The Deserter's Tale (3 page)

Gun accidents weren't uncommon in my world. J.W. had a daughter from a previous marriage, and she had a son named Nathan. For his fourteenth birthday, Nathan received a handgun from J.W. Later, Nathan played with it in his bedroom. While looking at the barrel he pulled the trigger and blew his head off. Everybody said it was an accident. And in high school, I had a seventeenyear-old friend named Chris Coleman who died at a party when someone put a nine-millimeter pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Then too, the kids at the party assumed it was not loaded.

J.W. bossed me around and called me stupid and fat all the time, but he reserved the very worst for my mother. When J.W. got drunk, something evil came over him, and he went looking for her.

Once, Mom got up from the dinner table and opened the dishwasher to reach for a plate. Without provocation, J.W. swept up behind her, grabbed the dishwasher door, and slammed it shut against her hand. Mom let out a scream and went to hide in her room. She never wanted us to see her when she was in pain. Mom went to the doctor a few days later, claimed she had fallen down some stairs, and came home in a cast. I wished that the doctor had paid a house call. Surely he would have seen that there were no stairs in our trailer. Maybe he would have demanded another explanation for the broken hand.

Another time, J.W. loaded Tyler and me into his car and raced up to the highway restaurant where Mom was working. As soon as he barged through the door he began shouting that Mom had been sleeping with other men

Mom stared at him, eyes wide. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Go away. I'm working.”

But J.W. would not stop shouting. Finally, the boss came out and told my mom to leave. She lost her job. Mom drove back home in another car, and I rode with her while she cried and said she had no idea what J.W. had been talking about. I remember seeing him punch her when we got back home. After that, my mother stayed in bed most of the time, depressed and unable to do anything for herself or for us.

I wasn't yet eleven.

After Mom lost her job, the troubles continued. Alone in our bedroom, Tyler and I could feel the trailer shaking. We knew it was Mom, being thrown against the walls. I looked out through a crack in the door and saw J.W. rip a phone off the wall and use it to smash my mother in the head. I came out of my room and saw blood running from her ear. J.W. hollered at me to get back and to close the door behind me. Mom, too, pleaded with me to stay out of it. She went to the hospital and came home with a bandage like a turban around her head. J.W. had broken her eardrum.

Sometimes in the morning I would notice a scratch or a bruise on J.W.'s face. That would make me light up in a moment of private victory. The battle scars meant that my mother had managed to scratch or punch back at least once during the beating. I could not understand why she wouldn't leave him, and I could not believe that his brothers would just sit around and drink beer and watch without a word of protest when J.W. beat my mother.

I wonder if seeing my mother get beaten up so many times led me to feel, in the end, that it was only normal that I, too, should have a few knocks in life. When I was sixteen, I began my first part-time job. A few evenings a week, I worked in the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Guthrie for about $5 an hour. One day, while I was changing an oil filter on a deep fryer, I accidentally placed my hand in vegetable oil that was boiling in a vat. The grease exploded against my face and one hand. I jumped back and leaned over a sink to throw water over my face and hand. I could feel that I had been seriously burned, so I asked the manager to call an ambulance. She was busy serving customers and refused to help me. I ran out the back door to my truck to drive myself to the hospital. The truck had a flat tire. With blistering hands and a face that felt like it was on fire, I had to change the flat before I could jump behind the steering wheel and drive with my third-degree burns to the hospital. I never returned to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I didn't stop to think that I deserved better treatment and never even thought about making a complaint.

Somehow, I survived my childhood. Perhaps it helped to feel normal and to know that other people had it much worse. Maybe they didn't have enough food to eat. Maybe their loved ones were sitting in prison. Maybe a man named Timothy McVeigh had just blown up their folks in Oklahoma City. It was probably just as well that I didn't know that my own life was difficult.

I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone, and I want to protect my own children from a life like mine. But I will say one thing for it: learning to cope day after day with harshness gave me the strength to push through the nightmare in Iraq and the stubbornness to find a way out. Perhaps my childhood outrage rekindled after some months in Iraq and made it possible for me to do the one thing a soldier must never do: think for myself and question my commanders.

The Oklahoma summers were hotter than hell. My brother and cousins and I would make mud pies and watch them dry out in the sun. It never took long in 115 degree heat. My cousins liked to swim in the pond, but I mostly stayed out of the water because I lived in fear of cottonmouth snakes. We dug pretend war tunnels underground and shot paint balls at one another until, at thirteen, we graduated to whiskey and beer and racing down country roads in pickup trucks.

We called the spring “beer-drinking weather,” and early on we found two more ways to amuse ourselves. After drinking late into the night we would go out cow-tipping in farmers' fields. Cows fall asleep standing on their feet, and we would sneak up and knock them over real fast. They had no balance at all and would topple like bowling pins. Farmers didn't like our pranks, and we had to clear out as fast as we could before someone caught sight of our license plates.

Our second amusement was mailbox crashing. A friend and I would go tearing down the road in my 1992 Nissan pickup. While he drove, I leaned out the side window with a baseball bat, swinging at the country mailboxes. You can get in a decent pop at thirty miles an hour.

Three miles down the road lived my junior high school shop teacher. Mr. Smith was a heavyset man with gray hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He wasn't a bad teacher, but he had an irresistible mailbox. Each time I smashed up his mailbox he put in a new one. Finally, he installed a rubber mailbox. The baseball bat didn't do any good, so I—using a recipe from
The Anarchist Cookbook—
cooked up homemade napalm on my friend's kitchen stove, carried it in an old paint can, and poured it all over the mailbox, which melted. Once more, my shop teacher couldn't get his letters delivered.

Some of the men in my life—my grandfather and J.W. in particular—had a lot of prejudices about blacks and Asians. One time, I was working in a doughnut store run by one of my aunts and my grandfather happened to be there when a number of black college students walked through the door. I was mortified to hear him mumble aloud about how he wished the Ku Klux Klan would come back. I noticed one of the students giving him a withering look, as if to say, “You are one pathetic loser.” I was relieved that he and his buddies got out the door without incident and—even though I loved my grandfather deeply—resolved not to be like him in that respect. I brought black friends by the house, and kept doing it even after he asked me to stop. “Grandpa, you've got to get out of the 1950s,” I would tell him. “It's the 1990s now.”

I think that the fear of the unknown—blacks and Asians, in this case—led my grandfather to hold those prejudices, and I would say that the very same fears made it easy for too many American soldiers—myself included—to abuse Iraqi civilians. In our training, our commanders taught us to demonize and hate Iraqis and Muslims. Looking back, I am sorry to admit that some of the negative parts of my own upbringing climbed from the darkness of my soul and shook hands, in a way, with my army training. It took some time in Iraq before I could put the hateful thoughts behind me.

During my childhood in Guthrie, folks used to say that one day there would be another war between the North and the South. People sometimes wish they could bring back the past, but I don't think they truly want war in their own backyards. If they had any idea of what war meant—if they could picture blood spilling from white, black, or any other bodies—I am quite sure they wouldn't want it. I learned this the hard way, at war in Iraq. The first time an innocent civilian died before my eyes, I didn't ask myself questions about her racial or ethnic background. The only question to ask was why she had to die in the first place. When I look back at my childhood in Guthrie, I think all the talk about bringing back another war between the North and the South was just a way to let out hot air, and no more than an ignorant way to shoot the breeze. I think that deep down all such people really wanted was to pass the time by watching—or joining in—an old-fashioned fistfight. The summers were hot and god-awful boring, and there wasn't much to do in Guthrie except get drunk and start fighting. In that respect, I quickly became a model citizen.

I got in my first fight when I was eight. A thirteenyear-old boy started picking on a kid in my grade, so I kicked the bully in the face. He was a foot taller and a whole lot bigger. He blacked both of my eyes and busted my lip. I had another stepdad back then, and I feared that I would get a whupping for coming home beaten in a fight. I had been at a football game, and when my stepdad came to pick me up I pointed out the boy I had fought. My stepdad noticed the size of the older boy and said I had done enough for the day.

I fought through junior high and kept fighting in high school. I fought black kids and I fought white. I even fought teammates on my football team. I fought so many times that my jaw still locks up on occasion from having taken so many punches.

When I was about seventeen, I got arrested for taking a swing at a police officer who tried to stop me from going to help my mother during a forest fire. My grandmother nearly got herself charged for barging into the police station, swearing at all the officers, and demanding my release.

In court, the judge suspended the charges when he heard that the police officer had ganged up with other cops and roughed me up. My only requirement was to attend a few classes on anger management. I took the classes with two men who had gotten into all sorts of trouble. One of them had beaten up his ex-wife's boyfriend. Not long after the anger management instruction ended, I discovered the two classmates yet again pounding the snot out of the ex-wife's boyfriend. At the time, I thought that anger management was a bit of a joke. Looking back, however, I think that everybody would have been better off if a few soldiers I know had been sent to anger management class instead of Iraq.

* * *

These days, Brandi and I don't let our children play with toy guns. I see the irony in that. Zackary, our eldest, is nine years old. When I was his age, one of my favorite pastimes was to stand alone in the backyard, blasting apart beer bottles with a .22 rifle. Because he'd come from another country, had an American accent, and took some time fitting into his new Canadian school, Zackary became the target of a bully. One of my biggest challenges as a father was
not
to tell him to cock his arm and slug the bully in the mouth. But I know that Zackary will do better things in life and that the world will be a better place if he learns to use words to solve his problems.

My first experience with terrorism was in my home state of Oklahoma, and I know that 168 lives would not have been lost if a man named Timothy McVeigh had been taught to use words instead of force. In 1995, when the ex-soldier and war veteran blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, we felt the blast in our high school some twenty miles away. McVeigh used a truckload of ammonium nitrate—cow shit fertilizer, basically—to kill all those people, including nineteen children. A boy in my school lost his dad in the explosion, and a girl lost both of her parents. Before the explosion, some of the kids in school had teased this girl about coming from a poor family. The teasing stopped after the explosion. I had no idea what to say to a person who had lost both her parents, so I just felt sorry for her and said nothing at all. Classes were canceled as soon as we got the news. We assembled in school for the rest of the day to watch the television reports. Within forty-eight hours, the police had charged Timothy McVeigh with blowing up the building. I couldn't believe it. I had figured it was the work of a foreign terrorist. But it was an American—a former gunnery sergeant in the 1st Infantry Division in the Persian Gulf War—who had blown up his own people.

When I started going out with Brandi, she knew that I had gotten into my share of fights down by the Cimarron River, but her background was just as rough as mine. She had plenty of fights under her own belt and had also been warned that she'd face consequences at home if she lost a fight in the streets. I told her I had seen my mother get beaten too much, and that I would never beat a woman. She liked that about me. She liked everything about me. She was so like me that there was barely anything that needed explanation. We were both poor, had grown up with way too much violence in our family lives, and wanted to put the worst of our lives behind us. I knew, within five seconds of meeting her, that she wanted to be a good person and to lead a good life. I believe she felt the same way about me.

Brandi and I were both eighteen when we met. I was still in twelfth grade but she had already graduated from high school and was working in a dollar store. The day after we met, I stopped by the store to ask her out to dinner. She accepted the date but persuaded me to forget the restaurant and settle on fast food. Why waste money when we could park the pickup by a quiet creek, talk, look out at the water, and let the night grow late?

Brandi liked my mother, but she could read J.W. like a book. She knew the score. When Brandi was three her mother was murdered. At the time, her father had been doing a seven-year jail term. J.W. tried to tell Brandi and me what we could and couldn't do in bed, but we didn't listen to him. It wasn't his trailer anyway, it was my mother's. To hell with his instructions that Brandi sleep on one side of a bedsheet and that I sleep on the other.