The Deserter's Tale (7 page)

The Iraqi brothers were taken away to an American detention facility for interrogation. I don't know what it was called, and I don't know where it was. All I know is that we sent away every man—pretty well every male over five feet tall—that we found in our house raids, and I never saw one of them return to the neighborhoods we patrolled regularly.

Inside, we kept on ransacking the house. The more obvious it became that we would find no weapons or contraband, the more we kicked the stuffing out of the house. We knocked over dressers, sliced into mattresses with knives, kicked our way through doors, raiding the three bedrooms on the second floor, then raced up to the third floor. Would we find terrorists or nasty weapons stashed there? Nope. It was basically just a landing that led to a rooftop area where the family had washed clothes and hung them to dry.

We turned over everything we could and broke furniture at random, searching for contraband, weapons, proof of terrorist activity, or signs of weapons of mass destruction. We found nothing but a compact disc. Soldiers initially said it showed proof of terrorist activity, but it turned out to have nothing on it but a bunch of speeches by Saddam Hussein.

I figured the terrorists had managed to dance out of our way that night, but that we'd nab them the next time.

Once we had everybody outside the house and had done our initial job of ransacking, another squad took over inside. They kept raising hell in there, breaking and turning over more furniture, looking for weapons that we might have missed. Outside, under a carport—a parking space under a roof, but with no walls or enclosure—I was assigned to watch the women and children. We weren't arresting them, but we weren't allowing them to go anywhere either. The family members couldn't go back inside, and they couldn't wander off into the neighborhood. They had to stay right there while we tore the hell out of their house.

A girl in the family—a teenager—started staring at me. I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me. Inside, when we had been screaming at her and the others, I'd assumed that nobody understood a word of English. But this young girl spoke to me in English, and her eyes bored holes right through me. She was skin and bones, not even a hundred pounds, not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing.

I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could, but it was my job to stay right there and make sure she didn't move. I had my weapon ready. She was wearing a blue nightgown and had a white scarf covering her hair. She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly. Her eyes were coal black and full of hatred.

In English, she asked me, “Where are you taking my brothers?”

“I don't know, Miss,” I said.

“Why are you taking them away?”

“I'm afraid I can't say.”

“When are you bringing them back?”

“Couldn't tell you that either.”

“Why are you doing this to us?”

I couldn't answer that.

I hoped she would not raise a fuss. I didn't want her to start screaming, which could attract the attention of my squad mates. One or two of them, I feared, would be more than happy to use a rifle butt to knock out her teeth.

I hadn't been in Iraq more than twenty-four hours and already I was having strange feelings. First, I was vulnerable, and I didn't like it. Even with all these soldiers and all this equipment, I knew that anywhere, at any time, any enterprising Iraqi with a gun, a wall to hide behind, and one decent eye could pick me off faster than a hawk nabs a mouse. Second, with hardly one foot into the war in Iraq, I was also uneasy about what we were doing there. Something was amiss. We hadn't found anything in this girl's house, but we had busted it up pretty well in thirty minutes and had taken away her brothers. Inside, another squad was still ransacking the house. I didn't enjoy being stuck guarding this girl under the carport, in the cool April air before dawn in Ramadi. Her questions haunted me, and I didn't like not being able to answer them—even to myself.

I dared not speak more with her because that would amount to “fraternizing with the enemy”—something about which I would be warned many times in Iraq.

In the days to come I tried to drive that girl out of my mind. We hadn't found a thing in her house except slabs of meat in the freezer and a Saddam Hussein CD. No matter. We'd catch the terrorists the next day, to be sure. Or so I told myself.

We were pumped after that raid. It felt like a pouch of adrenaline was slung on an IV and dripping straight into my veins. It was one of the most exciting things I had ever done. After the first hit I wanted more. I wanted to catch those flicking terrorists, and I figured it was only bad luck that had prevented us from nabbing them the first time.

We were told that the purpose of the house raids was to nab terrorists and to find evidence of terrorism. During that first month in Ramadi, we usually raided at least one home—and sometimes as many as four—each night. The houses we raided were ordinary, one- or two-story homes in residential areas. They were far more attractive, spacious, and comfortable than the trailer, apartments, and houses I had inhabited in Oklahoma. Most of the houses in Iraq looked neat, tidy, and well arranged—before we showed up. Our raids always took place in the middle of the night, in order to catch people sleeping and to intimidate them.

My whole platoon, consisting of about twenty officers and soldiers, would take part in the house raids. Twelve or so soldiers would place themselves outside, six positioned as guards and another six stationed at the trucks used to take away all the men—or any boys over five feet tall—that we found inside. It was always the job of my squad of six or seven men to begin the raid itself. I was usually the one to put the plastic explosives on the door, set the charge, and blow down the door. I never saw a person killed in a house raid, but if any Iraqi had been standing just inside his front door at the moment I blew it off, he certainly would have been killed.

When we burst in the door, sometimes we raced through the house and found people in bed. At other times men and women were standing or sitting inside, looking completely stunned. Sometimes their hands would fly to their mouths. Sometimes they would start screaming. We would scream at them to get down and knock down the men as quickly as we could so they could be zipcuffed and taken out to our waiting trucks. Any male who took his time about getting to the floor or who protested loudly would be given a quick rifle butt to the head or the stomach. I dished out my fair share of licks in those first raids.

Although I lived in terror in the first month or two that somebody would ambush us in the midst of a house raid—throwing grenades or lighting us up with machine-gun fire—nobody ever resisted with as much as a finger. Looking back, with twelve American soldiers stationed outside and six more charging into the house, each one armed to the hilt and ready to shoot, I can see that resistance would have been suicide for any Iraqi. Even though not one person tried to shoot us or made any effort to hurt us, it was common for American soldiers to beat the civilians. At least every two or three days during my time in Iraq, I saw our soldiers kicking Iraqi civilians in the ribs and punching their faces until blood ran from their noses, mouths, or eyebrows. I'm not proud to say that I participated in these beatings, but I was far less extreme than some of the soldiers. As time went on I lost any appetite for the beatings and refrained from them entirely.

We got the men outside as fast as we could, and it usually took longer to round up the women and children. The women would sometimes scream at us, and we would shout right back at them to “shut the fuck up.” Sometimes they spoke English and sometimes they didn't. Often, we had no idea what they were saying and the only language of ours they understood were our pointed machine guns.

Inside the houses, we knocked over wardrobes, kicked in doors, ripped through mattresses, and threw bookshelves to the floor. We busted locks, threw over refrigerators, and broke lanterns and lamps. Radios and televisions were thrown around and smashed.

In the first raid, the second, the third, and the fourth, I wondered why we never managed to find anything. We tore the hell out of those places, blasting apart doors, ripping up mattresses, breaking locks off furniture, and ripping drawers from dressers. With all of our ransacking, we never found anything other than the ordinary goods that ordinary people keep in their houses.

We commonly found AK-47s in the course of our raids—just as commonly as one might expect to find guns in houses in Guthrie, Oklahoma—and we didn't consider this unusual or evidence of terrorism. Initially, we confiscated every weapon we found. But after several weeks, Sergeant Padilla told us to stop taking them because Iraqis used them for their personal protection. Each family could keep one AK-47, Padilla told us. At the time, I thought that was perfectly ludicrous. I couldn't see the point of raiding houses if we allowed the very people who were supposed to be our enemies to continue to own automatic rifles. During my entire stay in Iraq, the rules about whether or not to take AK-47s from houses kept changing. One week, we would be told to take every assault rifle we found. A little later, we would be instructed to let families keep a weapon for personal protection. Over time, I expected to find one gun in each house and paid it no more attention than I would a television.

Other than weapons and people, the only things we found in our house raids were books, clothes, rugs, furniture, and food. When we found money, jewelry, or knives, we helped ourselves to them and to anything else that caught our fancy.

Not long into my stay in Iraq, I saw $100 in a house. I snapped up the bills and stuffed them in my pocket. A man who was being zipcuffed and led out the door shouted back at me angrily.

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

“This is American money,” I told him. “You're not American, and you have no business having it.” The money stayed in my pocket.

Jewelry. Money. If it looked good, we helped ourselves.

I stole whatever I wanted in the initial raids, but I stopped doing that after my first few weeks in Iraq. The more uneasy I felt about what we were doing there, the less I wanted to make matters worse. Others in my platoon looted to their hearts' content. One fellow collected gold jewelry and mailed it home to his wife. Another lugged a television straight out of an Iraqi house. Others took ornate knives, and I saw one soldier make off with a beautiful rug. Who was going to stop us? We were the army of the United States of America, and we would do whatever we pleased.

I still believed that eventually we would find the terrorists or the weapons that were said to be there, but it didn't take long before the raids left me feeling uncomfortable. It was easy to see the hatred in the eyes of the Iraqis as we broke apart their houses and arrested their men.

In the raids, I came to dislike the way Sergeant Jones loved to be the first one to bust into the homes. Jones, a freckled man from Ohio, had already done war duty in Afghanistan. He was just twenty-two, and I resented the fact that a man two years my junior outranked me in the squad. He had no wife or kids. He had been in the U.S. Army for years and talked about staying in it forever. One of the things that upset me about Jones was what he had said to me in Fort Carson, Colorado, the day before we flew into war. He wanted to get my goat and he knew exactly how to mess me up. “It's a known fact that your wife is gonna start fucking some other guy the moment you're out of the country. You wait. You'll see. It happens to them all. By the time you're back, she will have stolen your money, served you divorce papers, and found herself another man.” I loved my wife to bits. Brandi and I already had three children, and I had never doubted her. But the seed of anxiety that Jones planted grew like a weed during my time in Iraq.

I thought of Brandi and of our children when Jones and I charged into civilians' houses. Jones had no family, but I did, and it tore me apart to terrorize families like that. We were finding no weapons of mass destruction or evidence of terrorism. I soon began to feel that breaking apart a house and terrorizing its inhabitants was not something that should be done to any human being. Period.

One of the things that disturbed me the most in the house raids was having to run into bedrooms and round up sleeping Iraqi children. I couldn't help imagining how my own children would react if armed soldiers from another country burst into their rooms and tore them from bed. I was supposed to keep my guns trained on the children when I woke them, got them out of bed, and marched them outside. I couldn't do it, though. I could never point my M-249 at a child. I would tap the children gently on the shoulder and the poor kids would leap from bed, petrified, screaming like the world was ending. And outside they would go, as their brothers and fathers were being zipcuffed and shoved onto the backs of trucks and sent out to who knows where.

Our first month in Ramadi—from the last days of April to about the end of May 2003—was the quietest and easiest of my time in Iraq. The people of Ramadi had been bombed before our arrival, so perhaps it took the Iraqi resistance some time to get organized. During our first tour of duty in Ramadi, we were not subjected to rocket or mortar attacks, nobody launched grenades at us, and almost nobody took shots at us as we moved about the city. Nobody in my platoon was injured or killed. I fell into a pattern of four basic jobs: raiding homes; patrolling streets and traffic checkpoints; standing guard at banks, hospitals, and military compounds; and doing grunt work where we had put up camp in Saddam Hussein's bombed-out palace.

Even back at the palace we never got much sleep. Apache helicopters hovered and jets screamed above us at all times. At night, our forces shot constant illumination rounds into the sky. The rounds were like giant firecrackers, exploding one after the other so that darkness was never allowed to settle over Ramadi. Sometimes I was ordered to patrol the banks of the Euphrates, located just a stone's throw from the palace. I would often see Iraqi fishermen in small boats, pulling the pins out of grenades and toss ing them into the river. They would wait for the water to stop gushing up in fountains, and then they would scoop up all the dead fish. Eating fish full of shrapnel didn't seem like much of a meal to me, but the men were desperate for food and a livelihood.