The Deserter's Tale (11 page)

I wasn't the only soldier in our squad who gave rations to the girl. Sykora did it too, and we spoke of her often.

“I saw that girl today while I was out front of the hospital,” Sykora would say.

“Give her anything this time?” I'd ask.

“Damn right,” he would say. “Beef stew and a bottle of water.”

As the visits continued, I noticed little things about her. She seemed to have a slight limp when she ran. Each time she came, as soon as I tossed her one or two MREs, I would say, “Hey there, little sister. You really have to get going. Go. Don't stay here. Go home now.”

I didn't want her to stay long because every time Lieutenant Joyce saw me handing her food he scolded me for fraternizing with the enemy. When she stood too long at the fence, I would toss candies—Werther's and Star-burst, for example—far enough away to get her to move to a safer spot.

As for the MREs, I gave her a bit of everything we had, including chicken salsa and beef steak. It all tasted like dog food to me, but it could keep you alive in a pinch, and this little girl and her family needed them more than I did. When she got the food she would smile, give me a little bow, then turn and run back home.

After I had gone to Fallujah and then returned to Ramadi, the girl noticed me again perched on a rock at the corner of the fence, and she began running to me daily again, asking for food. I would also give her bottles of water.

One day she brought me a piece of bread. When it passed over the fence, from her hand to mine, I could feel that it was still warm.

“Fresh baked?” I said.

She smiled and waited for me to eat it.

It was a flat bread, and delicious, and she would not move until I had eaten the whole thing.

“Thank you,” I said.

The next day she brought me a glass of water.

I knew it was probably straight out of the Euphrates River, but I wanted to please her so I drank it straightaway. It was nastier than hell, but I was happy to do that for her.

I was away on house raids for a few days after that, and I found myself looking forward to guard duty at the hospital so that I could see the little girl again.

The next week, I was back at my post in front of the hospital. I saw the girl run out of her house, across the street, and toward the fence that stood between us. I reached for an MRE, looked up to see her about ten feet away, heard the sound of semiautomatic gunfire, and saw her head blow up like a mushroom.

Her death was so abrupt and such a shock that I couldn't believe what I had seen. I looked around immediately after she was killed. There were no armed Iraqis within sight, and I had not heard any of the steady drilling sound made by the Iraqi AK-47s. The only thing I had heard was the distinctive sound of an M-16, which doesn't give off a loud, sustained burst of gunfire. It sounds much weaker than the AK-47 and shoots just a few bullets at a time.
Pop pop pop.
Break.
Pop pop pop.
Break.

I looked in every direction. The only armed people in the area were my squad mates, posted at various points around and on top of the hospital. My own people were the only ones with guns in the area, and it was the sound of my own people's guns that I had heard blazing before the little sister was stopped in her tracks.

I saw her mother fly out the door and run across the street. She and someone else in the family bent over the body. I could feel them all staring at me, and I could say nothing to them and do nothing other than hang my head in shame while the family took the child away.

Even today I can't help thinking that it was one of my own guys who did it. And I can't help feeling that I was responsible for her death. If I hadn't been feeding her, and allowing her to believe that it was safe to come by daily to say “Mister, food” and to scoop up the MREs that I'd give her, little sister might be alive today. She would be about ten years old now, around the same age as my eldest son, Zackary.

Her death haunts me to this day. I am trying to learn to live with it.

6

al-Habbaniyah

NEAR THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST 2003, THE 43RD
combat Engineer Company left Ramadi and moved about ten miles east to al-Habbaniyah. It was a small, dusty town of no more than ten thousand people, set on the banks of the Euphrates River. Close to al-Habbaniyah, there was a village named Khaldia. In this book, when I write about events in al-Habbaniyah, I mean the area including it and Khaldia. We spent the next six weeks there raiding houses and patrolling streets and guarding munitions depots as well as our own compound.

The Bible says that the Euphrates River was one of four flowing out of the Garden of Eden. I wish we had found peace by the calm waters bordering the town, but by this time tensions in Iraq had escalated so much that we were under regular attack from fighters we could never see.

As a group of soldiers, if we stopped in any one place and stayed more than twenty minutes, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades would start raining on us. When I found myself alive at the end of a dangerous day, I sometimes imagined that, just like a cat, I had been granted nine lives. Even so, they were being used up quickly. Around this time, my squad mates and I were on foot patrol on the streets of al-Habbaniyah when rocket-propelled grenades started falling on us. I could hear them whizzing through the air. They were about half the size of a football but something of a blur as they flew nearby just above my head. I would have been injured if any of them had blown up within thirty yards of me, and dead if it happened within ten yards. I dashed for the cover of a concrete wall. Before I could make it, a grenade flew by me and hit the ground just inches away. I expected to be shredded by red-hot shrapnel but the grenade bounced, rolled, and failed to explode. I kept running and took shelter behind the wall. There was no wake-up call more brutal than a close encounter with a grenade. It was nastier than ten shots of Tabasco or five cups of coffee. As my pounding heart slowed I thought that sooner or later my time would come.

Being attacked so often by invisible enemies made all of us in the squad more and more anxious. We didn't like being shot at, didn't like not having anybody to shoot back at, and we wondered if we would ever get home alive.

I didn't get to call Brandi often. About five weeks went by in Iraq before I could make my first call home, and usually three more weeks would pass before I'd have another chance to call. Sometimes I would stand for hours in line, waiting for my turn on a military telephone. Some days, I would get my two minutes on the line and get through to my wife. Other times, before I could make it to the front of the line, I would have to report back to duty. I loved hearing from Brandi, and reassuring her that I was just fine, and I loved hearing her voice and receiving her weekly letters. However, throughout my time in Iraq, those words from Sergeant Jones kept ringing in my ears. “Your wife is gonna start fucking some other guy the moment you're out of the country,” he had said. “You wait. You'll see. It happens to them all.” That little bastard had known exactly how to upset me, and the seed of distrust embedded itself in my mind. I trusted Brandi and believed that she would stick by me until death parted us. Yet my heart was a different thing, and my heart worried.

Some soldiers lost their lives in Iraq, and others lost their limbs. A few were worried sick about matters at home. One private from Alaska heard that his wife had developed brain cancer. After waiting some time, he was allowed to fly home.

On one occasion, when I was next in line for the phone, I overheard a specialist in my company talking to his wife. There was no privacy whatsoever on the military telephones, and I could even hear her talking back to him. I could hear her saying that she was leaving him, and then I could hear a man bark into the line, “Your little bitch wife is my princess now.” And then the line went dead. I signaled to the fellow that I could wait and that it was all right with me if he picked up the telephone and called home again. He dialed the number and got his wife on the line. She told him that he would be getting separation papers in the mail. The soldier broke down and cried just as freely as a child. There was nothing for me to do but put my arm around him and hold him as his body shook.

A soldier named Foster, from Indiana, was thrilled when he got the chance to go home on a short vacation. I wished him the best, but I wasn't optimistic about how things would go because we all knew that he hadn't received a single letter from his wife during our months in Iraq and that his home telephone number had been disconnected. Foster was given two weeks off, but after ten days he was back. I asked him why he had returned early.

“My wife left me, sold everything we had, ran up our credit card, and took off,” he said. “I have nothing left, so I might as well be here.”

Our morale was dropping, but so was that of Sayeed, the nineteen-year-old Iraqi who traveled with our company. Since our first days in Iraq, he had been insisting to me and to some of the other soldiers that our commanders had promised him that if he kept serving them for $20 a week, running errands and translating to and from Arabic, they would bring him to America and let him live there.

“It's a pack of lies,” I told him. “There's no way in hell they're going to take you back with them.”

“The captain said it was true, and he knows more than you,” Sayeed said.

As time went on in Iraq, Sayeed saw no indications that he would be going to the United States. True, he kept drawing his $20 a week. But he also began getting death threats from Iraqis who saw him as a traitor. As the conditions of war worsened in the country, Sayeed became nervous and agitated. When he had first begun working for the 43rd CEC as an interpreter and errand boy, he had walked freely in the streets of Ramadi. But by the time we had set up in al-Habbaniyah, he would not leave our military compound without us. I wondered if he thought his meager salary and the shaky promise of a new life in America were worth the threats.

Occasionally I hand-washed my underwear and socks and let them dry under the boiling sun, but I never had the chance to wash my sleeping bag. I spread it out in our new lodgings in al-Habbaniyah—as usual, a former military compound that had been blasted with our own bombs. We set up a gate around the compound, a dormitory and meeting quarters. At night, all the soldiers in my platoon bunked together in one room. We each had a cot but they were only a foot apart, and it seemed that some of the men had given up entirely on sleep. Lying still on a cot could open the doors to memories and nightmares, and for some it was easier to escape the night by watching movies on portable screens, playing Game Boys, reading books, or masturbating. I had just as many anxieties as my buddies in Iraq but was lucky not to have any sleeping problems. I could sleep inside a tank and through a mortar attack, so the sound of ten men snoring was nothing to me.

Each American military company was responsible for dealing with the bodies of the civilians it had killed, so one of my first and most unpleasant duties in al-Habbaniyah was to build a shack in which to store dead Iraqis until someone came to claim them. We set the shack near our front gate so that relatives could retrieve their loved ones without entering our compound.

I began to discover that I was becoming almost as much a danger to myself as the Iraqi resistance fighters. Every time I stepped out of our compound gate, I was aware that I might not make it back alive. I frequently thought about shooting myself in the foot so that I could be removed from war and taken back home. Other soldiers talked about doing it too. With all the bullets and grenades in the air, we didn't think it would be such a big deal to take our own little shot. We didn't think of the pain, or of the fact that we would be dealing with that injury for the rest of our lives. All we thought was that a well-placed self-injury was manageable and that it would get us out of harm's way in Iraq. Back home in America, you would have to be pretty far gone to think seriously about shooting yourself. But at war in Iraq, with shrapnel exploding around you every day and notices being read to us almost nightly about our fellow soldiers killed in various parts of the country, and coasting on so little shut-eye that I felt as if I were sleepwalking in my daytime maneuvers, self-injury seemed like a normal thought.

We knew one man who had already done it and another who had spoken openly of suicide. Shortly before coming to al-Habbaniyah, a specialist named Love loaded his M-16 grenade launcher while he was standing on guard duty at our compound. I was changing the oil on our armored personnel carrier at the time, only about fifty yards away, when I heard the thump of the grenade and the soldier screaming. Sergeant Fadinetz, a few other soldiers, and I ran over to Love.

“What happened?” we asked him, but he would not say.

We could see that Love had shot himself in the ankle and we called for help. He was taken away for medical care, and we never saw him again. It was a good thing the grenade had not exploded or he could have been killed.

“Guess he's going home now,” I said. Wherever home was, we assumed that Love eventually made it there.

I talked about the incident with the buddies in my squad but none of us judged him, because we admitted we had all thought about doing the same thing.

I heard about a sergeant in my company who raised his nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, banged himself on the head with it, and said that he was going to kill himself. He too was sent home.

One day, Captain Bower walked into our sleeping area, told us to gather around our cots, and read us a notice passed down from his superiors. It said that any soldier who shot himself would be patched up in Germany and sent right back into action.

I believed he was serious, and stopped thinking so much of hurting myself, but I often considered another strategy and tried it a few times. While we took cover from flying bullets and shrapnel, sometimes I stuck out my arm in harm's way, hoping that an enemy bullet might smash into it. Although I was a good shot with a rifle, I luckily wasn't very good at getting shot, and no bullet or scrap of red-hot metal—shot by an enemy or shot by myself—took me down during the months I served in Iraq. Others in my squad talked about doing this too, and we would sometimes joke about it after a firefight.

“I guess you didn't manage to take one in the arm this time,” I would say to one of my buddies.

“No, maybe next time” the answer would come back.

Nevertheless, we resented the fact that we wore flak jackets of inferior quality, dating back to the Vietnam War. We may have thought about injuring ourselves, but that didn't mean we wanted to die.

One day, a colonel came to al-Habbaniyah to give us a pep talk. Just before we assembled to hear him speak, Captain Bower warned us to keep our mouths shut and not to ask any questions. After the pep talk the colonel invited questions. Nobody said a thing. The colonel reassured us that it was okay to tell him whatever was on our minds. Specialist Williams, who was in the second squad of my platoon, asked why the men had not received proper flak jackets. I saw Lieutenant Joyce and Sergeant Padilla giving Williams the evil eye; the colonel brushed him off.

A little later Williams came to speak to me. He looked furious. “They are docking half of my pay for three months just for asking a fucking question,” he said.

I estimate that he lost at least $2,000 in salary, but we received the better-quality bulletproof vests—called interceptors—within a matter of days. A number of soldiers thanked Williams for speaking up, but nothing we said could bring back his docked pay.

Most of us in the platoon had one reason or another for resenting our superiors. A sergeant was disciplined because he was caught drinking liquor with us while on guard duty. He was the only one punished, because he was highest ranking, and that didn't sit well with him at all.

Like my buddies, I nursed my own grievances. Chief among them was the duty that fell on my shoulders every second day: to ignite, stir, and burn all the shit in our toilets. Perhaps it helped us all to have some trivial point to be angry about. Maybe the anger motivated us to keep on stumbling from one day to the next.

One day, however, something new replaced shit burning as my pet peeve. I was sitting on my cot when one of Captain Bower's aides came for me.

“The captain wants to see you,” he said.

When I walked into the captain's makeshift office, he told me that Brandi had caused a disturbance on the base at Fort Carson. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You'd better learn to control your wife, Private,” he said.

It crossed my mind that I stirred his shit too. I should have kept my stupid mouth shut, but instead I said, “That's kind of hard, Captain, when she's thousands of miles away.”

“Well, Private, because of that, you won't be getting any more rank,” the captain said.

By that he meant that I would remain a private forever and not reach even the rank of specialist. Nor would my pay increase.

I walked out of his office with one more thing to stew about and, perhaps, one more distraction from falling mortars and grenades.

Busting into and ransacking homes remained one of my most common duties in Iraq. I had done it in Fallujah and in Ramadi and now I found the tasks continuing in al-Habbaniyah. Before my time was up in Iraq, I took part in about two hundred raids. But by the time I had made it to al-Habbaniyah I had lost all belief that we had good reason for the raids. We never found weapons or indications of terrorism. I never found a thing that seemed to justify the terror we inflicted every time we blasted through the front door of a civilian home, broke everything in sight, punched and zipcuffed the men, and sent them away.

I had no choice but to continue with the raids, and I remained the one who set the plastic explosive, blew up the door, and ran inside as the third squad member with my rifle locked and ready. But I had stopped shouting at people by the time I got to al-Habbaniyah, stopped roughing them up, and stopped stealing from them. I had no more heart in the work and believed that it did nothing except intimidate the Iraqis, destroy their few belongings, and inspire them to hate us.