Augustus D. Cole, also known as Preacher, was a United States Marine who served in the Vietnam War. He, like the rest of his platoon, were part of an experimental procedure that sought to enhance troop performance by inducing a permanent waking state via partial lobotomy. After being discharged, Cole developed psychic abilities that allowed him to create hallucinations so life-like and intense that they could cause physical and fatal harm, which he later used to go after the scientists responsible.
History[]
Born in Orange, New Jersey, Cole earned the nickname "Preacher" for constantly quoting from the Bible he always carried with him in Vietnam while serving as a corporal with a special forces unit, designated "Special Recon Force J-7". In 1970, while stationed at Parris Island, SRF J-7 became subject of a secret government experiment to test whether eradicating the need to sleep would create a better soldier. The experiment was carried out by Doctors Saul Grissom and Francis Girardi, and involved the surgical removal of a part of the subject's brain. Any ill effects of the soldiers' sustained wakefulness was alleviated by serotonin medication.
In one sense, the experiment was a brilliant success: without the need for sleep, the soldiers of SRF J-7 not only had twice as much time to devote to combat duties, but also experienced dulled sensations of fear and greatly heightened aggression. SRF J-7 tallied the highest kill ratio in the Marine Corps (over 4,000 confirmed kills by only 13 men). In greater sense, however, it was a terrible failure: only months after their field deployment, the squad suffered a collective psychotic breakdown and went AWOL, making up their own combat missions on the fly until local enemy activity had almost fully ceased, at which point they turned to massacring Vietnamese civilians, including children. Outside of Phu Bai, SRF J-7 killed an excess of 300 children at a school on a whim, becoming one of the deadliest known war time atrocities of the conflict. No one was charged and after the war, the government swept the experiment under the rug, with only two surviving members of the squad, Cole and Henry Willig, officially returning to civilian life, although a third, Salvatore Matola, who was listed as killed in action, was repatriated to the US in secret for unknown reasons. In 1982, Cole submitted to voluntary confinement at a psychiatric clinic in New Jersey for post-traumatic stress disorder, where he was noted for being uncooperative and making little progress in his treatment.
In Cole's case, the sustained wakefulness led to an unforeseen side effect: he developed psychic abilities that allowed him to project illusions (i.e., "living dreams") that felt so real they could induce physiological changes in the people who experienced them.
In 1994, two days after the 24-year anniversary of the Phu Bai massacre, Cole took it upon himself to find and kill the remaining soldiers from the squad, as well as the two doctors responsible for the experiment, as punishment for their sins during the war. Having refined his powers with his fellow patients at the ward, Cole was able to coax the attending doctor into signing a full release forum under no supervision to travel to New York City.
He killed Dr. Grissom in Manhattan by creating an illusion that his apartment was on fire. Though Grissom's body was untouched by any flames, his internal organs hemorrhaged and calcified, as if exposed to extreme heat. Likewise, when Cole tracked down his old squadmate Henry Willig he created an illusion that over a dozen Vietnamese civilians had risen from the grave and shot him with automatic rifles. Again, there were no actual bullets, but Willig's body, "believing" that it had been shot, spontaneously developed over a dozen internal hemorrhages and splintered bones, perfectly mimicking the internal effects of multiple gunshot wounds. Afterwars, Cole robbed a drugstore in Queens for anti-depressants to maintain his focus and when police him down in his hotel room, he eludes captures by fooling two of the arresting SWAT officers into shooting each other.
Cole's last target was Dr. Girardi, knowing that he'd arrive at Bronx Station for Grissom's funeral, abducting him shortly before and distracting the agents with a false vision of himself gunning the doctor down. The real Girardi is tortured at a nearby renovation site with visions of Cole's squad performing the same surgical operation on him, but was interrupted by FBI Agents Mulder and Krycek. Mulder wanted Cole alive to testify about the government experiment, but Cole, who had intended to commit suicide as repentance for his crimes during the war, as well as desperate for the peace he had not had for 24 years, tricked Krycek into shooting him by holding out his Bible, making Krycek believe it was a gun aimed at Mulder. As he died from his injuries, Cole's last words were, "good night."
It was later implied, however, that Krycek had not been fooled by the illusion, but instead had shot Cole on orders from the Cigarette Smoking Man, to prevent Mulder from learning more about the experiment. (TXF: "Sleepless")
References[]
Augustus Cole was played by Tony Todd.
True to his nickname, Cole paraphrases from the Bible (NKJV) at several points, the passages being Micah 7:18-20, Proverbs 6:16-19, Psalms 58:10 and Exodus 21:24-25.
The name Augustus Cole is shared with a more recent character, Augustus Cole of the video game series Gears of War. This may be entirely coincidental, although they share many characteristics. Both characters are African-American, both are special unit soldiers and both have a seemingly mental instability.