The Deserter's Tale (9 page)

About twenty minutes later, Lieutenant Joyce got off his army radio and told us all to pack up and leave. We left the car and the driver right where they were, in the middle of the busy road. I couldn't stop thinking about how we didn't even put the man in a body bag and take him to the hospital or to our compound, where his family would know to find him. When we got back to our compound I got off my armored personnel carrier, walked behind a building, and vomited. I saw Sykora throw up too, and I heard at least one other soldier in my squad vomiting at the same time. I had never before seen a man shot to death. As far as I could tell, he was killed simply because he hadn't known where to stop his car.

The next day, as I was stationed on top of our moving APC, I looked out at the spot where the man had been killed. He and his car were gone.

In Fallujah, we stayed in a compound of bungalows located outside the city. In my own mind I called it Dreamland; its artificial lake seemed utterly removed from our day-to-day activities at war in Iraq. In our free time, we tried to forget our troubles and the shooting we had seen by jumping off a sixty-foot bridge, straight into the water. Lewis didn't want to jump, so we just pushed him off the side of the bridge. Even Sykora, who could barely swim, was forced into the water, and I watched as he dog-paddled back to shore.

Just a few days after we had left the dead man in his bullet-ridden car, the violence began again.

After nightfall our platoon left Dreamland to drive across Fallujah to a traffic control point. I rode as usual on top of the APC, holding my M-249 rifle. One of my sergeants sat up on top with me, positioned to shoot from his turreted .50-caliber machine gun. Specialist Mason was driving. Two APCs belonging to the other squads were directly ahead of us and behind us traveled an Abrams tank.

As we approached an intersection, I saw a small white pickup truck driving in our direction. It looked like a Toyota or a Nissan. It made a quick left-hand turn, cutting in front of us. This split us off from the second APC, but I saw no sign of danger and there were about thirty yards to spare. Nonetheless, my sergeant let loose with his .50-caliber machine gun. Blasting away with bullets about six inches long, he shot the car and brought it to a halt. I saw a trail of gas leaking from the car. The sergeant shifted his gun, aimed at the trail of gas, and shot again. The line of gas caught fire and flew back toward the truck, and when it hit the gas tank the truck exploded in a ball of fire.

We kept on driving. I looked back at the explosion and the fire. I watched our Abrams tank roll right through it and keep following us. It looked like something straight out of
Rambo.
The boys in my squad let out some hollers of delight.

“Man, did you see that?” someone called out. “Did you see that tank run right over that thing?” another said.

I didn't see any reason for the sergeant to shoot up the truck. It had enough room to turn without causing an accident. I said nothing to the sergeant, but later that night I heard him tell Sergeant Lund, who was asking questions, “What if the truck was cutting us off?” From what I could see, the truck hadn't been shot because it posed a danger to us. It had been shot merely because it had annoyed my sergeant. The truck could have been stopped, or even confiscated. But it was quicker and less trouble all around simply to shoot until it exploded, and blow its driver and passengers—if there were any—to bits. Only six weeks had passed since my arrival in Iraq, but I could already see that, for American soldiers at war, it had become too easy to shoot and too easy to kill. We couldn't catch or see the real insurgents, let alone take a clear shot at them, so civilians would have to do.

In two short weeks in Fallujah, I had already heard gunfire from another division bring down twelve civilians, and I had witnessed my own platoon members killing at least two others. I had seen more blood and death than I cared for, and I felt that we were wrong to be dishing out such violence against civilians. Still, I thought that our military presence was justified in Iraq. I believed we were there to eradicate terrorism, but that the villains had simply not yet shown their faces. Sooner or later, I thought, we would catch them. In the meantime, my job was to follow orders: stand guard, raid houses, and stir shit. I did what I was told and kept my mouth shut.

4

Return to Ramadi

DURING MY FIRST TOUR OF DUTY IN RAMADI,
I had no way of knowing that it would be my quietest time in Iraq. Camped so close to the Euphrates River, my squad mates and I stripped down to our underwear one hot afternoon and jumped in the water. We felt carefree for a while and in no real danger, with our weapons set aside, so we shouted and laughed and dunked one another under the water until we saw some small objects floating past us. They were dull green and cube-shaped, each side about six inches long. Unexploded mines. I had learned all about them in military training. If any one of them had blown up, the Euphrates River would have become our instant grave. We swam to the shore, climbed out on the bank, got back in our gear, and never again jumped into the Euphrates.

About a month later, when we returned to the city after spending two weeks in Fallujah, Ramadi had changed for the worse. It was no longer a quiet place. It had become the war zone I had first anticipated when arriving in Iraq, with one exception—the enemy was never visible.

Almost every night I could hear the mortars being lobbed toward the former Iraqi military compound that my 43rd Combat Engineer Company had moved into for lodgings. The most frightening thing about being mortared was watching the flying bombs become a little more accurate each time. A mortar comes in different sizes, and some of them flying toward us were the size of a football, with little wings on them. I thought of them as long bombs, lobbed by Iraqi quarterbacks who walked just a little closer to us each time they let one go. Clearly, the Iraqi fighters had people stationed near us to indicate how close the mortars were coming to their targets—us. The second round would come a little closer, and the third round even closer, and this we described as the Iraqis “walking the mortars in on us.” Wherever they were—and we could never see them—they were moving their launchers a little closer.

Initially, the mortars were terrifying. Sometimes I could make out a faint whir as they sailed through the air. We called it a “splash” when the mortar exploded, and the kill zone had a radius of some thirty yards. The small, falling bombs kept us jittery and got on our nerves. None of them was big enough to blow up a building. But any one of them, if it landed close enough, could kill us in a second.

Eventually, I learned to sleep through at least some mortar attacks, but not everybody was so lucky. Sergeant Fadinetz, for example, a divorced, thickset man in his mid-thirties who had been in the military for years and had served overseas in South Korea, tried to talk a good game during the day. Sometimes he would lift up his chin and say, “Key, I never want to see you or any of the other sons of bitches in this company once we get out of this war and go home. Once I'm a civilian, as far as I'm concerned, you guys are history. Don't come looking for me, because I won't want to see you.” But Fadinetz wasn't as tough as he sounded. He rode with me on top of our armored personnel carrier, told me that he was from Rochester and hoped to go to college one day in Colorado, and I sensed that it took a certain effort for him not to complain about the madness of our assignments in Iraq. You get to know the guys you go to war with, and Fadinetz's fears would come out at night, when the mortars landed and he woke up screaming. I could only imagine the way the sounds of war must have twisted his dreams into nightmares, and I felt for the man as I watched him wake up in terror beside me. Honestly, I didn't know what was worse for him: the nightmares or waking to the sounds of explosions just a little more than a kill zone away.

For many of us in the platoon, adrenaline jolted through our systems like an electric shock and woke us completely—even if we had been sound asleep and had had only an hour of shut-eye in the past day.

It was a strange way to fight a war. We never saw the people who shot at us, never spotted the mortar launchers, and never located the people who used rockets to propel grenades at us. Because our enemy remained invisible, our fears and frustrations mounted, but we could always take those frustrations out on the civilians.

The duty that frightened me the most, in Iraq, was going out with my platoon on foot patrols. We frequently patrolled the streets of Ramadi, trying to engage the enemy, hoping to lure somebody into a firefight. Fortunately for us, the most common thing that happened on our foot patrols was also the worst: once in a while, a man or a child would throw a rock at us. Still, I felt completely vulnerable in those moments. In the thick crowds of people, sometimes I would catch sight of a grenade riding on the tip of a weapon perched on an Iraqi's shoulder. At any moment, I feared, someone would lob a grenade at us or take a clean shot from a rooftop while we were making our way through the crowded markets. Now that we were back for our second tour of duty in the city, few people were smiling at us, and a number made no effort to mask their hatred of us. One day, when a butcher in the market caught me looking at him, he raised his knife and held the sharp edge close to his own throat as I walked by. I swept the rooftops with my eyes, keeping my weapon ready in case I pinpointed a sniper.

Our foot patrols often went on for hours and took place in sweltering heat. Some days in July, I would estimate that the temperature exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The breeze provided no relief at all; it felt like a gust from a blow-dryer smacking me in the face. Between the uniform, backpack, and M-249, I carried one hundred extra pounds with each step; I would finish the patrols soaked in sweat. Some of the men struggled gravely in the heat. Specialist Sykora became so dehydrated during one long foot patrol that he began to rock back and forth on his heels, like a boxer caught on the chin, and then he crumpled to the ground. We surrounded him to keep him safe and radioed for backup. A Humvee rolled up within minutes. We carried him out to it. He recovered quickly after a medic hooked him up to an intravenous unit.

One day, my platoon mates and I were walking single file through a crowded Ramadi market. Thousands of people were milling about, and I could not stop thinking about the warnings I had been issued by my superiors: the Iraqis were Muslims, and Muslims were terrorists, and I was therefore at risk of attack at any moment. The fruit and the meat stalls were close on either side, and with all of the marketgoers it was hard to stay in contact with the soldier walking in front of me. Suddenly, an Iraqi man cut in front of me, separating me from the soldier ahead of me in our single file. I feared he would try to plunge a knife into me, so I slugged him in the face, pushed by as he stumbled, and ran forward to join my comrades.

It was always with relief that I made it back to the compound at the end of the day. During our second tour of duty in Ramadi, we no longer camped in Saddam Hussein's bombed-out palace. This time, my entire 43rd Combat Engineer Company took over a former Iraqi military compound consisting of several one-story buildings. The compound was located close to the Euphrates River, in central Ramadi. Like most buildings we occupied in Iraqi, it had been bombed earlier by our own forces.

When we moved into the compound, we discovered an Iraqi family of thirteen people—a man with three wives and nine children—inhabiting the facility. I assumed that their own home had been destroyed by American bombs. They had been squatting in there with their clothes, pots and pans, blankets, and all their other possessions. The husband reacted wildly when we commandeered his home. Clearly, he was about to lose the little security that his family had. He shouted at Sayeed, our interpreter, who relayed the message to Captain Conde, who led our company. At the time, I happened to be standing about ten feet away with my squad leader, Sergeant Padilla. So I was close enough to hear Conde laugh and tell the man, “You've got two hours to get out of here.” The man had no choice but to pack up his things and leave with his family.

On other occasions, distraught Iraqis came to us at the compound. While I stood guard, a man entered with his wife and daughter and complained that his daughter had just been raped. I was not able to tell if they were complaining that Americans or Iraqis had committed the crime. I radioed my commander for instructions and was told to send the man off because we couldn't get involved in people's domestic affairs. Another time, a man complained that one of our illumination rounds had crashed into his home and burned his bed. I thought my superiors would send him packing but he was given a small amount of American cash—about $50—and I heard talk among my platoon mates that some officers had a small fund to soothe Iraqis with minor grievances.

As we resumed our regular duties in Ramadipatrolling streets, checking traffic, guarding buildings, and raiding homes—we began to receive nightly reports from our commanders. When my six squad mates were gathered together at night, our leader—Padilla—would usually read us official army notices. They often contained news items about American soldiers who had been recently killed in Iraq. The notices were like haunting bedtime stories that made all of us more nervous as mortars fell and rocket-propelled grenades exploded closer and closer to us. Just two months earlier, President Bush had flown to the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln,
off the coast of San Diego, to give his “mission accomplished” speech. In Iraq, we had heard about the president's speech. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” the president said. As I listened to the sound of gunfire and explosions, I wished it were true.

Not long into our second tour of duty in Ramadi, I was working at a traffic control point, pulling over vehicles. The standard practice was to order everybody out of the car and to have the driver open the hood and the trunk. A black, four-door Mercedes-Benz pulled up carrying a driver and three male adult passengers. Glancing inside the car, I spotted four grenades tucked between the two front seats.

The driver was a young man, and he didn't say or do anything to provoke me. However, the mere presence of those grenades set me off. I hauled him from the car and began kicking and punching him. An older man in the car began screaming at me in Arabic. I could not understand a word he said, and he would not shut up, so I beat him badly too. By the time I finished with them, both men were bleeding profusely. With the help of my squad mates, I zipcuffed the men, threw one of them in the trunk, and stuffed the other three in the backseat.

Sergeant Fadinetz got into the passenger seat, I jumped into the front, and we drove ten minutes through Ramadi to the police station, where we turned over the men for arrest. I have no idea what became of them, but I do know what happened to their car: I stole it for the use of my squad. We had no keys, so I hot-wired it and attached a switch to make it easy for my squad mates to start. We kept the Mercedes and used it on our house raids, preferring to arrive in an unmarked vehicle to disguise our approach.

When I beat up the two men, I justified it to myself on the grounds that they had grenades in the car. But the truth was that, strange as it may seem to someone outside the war, grenades were everyday items in Iraq, just like the rifles we routinely left behind on our house raids. Although we always confiscated grenades, I had no good reason to attack the men. My own moral judgment was disintegrating under the pressure of being a soldier, feeling vulnerable, and having no clear enemy to kill in Iraq. We were encouraged to beat up on the enemy; given the absence of any clearly understood enemy, we picked our fights with civilians who were powerless to resist. We knew that we would not have to account for our actions. Because we were fearful, sleep-deprived, and jacked up on caffeine, adrenaline, and testosterone, and because our officers constantly reminded us that all Iraqis were our enemies, civilians included, it was tempting to steal, no big deal to punch, and easy to kill. We were Americans in Iraq and we could do anything we wanted to do.

At this time, I was stealing money, knives, and sunglasses from cars and houses. Once I found 1.5 million dinars in an Iraqi truck that I had been assigned to drive to a hospital, and I took that money too. I was not sure how much it was worth, but I imagined about $500. It paid for my cigarettes and Coca-Cola for a while. But one day at a traffic checkpoint, when a man with a large family complained about having no job and no other relatives who could help, I tossed the rest of the money in his backseat and sent him on his way.

Another time, I made a man at a traffic control point remove his artificial leg. Inside it, I found $10,000 in American hundred-dollar bills. I know it was $10,000 because I counted every bill. If my superiors had not been present, I would have considered stuffing it in my pockets and sending it home. But I was flanked by my superior, Sergeant Gurillo, and I gave the money to him when I finished counting it. He handed it to his superior, Captain Bower. I have no idea what happened to the money, but the man with the false leg was carrying on angrily in Arabic and I doubt that he ever got it back.

I am not proud of the things I did in Iraq. However, I will say that before my company left Ramadi, near the end of July, I stopped beating civilians and stopped stealing from them, and I did it no more for the rest of my time in the country. As my conscience began to catch up with me, I witnessed American soldiers and officers losing control of themselves more and more often.

Not long after I beat up the men with the grenades, I found myself yet again at a traffic control point. This time it was late in the evening and we had decided to stop all vehicles that were out past our nighttime curfew of ten p.m. For an hour or two, we stopped about forty taxis and forced the drivers to get out of their vehicles. To their distress, we told them that we were detaining them for breaking the curfew. While some laughed defiantly and others swore, we assembled all the drivers and herded them in small groups into the back of a five-ton truck. A couple of my platoon mates then drove them down to the Ramadi police station, where they were arrested. My superiors instructed me to remain behind and hot-wire the taxis so that the rest of my platoon mates could race them to the police station. A captain of our 43rd Combat Engineer Company (I can't recall for sure which captain it was, as two different captains served during different parts of the month of July) jumped in a taxi and raced with us. For an hour or two that night, my platoon mates had the time of their lives. They bumped and banged the vehicles on their way through the city, but nobody cared. Nobody, that is, in a position to do something about it. I got into the last taxi and took my turn, cranking it up to over sixty miles an hour as I raced through the streets of Ramadi.