The Deserter's Tale (5 page)

Two other noncommissioned officers looked over my shoulder, turned the pages of the contract, skipped over the fine print, and pointed out all the X's where I was to sign my name. I signed where they pointed and believed what I was told. I was a bloody fool to do so.

On April 13, 2002, I entered into a contract with the U.S. Army. Eighteen days later I was sent to basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

* * *

I took a commercial flight from Oklahoma City to St. Louis. At the airport, I met up with about 150 other new recruits. We boarded a number of military buses. It was a long drive to Fort Leonard Wood, but at least I was on the military payroll now. Brandi—who went to live with our boys in Checotah, Oklahoma—would be able to buy the children some clothing, and we would all eat a little better.

We pulled into the fort around three a.m. As we prepared to disembark, a long line of drill sergeants awaited us. They shouted that we had to get off the bus immediately, screamed that we were worthless assholes, and hollered that anything could be changed in the contracts we had signed and any promises made to us could now be thrown out the window.

The drill sergeants held megaphones as we all scrambled to get out. “Get the fuck out!” they screamed right in our faces.

Like the others, I was nervous and scared, but I knew—even amid all the pushing and the shouting—that they were just trying to break us down mentally, and that more of this would come.

We had to give up our cigarettes, lighters, scissors, and nail files. We were taken to the barracks, allowed to sleep for an hour, then rushed to a mess hall and given one minute to eat. And I mean one minute. I wolfed down the scrambled eggs as fast as I could.

A day after our arrival I was allowed to call Brandi. I had only a minute or two on the telephone with her, and I wouldn't be given another chance to call her for seventeen weeks. Quickly, I told her that they did not let us have coffee or tea in boot camp and that she should send me some over-the-counter uppers called Yellow Jackets. You can't get them any longer but back then they were perfectly legal, and you could buy them at any gas station or drugstore in Oklahoma.

Ever the dutiful wife, Brandi slipped the Yellow Jackets inside a box of Zest soap, repackaged the bar of soap, and sent me the uppers by mail. Every morning I swallowed a pill to jolt myself awake.

Within a day or two of arriving at Fort Leonard Wood, while I stood at attention with three hundred other recruits, a drill sergeant hollered out that we had been put into the 35th Combat Engineer Company and that we would learn to be “the most devious goddamn killers on the battlefield.”

I didn't know exactly what that meant, but it sure didn't sound like bridge building. I tried not to worry about it because I still believed that after boot camp I would be sent to a nondeployable military base. So, to my way of thinking, it did not matter if I learned about grenades and mines because I wouldn't have to use them in combat anyway.

I turned twenty-four just a few days after arriving at boot camp. I didn't tell anybody, because I didn't want to draw any attention to myself. If anybody notices you or stops to speak to you at boot camp, it's bad news for sure. The name of the game is to stay out of sight of anybody in any position to rain down punishment. When sergeants blew horns and banged trash cans at two in the morning, hauled us out of bed and made us each do a hundred push-ups, I tried to struggle through it and to stay under the radar.

I shared a bunk bed with a private named Babbit, who was steaming over a lie he had swallowed during recruitment. The poor sucker had been told a story like mine—but even more ridiculous. A recruiter in Lawrence, Kansas, had promised Babbit that if he signed up for service, the army would reward him and his girlfriend with a holiday to Korea. When Babbit got to Fort Leonard Wood and found out that his Korean junket had disappeared about as fast as my bridge-building promise, his girlfriend dumped him.

“When I get back home I'm going to find that recruiter and tell him that he's a lying piece of shit,” Babbit fumed.

Among the three hundred recruits, about a third of us were white, another third black, and another third Latino. There were just two women. As we went through the seventeen weeks of basic training, we were all shouted at, insulted, awoken abruptly, and kept off balance by sergeants whose job it was to break us down and build us back up in their own mold.

If somebody failed to do something properly, every recruit in the company would be punished. That quickly taught us to hate laggards and people who just couldn't follow orders quickly enough.

I must say that I loved boot camp. I was good with guns, didn't mind the exercise, and felt myself swell with patriotism and pride when our commanders told us that Americans were the only decent people on the planet and that Muslims and terrorists all deserved to die.

One day, all three hundred of us lined up on the bayonet range, each facing a life-size dummy that we were told to imagine was a Muslim man.

As we stabbed the dummies with our bayonets, one of our commanders stood on a podium and shouted into a microphone: “Kill! Kill! Kill the sand niggers!”

We, too, were made to shout out “Kill the sand niggers” as we stabbed the heads, then the hearts, and then slashed the throats of our imaginary victims.

While we shouted and stabbed, drill sergeants walked among us to make sure that we were all shouting. It seemed that the full effect of the lesson would be lost on us unless we shouted out the words of hate as we mutilated our enemies.

I shouted as loud and stabbed as mercilessly as any man on the range, and I slowly began to feel that I was somebody important. I was no longer a fast-food delivery man earning a pittance for a wage plus tips and all the pizza I could eat. I was no longer wondering how I could possibly put enough food on the table for Brandi and the boys. I was now an American soldier, and proud to think of myself as a perfect killing machine. I felt patriotic and invincible. I believed every word I was told, including that it was the job of the American army to keep order in the world. Our commanders told us that people who were not Americans were “terrorists” and “slant eyes.” They said that Muslims were responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on our country, that the people of Afghanistan were “terrorist pieces of shit that all deserved to die.”

Commanders drilled these beliefs into us by making us memorize and call out various chants. I have trouble remembering the precise words of all of these chants, but one of them went something like this:

One shot

One kill

One Arab

One Asian

Another of our chants had to do with putting our skills as sappers, or makers and defusers of bombs, to good use:

Who can take a shopping mall

And fill it full of people?

The sapper daddy can,

‘Cause he takes a lot of pains

And makes the hurt go good.

Who can take all the people in the mall

And chop ‘em up with Uzis?

The sapper daddy can,

‘Cause he takes a lot of pains

And makes the hurt go good.

Iraqis, in the mouths of the officers and soldiers of the United States Army, were never Iraqis. And Muslims were never civilians. Nobody once mentioned the word “civilian” in the same breath as “Iraq” when I trained to become a soldier. Iraqis, I was taught to believe, were not civilians; they were not even people. We had our own terms for them. Our commanders called them ragheads, so we did the same. We called them
habibs.
We called them sand niggers. We called them hajjis; it wasn't until I was sent to war that a man in Iraq explained to me that hajji was a complimentary term for a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In training, all I knew was that a hajji was someone to be despised. The hajjis, habibs, ragheads, and sand niggers were the enemy, and they were not to be thought of with a shred of humanity. No wonder my wife and I both thought, by the time I flew overseas to war, that all Muslims were terrorists and all terrorists were Muslims and that the only solution was to kill as many Iraqis as possible.

There is one other thing I was taught at Fort Leonard Wood that chipped away at my soul and made it that much easier, a year or so later, for me to accept and take part in the violence that my fellow soldiers dished out to civilians in Iraq.

Twice during my time at boot camp, a drill sergeant by the name of Johnson made me get up from my bed in the middle of the night, collect one or two aides, and beat up recruits who were falling behind in their duties or failing to comply with orders.

Sergeants, I was told, were not allowed to beat up trainees. So they used me to do their dirty work, and I, stupidly, felt honored to do exactly as they said.

The first time, Sergeant Johnson sent me to beat up a trainee named Taylor, who had lunged at a drill sergeant and tried to start a fight with him. My buddies and I threw a blanket over his head and beat his chest and ribs with a sock stuffed with soap. I whacked him hard while he cried out in pain. “You been making trouble for all of us and there will be more of this tomorrow if you keep it up,” I said.

After taking his licks, Taylor didn't try to start any more fights with noncommissioned officers.

A little while later, Sergeant Johnson sent me out again, to beat up a recruit by the name of Armstrong who had been refusing to take orders. Once more, my buddies and I jumped on him in the night, covered his head, and pummeled his body. Armstrong screamed during the whole beating and kept on screaming when we left. I had to run back and threaten to beat him again if he didn't shut up. He fell silent after that, but in the morning I saw that my intimidation tactics had not worked.

When we were awakened in the morning, Armstrong began shouting to anyone who would listen that he would not get out of bed and that he would not follow orders. The drill sergeants took him away, and I never saw him again. I heard that he was let out of the army, although I don't know if that is true. At the time, I thought of him as a weakling and a coward who was an embarrassment to the army.

I enjoyed boot camp. I liked the challenge involved in setting and defusing land mines. It was fun to learn how to set off bombs using plastic explosives and TNT. One day, well into our training, we were rewarded for our hard work with the opportunity to set off a bomb consisting of about two hundred pounds of C-4 explosives. After hiding inside a bunker at a distance of a few hundred yards, we ignited the bomb. The blast roared in our ears, and the earth shook. I felt the vibrations rolling through my body. Dirt and debris flew through the air. I had never witnessed such a powerful explosion in my life, found the experience exhilarating, and hoped I would get to make another bomb and see it explode.

I loved shooting on the practice range, and I earned a pin for my good marksmanship. When we were tested in rigging and defusing bombs, I got top grades in my company. After nine weeks of basic training, five weeks of sapper training, and three more weeks of training in how to drive tanks and armored personnel carriers, I moved to my permanent military station at Fort Carson, Colorado.

In October 2002, Brandi, the boys, and I moved into a modest row house on the new base. I still believed that Fort Carson was a “nondeployable” base, one that did not send soldiers to war, but that last bubble burst within minutes of my arrival.

A specialist named Abby was sent to pick me up at the reception area on base. When he showed up, he said that I would be joining the 43rd Combat Engineer Company.

“Since the nineteenth century, we've been in every major war the United States has fought and we're proud of it,” he said.

I was shocked, but I said nothing as he drove me to my barracks.

Over the next days, I learned that I had been placed in the third squad of the first platoon of the 43rd CEC, as it was called. Each squad had six or seven members, so there were about twenty people in a platoon. There were six platoons in the 43rd CEC, for a total of about 120 men. Most of us were combat engineers, trained in how to make and defuse bombs and mines. Our company was part of the second squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The 3rd ACR had its own distinguished wartime history. Known also as the “Brave Rifles,” soldiers with the 3rd ACR's precursors had fought in the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both world wars, and the Persian Gulf War, among others. One of the 3rd ACR's most famous and colorful generals was George S. Patton Jr., who during World War II favored ivory-handled Colt .45 revolvers and traveled with a bull terrier named Willie.

Shortly after arriving at Fort Carson, I paid a visit one afternoon to the office of Lieutenant Joyce and found him sitting in his chair.

“Do I have permission to speak, sir?”

“Yes, soldier.”

“Sir, when I joined the military I was told I was being sent to a nondeployable base. But I hear that the 43rd Combat Engineer Company is a combat company. Is there some way we can fix this problem, so I can be sent to a nondeployable unit?”

“Soldier, you obviously don't understand the military way of life. Get the hell out of my office.”

I felt that everything was lost, and that I should get out of his office before I made matters worse for myself. I paid for that complaint.

The next morning my squad leader, Sergeant Padilla, shouted in my face.

“You broke rank by speaking to Lieutenant Joyce and you're a fucking piece of shit.”

The team leader at the time, Specialist Abby, continued with the endless stream of insults. I was “smoked,” as they say, for several days. They made me do push-ups, duck walks, crawl around on my hands and knees, and stand at attention while every man in my platoon hollered that I was a “useless asshole” and a “stupid shit.”