The Deserter's Tale (18 page)

After I left Iraq and came to Canada, it came to light that American soldiers had been humiliating and abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Two soldiers—neither of them members of the 3rd ACR—were jailed for taking photographs of prisoners in forced poses. When I was in Iraq I had no idea where our troops sent all the men and boys I detained in house raids. Every single male we found who was over five feet tall was zipcuffed, head-bagged, and tossed onto the back of the five-ton truck waiting dutifully outside each house we raided, ransacked, and plundered. I still shake my head in shame and wonderment when I think of the Iraqi man who had the guts to shout out in anger—as he was being seized by my squad mates—when he saw me stealing one hundred dollars in American bills that I had found in his house.

“Why are you taking that money? It's not yours.”

I kept the money, and for a good while I held the attitude that Iraqis had no rights in their own country. It was an attitude I had picked up from my commanders, and it took me an embarrassingly long period of time before I began to question and then reject it.

When I fled to Canada, I was required to make a deposition to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, stating why I was seeking official refugee status. In this book, I have addressed all the facts set out in that deposition, and have written for the first time about a number of other incidents that I also witnessed in Iraq. However, there are two details in the deposition that I wish to correct, for the record.

The first has to do with the killing of a child in al-Habbaniyah shortly after my platoon raided a home inhabited by two disabled men. The deposition says that the victim was a boy. That is an error. The child was a girl. I am not sure how it came to be recorded incorrectly in the deposition, but I remember all too well that young girl in her school uniform, and I always will.

The second detail relates to the number of houses my platoon mates and I raided in Iraq. The deposition says that I conducted about 75 raids. At the time that I prepared the deposition, I was anxious to avoid any possibility of overstating the number of raids. However, after making that first statement, I have had many more months to reflect on the matter and to do a tally of our raids. I now realize that two hundred raids is a far more accurate figure, and I believe that this estimate is still conservative.

If we detained an average of one male per home—and that would be a conservative estimate—that means that the men in my squad alone sent two hundred men into detention centers and prisons. I can only imagine that some of them ended up at Abu Ghraib.

Some people will say that the terrible things I have described seeing in Iraq were exceptions to the rule. This might be comforting, but it would also be naive to think so. Because I saw fundamental violations of basic human rights every day or two for six and a half months in Iraq, and since I never saw one soldier or officer criticized or disciplined for carrying out such violations, I tend to fear the opposite. I fear, and believe, that what I saw was only the tip of the iceberg in Iraq. I know that on two occasions when I did encounter other military companies in Iraq, I also witnessed the murder of Iraqis I believed to be civilians. I am thinking of members of the 82nd Airborne Division who shot and killed twelve civilians in Fallujah. And I am thinking of the members of the Florida National Guard who shot up four Iraqis so mercilessly. “We fucking lost it, we just fucking lost it,” one American soldier of the guard hollered when I came upon him and his buddies as they stood near the decapitated bodies. By a fluke of timing, I had caught him in a moment of complete honesty. He said it when the heads had just been severed and the blood was still fresh. He said it before he knew enough to shut his mouth. And as far as I could tell, he was speaking the ugly truth.

In our military training and in our daily experiences at war, American soldiers were taught to show no regard for the lives of Iraqis—not even for civilians. This will go on until one of two things happens: the people of America no longer tolerate it or the people of Iraq find their own ways to strike back at us. In my opinion, the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were cowardly and despicable crimes. On that day, the terrorists had no right to take the lives of American civilians. But I fear that our own behavior in Iraq has invited more of the same. The young Iraqis who survive our raids, abuse, and detentions have all the motivation they need to seek revenge. I am not looking forward to the day they get organized. Whenever I remember standing with three hundred military trainees in Missouri shouting, “Kill the sand niggers” as loud as we could while stabbing and slashing with our bayonets at straw dummies, I say to myself that I hope the Iraqis who survive our war prove to be more civilized than we were.

When I was in high school, I would have scoffed if one of my friends had predicted that I would one day become an antiwar activist. If anyone had suggested that newspapers, magazines, and documentary films in North America, Europe, and Japan would be examining my role in the war in Iraq and talking about why I had run from it, I would have thought that they were out of their mind. I grew up a patriot, I entered the American army as a patriot, and I commenced duties raiding homes, patrolling streets, and checking cars in Iraq as a patriot. I hated to read and write as a child, but if somebody had forced me to predict—maybe in my school yearbook—what would happen in my future, I would have written that I'd have a family, believe in my country and my government, and become a workingman in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Perhaps I would have become a mechanic, or a welder if I was lucky.

Going off to war in Iraq and then going AWOL—first in my own country and then fleeing to Canada—forced me to give up many things. I had to give up my innocent and unexamined belief that my country and my army were a force only for good in the world. I had to give up my assumptions that leaders of my own country would speak the truth when they spoke to me. I learned the hard way that it was not true that I could sign up for the military and choose to become a bridge builder in the continental United States. The way the military reeled in the other recruits and me—many black and Latino, and all poor—I now call the poverty draft. It was not true that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And it was not true that every man, woman, and child in Iraq was an evil terrorist who deserved American hatred, bombs, and occupation. All I had to do was look in the eyes of a seven-year-old girl who ran to me to ask for my rations, day after day until she was shot dead, to know that the people we intimidated, beat, detained, and killed were human beings with the same hungry stomachs as my American-born children.

When I finally abandoned my country and entered Canada, I had to continue to leave behind a number of attitudes I barely knew I had. My grandfather—the man who had passed on the good values that helped me find my own conscience in Iraq—was not a perfect man. He was an out-and-out racist, as a matter of fact, and he believed that Asian people were the enemies of Americans. When Brandi, the children, and I crossed the border at Niagara Falls, New York, we drove to Toronto and stayed for six months—at no charge—in the home of Winnie and Eugene Ng, two Asian Canadians.

I hadn't known many gentle caregivers in my early years in Oklahoma. In a way, Winnie and Eugene became caring parents to Brandi and me. Our own boys called them “Grandma Winnie” and “Grandpa Eugene.” All I had to do was spend one hour at the table of Winnie and Eugene to realize how sadly mistaken was my grandfather in his blind hatred of Asian people. Grandfather Elmer, too, had been to war. He had fought in Korea. I imagine that he had found it necessary to demonize and hate the people he fought. But I don't have to keep my grandfather's demons alive. And I don't have to nourish the prejudices I was taught in my own training in the American army.

Because I fought an unconventional war in Iraq, and because that war brought me into close contact with ordinary civilians who were struggling to survive—in the very ways that Americans would be struggling to survive, if the tables were turned—I was able to slowly awaken to the humanity of the very people I was told to despise. Coming to Toronto and staying with Winnie and Eugene moved me along the same path. It showed me how easy it was to put my grandfather's demons to sleep. That is one less demon for me to pass on to my children.

If every American soldier set aside his or her M-249 automatic rifle and sat down to dinner with an Iraqi family, I believe that the house raids the next day would be a tad less brutal. If the dinners continued, perhaps the house raids would come to an end. I believe that even the most patriotic soldiers in my company would hesitate to beat up, zipcuff, and arrest a sixteen-year-old boy if they discovered that the teenager liked falafels and mint tea and studied trigonometry in the hope that one day, if the universities open up again, he might be able to learn from the brightest minds still alive in his country.

The War Resisters Support Campaign is a Toronto-based group with volunteers around the country. They help out the thirty or so deserters who, like me, have applied for refugee status in Canada. They provided food for my family during our first several months in their country. I did my best to pay them back by speaking at public events about my experiences in Iraq.

I will never forget the first time I was asked to speak in public. It was at a meeting of the Canadian Labour Congress, just a month or so after we arrived in Toronto. I was so terrified that I could barely open my mouth. Eventually, I grew into public speaking. In the summer of 2005, Brandi, the children, and I drove from Toronto to the Pacific Coast and back, stopping for me to give talks in some twenty towns and cities along the way. I spoke in churches, mosques, libraries, and community halls. I met with journalists everywhere I went. All I wanted to do was tell people what I had seen and done and why I had chosen to desert the American army in Iraq.

I especially liked speaking in mosques. I was worried the first time that I might be received with hatred and accusations. But each time I have visited a mosque, I have been received warmly and encouraged to speak about my experiences at war and why I deserted the army. I can never undo the things I did in Iraq. I will always have to live with them. But I live with them a little easier when I reach out and speak to Muslims in Canada. I tell them that I am sorry about what I did to their brothers and sisters, and that I hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive me. Prospects for peace do not look good in the world, but I believe that individual citizens can make a difference. For my part, I speak to as many people as I can about the things I did and saw in Iraq. I am grateful to break bread with Muslims when they invite me to meet with them.

Although some Canadians have disagreed with me, and one man in British Columbia even threatened to put me in a boat and drag me to the American border, most of the people I've met in this country have treated me well. Yet it remains to be seen whether I will be allowed to stay in Canada. Just as this book was going to press, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board rejected my application for refugee status. However, I am appealing that decision in court and will not give up my fight until I have explored every avenue to make Canada a permanent home for my wife, our children, and myself. I also believe that the other men and women who have deserted the American armed forces because they do not wish to serve in Iraq should be allowed to stay in Canada. I believe that it would be wrong for Canada to force me to return to a country that ordered me repeatedly to abuse Iraqi civilians and that was later found to be torturing and humiliating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. I don't think it's right that I should be sent back to do more of the same in Iraq, or that I should serve jail time in the United States for refusing to fight in an immoral war.

Some thirty years ago, under the leadership of the late Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian government welcomed draft dodgers from the Vietnam War. The current Canadian government, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has not looked favorably on such refugee claims made by recent deserters of the American army. My case is unusual because I am the first deserter in Canada to argue that I went AWOL after being ordered to take part in a steady stream of human rights violations in Iraq. Still, I am not optimistic about my future, and it is challenging to live in shadows of doubt. At some point soon, I could be told to pack my bags and leave. Any day now, my family could be completely torn apart.

If I have any choice in the matter, I will not return to the United States. I have lost my country, and it has lost me. I would reconsider this position only if the United States prosecuted President Bush and all the senior military officials responsible for sending our army into Iraq. I would be willing to sit in a jail cell with the president, for instance, but I would not use my hands on him. Much as I think the man deserves a licking, I'm through with physical abuse—in Oklahoma, in American boot camps, in Iraq, and everywhere else in the world. If I were alone in a jail cell with George W. Bush, I would use words with the man and try to talk some sense into his head.

If given the chance to have a man-to-man talk with the president of the United States, I would tell him to take a look at the laws and the constitution of his own country. He needs to know that during the time I served in the war in Iraq, soldiers and officers of the American forces violated the very values that we claim to uphold in our own. nation. If the president wishes to know exactly what values I am talking about, I would direct him to some of the first words of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Although I would love to sit down with the president, I would like even more to have half an hour with every young American who is thinking of signing up for the poverty draft. As poor and as desperate as my young family was when I drove to the armed forces recruiting center in Oklahoma in March 2002, I never would have signed up if I'd known I would be blasting into Iraqis' houses, terrorizing women and children, and detaining every man we could find—and all that for $1,200 a month as a private first class. Somehow, somewhere, I would have found a job and a way to survive. I never would have gone to war for my country if I had known what my country was going to do at war in Iraq.