The Deserter's Tale (8 page)

I ran a pipe from the Euphrates to our palace and rigged up a pump so that the men in our platoon could use a makeshift shower. I also connected our electrical wires to the Iraqi power grid so that our lights, fans, and air conditioners could run. I could have been electrocuted at any time, but I never stopped to worry about the dangers. I was living in constant fear of being attacked, was jacked up on adrenaline from all of the house raids, and was never allowed to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time. As a result I felt constantly stoned, and didn't think any more about the juice in the Iraqi power grid than I did about sleeping next to an American bomb or wandering out in the middle of the night to urinate next to an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade.

Because I was among the lowest-ranked, I got stuck every few days with one of the worst jobs going: to burn up all of our shit. We crapped into fifty-gallon metal barrels, each sliced in half. When the barrels were full, I would toss in five gallons of diesel, light a match, and use a fence post to stir the shit. Usually I would have two or three barrels burning at once, stirring them for hours at a time. I would have to keep tossing on more diesel and lighting more matches, and I had to keep stirring to make the shit burn. As I worked, the ashes settled all over my face and my hands. It took hours to burn down our shit that way. In the first platoon of the 43rd Combat Engineer Company I became the main shit burner, and I imagine I stirred more of it than any soldier in Iraq.

During our quiet time, some of the men read or listened to music. Most of them played Game Boys. Many times, we gathered together in groups to watch bootleg videos that we purchased from Iraqi street vendors or from Sayeed, a nineteen-year-old Iraqi who had studied in England and who was paid $20 a week to serve as our interpreter and errand boy. On portable DVD players, we watched every kind of film imaginable. Action films. War movies. Porn. One time, Sayeed brought us a porn movie featuring Asian children. While I watched in horror, a teenage girl in the video was tied on a stretcher and raped by two men. In the middle of a war zone, with tanks rolling and jets screaming, I stared numbly at the screen and asked myself what had gone wrong with the world. The other soldiers and I sat there stupidly and watched until Staff Sergeant Lindsay broke up the show, called us all perverts, snatched the DVD, and broke it with his hands.

Our commanders told us it was okay to masturbate, because they wanted us to check if we had any blood in our sperm—which, we were told, might suggest that we had ingested
E. coli.
For a laugh, some of the men began a competition to see which one could go the longest without masturbating. We worked on the honor system, but it would have been hard to lie anyway.

Because I was eating with, crapping next to, sleeping beside, and busting into homes with the same guys day in and day out, I ended up knowing them all pretty well. There's barely a thing about them I didn't know. I knew whose wife has just written him a Dear John letter or, worse, told the poor guy, after he had stood in line for two hours to use a phone, that she had a new man in her bed. I knew who came from Indiana and who hailed from Alaska. I knew who liked video games and who read Dean Koontz novels. I knew which soldier had the biggest penis —measured by socket wrench, while the rest of us looked on—and who wanted to take a course in small engine repair when he got the hell out of Iraq. But one thing I almost never knew were the guys' first names. We all had our last names written on our uniforms, and our rank clearly marked, so we all went by our last names. Nobody knew me as Josh. Nobody called me Josh. I was Key to one and all of them, and I knew only their last names.

Because I grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and because I was five foot nine and weighed 215 pounds, I got called “fat boy” more times than I care to remember, and I had to listen to a whole lot of nonsense about how people from Oklahoma fucked hogs. My weight dropped fast in Iraq, however, and people stopped teasing me when they realized I was the quickest guy around when it came to using my hands. I can make just about any broken thing work. I may not fix it properly, but I'll fix it well enough to make it go again, and as a result they started calling me MacGyver again. Under orders, I jump-started Iraqi trucks, taxis, and cars. By making myself useful, I kept the bullshit off my back and I managed to get along with most soldiers.

Specialist Sykora got it into his head to ask Sayeed, our interpreter, about how to make sexual taunts in Arabic. He and a bunch of others learned to say something like
sofeeni deeaytcha,
which was supposed to mean “show me your tits,” and
sofeeni goose goose,
which apparently meant “show me your pussy.” On foot patrols he and a few others would shout the words at Iraqi women in the street. I never said those words, and I worried about the safety of the Iraqi women. Sometimes they were walking with their husbands. If their situation at home was anything like my mother's, I knew that their husbands would beat them just for having been taunted in this manner.

One day, while we were guarding the children's hospital in Ramadi, Jones—who also enjoyed taunting Iraqi women—stopped a woman doctor as she was entering the building. He made her remove her veil. I told Jones to leave her alone, but it was too late. She removed the veil and stared into Jones's face. In her eyes I could see liquid fury. Later that day, as she was leaving, she passed us again and said to Jones, “Actually, you asshole, I was born and raised in Boise, Idaho.” She went on to say that she had come to Iraq to help her people during the war. Jones was so embarrassed that he could not speak, and I was pleased for the woman from Idaho.

In the month of May, my platoon was ordered to go to the Ramadi police station to retrieve a truck full of rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. I was told that the truck contained one thousand rounds of live ammunition that had been taken from the Iraqis in battle. Escorted by our platoon, Iraqi police officers drove the truck full of ammunition to an isolated spot fifteen minutes outside the city, but we were ordered to wait for authorization before blowing up the truck. In a display of typical army inefficiency, we left the truck unguarded in the desert and returned to Ramadi. The next day, after receiving the detonation order, we returned to blow up the truck. But it was gone. I shook my head in disgust.
Great work,
I thought. We just gave a thousand rounds of ammunition right back to the enemy.

After about a month in Iraq, the 43rd CEC was transferred out of Ramadi. We moved to Fallujah for a two-week period. One day in early June, not long into our stay in the new city, my platoon mates and I were standing guard outside a public building. Local Iraqi officials met in this building and held talks there with our own military commanders.

While standing at the back of the compound, I felt the ground shaking under a good thirty seconds of heavy gunfire. The barrage came from the other side of the building, which was being guarded by members of the 82nd Airborne Division. I heard voices crackling on army radios.

“What happened?” my squad leader asked.

“Looks like somebody got trigger-happy,” someone else said on the radio.

It was clear that once one soldier had started shooting, everybody else had joined in. A few minutes later, I saw about a dozen body bags being carried away and was told that the victims were all Iraqi civilians. It was the first time I was aware of Iraqi civilians being killed by American soldiers. I heard no more about the incident. I was struck by the absence of discussion in the aftermath. I kept my mouth shut. Soldiers were not allowed to ask questions; to do so showed insubordination and invited punishment. In my presence, no soldiers or officers asked how or why the civilians had been killed, and no explanations were offered. I came to see that silence usually followed in the wake of a killing.

One of my jobs in Fallujah and elsewhere was to monitor cars at traffic control points. We stopped cars, searched them, and searched drivers. When we found people out driving after the nighttime curfew, we detained them and took their vehicles.

I hated it when people smiled at me at checkpoints. It made me want to punch them. What did they have to smile about? Did they know something I didn't know? Were they planning some sort of attack?

Early in my stay in Fallujah, while I was on checkpoint duty, one driver got out of his car and told me—in English—to go fuck myself. I felt an explosion of hatred and anger in that moment. I started beating the man. I was even tempted to shoot him. Something about all my pent-up anger and fear craved an explosion of violence in that very moment, but Lindsay—the sergeant first class who was overseeing our platoon at the time—grabbed me and pulled me back.

“Lay off him, Key” was all he said.

He didn't punish me or say anything more about it. I was angry at the time, but not many minutes passed before I felt thankful that I had been stopped from seriously harming or killing the man.

I backed away from beating people at checkpoints but saw that others continued to hand out beatings just as often as they felt the urge.

While we were still doing traffic control in the first week of June in Fallujah, I saw Sergeant Lindsay join up with Specialist Mason to beat the daylights out of a man. My mouth fell open. Even Lindsay was losing it now. I saw the beating but had no idea what had provoked it. Maybe the man had said the wrong thing, or had smiled the wrong way. One thing was clear: he hadn't attempted any sort of assault or attack. In my countless days at traffic control points, I never once saw an Iraqi civilian threaten or harm an American soldier. Lindsay and Mason kicked the man in the back and the head and kept on kicking once he fell down. They rubbed his face in the sand and then began spitting on him. I remember thinking that it was going way too far, but I knew I didn't have the rank to stop the attack. Finally, an Abrams tank belonging to another platoon stopped and a sergeant jumped out.

“What the hell are you doing?” the sergeant asked, telling Mason to get away from the man and to stand behind the tank.

Lindsay told the sergeant to mind his own business. “My troops will do whatever I tell them to do,” he said.

The tank sergeant did not outrank Lindsay, so he got back inside and drove on. Lindsay and Mason did not return to their beating, however. They let the man get up, climb into his car, and drive away. We never discussed the incident in our platoon. It was not that far out of the ordinary. Every day or two, I saw American troops beating the daylights out of Iraqi civilians. In our own platoon, all we had to do was look at our highest-ranking sergeant to see that it was okay to kick and punch Iraqis whenever we felt the urge. Fortunately, I no longer felt the urge. But I also knew that I was powerless to stop Sergeant Lindsay from punching an Iraqi civilian. If I had spoken directly to him about the beating, I would have been violating the chain of command. I wasn't even authorized to speak to a superior officer unless he addressed me first. If I saw something that concerned me in Lindsay's behavior, the only course of action—apart from keeping my mouth shut—would have been to speak to my team leader, who, if he felt like it, would have had to speak to his squad leader, who, in turn—if so inclined—would have had to go to Lindsay himself. For all that, I was sure, I would have been bawled out for leaving my post and likely docked some of my pay. The simplest thing to do was keep my mouth shut and stay out of trouble, so that is what I did.

The people of Fallujah were so accustomed to bullets flying that some of them walked about oblivious to the dangers. It was as if they felt their lives were so entirely in the hands of God that they believed it would be useless even to bother ducking for cover. One day, I was with my squad mates on our armored personnel carrier, chasing a truck. Somebody said that shots had been fired at us from the truck. As it drove and we gave chase over a bridge, my squad leader—Sergeant Padilla—sat on top of our APC, blasting away with his .50-caliber machine gun. Perched as usual on top of our vehicle, I could see an old man walking toward us. Bullets whistled past him, blasting chips out of concrete walls on the side of the bridge, but the old man kept walking calmly, as if in a dream. I thought it was a miracle that he was not hit, but he didn't even appear to be thinking about it.

Unfortunately, the violence meted out by American troops was not limited to kicking and punching. One day in our first week in Fallujah, my entire platoon—three squads, consisting of a total of about twenty men—was stationed at a traffic control point. Lieutenant Joyce was the highest-ranking officer with us that day. While the other two squads monitored approaching cars, I was busy with my squad mates searching vehicles and drivers. While I was looking under the hood of a car, checking for bombs and hidden weapons, the ground started to shake. I dropped to my knees but realized that it was fire from my own troops. The hail of gunfire came from M-16 rifles, M-249s, and .50-caliber machine guns. The fire was coming from the first and second squads of my platoon. Even a Bradley tank belonging to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (but not to my 43rd CEC) got into the act. The tank and the other squads were all firing at a white car with yellow stripes that had two people inside.

I noticed that the car had driven too close to the checkpoint, about ten feet past the line at which it was supposed to stop. As a result, it had been brought to a halt in the most murderous way. When the car stopped inching forward and the gunfire ceased, my squad mates and I ran to the vehicle. We found it riddled with bullet holes, each two inches or more in diameter. Inside the car, one man was dead. His head was attached to his neck by only a few threads of flesh, and blood was splattered all over him and the car. Nobody touched him. But then I saw a boy in the front seat. He looked like he was about ten years old. A medic pulled him out. One of the boy's arms was nearly severed, but he was alive. The boy was conscious, and he was looking at his father. With the help of the medic we put the boy in our APC, raced him to the Ramadi hospital, and dropped him off there. When we got back to the checkpoint, I spent ten minutes searching the vehicle and patting down the dead man. There were no weapons inside it. There was nothing unusual in the car, except all the blood that we had made run.