nausea: He was convinced his wife was poisoning him.

At times, the paranoia would lift and he would think: That's absurd. She would never hurt me. She loves me. Paranoia turned to guilt. He felt as if he were at war with himself.

In October, one month after starting on interferon, Samples saw his psychotherapist.

"His mood was absolutely despairing, black," Peterson would later say.

Within two months of starting interferon, he had stopped attending therapy and seldom left the house.

In November, Samples told a psychiatric nurse at the VA that he was thinking about killing himself. The VA increased his Prozac and kept him on interferon.

During a New Year's visit with relatives in West Virginia, Samples and his brother, Thomas, sat together in the car and talked. Mark said he was concerned about his marriage. His brother, younger than Samples by nine years, tried to reassure him; any marriage has its rough patches.

Mark said he was thinking about killing his wife.

What?

Thomas thought his brother must be joking.

Mark said he'd considered how he might do it. He would take her rock climbing, then . . .

Thomas was sure Mark would never hurt his wife. It must be the medicine, he thought.

The medicine had become the family's mantra.

"Well, he doesn't feel good. He's on that medicine," his sister, Deb Bauer, remembers thinking. "But Mark would never tell you what depths he wasn't feeling good."

He dutifully continued the interferon injections. He never connected the drug to the paranoid, suicidal shroud that hovered over him.

In February, the whole Samples clan gathered in Wisconsin to watch his sister, Debbie, an elite cross-country skier, race in the American Birkebeiner in Hayward. They stayed in a lodge roughly 100 yards from the start of the course.

But when the race started, Samples stayed in his room. His sister finished third, standing on the podium to receive her medal. He saw none of it.

One day around the same period, Samples phoned his old friend from the USS Stark, Bill Morandi, who had survived the attack by falling through a hole in the hull and was now living in Orlando.

"Where are you?" Morandi asked.

"I'm here. In Orlando."

Samples was staying at a hotel in the city. He said that he'd told his wife he was going camping and had gone to Orlando instead. Morandi went to see him, but all Samples wanted to do was hang out at the hotel pool. His face looked joyless.

Later Morandi would say: "It was totally out of character for him to be lying to his wife. He's one of the most honest guys I ever met."

Samples was hiding other things from his wife, secretly buying extravagant gifts for Christopher and for himself (a snowboard, walkie-talkies, a titanium cook set). Buying things was like a pill that temporarily brightened his dark mood.

Suicide was occupying his thoughts more and more. He'd gone beyond merely thinking about it. He was planning for it.

The part that worried him was what would happen afterward to Jennifer and Christopher. She was working, but he figured they would need more money. He planned to disguise his suicide as a car accident, placing deer hair in the grill of the car. That way his wife and son could collect his insurance.

But what if the plan failed? Maybe the insurance company would discover the truth. Maybe the crash wouldn't kill him but leave him paralyzed and more of a burden to his family.

Then he remembered something. In SEAL training, he had once heard someone jokingly suggest a unique way to rob a bank. You could scuba dive for the getaway. Samples had been scuba diving for more than 20 years.

In the last few days of April 2001, he began to consider a change of plan - from suicide to robbery-suicide. He didn't look far for the robbery. He thought of the Red Wing Credit Union, where he kept his account.

For a weapon, he had the Colt .45 he'd reported stolen seven years earlier, then found. It had been loaded for months, though he hadn't thought to check the number of bullets. He intended to use just one.

On May 2, Samples took Christopher, now approaching his second birthday, to the ShopKo in River Falls and bought him an extravagant final gift: a $250 battery-powered toy Jeep. He bought himself an $80 mountain bike and kept the receipt to show his wife in case she asked how much he had spent on the present for Christopher.

Everything was set, even the final act.

It would take place at Lake Pepin, the widest part of the Mississippi River, where Samples took Christopher often and watched his boy throw rocks into the water. He would return to their special place after the robbery. Alone.

And he would bring the .45.

CHAPTER 5: THE ROBBER

Mark Samples rises early, 6 a.m., and trudges up from the basement, where he has been sleeping. The 37-year-old father has been driven from his bedroom by nightmares of a burning ship and paranoid delusions that his wife is trying to poison him.

The interferon prescribed by doctors at the Veterans Affairs hospital for his hepatitis C is not helping. The possible side effects include suicidal thoughts.

He climbs the stairs to the room where his son, Christopher, rests and leans over the bed. The boy will be spending the day with his grandmother. Samples kisses the sleeping 20-month-old goodbye.

"I love you."

Next he hugs his wife, Jennifer, a teacher who is hurrying to prepare for work. In spite of the crazy ideas spinning through his head, he loves her.

Having embraced his wife and son, the only reasons he can find for living, Samples is out the door.

For 14 years he has lived with visions of his dead shipmates, burned and blown to pieces on the USS Stark; 14 years is enough.

It is May 3, 2001, the day he has chosen to be his last.

He leaves his Hager City home and drives into Minnesota to the banks of the Mississippi River, where he drops off an air tank. He parks his Grand Am at the YMCA in Red Wing and changes into his wet suit.

He slips on black gloves. He removes his mountain bike from the car and pedals to the Red Wing Credit Union. There he pulls a black-knit hunting mask over his head. And then he pauses.

He keeps his account in this credit union, has chatted with these tellers.

He feels the urge to kill himself now. The gun is loaded, a bullet in the chamber. He has never been arrested for a crime and could go to his grave that way.

He remembers his mission: money for Jennifer and Christopher. Then he can die.

He rushes through the credit union door.

Unknown to Samples, Thursday is payday for several large employers in Red Wing, and the credit union has a large amount of cash on hand. The bills are stacked on tellers' counters. At 11:40 a.m., the credit union is quiet; a lone customer stands in the lobby, an elderly man.

Teller Julie Harnly, counting and clipping bills, sees a dark figure run through the front door. She knows something's wrong. He leaps over a low gate. He's in the teller area.

Harnly sees the gun in his hand. She yells for the operations manager.

"Lynn!"

Lynn Holm, who worked in a California credit union for 11 years and sees herself as the mother-protector of her staff, starts to tell the intruder, "Excuse me, you can't come . . . " But he keeps coming. Her eyes go straight to the gun. It's a fake, she thinks, but she puts her hands up and tells the staff to give him what he wants.

A sound is burned into her brain: the swish-swish of his Windbreaker as he runs.

Behind the counter, the robber helps himself to stacks of hundreds, fifties and twenties. He approaches another teller, Breigh Noel Mooney. In a monotone voice, he utters his only words: "Open your drawers." She tells him she has no money out front. He stands there staring until she walks with her hands up to the area that serves drive-up customers.

He follows.

She starts handing him ones and fives; he reaches for more bills. Mooney is thinking, This could be the end of my life.

Instead of placing the money in a bag, he stacks the bills in his hand and under his arm.

Then he runs to the front, leaps over the teller gate and he's out the door. Holm hurries after him, hoping to glimpse the getaway vehicle. She sees him pedal away on a bicycle. Lock the doors, she reminds herself. Write down a description.

When police arrive, they discover that within 100 feet of the bank, the robber dropped his gun, along with almost $58,000, the vast majority of what he stole. They examine the gun. Until this moment, Holm has maintained an almost unreal calm.

Now, she learns the gun is real and loaded. Eight bullets.

The next morning, Holm will arrive early to meet the day's first customer and right away she'll excuse herself and head to the vault. Co-workers will find her there sobbing.

After dropping most of the money and jumping into the Mississippi River in scuba gear, Samples drifts downriver for more than seven hours.

Once he delivers the money to his family, he can kill himself. He plans to end his life at Lake Pepin, a special place he shares with his son. But as he swims, he thinks about leaving Christopher without a father.

The plan unravels. He wants to live, if only for Christopher. He thinks about what he has done and what will happen to him now that he is a bank robber.

Finally, he emerges from the river and stashes his wet suit and what's left of the credit union money under a log.

He has overshot the place where he left his car, so he starts walking back along the railroad tracks. By chance a train approaches and he does something he's never done before: He leaps onto a moving train. He has seen people do this in the movies, but when he grabs onto the train it feels as if his arm is being pulled from its socket.

Samples rides the train a short distance and jumps off a few hundred yards from where his Pontiac Grand Am is waiting. Instead of driving home, or to the lake to kill himself, he drives north to the Twin Cities, to the VA Medical Center. Along the way he stops to call his wife from a pay phone. He tells her he's at the hospital. An ulcer.

As he sits in the hospital waiting to be seen, he realizes that he does not know what he is going to say. What will he tell them? He still isn't sure whether to turn himself in for the robbery or kill himself.

For two hours he waits for his name to be called.

When it isn't, he leaves and takes a room for the night in a nearby hotel. He phones Jennifer again. He tells her he is being kept at the hospital for observation.

The night after the robbery passes without sleep. He lies awake, knowing that he dropped his pistol, knowing that when police trace it his name will come up.

Are you going to turn yourself in? he asks himself.

The next morning he phones the VA and leaves a message for a nurse in the hepatitis study. He's depressed and thinking about ending the treatment.

When the nurse plays the message back, she notes how quiet and flat his voice sounds. She leaves her own message on his answering machine: Stop treatment immediately.

By then Samples has driven home to Hager City. He has to tell Jennifer what he has done. He has to. But he can't.

A few nights later, she awakes to find him crying.

He tells her he is thinking of ending his life. He's planned his suicide.

She comforts him.

But he cannot bring himself to tell her about the robbery.

Mark Samples sits in his front yard on a quiet street tucked behind a farmer's field and the local airport when a car pulls up and two men exit. He knows instantly who they are and why they've come. It's the afternoon of May 8, five days after the robbery at the Red Wing Credit Union. They are lawmen. They want to know about the gun.

He has been dreading this moment.

Hours earlier he'd driven to a boat storage area by the Mississippi River, lifted an old log and retrieved the money from the robbery. He thought maybe he'd turn himself in, or place the cash in a box and mail it to the bank anonymously. He hasn't decided.

Now, as the lawmen approach, the evidence sits in his basement: more than $10,500 in bills, still damp from the river and smelling like a sewer.

The men introduce themselves: Agent Scott Pulver from the FBI; Investigator Wade Strain from the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. They want to talk about the firearm he purchased from a Gander Mountain store in Eau Claire in 1994. It was used in a crime in Red Wing, Minn.

Samples leads the men into his backyard to a picnic table, where they sit down. He is thankful Christopher isn't home; he is with his grandmother.

In a calm voice, Samples tells the men about his years in the Navy. He tells them about his marriage and the move to Pepin and his disability.

About the gun he says this: It had been stolen from their old apartment in Eau Claire along with a rifle, stereo equipment and other valuables.

Where had he been on May 3?

Home in bed all day with back pain, he says. He had no visitors. His wife had been at school teaching.

The agents ask why he is walking with a limp. Numbness and tingling in the legs, he says, caused by a pinched nerve. He leaves other possible explanations unmentioned: his bicycle crash during the robbery, his awkward jump from a moving train later on the day of the crime.

Did he swim or bicycle?

Occasionally, Samples says. He shows them two bicycles.

What about the family's financial status? They are in good shape, Samples says. Recently he received a $24,000 settlement from the military.

They ask if he has certain clothing. He shows them a jacket; it doesn't match the one used in the robbery.

He shows them a black hunting hat; it, too, does not match the one worn in the robbery (the mask he'd lost swimming down the Mississippi).

They ask if he would be willing to take a polygraph test, and Samples says he would.

It crosses his mind they might search the house. They'd find the cash in the basement, and his wife would return home to see him led away in handcuffs. If they just leave now, he could break the news to her alone and turn himself in.

When Jennifer Samples arrives home, the lawmen are still there. They speak to her for a short time in another room.

Then the men leave, saying they'll be in touch.

After their car pulls away, Jennifer comes into the living room.

I need to tell you something, her husband says. She looks at his face, his hazel eyes.

He is on the verge of crying.

Oh, my God, she says. You really did it, didn't you?

CHAPTER 6: THE ACCUSED

Concrete abutments rise from the highway, and each time Mark Samples sees one he wants to jam his foot on the accelerator and aim for it. The crash, he imagines, would be easier than what lies ahead.

An hour ago he was in his Hager City home, crying as he confessed to his wife that he robbed the Red Wing Credit Union at gunpoint. She looked stunned. He told her he needed help, begged her to drive him to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis, but she couldn't.

So he makes the 90-minute drive alone.

Each mile brings him closer to his next confession. He must explain to the doctors what he has done and what he might do to himself. Then he must tell the whole story to the FBI, to the same agent he lied to that afternoon. He stands to lose everything that matters to him - his freedom, his wife and, most of all, his son, Christopher, not quite 2 years old.

Overriding the compulsion to crash is a single fact: He would never see Christopher again.

The last time he went to the VA Medical Center, after the robbery five days ago, he spent two hours waiting to see someone before walking away. This time he goes to the front desk and tells the woman, "I need to see somebody now!"

A nurse emerges and he tells her about the robbery and the urge to kill himself. The nurse summons a doctor and a security guard.

Samples' internal debate - to kill himself or turn himself in - is over. For now, anyway.

In River Falls, FBI Agent Scott Pulver receives a message from the bureau's Milwaukee office: Mark Samples has called. Samples, the man he interviewed that afternoon, the man who once owned the gun found at the robbery, is now at the VA Medical Center.

The agent calls the center, and right away Samples apologizes for lying. I did rob the credit union, he says. The money is in my car.

Samples assures Pulver he is unarmed. He has checked himself into the hospital.

He's in the locked psychiatric ward.

Pulver heads for Minneapolis, and by 11:15 that night he sits face to face with Samples in a hospital conference room, reading him the Miranda rights.

Samples, neither arrested nor handcuffed at this point, describes everything: how he failed to correct the insurance report years ago that said his gun had been stolen; how he used that same gun in the robbery; how he used scuba gear for the getaway, something the FBI had not discovered. He says, too, that he wants to apologize to the tellers in the credit union.

He explains how he retrieved the stolen money. The bills were wet, so he tossed them in a clothes dryer. The $10,550 is in the trunk of his car.

Everything except $15 he'd spent on a haircut.

It occurs to the agent that while telling the truth about the robbery, Samples looks and acts very much as he did hours earlier when he was lying to authorities. He appears calm, his words clear, his thinking lucid.

Although Samples feels distraught, the anti-anxiety drug he's been given kicks in, deadening his mood. When the interview ends after midnight, he is drained, talked out.

That's how his brother, Thomas Samples, finds him when he enters the hospital room later that night. As he hugs Mark, he feels him cringe and pull away.

"Mark, I know you're in a bad place," he says. "You don't have to ask. I'm here for you."

Before bed, Mark Samples writes a letter apologizing to the tellers and gives it to his brother. Thomas worries, however, that the letter might hurt Mark's case. He never sends it.

That night, Samples sleeps erratically. For once, the bad dreams don't take him back to the USS Stark and the charred bodies of the shipmates he could not save.

This time, he dreams of the robbery and the hours afterward, drifting down the Mississippi River.

He wakes in the psychiatric ward. There is a television. There are books. He can't focus on them.

He phones Pulver, the FBI agent. What's going to happen to me? Will I get probation or prison?

That will be up to a judge, the agent says.

The hours drag. Samples wants to go home to his wife and son. She visits once, without Christopher. And when they hug, he thinks how distant she feels, as if they've separated already.

After a few days, Samples leaves the hospital to make his initial appearance at the federal courthouse in St. Paul. Defense lawyer Robert Richman's first impression of his new client is that he's "emotionally distraught, a wreck."

Samples spends the weekend in the Sherburne County Jail and is then released on bond to go home to Hager City, where his mother, father, brother and sister are waiting. When he arrives home, however, he learns that his wife and son have moved out. They are staying with her parents in nearby Stockholm.

They won't be coming back, Samples fears. He has lost them.

One morning, a week or so after his release, he rises early. While his relatives are still asleep, he leaves the house and drives the Grand Am along Highway 35, following the Mississippi River to a scenic pullover halfway between Hager City and Pepin. From atop a steep cliff, overlooking railroad tracks, he accelerates toward a rock wall at the edge.

His note to his wife and son says that he's sorry. They'll be better off without him.

Instead of plunging to the ground, the car crunches into the wall and stops, his head shattering the windshield. He suffers no major injuries.

I fell asleep at the wheel, he tells his pretrial services officer. He lies about the suicide attempt because he worries about being held in jail or the psych ward.

After the crash, Jennifer Samples urges her husband to go back to West Virginia, and he does for a few weeks. While there, he phones her and for the first time tells the full story of what happened the night the Stark was attacked. In an hour and a half, 14 years of guilt and pain pour out of him. When he puts down the phone at last, he feels warm, calming relief.

Back in Hager City, he lives alone in their rented duplex. From time to time he sees Jennifer again. From time to time she permits him to see their son. Gradually, he begins to hope that he can save his marriage.

Still, weeks later there is no answer to the question he asked the FBI: What will happen to me?

He has been preparing to plead guilty. His wife wants him to accept responsibility. What he wants is assurance: If he goes to jail, she and Christopher will be there for him when he gets out.

He wonders: How long will I serve? How long will they wait?

One day, a few months after the robbery, after the floodwaters have receded, Samples paddles a canoe out on the Mississippi, to a place by the edge of some trees. On the day of the robbery, this was where he let his air tank, regulator and weight belt sink to the river bottom.

Now, he peers into the river, locates the spot and hauls his mud-coated equipment to the surface. Though he feels uncomfortable returning to the river, he knows that someday he might want to scuba dive again - as a hobby, he stresses.

"Not to rob a bank."

Months after he ran in carrying a .45, Mark Samples haunts the Red Wing Credit Union.

When it comes to post-traumatic stress disorder, the trigger can be a shipboard inferno, like the one Samples keeps reliving, or a robbery, like the one his victims relive.

Operations manager Lynn Holm wakes up some nights, wondering, Am I going to be robbed today? At her son's birthday, she wonders what would have happened if she'd made the wrong move during the robbery. How would he be growing up without me? She cannot shake the feeling of unease when people enter the credit union and she cannot see them clearly.

And when she hears the swish-swish of someone passing in a Windbreaker, the jacket the robber wore, a little shock runs through her. She's on alert, tense.

Julie Harnly, one of the tellers at the credit union, feels nervous and edgy when people enter with hands buried in their pockets. In one motion, a hand can produce a weapon. At stores, she worries about people in dark clothing. At home, she is afraid to be alone.

"I pray about it a lot to try and relax my fears," she says.

Mark Samples is not the only one wondering what will happen to him. Holm and Harnly wonder, too.
LIKE A CORNERED ANIMAL
Trouble follows, from Wisconsin to West Virginia

On Aug. 14, 2001, three months after the robbery, Samples pleads guilty. Although the sentencing guidelines call for 63 to 78 months in prison, Samples and his lawyer believe the judge will be able to reduce the time based on circumstances: his heroism aboard the USS Stark, the years of depression afterward and the side effects from interferon, the drug the VA hospital placed him on for hepatitis C.

But at the sentencing on April 12, 2002, they learn otherwise. Judge Donovan W. Frank says he cannot depart from the guidelines. He allows Samples to withdraw his guilty plea.

A trial is scheduled for September.

Samples has been feeling better, free of the interferon that seemed to make him so sick before the robbery.

"Although the sword of Damocles hangs over his head, he is surprisingly animated and ready to fight, drawing on images of himself fighting the fires on his ship," his psychotherapist Charles Peterson writes.

Samples has found a source of hope.

There is a farm in West Virginia about 45 minutes northeast of Charleston. He wants to buy it, and then maybe Jennifer and Christopher can come live with him until the trial. They can be a family again; he wants this to be true.

But Jennifer Samples is not so eager for reconciliation. She feels duped. The robbery, all the college courses he dropped and now the change of plea have her thinking that she does not know the man she married. Mark Samples, the hero, has become this other Mark Samples, the man who committed a bumbling robbery.

Even Samples begins to lose faith in a magical reconciliation.

After a session in mid-May, his psychotherapist writes: " . . . he fully believes his marriage is over, even if his joyous parenthood is not."

Samples' next therapy appointment is on May 30, 2002; he never shows up.

The following day, he picks up Christopher for a weekend visit; he is supposed to return the boy on June 2.

Instead, he goes home to West Virginia. The court has not restricted his travel. The owner of the farm is allowing him to stay there while they finalize the purchase.

When he arrives, he calls Jennifer Samples and tells her about his plan to buy the farm and spend time there with her and Christopher. She is surprised that he has taken Christopher outside Wisconsin and demands that he bring him back. When their argument gets heated, Samples hangs up. Then he drives to the farm with Christopher.

His wife calls law enforcement.

A few days later, Samples phones his father.

"What's going on?" Bill Samples asks. "The FBI's been here."

There's a warrant, Mark Samples learns. Authorities think he has taken guns with him and fled.

Call them, his father urges. Get this straightened out.

For more than a day, Samples tries, placing calls to his pretrial services officer. He tells the officer about the farm. He insists he isn't running and has no guns with him. Can't the warrant be dropped?

He does not expect the answer that comes back. The warrant cannot be dropped.

So it comes to this: He is at his aunt's house not far from his boyhood home, listening to his brother and father. They keep saying he should turn himself in.

But if he does, Samples thinks, it will be the last time he sees Christopher. Suddenly, their separation isn't hypothetical, or months away.

It is real and it is now.

Mark Samples looks like a cornered animal, his brother thinks. Thomas Samples tells him this thing is snowballing. You have to stop it before it ruins your life. Let me and Daddy take you back to Wisconsin.

But Mark is not talking about returning to Wisconsin.

He walks toward the back door and Thomas steps in front. The two brothers grapple. Thomas is crying, telling his big brother not to do it.

Finally, Thomas gives up.

"You're making a mistake," he says.

Their father feels helpless as he watches Mark walk out the door, carrying Christopher.

This narrative was drawn from extensive interviews and written correspondence with Mark Samples at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, 60 miles north of Madison. Interviews also were conducted with: Samples' parents, siblings and other relatives; a dozen of his shipmates on the USS Stark and the ship's former ombudsman; a former inmate who shared a cell with him at Oxford; two employees of the Red Wing Credit Union who were present during the robbery; two neighbors who lived near Samples in Ohio; the police chief of the Village of Pepin; and several experts on post-traumatic stress disorder.

Documents used included: the 1,200-page transcript from Samples' trial and sentencing and the brief from his appeal; the Navy's "Formal Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Attack on the USS Stark"; Samples' psychiatric records from the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Minneapolis and military records saved by his family; and a book on the attack on the Stark, "Missile Inbound," by Jeffrey L. Levinson and Randy L. Edwards.

Samples' former wife declined several requests for an interview, citing her former husband's ongoing appeal and her need "to protect the innocence" of her son. Quotations from her and other information was drawn from interviews she gave to the magazines Marie Claire and The Lutheran, and to "The John Walsh Show," as well as letters she wrote to the judge and to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Samples' prosecutor and the FBI agent who questioned him also declined requests for interviews.

At some points in the story, people's thoughts are described. In each case, the sources themselves described their thoughts, either in interviews or court records.