The Deserter's Tale (12 page)

We took part in many raids in al-Habbaniyah, but two stand out in my memory.

For the first of these raids, we were told at three a.m. to get up and go to a home that was suspected of having a cache of weapons. They dropped off our entire platoon of twenty guys near the river, saying that the house was only two hundred yards away. We couldn't find the house and got lost. We struggled for a good hour in a rice paddy by the river. It was hotter than hell, even before dawn. Along with our regular equipment we lugged pickaxes that we had received recently as a tool to use in our searches. We finally came up to a house. It resembled the photos we'd been given. We punched our location into the GPS and it matched the coordinates we'd been given.

It was a handsome two-story house and quite isolated. Along with my usual squad members—with the exception of Specialist Mason, who had returned home and been replaced by Specialist Barrigan—I ran up to the house. As usual, I put the charge of C-4 explosives on the door and we blew it in.

As we rushed into the house, women were staggering out of their rooms. Three teenage girls screamed when they saw us. Some of my squad mates grabbed them and held them at gunpoint, and the rest of us ran through the house. We found no men at all, just six more women in their twenties and thirties.

The guys in my squad couldn't find a thing—not even any guns—and it seemed that the more incapable they were of locating contraband, the more destructive they became. They smashed dressers, ripped mattresses, broke cabinets, and threw shelves to the floor.

I said, “What the hell are you guys doing? There's not even a single male in this house.”

But on they went, until somebody had the bright idea that weapons were likely hidden under the floor. So out came the pickaxes and the guys started busting up the floor, going through the rug, the tiles, and into the concrete.

It was so ludicrous that it was almost funny. Here were my guys trying to break through a concrete floor with pickaxes. If weapons had been stored under the rug, you'd think that the tiles would have given way quickly to a secret hiding spot—not a uniform foundation of concrete running all the way across the floor. But this destruction continued for ten or fifteen minutes. When it became obvious even to the guys busting the concrete floor that there was nothing in the house but a number of angry women, we went back outside.

I found Private First Class Hayes with a woman under an empty carport. He pointed his M-16 at her head but she would not stop screaming.

“What are you doing this for?” she said.

Hayes told her to shut up.

“We have done nothing to you,” she went on. Hayes was starting to lose it, and we weren't even

supposed to be talking to this woman. I told her that we were there on orders and that we couldn't speak to her, but on and on and on she bawled at Hayes and me.

“You Americans are disgusting! Who do you think you are, to do this to us?”

Hayes slammed her in the face with the stock of his M-16. She fell facedown into the dirt, bleeding and silent. The woman lay still on the ground. I pushed Hayes away.

“What are you doing, man?” I said to him. “You have a wife and two kids! Don't be hitting her like that.”

He looked at me with eyes full of hatred, as if he was ready to kill me for saying those words, but he did not touch the woman again. I found this incident with Hayes particularly disturbing because during other times I had seen him in action in Iraq, Hayes had showed himself to be one of the most levelheaded and calm soldiers in my company. I had the sense that if he could lose it and hit a woman the way he had, any of us could lose it too.

Then something happened that haunts my dreams to this day. All the women were led back inside the house and our entire platoon was ordered to stand guard outside it. Four U.S. military men entered the house with the women. They closed the doors. We couldn't see anything through the windows.

I don't know who the military men were, or what unit they were from, but I can only conclude that they outranked us and were at least at the level of first lieutenant or above. That's because our own second lieutenant Joyce was there, and his presence did not deter them. He was the highest-ranking among the 43rd CEC soldiers at the house that day, and he would have had every right to question any person of his rank or lower who assumed control over our raid.

Normally, when we conducted a raid, we were in and out in thirty minutes or less. You never wanted to stay in one place for too long for fear of exposing yourself to mortar attacks. But our platoon was made to stand guard outside that house for about an hour. The women started shouting and screaming. The men stayed in there with them, behind closed doors. It went on and on and on.

Finally, the men came out and told us to get the hell out of there.

It struck me then that we, the American soldiers, were the terrorists. We were terrorizing Iraqis. Intimidating them. Beating them. Destroying their homes. Probably raping them. The ones we didn't kill had all the reasons in the world to become terrorists themselves. Given what we were doing to them, who could blame them for wanting to kill us, and all Americans? A sick realization lodged like a cancer in my gut. It grew and festered, and troubled me more with every passing day. We, the Americans, had become the terrorists in Iraq.

Just a few days later I used up yet another of my nine lives. Our platoon of three squads had been assigned to guard a public building used by local Iraqi officials. While we stood on guard duty, several rocket-propelled grenades came raining in on us. Three or four grenades bounced off the hatch of my armored personnel carrier. I was standing just a few feet away, but miraculously the grenades yet again failed to explode. We did what we always did in such circumstances, blasting away with our machine guns at the area where we imagined our enemies were hiding. We didn't stop to ask ourselves if any civilians were in the area; on orders from our commanders we just lit up the area with machine-gun fire. As always, we had no real idea where our true enemies were, or if we hit anybody with our return fire. A few moments later, we received orders to move out of the area, so we got on our three APCs and began traveling slowly back toward our compound.

About half a block later, as our three vehicles inched forward in formation, with mine at the back, we saw dozens of Iraqis assembling. I assumed that because our machine guns had finished lighting up al-Habbaniyah, people were coming out to see what had happened. Among the crowd was an older-looking man—perhaps in his forties or fifties—sitting in a chair near the side of the road. He wore the traditional white gown, and he was not armed.

As we approached, I saw the seated man raise his leg to bare the sole of his foot at us, a sign of disrespect. We all knew that this was the Iraqi equivalent of the middle finger—a clear “fuck you.” As I watched, Sergeant Gurillo—perched atop an APC just ten feet ahead of mine—put the man in the sights of his semiautomatic rifle. Gurillo's rifle had a lever allowing it to be used as a machine gun or for firing single bursts, and Gurillo—a short, stocky guy who was known to us all for getting love letters from both his wife and his girlfriend—must have switched the lever to single-shot mode. He tipped the barrel of his rifle down ever so slightly, squeezed the trigger, and shot the man squarely in the foot.

The man tumbled off his chair and onto the ground and found himself immediately surrounded by a crowd growing louder and angrier by the moment.

My APC stopped rolling. So did the other two.

From his position in the first APC, Captain Bowel radioed Sergeant Padilla, standing in front of me on tor of our vehicle, as well as the sergeants on top of the other APCs.

Padilla told us that Bower was asking, through thf radio, “Who shot that man?”

Nobody said anything.

Padilla told us that Bower repeated the question, so he relayed it to us one more time: “Did any one of you see who shot that man?”

Again, no soldier answered. Sergeants Padilla and Fadinetz had been with me on top of my APC, other soldiers were with Gurillo on his, and yet more soldiers were positioned on top of the first APC, but not a single person answered the question. I knew that I would get in more trouble for opening my mouth than for keeping it closed, so I did exactly the same thing as every other man in my platoon. I didn't say a word about what I had seen. As the lowest-ranking soldier in the three armored personnel carriers, I had no right to break the chain of command by speaking to Bower, and I knew better than to raise the matter later.

I feared that the crowd of people would riot and was relieved when our APCs began moving again and slowly rolled away.

Not long after Gurillo shot the man who dared to raise his foot at us, our commanding officer Captain Bower summoned us into the compound. He told us that a terrorist named Al Jawiri was holed up in a house and that we were going to smoke him out. He said our operation was called Task Force 26, and that it would involve elite soldiers from other military units. Rangers and marines would join this house raid, but the members of my squad were to go in first, as usual. Given the dangers, however, instead of blasting apart the door with C-4 explosives, Captain Bower instructed us to break down the door with our armored personnel carrier.

At this point, in the midst of our briefing, I lost it. I spoke up.

I said, “If you're using Task Force 26 with fancy military people, why do you need our squad? You say this is the house of a known terrorist, and you're sending us in first? Looks to me like you're sending us on a suicide mission.”

The officer ignored my complaint. But that day I just couldn't control my mouth. I looked at Captain Bower and at First Sergeant Meyer standing with him and said, “If anything happens to any of us, there's a grenade waiting on you two!”

Sergeant Skillings, my squad leader at the time, tackled me. He took me outside and said, “What the hell are you doing? Do you know what kind of trouble you can get into for speaking like that?”

“That's how I feel,” I said. “It's a damn suicide mission.”

He said, “The only reason you're getting away with your loud mouth is that you know how to fix stuff and hook up our air conditioners.”

We moved out to get ready for the raid. I traveled with my squad mates in our APC and, sure enough, we used it to ram through the door. We drove several feet into an open room, pulled back outside, stopped the vehicle, jumped out, and raced in with our weapons. Inside, we found two men on the floor: one sitting and one lying down. I could see that something was wrong. The two men were immobile. They were alive, and awake, and they showed no sign of injury. The men appeared to be in their forties or fifties. They both wore white robes. One had a mustache. But they remained utterly silent. Although we had just smashed into their home with an armored personnel carrier, they weren't getting off the floor or even turning their heads.

There was hardly any furniture in that house. There were no other people and no weapons or suspicious items. My squad mates jumped on the men, zipcuffed them, and started hollering at them to “get the fuck up” and “get the fuck out the door.” The Iraqis didn't move. When my guys started kicking and punching, the Iraqi men didn't even try to block the blows.

“No!” I shouted. “Stop! There's something wrong here. Look at these men.”

But the guys in my squad continued with the beating while all the other soldiers waited outside. As the minutes passed, I kept hollering at my squad mates to give up their beating and to leave the men alone. Finally, a medic ran in, waved a hand in front of their faces, got no reaction, and told us that the men were mentally handicapped. I gave my squad mates so much grief about beating up the two men that they got sick and tired of my bitching and sent me outside to pull perimeter.

These two Iraqis had been beaten up because they were handicapped and couldn't understand what we wanted them to do. But even once we understood that the men were handicapped, we showed no pity and took them away just like all the others we found in home raids.

It would have been a lot better if we had just left. While soldiers continued to ransack the house, in search of the terrorists that they would not find, I stood outside with the many soldiers assembled to take part in the raid.

Iraqi civilians began walking toward us. They wanted to see the house that had been rammed by our APC. Apache helicopters hovered in the air, and our APCs and tanks were lined up outside, and—with the additional military support—we had more firepower than I had ever seen in one place in Iraq. It was an eerie morning, the early dawn. There was light in the sky but the sun had not yet risen. I felt a cool breeze, and held my position guarding the corner of the house. Across the street, I noticed a man burning piles of what appeared to be Iraqi dinars.

“What's he doing?” I asked Sayeed, our interpreter. “He is burning all his counterfeit money before you guys go over there and arrest him,” Sayeed said.

Nobody else, however, was paying attention to the counterfeiter with his burning bills. The crowd continued to grow as people pressed forward to see the house we had rammed.

Suddenly, from another side of the house, a shoe rang out. I heard shouting and over my walkie-talkie I could hear Sergeant Padilla speaking to another soldier it my squad.

“I thought she threw a grenade, and that's why I shot her,” Padilla said.

I heard Padilla go on to say that he needed two other soldiers to push the crowd away from a body so that he could inspect it.

I had to stay put, holding my position for another thirty minutes, but finally as we were given authorization to leave I met with my squad mates near the APC, where there was a body on the ground. I saw that it was a young girl about ten years old. The girl Padilla said he had shot wore a school uniform and had blood on her skirt. I was struck by how little blood there was on the girl. I assumed that the bullet had entered her stomach. As the girl's body was being lifted into the bag and zipped up inside it, a soldier in my squad said that he had found no sign of a grenade or weapon on the girl. My squad mates lifted up the girl in the bag and set her down inside our APC. The rule was that if we killed somebody, we were responsible for policing the dead. That meant we had to get them into a body bag and take them back to our compound, where they would be kept until a relative came to claim them. When we left that scene, we took the girl's body with us and then left it at our compound in the shack used for storing the bodies of deceased Iraqis killed by our platoon or other platoons in my company.