The Deserter's Tale (14 page)

One of my jobs on the border was to inspect the cars and trucks leaving Iraq. People were allowed to take only five gallons of gas and five cartons of cigarettes out of Iraq and into Syria. My chief job was to find their extra stashes and confiscate them. Sometimes, when nobody was looking, I let the people go even when they were over the limit. I suspected that they were in desperate need of the gas and saw no good reason to deprive them of it.

Although my buddies and I worked as quickly as possible, we could do nothing about it when the Syrians decided to shut down their border. Sometimes, the Syrian border closed for hours or even an entire day. This created a massive buildup of vehicles. The drivers and passengers could do nothing but wait for the Syrians to open their gates again.

When the border shut down unexpectedly, I sometimes passed the time by smoking and chatting with men who climbed down from their trucks.

One man asked where I came from.

“Oklahoma,” I said.

“Where is that?” he asked.

“In the south.”

“The south?” he repeated, still confused.

I was going to explain where it was located, but the

man raised his finger. He had something more pressing to ask.

“Your President Bush,” he began. “Is he a good

man?”

I turned to look in all directions. No American soldier was watching or was within earshot.

“He is a terrible president,” I said. “If it was up to me, I'd be with my wife and kids back home.”

The truck driver seemed shocked. I guess he had never thought that an American soldier would criticize his own leader.

“How long are the Americans going to be here?” he asked.

“Probably forever,” I said.

“We've got nothing to eat and no money to buy anything,” he said.

I didn't know what to say to the man, so all I could do was give him a cigarette. He looked at it and raised his eyebrows.

“Mikado?” he said. “Don't you have American cigarettes?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Can't afford ‘em on soldier's pay.”

He shook my hand and returned to his truck. As I watched him close the door, it struck me that if he made it through the day and got across the border, he'd probably be back a week later to wait again in the very same place. The only way truck drivers could make a living was to keep carrying goods back and forth across the border, no matter how dangerous the task.

Not long after a mortar attack on the border, I saw a man open his truck door and stumble outside. He had a hand over a gaping wound in his stomach. I feared that his guts would spill out of him. I asked one of our medics to help him.

“I don't touch Iraqi blood,” the medic said.

I ran to the man and gave him some of my bandages, but I have no way of knowing if he survived that accident or if he managed to get the shrapnel extracted.

During my six weeks of duty in al-Qa'im, I was sent four times after mortar attacks to check on truck drivers who had been caught in their vehicles. On two of these occasions, dead men fell out from behind the wheel when I opened the truck door. The other two times I had to pull the dead drivers out myself and lay them out on the ground. True, the Iraqis were killing their own people with those mortars. Still, I felt responsible. We had drawn the fire, and innocent people had caught it. Each time I pulled a dead man from his truck, I wondered whom he had last hugged on his way out the door and if his loved ones would ever find out what had happened to him.

One day Sergeant Skillings received a care package from his wife. Inside was one of the most treasured gifts of all—a two-pound tin of ground coffee. Skillings let us all share in the proceeds.

Sergeant Fadinetz and I frequently stood guard together on a tower at the border. The coffee sent by Skillings's wife helped us get through the all-night shifts on the tower. Fadinetz and I lugged a miniature, one-burner gas camping stove to the top of the tower, along with a percolator, the coffee, powdered cream, and packets of sugar. One night, while we stood sipping coffee, I heard a
zing zing zing
sound.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Dunno,” Fadinetz said. “Good coffee, though.” I heard it again.
Zing zing zing.

“Sounds like mosquitoes,” I said.

I heard it again, looked behind me, and just a few feet away saw little explosions against the concrete wall. “Get down,” I shouted.

The next bullet grazed Fadinetz's helmet. We dove to the floor. The sergeant and I both had functional weapons on the tower—another soldier had lent me his for the night—but when we radioed our commanders we were told to hold our fire. That ticked me off. I thought of all the times our men had beaten, shot at, and even killed Iraqi civilians. But now, in a firefight with bullets whizzing around me, I had to crouch low and hold my fire. Perhaps it was just as well that I was made to lie low and stay out of the firefight. Although the shooting went on for an hour, we escaped without injury. I don't quite know how we managed to get through that night, but it didn't hurt to have had the coffee sent by the wife of a platoon mate. We had good coffee, which was a rare treat in Iraq, but I had paid with yet another of my nine lives.

I worked at the border along with Iraqi officials and police officers. I checked the dates on passports while the officials read the details. I was supposed to teach the Iraqis the finer arts of ripping apart a car to look for hidden weapons and other forbidden materials. To protect the infrastructure of Iraq, no one was allowed to take windows, lumber, or building supplies out of the country. I became pretty good at ferreting out hiding spots—under boards in trunks, behind false walls, and even inside spare tires and jacks—but all I found hidden was gasoline and cigarettes. I found no sign of weapons and arrested no terrorists. One friendly police officer invited me home to have a meal with his family. I had to refuse, but he would sometimes bring me bread, cooked slices of lamb, and fruit. Once in a while drivers at the border gave me dates, and I usually passed them along to the police officer.

We had clear instructions about what to do if we saw people trying to sneak into Iraq at night when the border was officially closed.

Nobody was allowed to cross into Iraq at that time, and if I happened to see someone trying to do so I was to shoot to kill.

One morning at about one a.m., while I stood guard on a tower at the border, I spotted a man sneaking into Iraq. He was about two hundred yards from the gates that opened during the day for traffic.

I didn't shoot at him myself; it was hardly necessary. The men in my platoon were stationed on various other towers at the border and they opened up with a barrage of fire. Some of the men climbed onto a Humvee, swung into place on a mounted, belt-fed, antiaircraft weapon consisting of two linked .50-caliber machine guns, and drilled hundreds of rounds at the trespasser. He somehow escaped the first blast of bullets and turned to run back into Syria. Still the men kept firing away and, after a blast of a weapon that normally would have been used against aircraft, the man's head exploded.

We were sent out to find the body. All I saw was blood and guts, and I turned away from the carnage. I had already seen enough of it in Iraq to last me for a lifetime.

In the photograph on page 233 of this book I am standing next to an Iraqi man. He wears the traditional white robe. His wrists have been zipcuffed, and a burlap sack covers his head. I am expelling smoke from a cigarette. This photo was taken in al-Qa'im, and I cannot say exactly what motivated me to pose for it. One of my squad mates took the photo. I don't think that any other soldiers posed with the prisoner, but most American soldiers did take photos when they had the opportunity. I did not beat the man, touch him, or threaten him. I never even saw his face. We picked him up from a little bungalow—serving as a miniature detention center—located at the headquarters of the second squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Two soldiers guarded the front door of the bungalow and another stood ready at the gate, where the prisoner was given over to my squad.

We were told to wait with him, just outside our armored personnel carrier, until we had authorization to take him to yet another location. There, I imagined, he would be held until he was driven somewhere else yet again, eventually arriving at some sort of major detention center.

I had no idea who he was, where he had come from, why he had been detained, or where he was being sent. This was typical of the few experiences I had with detainees. Except for the ones I helped grab and zipcuff during house raids, I never saw where the men had been first taken into custody or where they were going. And rarely was I in a position to witness how they were kept. One morning in Ramadi, while I was sitting on top of my armored personnel carrier outside a little house controlled by men from another platoon in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, I saw soldiers open the door and push a naked prisoner outside. The prisoner looked like he was about forty years old. One soldier kicked him as he stumbled out the door and into the light, and another soldier kicked him as he passed through the gate. The detainee was sent to stand in the middle of the street, and for an instant I wondered why he had been brought out like that. And then, in full view of passersby, the naked man defecated in the street. I turned my head guiltily, but not before I had witnessed his humiliation. He stood up and was kicked on his way back inside the building. I never saw him again, and I don't know what happened to him.

It would not be until much later, after I had deserted the army, that I heard of Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, or about the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of Americans, or about human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. While I was at war, I wondered where all the men that I helped arrest were taken, but at no time was I given any details or sent to any of the centers where they were held in large numbers. I only knew that we arrested every male over five feet tall that we found in our house raids and that I never saw one of them again in the neighborhoods we patrolled day in and day out.

In al-Qa'im, the detainee who was taken out of the bungalow and given over to my squad wore nothing but white boxer shorts and a rough sack over his head. We received no explanation as to why he was unclothed. Our orders were to wait with him at our armored personnel carrier until given authorization to drop him off with other soldiers. We gave him a white gown to put on, zipcuffed him, and kept him for thirty minutes until we were told to drive him a few miles to the drop-off point.

He didn't say anything during the time we held him. I don't even know if he spoke or understood English. Sergeant Fadinetz held a baseball bat ready, in case the man moved or attempted to resist, but he didn't use it, and I didn't see anybody lay a hand on the man or threaten. him. Finally, we dropped him off with soldiers from a different company.

I regret posing for the photo with that man. It was a stupid thing to do. Even at the time, I derived no pleasure from his misery. I would have offered him a smoke if not for the bag on his head. As far as I was concerned, he was just one more Iraqi man who might never again see his family.

* * *

And now I come to the last story about my time in Iraq. I was still in al-Qa'im. I remained uninjured, despite all the bullets, mortars, and grenades that had been shot in my direction. As far as I knew, I had not killed any person in Iraq. I had not fired my M-249 since it had stopped working a month or two earlier. I had taken part in about two hundred house raids but had months earlier lost any belief in the cause. Most of my buddies felt the same way. The house raids were nothing but an excuse to insult, intimidate, and arrest Iraqis. They gave us a convenient target to vent our frustrations, never having any real enemies to kill in battle. For a time, the raids gave us an opportunity to beat people, steal their belongings, and destroy the things we didn't care to take. But I wasn't the only one who had let up on the beatings and the stealing as my conscience returned. For most of us, setting off C-4 explosives, ransacking houses, and zipcuffing teenagers and men provided a boost of adrenaline and excitement for a month or two at the most. As time went on, we found no weapons of mass destruction. We found no signs of terrorism. We found nothing but people whose lives would deteriorate, or end, simply for having met us face to face in their cars and their homes. Some of us had not even respected them in death.

And so, while I waited to find out exactly what day I would be allowed to return for a two-week vacation with my family, I found myself on duty as usual one day at the border in al-Qa'im. On this particular day, I was admitting people who were coming from Syria into Iraq, inspecting their passports and matching photos to faces. The travelers had little more than the clothes on their backs, and we usually let them in without delay.

I found myself speaking with a young girl. I don't recall her name or much about what she looked like, except that she was short, chubby, and wore a black dress. She had no veil over her face. She spoke English well. She told me she was thirteen and that she was an Iraqi. She said she had been in Syria when war broke out with the United States and was now returning to her family in Iraq. She was traveling alone, on foot, and had one suitcase. I checked the suitcase and found nothing but clothes.

I took her passport to an Iraqi official who was seated nearby in a shack. His job was to stamp the passports I brought him.

“What's this?” he asked.

“Just her passport,” I said, waiting for the stamp.

“There's no stamp showing when she left Iraq,” he said.

It didn't seem important, so I said nothing and waited for the stamp.

“How old is she?” he asked.

“Thirteen.”

“And she is traveling alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then she's a whore,” he said.

My mouth fell open. I stared in shock. He hadn'teven seen the girl.