The Deserter's Tale (2 page)

1

Childhood

I COULD HAVE USED A FATHER'S ADVICE BEFORE
deciding to join the army. A father could have guided me through my worst hours in Iraq. And by the time I ran away from the American army, I was starving for the counsel of an older man. I wished for a father with two basic qualities: knowledge of war and love of his son. But there was no such man in my life. There was no one at all who fit the bill. Anonymously, I called an army lawyer. His job was to advise soldiers in distress, but the only thing he gave me was an earful. “Soldier,” he said on the telephone, “you've got two choices. You get back to Iraq or you go to jail.”

Hanging up the phone, I took comfort in the arms of my wife. Without Brandi, I could never have made it through the hell of living as a fugitive. I was a total mess. I couldn't sleep. Couldn't handle crowds. Couldn't even stand in a supermarket checkout line. All around me I imagined grenades launching, bullets pinging off concrete, and the heads of decapitated Iraqis accusing me of war crimes. I kept reaching for my weapon—an M-249 squad automatic weapon, thirty-six pounds fully loaded—and felt naked without it.

In Iraq I learned that every soldier has his story. One man who was ripped apart by an explosion in his armored personnel carrier told me, as I picked up his leg and put it beside him on the stretcher, “Now I get to see my daughter.” Others sank under the weight of “Dear John” letters and had no reason at all to go home.

As for my own story, I am not yet thirty but feel as if I have already lived four distinct lives. In my first life, I lived at home in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and then started a family of my own with Brandi. In the second life, I spent eighteen months in military training and at war in Iraq. In the third life, I deserted the U.S. Army and hid in Philadelphia for fourteen months, slinking under the cover of darkness from one cheap hotel to the next. In this current life, I am hanging on in a new land with my wife and children, waiting to see if the Canadian courts will let us stay.

* * *

I was born in 1978 and grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Guthrie, a small town twenty miles north of Oklahoma City. The land was owned by my grandfather Elmer Porter, who bought it after serving in the Korean War. Elmer had been an airplane mechanic at Tinker Air Force Base, but he was retired by the time I came along. He lived on the property with my grandmother Doris Porter. Some aunts, uncles, and cousins of mine had their own houses on the property, and my mother, brother, and I lived in a two-bedroom trailer about two hundred yards from my grandparents' house. Before heading to school, I would often stop by my grandparents' bungalow for breakfast. Doris always made me eggs over easy, and Elmer cooked bacon in an iron skillet. My memories of eating with them are the fondest of my childhood. They were the rocks in my life, and I took refuge in their home when it was too hot or too violent in the trailer.

Doris and Elmer were Pentecostal Christians. Elmer said it was wrong for a man to hit his wife. I never saw him raise a finger against anyone. He showed me how to whittle and taught me how to fix motors, pumps, and fences on the farm. He kept ten ancient tractors that he couldn't bear to part with. Every spring, while I held his tools, he would tune them all up and drive each one around the property.

When I was thirteen or so, my grandfather said there was no room on the farm for seven new puppies. He had a quick death in mind. It was nothing to him—nothing more than avoiding a situation where he would have to feed too many dogs. I knew he didn't mean to be cruel, and I suspect he thought that with his sharp blows to the head he was bringing them an instant and painless death. But I had seen his solution before and just couldn't stand by and watch him take a hammer yet again and kill the puppies that way. So I dug one big hole in the woods behind my trailer, spread the puppies out on the ground, aimed my .22 rifle, and shot them each once at point-blank range, hoping to spare them the misery of my grandfather's hammer. I covered the pups with dirt, stood up with the shovel, took a step back, and could hear two of them still weeping under the ground. I dug them up in a panic. Two of them were barely moving, but they were still whimpering. I knew they were suffering and I didn't like to see anything suffer. I choked back the realization that I had just caused them more pain than my grandfather would have done with his own technique. I ran back to the trailer as fast as I could, opened the unlocked gun cabinet, and scoured the shelves for a weapon I knew would be loaded already and much more powerful. I grabbed a silver nine-millimeter Ruger pistol and ran back to the hole. I shot every round from the gun—I believe it was thirteen bullets—into the bodies below. My lungs were heaving, and my body was racked with sobs, and I shot indiscriminately until I knew for sure that all the puppies were dead. I didn't speak to a single person about what I had done, and for weeks I was haunted by the killing of the weeping dogs.

My grandmother Doris smoked Virginia Slims and was always crocheting, sewing, or knitting. She watched
Walker, Texas Ranger
every day on TV. She used to make pecan pies and let me eat them warm. On nights when it wasn't safe in the trailer, I slept near my grandmother in her bedroom. Doris was religious, but she swore like a trooper. She was reliable on one hand and easygoing on the other, and I loved my grandmother more than anyone else in the world.

The day before I flew from Fort Carson to Kuwait, I called Doris on the telephone. I told her that I would think of her every day while I was overseas and asked what she was doing that day.

“I'm covering all the house windows with plastic,” she said.

I chuckled. “Grandma, what's all that foolishness about?”

“In case of chemical attack,” she said. “Half the folks in Guthrie are doing the same thing. People say we might get chemical attacked, so they're covering up their windows.”

I laughed out loud. I wished I could be there to hug the woman and fix her a glass of iced tea.

“Grandma, you ought to sit down and relax. Forget covering the windows. Plastic won't help you if we get chemical attacked. If that happens, you might as well just bend over and kiss your ass good-bye because we're all gonna die.”

She laughed and said it was probably true. She said that I should take good care of myself, and that she would always love me. I never heard her voice again. Doris died seventeen days after I flew into war.

When I was still a teenager, my father almost came back for me. His name was Donald Ernest Key. I knew little about him. He had three sons from an earlier marriage, but I've met them only once. He was a welder and he drank too much. He took off when I was three and never paid my mother a cent of child support or alimony. The next time I saw him was twelve years later, when he was lying in his casket. I heard that he had died in an accident while working on an oil rig off the coast of Africa. I was told not to go to his funeral, because he had remarried and his relatives might think I was chasing his money. So I didn't go to the funeral but I went to the visitation. I spoke with his sister, who said she had heard that Dad had recently come to see me. That seemed a strange thing to say, since I had never seen or heard from him. A little later, I wandered through the woods on our property and came across a beaten-up old lawn chair in a grove of trees. Empty liquor bottles were strewn around the chair. Peering through the growth I could see my own yard. I assumed that my father had hidden himself there to watch me coming and going on school days. Who else would have been hiding in the woods on our family farm, south of Guthrie, emptying bottle after bottle of Wild Turkey? It sure wasn't my stepfather, J. W. Barker, who kept his own beer locked up in a refrigerator in his bedroom. My father was said to be a fine welder, but he never found the courage to speak to me.

My mother's name is Judy Porter. She is fifty and lives in Guthrie. She has heart trouble and a pacemaker and uses an oxygen tank to breathe. I speak to her almost every day by telephone but haven't been able to see her since I went AWOL four years ago. Most deserters get caught, and they get caught being stupid. They just can't resist the urge to visit their loved ones. It was fortunate that Brandi and the children came with me the moment I went into hiding. And it was a good thing I never went back to see my mother. The military police would have caught me for sure. Mom told me that after my desertion she saw strange cars parked down the road. Even Captain Bower, my commanding officer in Iraq, called my mother on the telephone. Bower told her that a number of soldiers had deserted his company of 120 men, and that he had caught every last one of them except for me. He warned that she could be charged if she helped me in any way. “Aiding and abetting a criminal is against the law” is the way Mom said he put it.

Here is how I avoided detection: by following every word of training that I received in the army. When your job is to defuse land mines and to set plastic explosives on people's doors before busting into their homes, you either pay attention to details or die with your head up your ass. After I went AWOL, there was one detail I never forgot:
If you don't want to get caught, don't go see your mother.

Unlike the men who walked in and out of my life, my mother did not have a drinking problem. However, by the time I was in high school she rarely got out of bed or left the house. She never went to meet my teachers. She never drove to a football game to cheer me on. She hardly went anywhere at all. Looking back, I think she was depressed because she had married a string of alcoholics. Earlier, when she was healthier, she served coffee and meals at a local truck stop on the road to Oklahoma City. When I was nine, a trucker named James Willard Barker moved in with my mother and became my third stepdad. He stayed eleven years with my mother before he finally left.

I can credit J.W. with one thing: he did such awful things to my mother that I learned the hard way how not to act. Nobody deserves the kind of treatment J.W. dished out. J.W. intimidated and dominated my mother, my younger brother, and me. His reign of terror lasted until two things happened around the same time: I finally outgrew him and he developed cirrhosis of the liver.

When I was a young boy, I doted for years on a black, brown, and white weenie dog with a ridiculously long tail. His name was Buttercup and he slept in my bedroom. Not long after J.W. moved in, he made me put Buttercup outside on a cold winter night. I begged my mom to let me bring Buttercup in from the freezing weather, but she said that I had to obey my stepfather. The next day, I searched everywhere but couldn't find my dachshund. Two days later I found Buttercup huddled under the trailer, frozen to death.

J.W. got rid of my mother's animals too. She had been keeping horses, goats, and chickens for years, but J.W. sold every one of them off. Drinking money, I supposed.

It didn't take long before I hated him and wished for his death. A short, muscular man who wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, J.W. kept dozens of loaded weapons in unlocked cases in the trailer. I learned how to use them all.

On my ninth birthday, as a lark while his drinking buddies looked on, J.W. let me hold his nickel-plated .357 Magnum pistol.

“Go ahead,” he said, “see how it feels. Pull the trigger. It's not loaded.”

When I pulled the trigger, a bullet exploded from the barrel. The gun flew up and rocked my shoulder, nearly knocking me over. Witnessing my humiliation, J.W. and his buddies bent over in laughter.

I already knew how to shoot a .22 rifle before J.W. came into my life, but under his watch I learned to clean, load, and shoot every weapon in his collection. In the field behind our trailer I shot pistols, shotguns, and rifles. By the age of twelve, I was shooting M-14 and AK-47 assault rifles.

Someone gave me an Uzi around that time, and I used it to shoot snapping turtles in the pond near our farm. When I hit them, the turtles would fly up in the air and land on their backs in the water. I had a mortal fear of snakes, and one day I spotted a large one wrapped around a tree. I ran home, loaded a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, raced back to the tree, and blasted the sucker over and over. My grandfather, who had seen me while working outside, teased me about it for a long time. “Did you need all those rounds for just one snake?” he asked.

I began to hunt at the age of nine or ten. I didn't need a permit because I was underage. On a hunting trip a few years later, I spotted a deer two hundred yards away. Aiming a Remington seven-millimeter rifle with a scope, I shot a four-inch bullet into its neck. I felt a rush of adrenaline. When I ran up to take a closer look, I found blood everywhere. It was shocking to me. I felt horrible. The animal seemed big-eyed and defenseless, its life utterly wasted. J.W. made me help as he hung the deer from a branch and gutted it. Blood and guts spilled over our hands and arms, but we had to keep moving so the meat wouldn't spoil. It didn't matter that we ate the meat, or that it tasted good. My first deer became my last, and I did not go hunting again.

J.W. was obsessed with guns, but everybody else in the family had them too. My mother kept one by the side of her bed, and to this day my eighty-year-old grandfather packs a pistol in his pocket.

Twice in my thirteenth year I nearly shot J.W. The first time, J.W. gave me a .410 shotgun and told me to put it away in the gun cabinet. To check if it was loaded, I pointed it at the window and pulled the trigger. When the shotgun blasted, some pellets hit the fireplace and others shattered the window. I missed J.W. by about an inch. He screamed and hollered about how I was a fat, stupid, dumb-assed retard.

The second time, I heard our trailer door open in the middle of the night. I reached for my twenty-gauge shotgun, which I kept with rounds of ammunition in the bedroom that I shared with my brother, Tyler. I picked up the gun and stepped out into the corridor, pointing it forward. At the same moment, J.W. stepped out into the hall with his AK-47 pointed at me. The door had merely blown open in the wind. We saw each other just in time, lowered our weapons, and returned to our bedrooms.