The Deserter's Tale (10 page)

We found various other ways to amuse ourselves during quiet moments at the compound. Once again, I earned a few brownie points by hooking up air-conditioning units to the Iraqi power lines. We were supposed to sleep on cots on the main floor, but even with the air conditioners only a small part of the compound was cool enough to sleep in. I often went up to the roof to try to catch some of the evening breeze. Using cinder blocks and an iron bar, I also started weight lifting. Other times, we would hook up portable DVD players to our APC, huddle close together, and watch bootleg movies from our stash, such as
The Hulk
and
House of 1,000 Corpses.

In my downtime, I chain-smoked, swapped cigarettes with my buddy Private Ricky Connor—a twentythree-year-old single man from Amarillo, Texas—and teased him mercilessly about how the Oklahoma University Sooners football team spanked his Texas Longhorns team 73-21 while we were at war. We were not allowed to have satellite telephones but some platoon mates kept them anyway, and one of them was able to tell us football scores twenty-four hours after the games had ended. Connor was a patriotic American who believed and seemed to keep on believing that America was doing the right thing in Iraq. Despite my own doubts about the big picture, I liked hanging out with him to talk about Oklahoma and Texas.

We needed our relaxing moments to hang on to our sanity in an increasingly punishing environment. We rarely slept for more than two hours at a time, and frequently we stood guard and conducted other duties for more than twenty-four hours consecutively. At least once a week, officers told us that we were in grave danger of attack. In Fallujah, for example, the soldiers in my company were made to wait in armored vehicles outside a walled compound of old, bombed-out Iraqi military buildings. We were told that ten thousand Iranian supporters of Saddam Hussein had congregated inside the compound. They were planning to riot, we were told, and we had to be ready for battle. It seemed like a ridiculous story, but I had no choice but to join my fellow soldiers in surrounding the building. We stood outside it for hours while aircraft screamed overhead, Apache helicopters hovered, and Abrams tanks rolled into position. Finally, after hours of waiting and repeated warnings that we were in danger of a riot, the doors were opened. About one hundred unarmed women were let out. There had been no rioters, no weapons, no Hussein sympathizers who had appeared miraculously from Iran, and no threat to our safety.

I believe that the repeated warnings of danger were meant to keep us off guard, and to keep us frightened enough to do exactly what we were told. But what I witnessed was that after a month or two in Iraq, the other soldiers and I could not help but take the warnings less and less seriously, as if they were coming from the boy who cried wolf.

Still, some Iraqis were certainly trying to kill us. We couldn't see them but they were there. A man named Sergeant Taylor, who worked with another platoon in my company, was driving across Ramadi in a Humvee when a bomb blew up under the vehicle. My squad mates and I had been guarding a bank at the time, and we were ordered to race across Ramadi in our APC to help out. We found Sergeant Taylor—who was overdue to return home to the States—with an eye hanging out of his face and shrapnel wounds across his body. He was evacuated for medical care, and as far as I know he lived. The next night, we were told to raid houses in the neighborhood in retaliation for the attack on the Humvee. One of my sergeants said, “Tonight it's retaliation time against the city of Ramadi.”

We carried on with our house raids, ransacking houses and detaining every man we could find.

A short time later Sergeant Padilla woke me up at about one a.m. to tell me to climb out of my sleeping bag and get ready for action. Our platoon was designated a Quick Reaction Force, and our orders were to rush to help out American soldiers from the 124th Infantry Division who were said to be caught in a firefight with hundreds of Iraqis. I did not believe the story. I had yet to see one Iraqi militant rioting and shooting, so it seemed unlikely to me that I would now find hundreds doing so.

My six squad mates and I jumped in our APC, and I took my usual position on the top left of the vehicle, training my machine gun on rooftops as we drove in formation with the other two APCs in our platoon.

I rode up top with Fadinetz and Padilla. Down below, Mason drove the APC while Jones, Sykora, and Lewis sat inside with him. Sergeant Jones shouted that we were on our way to face hundreds of rioting Iraqis in an alley. Fadinetz and I shared a private laugh over this, because we both felt it was highly unlikely. We rode slowly for about ten minutes. We made two turns in our APC and, while traveling at just a few miles an hour, moved toward the banks of the Euphrates River along a small road that we called “the red route.” I could make out the sounds of a firefight.

It was about two a.m., but I could see very well because there were streetlights on our road and because of the American illumination rounds that kept the sky lit up all night.

Suddenly, I looked over to my left and saw the bodies of four decapitated Iraqis in their bloodied white robes, lying a few feet from a bullet-ridden pickup truck to the side of the road. Because I sat on the top left of the vehicle, and because the bodies were on the left-hand side of the road, I had them in clear view. I assumed that someone had used a massive amount of gunfire to behead them.

“Shit,” I said.

A few seconds later, our slow-moving APC came to a stop. Among the three APCs in our convoy, I was the only soldier immediately ordered down to the ground. As I slid down into the APC and then out the hatch, Sergeant Jones told me to look for brass casings, which would be signs that Iraqi fighters with AK-47s had been shooting at American soldiers in the area.

I saw no sign of brass casings, but I did see an American soldier shouting at the top of his lungs while two other soldiers stood quietly next to him.

“We fucking lost it, we just flicking lost it,” the soldier was shouting. He was in a state of complete distress, but the soldiers next to him were not reacting. The distressed soldier stood about twenty yards from me, and another forty or so yards from the four decapitated bodies.

Two other soldiers were laughing and kicking the heads of the decapitated Iraqis. It was clearly a moment of amusement for them. This was their twisted game of soccer.

I froze at the sight of it, and for a moment could not believe my eyes. But I saw what I saw, and was so revolted and horrified that I defied Sergeant Jones's orders and climbed right back into the APC.

“I'm not having anything to do with that,” I said. I wondered who the soldiers could possibly be, what their rank was, and who their commanding officer was, but I had not been able to see any of the details in the brief time I was on the ground.

Jones looked at me like I was crazy for defying him, but I was not sure if he had seen what I had seen. I doubted it, because he was stuck down inside the APC and it was facing in the opposite direction of the heads that the soldiers had been kicking.

On the radio, Lieutenant Joyce—who was in one of the other APCs—asked Sergeant Padilla why I had gotten back in my vehicle, but I was too shocked to offer an answer. I just climbed back to my spot on top of the APC and—like my fellow soldiers—faced in the opposite direction of the bodies and the heads. We were still supposedly protecting the American soldiers on the ground from attack. We remained in that one spot for another thirty or forty minutes, holding our position, facing down an alley, preparing for the promised onslaught of rioting Iraqis. They never came. As far as I could see, the only armed men in the area were American soldiers from the 124th Infantry Division and from my own 43rd Combat Engineer Company. Finally, we spun around 180 degrees to return to the compound. As we began to roll I could see the four decapitated bodies again as well as the shot-up truck, but I could no longer see the heads.

Our APC moved slowly forward, then suddenly swerved so sharply that I nearly lost my balance. I had no idea why Mason, who was driving, had made us swerve like that.

Later, I asked Sykora if he had seen what I had seen. He said nothing at all but just looked through me with the thousand-mile stare, a sort of trance that made him appear to be looking off into space.

The compound, when we returned to it, seemed even less safe to me than it had before. Like most of the other military buildings and palaces, it had been bombed before we'd gotten there. I couldn't sleep in it or walk through it without having bits of concrete and dust fall on my head. I stood guard duty for a few hours, and as I was finishing I went to our urinals to relieve myself. There, I found myself standing beside Mason, our APC driver, who was about to begin guard duty.

“Hey, man, you nearly made me fall off the APC,” I said. “Why the hell did you swerve like that?”

“I was trying to run over one of the heads,” he said. “You've gone right fucking nuts,” I told him.

Mason gave me a furious look, and our conversation went no further.

I was revolted that Mason had tried to join in on the mutilation of the heads. The killing of the four Iraqis, the games American soldiers played with their heads, the silence of my own military commanders when we came upon the scene, and Mason's attempt to join in on the act all combined to snap the last threads of belief I had in my country and what it was doing at war. I had always seen my fellow Americans as upholders of justice in the world, but now I had come face to face with the indecency of our actions in Iraq.

Later that morning, I asked Sergeant Skillings about the soldiers who had been out with us at the Euphrates, and he confirmed that they belonged to the Florida National Guard, part of the 124th Infantry Division. I hoped that someone would write a report about the events of the night, and I naively asked Sergeant Padilla if I could see it. He told me that it was none of my damn business and that I should leave it alone. I had expected such an answer but had not been able to prevent myself from asking the question in the first place. It was too horrendous an act to be left unreported, yet Padilla's response led me to suspect that my commanding officers would not write a single word about the incident.

I didn't raise the matter again, but the event changed the way I thought about my army in this war.

I didn't know much about the Geneva Conventions, but I knew one thing: what I had witnessed was wrong. We were soldiers of the U.S. Army. In Iraq, we were supposed to be stomping out terrorism, bringing democracy, and acting as a force for good in the world. Instead we had become monsters in a residential neighborhood. Civilians in houses just fifty yards away could easily have been watching as soldiers in the American army had not only shot dead four civilians but used an outrageous amount of gunfire to cut off their heads. I didn't have to be a lawyer to know that armies at war were not supposed to rape, plunder, loot, or pillage. They were not supposed to harm civilians or mutilate the bodies of the dead. I was so troubled that I could not speak about the incident.

My grandparents were far from perfect people, but I had learned one or two fundamental lessons growing up on their farm. It was wrong to attack defenseless people. And if you did get into a fight, it would be utterly despicable to start kicking your opponent once he was down. When I was back home in Oklahoma, if somebody had described the situation of the decapitated corpses, I would have had a hard time believing it. I would not have wanted to accept that American soldiers would behave in this way overseas. But I was no longer in Oklahoma and I could not deny what I had seen.

For the rest of my time in Iraq I was not able to forget the scene of the decapitated bodies and the heads being kicked by American soldiers. Sometimes, in my dreams, disembodied heads plagued me with accusations. They told me what I was slowly realizing: that the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of the machine.

5

The Girl at the Hospital

SPECIALIST SYKORA WAS HOOKED ON DEAN KOONTZ NOVELS
,
“007” and “Splinter Cell” on his Game Boy, and World Wrestling Federation matches. He was originally from Chicago, but his wife and children lived in Ohio. He said his wife would not let him get out of the military because they needed the salary and the health insurance benefits. He hoped to change his life one day and learn how to repair small engines, but he had been stalled in the military for many years and was already thirty-six. In the army world, I wondered if he had become a lifer.

Not long after the four Iraqi civilians were shot and beheaded, Sykora and I decided to get drunk. Even though there were strict rules against drinking while we were at war, we took a chance anyway, trying to drown our anxieties in beer and a bottle of Jordanian whiskey.

We were in shock over the deaths but we were also worked up over Captain Bower, who had recently taken over command of our company. Bower was tall and thin and wore glasses. He had a direct and forceful personality, and I didn't like him. Bower knew that his soldiers had been complaining about the day-to-day dangers, so he addressed the matter head-on in a meeting of our platoon. He poked me in the chest and at the same time began lecturing Sergeant Fadinetz. “You know what, Sergeant?” he said. “Your dangers don't matter to me. If one hundred of you walk out that door, as long as seventy-five percent of you walk back inside I'm a happy man because it's an acceptable fatality rate.”

Sykora and I got the message then and there that we were little more than numbers in the eyes of our superiors. We felt that it didn't really matter to our commanders whether we lived or died. Feeling that we were expendable commodities gave Sykora and me all the more to complain about as we sought shelter in an isolated part of the compound—one that nobody was supposed to enter because our own air force had bombed it so thoroughly that nobody knew when the entire structure would fall in—and downed our beer and whiskey.

Food was another source of distraction to us. Two black men in my company refused to eat the military rations and instead used their pocket money to buy lamb sandwiches daily at $2 a pop. I liked those sandwiches too and ate a few of them, smothered in Tabasco and ketchup. They came straight from an Iraqi vendor who cooked large legs of lamb on a rotisserie by the side of the road.

Even as we broke into their houses, patrolled their streets, and stopped their cars, Iraqi vendors kept coming at us. They sold clothing, pipes, and cigarettes. They sold kebabs, Coke, and ice. They sold porn videos. They sold bootleg movies shot with handheld cameras inside movie theaters. Our food was so bad and we were so bored that we kept those vendors in business. I spent about $50 a month on food, drinks, and souvenirs from street vendors. Some of the guys in my platoon spent more.

One man in my company—a bone-thin nineteen-year-old named Private Lewis—had a mom back in Illinois who made the best damn beef jerky in the world. Hot and spicy, it lit a fire at the back of my throat. Whenever Lewis received a care package from home, I got a big wad of beef jerky and stretched it out as long as I could.

However, for most of us, there was no getting around our staple food, the military rations called Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs for short. We were supposed to eat three of them a day. Most soldiers agreed that the MREs were among the grossest foods known to man. In its almost indestructible package, the dried food was said to last up to ten years. For a soldier at war, the food was mostly about convenience: an MRE actually heats itself up. You stick a package inside a package, add a bit of water, and the stuff starts bubbling and boiling on its own. You have a hot meal in a minute or two—but that didn't mean we thought they were edible. I made up my own nicknames:
Beef Screw
(beef stew),
Please Relieve Me
(cheese tortellini),
Stork Piss
(pork rib), and
Gun Powder
(clam chowder). I could stomach just one of the MREs, and I let my squad mates know that no man's life was safe if he took it. The beef enchilada was mine and mine only. When I drowned it in Tabasco sauce, the enchilada reminded me vaguely of Mexican food in Oklahoma. Apart from bringing back the taste of home, the beef enchilada had one other advantage: it wasn't ruined by the presence of vegetables. I'm not your vegetable sort of guy. As far as I'm concerned, vegetables are what food eats.

When my squad mates and I traveled in our armored personnel carrier to do guard duty at the Ramadi children's hospital, we took our MREs along with us. Because our duties usually lasted for twenty-four hours, we kept a stash of MREs in the APC parked outside the hospital. While changing posts at the hospital every four or so hours, I was free to grab an MRE and a bottle of water.

Guard duty at the hospital was mentally draining. There was always the threat of danger, so we were required to have our weapons locked and ready to fire. However, nothing ever seemed to happen, which made the days go by slowly. When the sun beat down on us it was hard to find an inch of shade.

Sometimes, while standing guard on the roof, I would chat with a middle-aged doctor named Muhammad who came outside on his breaks to smoke cigarettes and look out over the city. He spoke English well, asked about my family, and told me that he had seventeen children. One day, while he fiddled with the stethoscope around his neck, he said that two of his sons had been hanged in Ramadi by Saddam Hussein's men. He didn't care for Saddam Hussein, he said, but he didn't like having Americans in the city either.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

I told him a little about life in Oklahoma. Like many Iraqis, he seemed stunned to be told that I had grown up poor. But he was heartened to hear that I had a wife and three sons.

“So when do you think the U.S. troops will pull out?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, “but I've got a feeling we're going to be here for a long, long time.”

He grimaced.

“I've got to tell you,” I added, “I'm looking forward to getting out of here just as much as you would like to see me gone.”

He laughed at that. I asked what he had been doing before the war began, and he mentioned that he had taught medicine at universities in Ramadi and Baghdad. I had heard talk about how difficult it was for Iraqi hospitals to get medical supplies after the first Gulf War and was going to ask him about that, but an angry voice crackled on my walkie-talkie. It was one of my superiors.

“Key! Get away from that man and stop fraternizing with the enemy.”

Muhammad returned to the roof at other times, however, which gave us more opportunities to chat. He liked his cigarettes, and we had that in common.

“What do you do in Oklahoma?”

“Whatever jobs I can find,” I said. “Painting, delivering pizza, but welding is what I really want to do.” “My country could use a few welders,” he said. “Over here, this is just a job for me, and it's not making any sense to me either,” I said.

“A job?” he repeated with a puzzled look. “You're different from most of the Americans here.”

The next time we met outside the hospital, Muhammad gave me a small edition of the Qur'an. It was in Arabic, but I was touched by the gift. Before any of my superiors could notice, I slid the book quickly into my trouser pocket.

“I hope this will help you,” he said, “and that you will return home safely to the ones who love you.”

I thought of Muhammad, and of how difficult his job must be, each time I walked through the hospital corridors and upstairs to the roof. The trips were depressing. I shuddered at the thought of needing treatment in such a filthy place. Needles were scattered all over the floors and by toilets, and I spotted blood and fetuses. I imagined that the tiny, half-formed bodies had come from miscarriages, and I stopped to think about how hard the war had to be on the women of Iraq. Given that the hospital lacked the equipment to properly dispose of needles and fetuses, it gave me the shivers to imagine the conditions in which the living were treated. I wondered to what degree our occupation of the country had caused all these problems in the hospital, and admired Muhammad and the other doctors and nurses for trying to save the lives of diseased and injured children.

Standing guard for twenty-four hours in a row probably killed more brain cells than alcohol. It was mind-numbing. I smoked cigarettes, chewed Copenhagen dip, knocked back shots of Tabasco sauce, bought Coca-Cola from street vendors, wondered how Brandi and our boys were doing on the base in Colorado and whether the arm Adam had broken just before I flew to Iraq had healed, and I welcomed any distractions to stay awake. One such distraction that I learned to anticipate and enjoy came in the form of daily visits from a young Iraqi girl who lived with her family in a house across the street from the hospital.

I wish I knew the girl's name, but she spoke almost no English and I knew no Arabic. She was about seven years old. She had dark eyes, shoulder-length brown hair, and—even for a young child—seemed impossibly skinny. She usually wore her school uniform—a white shirt with a blue skirt and a pair of sandals. Every time I was stationed outside the hospital, the girl would run up to the fence that ran between us and call out the only English words she knew: “Mister, food.” Over and over she would say that, and I can still recall her high-pitched, breathless enthusiasm. She seemed fearless, full of energy, and not the least bit frightened by my M-249. She acted as if she didn't even know that she lived in a war zone, and she ran to the fence the same way my own children might have approached a sandbox, piping out, “Mister, food.”

During my first tour of duty in Ramadi in May, and in my second time there in late June and July, I stood guard at that hospital on at least thirty occasions. She ran up to the fence every single time I was posted on duty there. I sat just inches away, on a big rock, but I would stand to greet her when she came up to me. I wondered who had taught her to say these two English words. Perhaps it was her mother, who often stood at the door of their ramshackle house, waiting for the girl to bring food for the family.

The first time she ran up to me I tried to ignore her. We were under orders not to speak to Iraqi civilians at all, unless authorized to do so by one of our officers. I knew that it would be better for me to have nothing to do with her, and it didn't seem like a good thing for a seven-year-old child to be anywhere near American soldiers standing with assault rifles locked and ready at all times.

“Mister! Food!”

“Go away,” I said.

“Mister, food.”

I waved my hand to tell her to go away because she clearly wasn't getting my words.

She kept at me, and I started mumbling at her. “Come on, little sister, you've really got to get out of here.”

She stood motionless, kept smiling, and would not leave. Finally, I reached over the four-foot-high, chain-link fence and handed her my MRE. It was a beef enchilada with Tabasco sauce, a packet of cheese, a few crackers, two pieces of gum, a bag of Skittles, a pouch of powder to make an orange drink, and a pack of matches. The whole thing came in a thick, tightly sealed plastic bag about a foot long, six inches deep, and three inches wide. It weighed less than a pound. She took it, turned, and ran with it back to her house. I don't know how her family got into that thing. The instructions in small print on the bag were only in English. I don't know if her family members figured out that you had to break open one pouch, pour in water, and let it boil for a minute or so before you ate it. I had no idea what a poor Iraqi family would make of food that was made to feed men on the moon. Perhaps it would be so bad that she would never come back.

But three days later, when I returned for another day of guard duty at the hospital, there she was, racing out of her house, across the small street, and up to the fence where I stood.

“Mister! Food.”

Her face and her feet were dirty. It occurred to me that it must be extremely hard to keep a child clean in a country with a destroyed infrastructure and a ruptured water supply.

I tried once more to wave her off, but she would have nothing of it. She stood her ground until I tossed her an MRE. This time, I had a different flavor stashed in my pants cargo pocket. Country Captain Chicken, along with a package of peanut butter, a container of grape jam, a slice of bread in vacuum-sealed plastic, a piece of poppy seed lemon cake, peppermint gum, and the drink powder. I handed it over. She smiled, took it, and ran off with it. When she got to her front door, though, I saw her mother slap her and send her right back out to me.

“Mister. More food.” Ah. A third word. She resisted my warnings to get clear of danger and stayed until I managed to fetch another MRE. I radioed one of my buddies in the squad to get an MRE from the APC and bring it to me. This time it was beef teriyaki.

She did not get slapped again when she returned with the second package, and I wondered if her family had ever seen peanut butter and jam, or what they thought of Country Captain Chicken. It struck me that they had a pretty dismal picture of American life: M-249s and the world's fastest yet least edible food.

As my guarding duties at the hospital continued, I began to carry a small stash of MREs with me so that I could give her two at a time.

The girl always ran home with them. She never walked. It seemed like running was the only speed she knew. It didn't matter if it was 125 degrees in the afternoon sun. When the girl moved, she ran. It made me happy to see her flying across the street on those light brown legs.

I wondered what sort of life she would have when the war ended. Would she continue in school? Would she end up becoming a doctor or a teacher?

Her visits were the best part of my days at the hospital, and she was the only person in Iraq—officer, civilian, or fellow soldier—whose smile I enjoyed. From my earliest childhood, I have distrusted the smiles of adults because I always wonder what they know that I don't. The smile of this child in Ramadi brought me to thoughts of my own wife and children. I wished that Brandi could see this girl and discover what I was coming to know: it was not true that all Muslims were terrorists, children included. The truth was that this little girl was the same as any child growing up in Oklahoma, Colorado, or any other part of the world: all she needed was a little food, a little schooling, a clean supply of water, and some loving adults to take care of her. She was no terrorist. She was nothing but a child, and everything about her—waving arms, uncombed hair, and torn sandals—reminded me that she and her family had the same needs as I did. All they wanted was food, water, shelter, safety, school, and work—who didn't?