Excerpts from Joshua Key, The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007)
[pp. 36-39]
For folks like us who were poor and getting poorer by the day, the posters suggested that getting a job with the armed forces would be like winning the lottery. The difference, of course, was that almost nobody wins the lottery. But just about anybody can get into the armed forces – unless he or she is as poor as I was. It had been humiliating to be booted out of the marine recruiting center, two years earlier, because of my debts and growing family. This time, I would have to be honest about my situation, but I sure hoped they would take me.
When I walked in I saw recruiters behind six desks. I walked up to a staff sergeant whose name was something along the lines of Van Houten. . . .
Van Houten had a stack of papers on his desk and a pen in his hand.
“All right with you if I ask a few questions?” he said.
“Sure.” . . .
Van Houten began with the basics. What was my full name? Where did I live? Where and when was I born? What were the names of my father and mother, and where and when were they born? What was my education? Was I married? How many kids did I have?
I told him everything, but Van Houten slowed down a bit when we got to my family situation.
“What is your wife’s name?”
“Brandi Key.”
“Maiden name?”
“Johnson.”
“And your kids?”
I told him about Zackary and Adam and said we had a third child on the way.
He raised one finger, stopped me right there, and spoke in a low, confidential tone.
“All right, not another word about your wife being pregnant, is that understood? We leave that part out. You can’t enlist if you’ve got three children, but if everything else checks out I can get you in if we leave that part out.” . . .
Van Houten told me to keep one or two other details to myself as well. He would not take down information about the two herniated disks from an early back injury, because he said that could complicate my entry into military life. He didn’t want me to say anything about the time I had been arrested for assaulting a police officer. When I began to raise the matter of my debts, which had made it impossible for me to join the marines, he stopped me once more. “I won’t ask and don’t you tell,” he said.
[pp.44-45]
Finally, in mid-April 2002 – just a month shy of my twenty-fourth birthday – I learned from Van Houten that the army had cleared all of my medical tests and paperwork. I was fit to join the United States Army, he said, and I would do my country proud. He explained that I would receive $1,200 a month in salary and commit to a three-year contract. He did not tell me what I would learn only later – that the army could recall me anytime it wanted up to seven years after I signed up. . . .
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.
[pp. 47-50]
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. . . .
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.
On 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 not 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.”
[p. 50]
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.
[p. 57]
I believed the reasons that President George W. Bush gave for beginning the Iraq War on March 20, 2003. I had faith in my country and accepted what I was told: Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States. I accepted the argument that is was time to overthrow Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. I wasn’t eager to fight, but I would follow my commanders. As I’ve stated, I thought it was better for me to help stomp out terrorism and defend America than to leave the job to my own children.
[pp. 213-214]
If you have beaten or killed an innocent person, and if there remains a shred of conscience in your heart, you will not likely avoid anguish by saying you were only following orders. We each have to find what we believe to be the right way to live. When we prosecute an unjust war, or commit immoral acts in any war at all, the first victims are the people who were unfortunate enough to fall into our hands. The second victims are ourselves. We damage ourselves each time we violate our own true beliefs, and the wrongs we commit weigh on our shoulders to the grave.
I cannot say exactly what would have happened if I had refused to blow apart the homes of Iraqis; if I had refused to send every male over five feet in height to American detention centers. I imagine that I would have been humiliated and punished by my superiors. I may have been beaten. Perhaps they would have sent me home to prison or disgrace. . . .
I am ashamed of what I did in Iraq, and of all the ways that innocent civilians suffered or died at our hands. The fact that I was only following orders does not lessen my discomfort or ease my nightmares. After I came across the four decapitated bodies by the side of the road in Ramadi, and saw soldiers in my own army kicking the heads for their own amusement, I began to dream of the incident and of the rolling heads. Though I had arrived after the murder, the very fact that I saw the results and was part of the machine that committed the act weighed on my soul and weighs on it still.
[p. 210]
There are certain things that I avoid these days, such as alcohol and crowds, because I fear they will trigger more of my own blackouts. I know that thousands of American soldiers have abused drugs or committed suicide after returning home from war. It would be easy to follow in the steps of many in my own family and drown my shame and my sorrows in alcohol. Alcohol, however, could lead to the very problem of suicidal depression that has plagued vets for generations. I won’t go down that road. I have a wife and four children who need me, and they are the single greatest reason why I want to stay alive and to lead a good life. As for the big city, well, I remain an Oklahoma boy at heart, and I like wide-open spaces, so I have fled Toronto and settled in the Canadian prairies.
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