The Deserter's Tale (13 page)

I stood guard for many reasons during my months in Iraq. I guarded our own compounds. I guarded a green zone in the two weeks I spent there. I guarded a bank and a hospital and the perimeter of all the houses we raided. But the worst kind of guarding I was called upon to do, in Ramadi, Fallujah, al-Habbaniyah, and elsewhere, was to stand near the bodies of the Iraqi dead and watch as relatives came to claim them.

After the girl was killed in the aftermath of the raid on the home of the mentally disabled men, I guarded her body too. There were many other bodies waiting to be taken—sometimes as many as ten or twenty at a time—and it appeared to me that most of them came back with other platoons in my company. Our platoon had been responsible for a number of deaths, but it seemed to me that we were almost saintly in comparison to the other platoons, who often came back with numerous victims in body bags. Some even kept count of their individual killings. I was glad that I never had to enter an Iraqi's house with them.

I mostly avoided these men but sometimes overheard conversations when we were eating in the chow hall.

“I got my first one yesterday,” one guy would say. “So what?” somebody else would reply. “Today I got number five.”

A day or two after the girl was shot, I was on guard duty with other soldiers at the front gate of our military compound, just a few feet from the shack with the dead bodies. A group of about fifteen Iraqi civilians—men, women, and children—left the road about a hundred yards away and began walking directly toward our gate. Iraqi civilians came to our compound only to pick up dead relatives, so I prepared myself for the inevitable discomfort. When they drew closer, I could see one old woman dressed in black; staring right through me. As she put one foot in front of the other, she would not take her eyes off me or release me from the hateful glare that seemed to be saying, “You are a monster. How could you do this? How could you kill the one I love?”

All I can remember about her, apart from the dark eyes radiating accusation and hatred, was that she was not veiled, had discolored sandals, and drew fearlessly toward me. She screamed at us in Arabic, and although I did not know exactly what she was saying I had no doubt that she blamed me for the death of the person she was coming to retrieve.

She continued to shout at us while others in her family dealt with an officer and the interpreter at the shack, and she wailed with her relatives as they carried a body in a short, four-foot-long bag. Tears filled my eyes. I wondered if she had come for the body of the little girl who had recently been killed. All I knew was that somebody she had loved had fallen from our bullets, and I felt nothing but shame and guilt as they walked away, carrying the dead with all the dignity they could muster.

When the old woman and her relatives left with the body, an officer from another platoon in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment—I do not remember his name or rank—ordered me to follow him into the compound. All I remember was that it was near the middle of a hot day and that the officer was thin, had a mustache, appeared to be in his thirties, and belonged to a tank unit in my regiment. And that he was very angry with me.

“What the hell is the matter with you, crying and all? You make us all look guilty when you show sympathy to the enemy.”

He threatened to tell officers in my platoon that he had seen the tears in my eyes, and to make sure that I was disciplined. I was afraid my pay would be withheld or reduced and asked him if we could just deal with the matter then and there.

He gave me a written reprimand. I do not remember the exact wording, but it basically said that I had been found fraternizing with the enemy and that I had broken the rules of the American Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is a federal law governing military justice in the U.S. armed forces. I believe that he let the matter drop, because I never heard about this from my immediate commanders.

I continued to stand guard at the gate of our military compound about once every three days. Generally, I noticed that about one person or group of relatives came each day to pick up their dead. I could feel my spirit breaking little by little, allowing for the thing that many men cannot do. But I knew enough not to get caught again and to shield the tears from the men in my company.

* * *

Specialist Sykora was a friend of mine and one of the few in the platoon in whom I would confide my honest thoughts of the war. Although he had been in the army for years, he did not appear to believe in the war any more than I did. He had his wild side, though. He talked all the time about professional wrestling matches, and he had a thing about looking at dead bodies. One day, as I was walking past the shed used for storing the dead, I heard thumping inside. I opened the door, peered inside, and saw Sykora holding up a body in a zippered black bag. He raised it and dropped it like one might slam a wrestler in the ring, then picked up another body and slammed it down too.

I was nauseated and backed out of the shed immediately. I didn't like ratting on my squad mates, but it just didn't seem right to let Sykora keep it up.

I sought out Sergeant Fadinetz. “Sykora has gone nuts,” I said. “He's inside the shed wrestling with bodies and tossing them every which way.”

Fadinetz looked away and said quietly, “He needs to let out his aggression. Let him have his fun.”

I had done my fair share of talking with Sykora, but after that point I stepped back from the friendship. He was just too much for me. I didn't see how anybody who had looked straight into the eyes of a grieving mother could entertain himself by wrestling with corpses.

* * *

There was a sergeant named Mike Meinen in the first platoon of my squad. He lived in Boise, Idaho, with his wife when he wasn't at war. A month or so earlier, he had handed out cigars to celebrate the birth of his daughter. I believe it was his first daughter, and I remember Meinen saying that he hadn't been able to get authorization to fly home to see her. He was a good fellow, and we would chat sometimes as we crossed paths on our way to and from the urinals at night.

In late August, while I was doing guard duty at the compound, Meinen and two others were patrolling the streets of al-Habbaniyah when they came under attack. Skillings told us that a rocket-propelled grenade of a type that the U.S. had given to Iraq during its war against Iran shot straight through the steel hatch of Meinen's APC. The grenade is made to penetrate steel and then explode, and it did its job to a T, slicing through the APC like a knife through soft butter and then splitting into shrapnel. The hot metal exploded inside the APC, cutting through everything it found. We Americans have good weapons, and I was told that we had used this one to fight in Vietnam. Meinen and two other men, Wyatt and Castro, were helpless against the exploding grenade. They escaped with their lives but not their legs.

The APC somehow made it back to our compound and we raced to the vehicle to help our buddies. A helicopter got there almost as fast as we did. As the three men were being evacuated for emergency care, I picked up Sergeant Meinen's leg and placed it next to him on the stretcher.

“Now I get to see my daughter,” he said.

He and the others were whisked away. We heard later that all three survived and had been fitted with prosthetic legs, but in the aftermath of the incident a gloom fell over our squad.

My squad mates and I were ordered to clean the blood out of Meinen's APC, but we refused to do so. He was our friend and we felt that it would have been more appropriate for someone in another platoon—someone who didn't know him at all—to be assigned that task. Our squawking, for once, was heeded. Someone else was given the job. My squad mates and I did have to wipe the blood off the weapons. I cleaned Meinen's rifle. It too had been ripped apart by the grenade.

Some of the men in my company wanted to take revenge, to go out and kill as many Iraqis as they could. My own anger, however, was reserved for the president of the United States and the military commanders who had put us in this war in the first place. I could find no justification for our role in Iraq and could not think of a single positive thing we had done in the country. My friends had had their legs blown off, and what was it for? If my time came the next day and I was sent home in a body bag, would history see me as a hero or as an accomplice to evildoers? To my way of thinking, only a hugely positive result—such as preventing genocide or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—could justify all the sacrifices that Iraqis and Americans were making in this war. Yet several months into my participation in the war, I saw no such positive results and no signs of them either.

Not long after that, while guarding a weapons depot in al-Habbaniyah, I confided in Specialist Sykora and Private Lewis, “If I get a chance to get away from here, I'm never coming back.”

“If you run they'll be all over your ass,” Lewis said.

I gave it no more thought. Stuck in the middle of a war zone, I found it too hard to think about what I would do in America, or how life might work out for me.

A few days later, I asked Sergeant Jones about the point of the war.

“There is no point, it's just your job,” he said. “But what's the justification for this war?”

“The justification is that you signed a contract and you're told to be here.”

“But when do I get to go home?” I said.

“Private,” he said, “we can keep you here just as long as we want, and we ain't never got to send you home.”

Soon after, while my squad mates and I patrolled the streets in our APC, we passed under a thick grove of palm trees.

“If you guys were fighting against me right now,” I said to Sergeant Fadinetz, “you would all be dead at this very minute. I would have strung a mine up in those trees and I would have been hiding right behind that big rock over there, and the instant you people rolled under these trees I would have hit the switch. And you know what, Sergeant? Every one of you would have been dead.”

To my surprise, the sergeant did not lecture me for speaking my mind. Softly, he told me, “I'd do the same thing if people invaded America.”

That got me thinking. How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to blow up the occupiers. I would dig a hole in my hometown in Oklahoma and rig mines in the trees and set them to blow up when the enemy passed below. I would lob all the mortars and rocket-propelled grenades I could buy. No doubt about it. If somebody blasted into my home and terrorized my family, I would become a force to be reckoned with. I would invent my own booby traps and come up with the most unexpected methods of mayhem. I would give the occupiers hell and keep at it until I was dead and gone, twice over.

7

al-Qa'im

AFTER LEAVING AL-HABBANIYAH, WE SPENT THE SECOND HALF
of September in a so-called green zone. Located in the desert, hours from Baghdad, it was a fortified, protected oasis where thousands of American soldiers were sent to rest and relax. Outside the guarded gates, there was nothing but sand for miles in every direction—nothing, that is, except hundreds of Iraqi vendors lined up along the road. As we inched forward in a military traffic jam, the vendors walked among our vehicles, waving their arms and selling cigarettes, soda, ornamental knives, blankets, and clothes. I figured that every one of them had been affected by the war. We had bombed their cities, raided their houses, and most certainly killed at least some of their loved ones, but they knew we had money. I didn't imagine that the vendors had any other way to make a living, and I watched them as they swarmed our vehicles.

Sergeant Fadinetz and Specialist Sykora jumped off our armored personnel carrier to snatch up Persian rugs for a fraction of the price they would have fetched back home. Later, in a postal station inside the green zone, they would mail them home to their wives. Private Lewis spent $30 on an Iraqi military uniform, complete with stripes and awards. I wondered whom it had belonged to and what had happened to the man who had once worn it. I'm not a big spender, never have been. From the vendors, I bought a caffeinated drink called Red Bat as well as Mond and Mikado cigarettes. Most of the soldiers hated the cigarettes sold in Iraq, but I liked them just fine, and appreciated buying them for an eighth of the price of American cigarettes.

Endless rows of huge tents had been erected in the green zone, and we set up our cots in one of them. I spent my time sleeping, smoking, drinking pop, weight lifting, and hanging out with my buddies Lewis and Connor. I'm not much of a reader, but I stretched out on my cot and read
Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer, about a disastrous climbing expedition on Mount Everest. Krakauer brought such a keen eye to the fatally mismanaged climbing adventure that I found myself wishing he could have seen everything I had been through in Iraq, so that other Americans and I could read his analysis.

I also spoke to Brandi every day, a luxury I hadn't had since arriving in Iraq. There were a hundred telephones in one big room in the green zone, and thousands of soldiers lined up daily to use them. It often took an hour or two to get to a phone. Even when I climbed off my cot to call Brandi in the middle of the night, I still had to wait more than half an hour for the telephone. She reassured me that all was okay at home. Philip was a healthy, growing baby who slept through the nights. Adam no longer wore a cast and his broken arm had healed. Zackary did his best to help out at home and asked every day if I was still away in what he called “Sergeant World.”

Brandi finally told me about the incident that had prompted Captain Bower to tell me I would not be promoted in rank because I had failed to “control my wife.” She had argued with a soldier guarding the gate outside the Fort Carson military base. When she complained that the soldier picked her car for a detailed inspection, he called her a bitch. She jumped out and threatened to take a swing at him. From that point, the argument escalated. Nobody was hurt, but it created a fuss on the base. Somebody reported it to my captain in Iraq, who disciplined me as a result. On the telephone, Brandi said she was worried that I would be mad at her, but I just laughed. I loved my wife and had no desire to try to control her from any distance. I had seen too many grenades and mortars to worry about a tussle at Fort Carson. And I didn't care about not being promoted from private to specialist. I didn't want to be in this war anyway.

* * *

A few days after arriving in the green zone I called home with great news. Sergeant Skillings had told me that because I was low ranking and had a family, I would be next in line to go home on vacation. He didn't say when I would be flown back to the States, other than that it would happen eventually. Brandi was thrilled. The enthusiasm and affection in her voice helped me stay settled and relaxed during my time of rest. Apart from guard duty we had no work to do.

It was indeed something of a shock to move into quasi-civilian life in the green zone. Overnight, I felt like I was light-years away from what had been my daily life for the past five months. I had spent so little time sleeping, and so much time raiding, patrolling, guarding, and worrying when the next bullet or bomb was heading my way, that I found myself oddly uncomfortable in the safety and comfort of the green zone. I also found myself increasingly resentful, because most of the soldiers that I met from other companies told me that they had spent the bulk of their time right there in the green zone. I didn't even know who to be angry at: the soldiers themselves, for being able to eat and sleep well and call their loved ones every day, or my commanders, for putting the men in the 43rd Combat Engineer Company in such constant danger for nearly half a year in Iraq. I was so tired and messed up after the months of hard duty that I didn't even know what I wanted. Part of me longed to stay safe, sleep more, enjoy the decent sanitation, and call home every day. But another part of me—the part of me that has never known how to sit down and goof off—chafed at feeling so inactive.

There were many American women in the green zone. Some were soldiers and others officers. Sergeant Skillings warned us that punishment would be swift if we were caught having sex with any of them. Nonetheless, one day while I was waiting my turn outside a portable toilet—which seemed like a luxury in comparison to what I had known thus far in Iraq—a female private tapped me on the shoulder, smiled, and asked if I would like to sneak off with her for a fast fuck.

While my buddies snickered a few yards away, she said that they had told her I was a father of three.

“I want to get pregnant,” she said. “It's the only way they'll let me go home.”

I grinned but did not budge from my place in line. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “You ought to try Specialist Barrigan for that. He'll be game.”

I pointed him out to her, and she left.

Barrigan thanked me the next morning.

“No problem,” I said. The guys thought I was crazy for turning down the offer, but I told them I was a married man. “I've already had my fun,” I told them, “and I don't want any trouble now.”

A few days later I was propositioned again. This time, a lieutenant asked for sex. I refused again, and suspected that she was trying to entrap me. Word among soldiers in the green zone was that some officers tried to lure privates into sex, only to bust them for breaking the rules. There was no way I was falling for that. I didn't want anything getting in the way of my trip back home. I kept to myself, pumped iron every day, and kept lining up at the telephones so I could hear Brandi's voice. It was wonderful to be able to call home every day.

I coasted along knowing that I would eventually get home, but then I found out that it wouldn't be anytime soon. After two weeks in the green zone, Skillings told us all to pack up our things. We would be leaving the next day for a “red zone”—by which Skillings meant another dangerous assignment—on the Syrian border.

We all groaned. The guys in my platoon had been hoping to be sent home together for a break. We all felt we had earned it after months of hard duty and countless mortar attacks.

“Nobody is going home yet,” Skillings said. “They need us for a tour of duty on the border. It's rough up there,” he added. He told us that Americans had been meeting a lot of resistance near Syria. It would fall to us to stop terrorists from slipping over the border and into Iraq.

We loaded our armored personnel carriers onto fifteen flatbed trucks and spent two days crossing the desert. When you crawl at twenty miles an hour with all your hardware tied down on trucks, you feel a bit exposed—like a line of ants on a beach. Although our army helicopters occasionally swept by for protection, we didn't stop for a moment. When I had to pee, I did like the others and aimed off the side of the truck. When other needs arose, I just had to wait. A military convoy doesn't stop for bathroom breaks. At night, I sat on top of the APC, stretched out my legs, and looked up at the stars. Never had I seen constellations as bright as in the desert. Shooting stars made me think of falling mortars. Even looking at the most peaceful sight in the world, I could not get my mind off war.

I didn't know we were going to al-Qa'im until I saw a sign in English. It was a large but poor and dilapidated town of 150,000 people on the banks of the Euphrates. It seems the waters of that seventeen-hundred-mile river flowed everywhere I went in the country. Perhaps, I sometimes felt, the river was keeping an eye out for me. With all the dangers we faced, something must have helped keep me alive.

There had once been a uranium extraction plant in al-Qa'im, but our American army had bombed it to smithereens in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War. The main thing now, I was told, was to keep an eye on the border traffic and to shoot anybody who tried to slip into Iraq at night.

The entire 43rd Combat Engineer Company bunked in a warehouse by an old railroad station, a fifteen-minute drive east of town. The senior officers had their own rooms, but the rest of us—more than one hundred soldiers—slept together in one big room. Apart from our two-week break in the green zone, it was the first and the only time in Iraq that my platoon mates and I slept in a building that had not already been destroyed by American bombs. It was loud, having a hundred men snoring all at once, but at least I didn't have to worry about the roof caving in.

After temperatures of around 120 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Iraq, the nights in al-Qa'im—perhaps 60 degrees or so—seemed bitterly cold. Gloves kept my fingers warm, and I wore a stocking cap on my head to keep off the chill and to ward off the sand. Storms blew in every few days, driving sand over me and all my possessions, even inside the warehouses. In the morning I would shake the layers of sand off my clothes and clean all the grit from my weapon.

In town, when I stood up on guard towers, I could see tanks blazing, jets racing, houses burning, and explosions in every direction. It looked like World War III out there.

Border duty took up most of our time in al-Qa'im, but we kept raiding houses as well. We took mortar fire and rocket-propelled grenades almost every day we worked at the border. They tended to fall on us in the late morning or early afternoon. As before, we could never see who was behind the attacks, but our men would shoot in what they hoped was the direction of the enemy. My weapon had stopped working and, failing to see the sense of it, I made no more efforts to have it fixed.

We often responded to mortar fire by raiding a house—any house—that seemed to be near the source of the attack. I was standing on a guard tower early one afternoon when another mortar attack erupted, followed by our own gunfire. When the battle ended our commander ordered us all into our armored personnel carriers so we could respond by raiding a house. Our three squads left the border, each in its own APC, made a quick turn, and came upon a middle-aged, gray-haired man walking at the side of the road. His hands were empty and nothing hung from his shoulders but a plain white robe.

From the first APC, a sergeant radioed to our vehicle, which was at the back. “Stop and apprehend that man,” he called out to us. “He's in the area of enemy fire, so he's got to be guilty.”

Specialist Barrigan, another squad mate, and I jumped out of our vehicle, grabbed the man, pulled him inside, and zipcuffed him.

Barrigan grabbed a billy club and started whacking the man on the head. When the man fell to his knees Barrigan continued to beat him in the ribs.

“I'll keep his mouth shut,” Barrigan said as he pounded away; the man remained totally silent. He gave no indication that he could speak English.

I felt terrible for him, having to lie down and submit to that beating while soldiers kept their guns trained on him. When the man was dazed and motionless, Barrigan halted the beating. We returned to the border, dragged the man out of the vehicle, and brought him into an interrogation room.

He remained zipcuffed and silent. He sat on the floor bleeding from the back of the head. I felt sorry for the fellow and saw no reason for us to detain him. After an hour or so, while I stood outside guarding the door, an English-speaking Iraqi who worked at the border came into the room and spoke with Sergeant Padilla. When he addressed our victim in Arabic, the detainee spoke back angrily.

“Release this man,” our interpreter said.

“Why?” Padilla asked.

“He works here at the border. He just finished his shift. He was walking home when you grabbed him.”

Our men cut off the man's zipcuffs, opened the door, and sent him walking back home for the second time that day. He received no explanation or apology.

A few days later our young interpreter Sayeed left us just as quickly as he had joined our company months earlier. He came to say good-bye.

“Why are you leaving us?” I asked.

“Captain Bower told me that I can't go to America,” he said.

I shook my head. I was not going to repeat now what I had been telling him all along. Sayeed said it wasn't worth staying any longer. Not for $20 a week. Not with the fact that Iraqis were threatening him for serving the Americans. And not after learning that all the promises made to him had been built out of thin air.

He extended his hand and I shook it warmly.

I thanked him for all the things he had brought us. I knew that a number of Iraqis had threatened to kill him for helping the American army, and I hoped that he managed to escape from Iraq before it was too late. I would never see him again, but I went on hoping that he and his relatives were safe.

My days at the border were long but straightforward. When the daily mortars fell on us, I took cover in a concrete shelter. As an American soldier, I could run into any building or shelter within reach when the attacks came our way. Although the mortars and grenades were aimed at us, they often fell near the drivers and passengers lined up in cars and semitrailer trucks waiting to cross over into Syria. Sooner or later, I was sure, travelers at the border would die—not because we killed them directly but because we drew fire in the very spot where they were trapped in their cars.