In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantánamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon

National Guard. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible
for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. “I just remember being super
excited, because I thought, I’m going to be doing something important,” Wood told me. For
two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured
on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Then a sergeant major pulled him aside for a brief
interview, and assigned him to work the night shift in Echo Special, a secret, single-
occupancy unit that had been built to house the United States military’s highest-value
detainee. The International Committee of the Red Cross—which has access to many of the
world’s most notorious detention sites, some of them in countries where there is no rule of
law—had recently sent representatives to Guantánamo, but the base commander, citing
“military necessity,” had refused to allow them into Echo Special. The man confined there
was referred to by his detainee number, 760. When Wood tried to search for 760 in
Guantánamo’s detainee database, he found nothing.

Wood was the second of three boys. His father died in a plane crash when he was three years
old, and his mother brought him and his brothers up in Molalla, Oregon, a lumber town about
an hour south of Portland. His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took the
children to an evangelical church on Sundays; Pat Robertson’s sermons blasted from the
living-room TV. In 1999, shortly after graduating from high school, Wood started a job at
the local sawmill. Several of his co-workers were missing fingers, and the manager took
every opportunity to denigrate the staff.