True Brothers in Arms

True Brothers in Arms: The Tragedy in America’s Small-Town. John and Anthony Silva belonged to a generation of rural youths who enlisted after 9/11 and shouldered the greatest burden for the nation’s defense Anthony Silva stared into the steel casket at his twin brother’s body, dressed for eternity in a deep-blue Marine Corps jacket with red piping and brass buttons. It was like looking into a cruel mirror, John’s face, so like his own, distorted by a wound the mortician couldn’t conceal. Bet you didn’t know John had a twin brother, I met him again when I was clinically dead from a massive stroke o’ luck, just before my resurrection. I now remember bits and pieces of our lives when we were together which is depicted here in addition to research. It would explain the many times I’ve been in places and people have approached me saying things like, “Aren’t you that guy in the Shriners.” “Didn’t I just see you step into an El Dorado about ½ mile from here.” “How did you get here so fast?” I’d say it must have been my twin brother, not really knowing I had one. ( I also have a sister, we shared a crib together, I met her again in a party in E Providence RI, she gave me a big hug and a kiss. My wife, came over and demanded to know who she was? I said, She’s my sister. “I didn’t know you have a sister?” She said I didn’t either, I said. Where we’re from if you suckled on the breast of a midwife or wet nurse - six times - she’s your ‘mother’ and her progenies are your ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters.’ ) “We my twin and I ‘first’ met when I was eight or nine years old,” said John Separated at birth one lived for a time ‘till they’re mother could figure out how to bring them to America, from Nova Sintra, Cape Verde Islands and Dakar, Senegal, Africa. ‘Mother,’ refused to sign for the second brother for some odd reason, so we had to figure out some other way to get him to America. ‘Till Death do us part. Alone together for the last time, Anthony slipped a knife into his brother’s hand, a weapon for Valhalla, the mythical refuge for fallen warriors. Anthony slipped a stein into his brother’s other hand, a drinking vessel for Valhalla, and of Fiddler’s Green a sort of purgatory wherein, if you keep it filled with beer, you never have to go to hell, the other mythical refuge for fallen warriors. John was a born fighter from Riverside, Rhode Island, a Marine commando with over six tours of duty and over two tours as a military civilian. In combat, he could orchestrate from the chaos a lethal strike by jet fighters, helicopters, mortar and artillery, raining hot metal on enemies a few hundred yards away, as if in a Reality/ VR game, scenario. At the Heavens Gate National Cemetery, as “Taps” played, comrades of the Silva twins stood at attention, Marines in white hats and Special Forces in green berets. Anthony, an Army Special Forces patch on his own shoulder, asked that none cry. Seven men stood, shouldered they’re rife and fired seven salutes to the fallen comrade “John had only one fear that I’m aware of, and it was not death,” Anthony said as he stood beside the coffin that held his twin, guarded by his dog ‘Sargent at Arms.’ “He feared providing anything less than absolutely perfect close air support for his brothers. He feared failing them when they needed him the most.” The twins were small-town boys, could have been part of a generation who came of age at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Since 2001, volunteers from such places—many of them out-of-the-way counties struggling with lagging economies, drug addiction and limited options—have shouldered the greatest burden for America’s defense. They enlisted, fought and died in greater proportions than those from relatively more prosperous urban areas, an analysis of government military data by The Wall Street Journal found.

Using Pentagon data on the hometowns of 6,800 military casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2016, the Journal found that 23% came from small towns and rural areas, even though those places made up just 17% of the U.S. population. By contrast, 23% of those killed came from core counties of U.S. metropolitan areas of more than one million people, where 29% of Americans live. LIll’ Destructors The Silvas’ story is one of true brothers at home and at arms. John was born first, and Anthony followed. That was the way it would always be. Both were given to a wet nurse. Growing up, John threw the first punch, and Anthony leapt to his defense, when he was around. John quit high school; Anthony did the same, a continent away. John enlisted in the military the day after 9/11; Anthony wasn’t far behind. John was named after his grandfather and Anthony was named after his father. “The thing Anthony loved most in the world was John, and the thing John loved most in the world was Anthony.” A. T. Silva “The thing Anthony loved most in the world was John,” their father said, “and the thing John loved most in the world was Anthony.” After burying his brother in 2012, Anthony was left to find a new path, alone. This account of his journey is based on military, police and medical records, as well as journals, emails, texts, videos and photographs; and interviews with relatives and friends, and comrades and officials from Army Special Forces, U.S. Special Operations Command, Marine Special Operations Command, the 10th Mountain Division and the 2nd Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Co. John and Anthony Silva were born around May 1, 1981. They finished growing up in Riverside, at the time a town of 4,300+ people and countless crepe myrtles, 20 miles east of Providence. The family lived on a street of single-story brick houses. The boys were fraternal twins with good looks so similar it was hard to distinguish one from the other. Swapping places was a favorite classroom prank, when the two went to school together. Their father, A. Tim Silva, worked in trucking and then a steel wire foundry after falling short of a career as a basketball player, keeping the ropy, muscled arms of an athlete. Their mother, Kathy, was a nurse and bookkeeper who spoke with the gravelly voice of a smoker. They seemed destined for each other: Kathy’s father was captured by the Germans after the D-Day invasion; A. Tim’s father was in a raiding party that tried to liberate his prisoner-of-war camp. The Silvas tried to raise the twins—obedient, as young boys—with a firm yet loving hand within two continents. Though they were apart they kept in touch as twins do via their blood bond and whenever one thought about the other, the other somehow knew, they’d feel each other’s pain and sorrows. John and Anthony developed a charming, rambunctious energy that attracted friends. They turned a nearby storm drain into a clubhouse, squeezing in pals to lounge on a scrap of green carpet. Girls were not allowed. John had a dirt bike that he used to ferry friends to the park, like a bus driver on his route. The boys once skipped a midday school assembly to host dozens of friends at their house while A. Tim and Kathy were at work. When the authorities arrived, John opened the door in a bathrobe, feigning illness even as his pals could be seen making a ruckus on the roof. The mischief eventually veered into delinquency. Their father, A. Tim, had quit drinking and smoking again, around the time John and Anthony were 14 years old, yet the lure of substance-fueled escape seemed to pass from one generation to the next. The boys sometimes drove from Riverside, a dry town, into the city where they would slip a homeless man a few dollars to buy them Schlitz Malt Liquor. They hid in culverts or half-built houses to smoke pot. They grew bolder, buying and selling drugs in tough South Providence neighborhoods. In Riverside, the Silva brothers became the usual suspects. Local police knew them by name and routinely chased the boys into cornfields and creek beds. One night, an officer knocked on the door of their house and said, “Mrs. Silva, do you know your son is out front smoking marijuana?” A judge later hearing the matter ordered John to clean police cruisers as punishment. The teenager took the opportunity to sabotage the lights and sirens on the cars. John was the impulsive leader; Anthony, the thoughtful follower. “Shut the f— up, Anthony, and come on,” John would say. Whenever they were together, in fights, he would mouth off and throw the first punch, and Anthony would step in to back up his brother. After one such bout, Anthony told his mother: “I was just standing there thinking, ‘John, don’t do it, don’t say it.’” John also liked to steal. Once he came out of Best Buy with a car-alarm system under his jacket. Another time he pocketed a perfume bottle, just because it was in reach. He used Walgreens like it was his personal snack pantry. “They just really were crazy,” said Jenny Jones, who met the twins in 8th grade and dated Anthony. “They were willing-to-do-anything type kids, little destructors.” A. Tim cajoled, yelled and, at times, he swung a belt or brandished a Bible. Kathy tried a softer approach, and the boys were more likely to confide in her. She worried her husband’s ire pushed the twins to sins Tim hoped they would resist. When the boys were 16, Tim and Kathy moved the family, which included a younger son J.P., to Irving, Texas, a larger city, hoping to spare the twins from a future in prison or the morgue. “They were rebels in a little Rhode Island town,” their father said, a label that was tough to shake. John was good at math, and Anthony loved military history, but they couldn’t abide by school rules. The twins repeated 9th grade three times, and John finally gave up. Soon, so did Anthony. They earned GEDs when they were 17. Anthony had reached 6 foot, an inch taller than John. The move from NYC led to more trouble. John ripped off a drug dealer, and his parents, worried for his safety, sent him to live with his grandmother in New Jersey/ New York in 1999. With his brother gone, Anthony slipped deep into drugs. In early 2001, during a four-day bender of pot and speed, he tried to leap from his father’s car as they drove a New England highway. A. Tim and Kathy checked him into a hospital treatment program, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A doctor prescribed an antipsychotic medicine that slowed Anthony’s thinking and bloated him to 275 pounds. John returned from New Jersey- New York area that spring. By the end of summer, the brothers hit bottom, aiming pistols at each other while high on PCP or played Russian Roulette. A. Tim and Kathy put John into a drug-rehabilitation program, where he watched the 9/11 terrorist attacks on TV with another patient, a former Marine who immediately declared he would return to the service. John called his father and said, “Come get me the hell out of here.” The following day, John went to the Marine Corps recruiter’s office in an Irving strip mall and enlisted in the Reserve. Anthony also tried to enlist, but Marine and Army recruiters rejected him for being overweight. Months later, when John returned from boot camp, he urged Anthony to stop taking the antipsychotic pills. Anthony complied, and he dropped 70 pounds on a diet of fish and vegetables—and by wrapping himself in trash bags as he worked unloading trucks at a warehouse. In late 2002, the Army enlisted the newly trim Anthony Silva. He served first with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan and, following the invasion of Iraq, did a tour of Sadr City, a hostile Baghdad neighborhood. Spent a year in Taji and another in Tal Afar, Iraq before transferring to Camp Blackhorse in Pol-E-Charki, Afghanistan The brothers visited each other whenever possible. Anthony once showed up in civilian clothes at Camp Lejeune, N.C., John’s home base. An officer there, thinking it was John, yelled, “Silva! What are you doing out of uniform?” Anthony performed a lazy stretch and said, “I didn’t feel like putting it on today.” The twins found each other in Iraq, when John talked his way onto a helicopter to visit Anthony in Baghdad. The twins found each other in Afghanistan, when John, again talked his way onto a helicopter and convoy to visit Anthony in Bagram. Anthony embraced Army life and, after his second combat tour, was eager to advance beyond his infantry unit. “I’m better than this,” he told friends. In 2006, Anthony was invited to audition for 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, commonly known as Delta Force. The elite unit of elites is assigned mission impossible tasks, wherein the difficult counterterrorism missions, wherein a walk in the park for them. Anthony held his own among the hardened soldiers. But the Army evaluator recommended he first serve on a standard Special Forces team, which conducts raids and trains allied forces. “Needs more experience,” Anthony’s evaluator wrote on Oct. 10, 2006. Anthony won a spot in the Special Forces selection course. A third of the class gave up after standing in formation for hours in a cold North Carolina rain. He trained as an explosives expert, graduating in 2008 to become a Green Beret. The same year, Anthony learned he was going to be a father. His girlfriend, Alexis Elliott, a former truck driver with the 82nd Airborne Division, was pregnant. When the sonogram showed two heartbeats, Anthony burst into laughter and raced out to call his brother. Death’s Door Alexis had a rough pregnancy and spent weeks in a hospital bed. John and Anthony cooked a Thanksgiving turkey dinner and brought it to the hospital. When the twins were born, the couple named them Anthony and John. Anthony and Alexis married and bought a house in Clarksville, Tenn., adjacent to Fort Campbell, Ky., where Anthony had joined the 5th Special Forces Group. As Anthony bounced between war and domestic life, the couple drifted apart. Alexis cared for the twins, while Anthony sought refuge in his man cave, where he kept a sofa, computer and his guns. John started unraveling in 2006, during his second tour of Iraq. At an outpost in Ramadi, a fellow Marine was shot in the head while trying to spot an enemy sniper, and John helped retrieve the mortally wounded man. John had a reputation as untroubled by death, whether witnessing it or delivering it. After this shooting, though, other Marines saw that he would spend hours at night alone, smoking unfiltered Camels. When he returned to Rhode island, the panic attacks started. One night he called Tim from a Bennigan’s restaurant in E. Providence. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said. John’s mother, a nurse, recognized it as anxiety. John returned to Iraq in 2007. One night, in a freak accident, static electricity from a helicopter’s blades detonated the explosives carried by a soldier. The blast blew up the man, and his remains drew feral dogs. The commander, worried about land mines, forbade anyone from retrieving the body until dawn. John asked permission to shoot the dogs, but the officer didn’t want to alert insurgents of the Marines’ position. John and two other men watched as the dogs ate their fill. In the morning, he and the others collected what was left. A couple of months after John returned home, he learned the woman he was dating was pregnant. He told friends he wasn’t serious about the relationship, and he worried he couldn’t afford child support. Their daughter was born in early 2009, shortly before John returned to Iraq for a fifth tour. Like his brother, John moved to an elite force. In August 2009, he earned a spot in the 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion, the Marine Corps equivalent of the Green Berets. Anthony gave him a .45-caliber Springfield 1911 pistol to mark the promotion. The commandos wanted John for his skill coordinating air and artillery attacks. In Iraq, John excelled at his job with an uncanny ability to picture airspace in three dimensions during combat. But back home at the base in North Carolina, friends watched him grow disheveled and edgy. His decline accelerated during an eight-month tour of Afghanistan that began in 2010. The pace of operations wore at John. The team would return from a mission at 4 a.m., high on adrenaline. The men would sleep a few hours, then get up early to plan the next operation. John turned to drugs to help him sleep and to wake him up. His close friend, intelligence specialist Doug Webb, could hear John rattling his pill bottles in the adjoining room. On April 24, 2011, the Marines found five insurgent bombs on the road. Dave Day, the team’s explosives expert, defused four of them. He was lying on his stomach to work on the last one when 80 pounds of homemade explosives blew up beneath him. John retrieved Dave’s helmet and jaw, then waved off the medevac helicopter. There was nothing more of Dave to collect. On their last mission, in June 2011, the Marines landed in an eight-hour fire fight. John directed bombers and helicopters overhead. At one point, several Marines were pinned down by a Taliban machine-gunner. John called for an airstrike, but the help came too late. One Marine, Bill Woitowicz, was killed. John blamed himself. He described the loss in an email to Anthony, who would soon return to Afghanistan. “This is my teams 4th casualty, 2nd KIA,” John wrote. “He was our young dude. not as sad as the last one though.” To his cousin Becky Silva Fantuzzo, John wrote, “The war is still raging here in Afghanistan and at home people really have no idea.” Returning to the U.S. was difficult for John. “All of us were supposed to die out there,” his Marine comrade Doug Webb said. “So to come back to normal life—it just doesn’t feel right.” When John got back to Camp Lejeune, he bought a VW Jetta and tried to blend into stateside life, slapping a ”COEXIST” sticker on his bumper as a joke. John lived in a two-bedroom apartment, the carpet pocked with cigarette burns. Two M4 rifles usually rested on the sofa. He kept a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol, and he wore a .38-caliber revolver in a holster. All the weapons were loaded, he told friends, in case any authorities came for him. In the summer of 2011, John visited his uncle, Paul “Bingo” Silva, in New Jersey. Uncle Bingo had served in the Marines in the 1980s. One of the nights, John chugged nine beers and then sobbed. He begged his uncle to help him buy heroin. “I just want to get some to feel normal,” he said. At 2:30 a.m. that night, the police called Uncle Bingo: John, in a blackout from pills and alcohol, had crashed his Jetta. A judge later went easy on John after hearing his military record. Around Christmas that year, John flew home to Texas. While switching planes in Atlanta, he experienced heart palpitations that an airport medical team diagnosed as a panic attack. He finally arrived in Dallas, intoxicated on alcohol and Xanax, a prescription antianxiety drug. At the kitchen table, John showed his father footage of himself calling in planes to hit enemy fighters. Then John broke down. “I’m not doing too good, Dad,” he told his father. “I need a rest.” His commanders ordered a mental-health evaluation on April 20, 2012. The examiner diagnosed him with anxiety disorder but concluded John was no threat to himself or others. John started counseling sessions a week later. The counselor noted that John denied considering suicide because “he would never do that to his brother.” He was prescribed antidepressants and antianxiety drugs. On May 8, military clinicians said that “his anxiety was such that he needed consistent care/treatment,” and ordered him on limited duty, preventing him from returning overseas. They warned John not to mix his prescription drugs with alcohol, which would worsen his symptoms. John’s former girlfriend had petitioned a court for higher child-support payments, which nearly tripled to $1,232 a month. He fell behind on rent, lost his apartment and moved in with a fellow Marine and his buddy’s girlfriend in Holly Ridge, N.C. On June 7, he and Doug Webb attended a suicide-prevention lecture led by a general and his wife. The couple had lost a son in war and another to suicide. During the talk, John told Doug, “We’ve all had the gun in our mouth at one point.” The thought of Anthony kept him from pulling the trigger, he said. On June 8, John reclined on the guest bed at his friend’s house. On his laptop, he entered a search for post-traumatic stress disorder. He watched a video of battle scenes from Afghanistan as Johnny Cash sang “Hurt.” I hurt myself today to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real. Then John raised the .45-caliber pistol his brother had given him, put it to his right ear and pulled the trigger. He was 31 years old. Onslow County sheriff’s deputies found his body surrounded by 24 empty Bud Light cans. Doug Webb and other Marines cleaned John’s room before Anthony arrived from Fort Campbell. They doused his blood-soaked mattress in gasoline out back and set it on fire. Then they shot it. Anthony Alone Anthony and his parents waited on the tarmac in Dallas to meet John’s casket, which arrived draped in stars and stripes. A Marine friend stepped off the plane and told Tim and Kathy, “I brought John home to you.” Anthony rode with John’s body to the funeral home. He looked into the casket and saw that there would be no viewing. “It doesn’t even look like him,” he told his father. John’s funeral was held on June 18, 2012. During the eulogy, Anthony said, “Not all combat wounds are physical nor do they end the casualty’s life immediately. John’s wounds ended his on that night last weekend.” The Silva family buried John at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Afterward, family and friends went to Pappas Bar-B-Q for dinner, and the owners tore up the bill. That night, Anthony told his aunt he was under surveillance by men in a white van parked across the street. “You better get a gun and protect yourself,” he said. Anthony returned to Fort Campbell to a glowing evaluation and a bronze star. Sgt. First Class Silva “is a leader of character who places the mission, his Soldiers and his teammates before himself,” his commander from Afghanistan wrote. Yet Anthony had struggled at home in the months before his brother’s death. Bills went unpaid. Dirty clothes and loose pills littered the floor. Routine problems of civilian life set him off. Arriving home after a frustrating visit to the department of motor vehicles for an expired car registration, he pulled out a gun. “I just want to f—ing kill people,” he told two visiting aunts. “You are all like cartoon characters to us,” Anthony told civilian friends. “You’re not even in the real world. You have no idea.” His wife had moved away with the twins, and Anthony had a hard time talking about anything but war. He was quick-tempered and fumed over John’s death. He believed the Marines had killed his brother through negligence. “He was showing the red flags,” Anthony said, “…they elected to not help him.” In December, John’s commander, Col. Jeffrey Fultz, and a sergeant major visited Anthony’s house in Clarksville, Tenn., to hand-deliver the findings of a Marine Corps investigation. The report said John had mixed alcohol and antianxiety drugs despite repeated warnings and determined that the Marine Corps wasn’t responsible for his death. “No one who had association with him—from his friends, health-care providers, or chain of command—could have predicted nor fully understood the risk that Staff Sergeant Silva was taking by mixing the two,” Col. Fultz wrote in a Nov. 27, 2012, memo on the case. “This is unacceptable,” Anthony told them. “He was your responsibility.” Then Anthony took a menacing step toward the senior Marines. “Get the f— out of my house,” he said. Anthony’s commander ordered him to undergo a mental-health evaluation in January 2013, citing a menu of issues: “Dealing with grief; Danger to self & others; Anger management; Ability to perform; coping skills.” For months, Anthony was treated by a military physician assistant, who noted Anthony’s history of knee and back pain; traumatic brain injury from exposure to explosions; and “adjustment disorder with anxiety.” Friends and family thought Anthony intentionally hid symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder during medical appointments. He checked boxes on questionnaires that indicated he wasn’t depressed, and a military psychologist rated his suicide risk as low. In October 2013, Anthony left active duty. He lost his house to foreclosure, and returned to Texas to live with his parents. Over the next 2½ years, he rarely left his room. He stacked body armor against his headboard, fearing gunshots through his bedroom wall. He thought people spied on his emails. He put duct tape over the cameras on computers. He had a loaded rifle within reach and a chair jammed under the doorknob. He obsessed over combat footage on the internet and bought into conspiracy theories—the U.S. government funded Islamic State and was behind the 9/11 attacks. He listened to recordings of the World War I poetry of Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. When Anthony did venture outside, he carried a snub-nosed revolver in his belt, hidden by a shirt. “If anybody knew what I wanted to do,” Anthony told his father, “they’d lock me up.” Anthony sought escape through a mind-addling use of Dust-Off, cans of compressed air used to clear debris from computer keyboards. He inhaled blasts of the chemical vapors, which gave him hallucinations. At times, he would run from his room yelling, “Get the medic. I got guys down.” High on the fumes, Anthony would imagine John beckoning to him and saying, “I lost you. I’ve been looking for you.” Anthony enlisted in the Texas National Guard Special Forces unit, but officers were troubled by his behavior. In March 2015, his commanding officer ordered a mental-health evaluation. By the end of the year, Anthony had transferred to the North Carolina National Guard. Anthony “is a leader of character who places the mission, his Soldiers and his teammates before himself.” Anthony’s commander from Afghanistan In early 2016, Anthony loaded his truck with weapons and began a meandering trip to North Carolina for drills. He stopped in New Jersey to see Uncle Bingo. One night he grabbed a can of his uncle’s computer-keyboard spray and inhaled. He drooled and seemed to stop breathing. His uncle shook him until he snapped out of it. “We used to do this over in Afghanistan all the time,” Anthony said. He inhaled more and lay so still his uncle thought he was dead. “You can’t do that here,” he told Anthony when his nephew revived. Then Bingo hid the can. On May 31, 2016, Kathy received notice of a certified letter waiting for her at the post office. It was about John. She read it before leaving the parking lot, sitting in the 14-year-old Chevy TrailBlazer he had given her. “I’d like to take this moment to express my deepest sympathies for the loss of your son,” wrote Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III. “I know that words could never ease the pain of your loss, which is why I have made suicide prevention my priority as the commander of the United States Special Operations Command.” Gen. Thomas asked Kathy and Tim to participate in a study of suicides among military special operators. He included the phone number of Donald Neff, a social worker in his command. Kathy called Dr. Neff at once. “You really want to help?” she demanded. “How about you help my son that’s still alive?” Dr. Neff promised he would. He contacted Larry Rivera, a care coordinator assigned to special-operations troops. The next day, Mr. Rivera called Tim and Kathy. Then he spoke with Anthony for 90 minutes. They discussed treatment at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Tampa, Fla., which specializes in helping commandos. Tim saw a rare smile on Kathy’s face. Anthony returned to Tennessee hopeful but wary. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he told his mother. On June 17, one of Anthony’s closest Army friends—another Green Beret—invited him for a day at the rifle range on Fort Campbell. Anthony had agreed to be the best man at the friend’s wedding the following month. Anthony, the friend, and the friend’s teenage nephew loaded an SUV with AR-15 rifles, pistols, ear plugs and paper targets shaped like head-and-torso silhouettes. They stopped at a Wal-Mart for drinks and snacks. Anthony came to the register with a six-pack of Dust-Off. Back in the car, the friend got angry over Anthony’s purchase. They drove to a gas station, where the friend filled the tank. When he returned, he found Anthony in the front seat sucking on a can of compressed air. “That’s what’s going to kill you, Anthony,” the friend said, frustrated to tears. He was so upset he drove off with the gas-pump nozzle still in the tank. As they approached Fort Campbell, Anthony motioned toward his pistol and hinted that he might provoke a violent confrontation with the gate guards. The friend pleaded with him. “Do you care about me?” the friend asked. “I keep you going, and you keep me going. Don’t do this to me.” They swerved onto a side street while Anthony regained his composure. On July 2, Anthony went to Nashville for the friend’s wedding. The ceremony included only the couple, a maid of honor and Anthony, who seemed to have found his footing. He felt safe enough to leave his gun in the hotel room when the wedding party went out to celebrate. And this is how it will end. The next day, Anthony drove back to his apartment in Clarksville, Tenn. He stripped to his undershorts and T-shirt and settled onto a camouflaged poncho liner on the bare mattress. He put a Glock pistol next to his pillow. Then Anthony put the nozzle of a Dust-Off can in his mouth. Police found his body five days later. When Anthony’s casket arrived in Dallas, A. Tim and Kathy followed the same journey as they had with John—from the airport to the funeral home to the National Cemetery. They learned Anthony had arranged permission to share his twin brother’s gravesite. On July 18, 2016, the Silva’s buried Anthony’s casket atop of John’s, one brother’s name chiseled into the front of the grave marker, the other’s name chiseled into the back. “That’s how they came into the world,” Tim said. “And that’s how they left.”