The Deserter's Tale (17 page)

After a few months in Philadelphia, a job advertisement in the newspaper led me to try my luck at the Curtis Elevator Cab Company. I asked if they still needed a worker and was told to return the next day. In June 2004, I began working for $12 an hour—more money than I had ever earned in civilian life—making the insides of elevator cabs. Two brothers—Rich and Bob Andrews—ran the company and seemed to be happy with my work. I am a good worker, when I put my mind to it, and I do like to use my hands. For the Andrews brothers, I made the insides of elevators: the paneling, the railings, the boxes that held the buttons, and the light fixtures. I was employed as a general laborer and machinist: welding, using shearing machines and presses, and working with wood and glass. I made myself as useful as possible. I wanted to keep the job and make money and didn't want to have to look for another job until we knew what we were going to do in the long term. I had already chosen to give the brothers my real name and social security number. It was a calculated risk, but I knew that by working legally I would be entitled later to a tax refund because of my large family. But I sure didn't want to give my social security number to another employer. The more people who had it, the more likely it seemed that somebody would find me.

At the new job, the Andrews brothers didn't ask too many questions and I didn't offer many details about myself, other than that I had been a soldier in Iraq and that I had moved with my family from Oklahoma.

I soon had one more reason to keep my employers happy: by the summer of 2004, Brandi was four months pregnant with our fourth child and had decided to quit her job. We didn't have the money to send her to a doctor and we feared that any contact with the medical world could lead to my arrest. As a result, Brandi had no checkup until the seventh month of her pregnancy. Thankfully, she and the baby seemed healthy, so all we had to do was keep the children quiet as we stayed in hotels and remain working until we could find a way to safety. Our friend stayed in Philadelphia and kept working, and I don't believe we would have survived our long time in hiding without her friendship and support—particularly with babysitting and spotting us money. When we were broke, she never let us do without food and she never let us down. Twelve dollars an hour seemed like very good money to me, but it still wasn't enough to keep my family going.

My employers were kind to me. However, they were Republicans and we argued furiously about the presidential election in the fall of 2004.

“Of course you like Bush,” I told them. “You guys are getting richer and richer.”

We argued about Bush and we argued about the war in Iraq, but I did not tell them the things I had done or the things I had seen.

Sometimes human kindness comes at the most unexpected moments. Not long after President Bush was reelected, I told my bosses that my twenty-five-year-old Camaro had broken down so badly that even I couldn't fix it. When Rich and Bob said they had to step out to lunch they asked me to mind the shop. An hour or two later, they returned with a gift for me: a 1994 Buick Skylark, complete with new license plates. It was ten years old but better than any car I had owned before. It must have cost them a good two thousand dollars, and I would have liked to return the favor by staying a long time on the job. I accepted the gift because we needed it desperately, but I took it with a sense of guilt. It was dawning on me that to have a shot at a decent life we would have to leave the United States.

I continued to look online for information about war deserters and people who could help me. I had no experience with Internet searches but finally, after typing something like “war deserter needs help” into the Google search engine, I came across details about an American army deserter named Jeremy Hinzman. Apparently, Hinzman had left the United States and was applying for refugee status in Canada. If he was in Canada and hoping to find help, I figured there might be a chance for my family and me in that country too.

In October, using the address [email protected], I e-mailed Jeffry House, the Toronto lawyer who was representing Jeremy Hinzman. I didn't give him my name. For all I knew, he could have been an army agent posing as a lawyer to catch fugitives like me. I said I was a war deserter and asked if he could help. He gave me the e-mail address and telephone number of a Toronto group called the War Resisters Support Campaign. I called a woman there by the name of Michelle Robidoux and described my situation without giving my name. Michelle promised that her group would help me if I got across the border. At Brandi's urging, I repeated that I would be traveling with a wife and four children. Michelle reassured me that they would find a place for our whole family to stay. I didn't call her again for months and I hoped she wasn't setting a trap for me.

Christmas came and went and we had no money for presents for the boys or for ourselves. Thankfully, however, Brandi had been able to get free health coverage from the state of Pennsylvania for the last part of her pregnancy and her delivery. When the labor began, two days after Christmas, our friend stayed with our three boys while I drove Brandi to the hospital. I had always wanted to have a girl, but now I could barely think about it because I was terrified that I would be nabbed in the hospital delivery room. While I looked out windows for government cars in the hospital parking lot, Brandi had our baby after four hours of labor. We had a girl and named her Anna. She nearly died on her first day. She had aspirated meconium in the womb and developed pneumonia after she was born. On December 27—the same day that she came into the world—Anna had to be rushed to another hospital for emergency care. But Anna recovered and we were able to take her back to our hotel three weeks later. As poor as we were, it seemed a miraculous gift to have a baby daughter. It struck me, as we drove back to the hotel where our friend was camped out again with our boys, that the gift of a daughter might never have been mine if I had returned to fight again in Iraq. Rather than helping to create a new life, I might have ended that of somebody else.

It seemed unbelievably risky to leave the United States and enter a foreign country with nothing more to go on than a promise that a stranger had made over the telephone. But staying in my own country was even more dangerous. If I stayed, something would eventually go wrong and I would get caught. And if I stayed I was condemning my wife and my children to a never-ending life on the run. I finally concluded that going to Canada offered the only real chance for me to avoid going back to Iraq or serving time behind bars. I knew almost nothing about Canada. I had heard that Canadians spoke English and French, but I didn't even know the name of Paul Martin, who was prime minister at the time.

I knew we needed to have some money in case things went terribly wrong for us in the new country. And the only way I knew then to get money was to file a tax return in early 2005, knowing I was likely to get a big refund. It was a risky thing to do. But I had to hope that the IRS and the U.S. Army had bigger fish than me to fry and that, even if they did decide to put their heads together and nail me, it would take them some time to get around to it.

As soon as I got the necessary forms from my employer, I took my tax return to an H&R Block office in Philadelphia. I had to give an address, so I gave that of the hotel where we had been staying. As a precaution, we then moved into an apartment our friend had rented so that we could no longer be found at the address on the tax return. The six of us stayed in a one-bedroom apartment. It wasn't comfortable, but we lived better than most Iraqis under American occupation. We had all the water we needed and no bombs were falling through our roof nor soldiers busting down our door.

In March, I received a federal check for about $3,000. It was the most money I had ever had in my life, and it would have to be enough for our trip to Canada. I gave our friend the car we had been using because it wasn't big enough for a family of six. To replace the Buick Skylark, I bought a 1992 Dodge Caravan—with 202,000 miles on the odometer—for $600.

I called Michelle Robidoux one last time at the War Resisters Support Campaign office in Toronto. Michelle warned us that a border official might ask for details about where we were staying in Canada. In that case, she said that we were to give the name, address, and telephone number of a person in Toronto who was a friend of the war resisters movement. Michelle also instructed us to say that we were coming to Toronto to see the musical
Mamma Mia!
She gave me the name and address of a man and woman who would let us stay for free in their home. I asked once more if she knew that I was coming with a wife and four children. Yes, Michelle said, that would not be a problem. I then told her the day that I would be entering Canada, and I told her that I would do so at the border at Buffalo. But I was lying. I did not cross that day, and I did not take that crossing, because I felt there was a chance I was being set up by U.S. Army officials. Two days after I said I was coming, we drove to the border at Niagara Falls, New York, with Brandi at the wheel. My driver's license had expired but hers was up to date.

Sucking up the courage to drive to the border of my own country was the hardest thing I had ever done. It would have been easier in some ways to go back to war and serve my time. It would have caused me a lot less stress to sit in a jail cell. But I didn't want to participate in an unjust war, and I didn't believe it was right that I should become a prisoner in my own country for refusing to act like a criminal in Iraq. I felt that the only right choice was to move forward, and I did so with my wife and my children beside me.

I could hardly breathe during the drive to the border. Brandi and I cooked up an insane plan about how, if it looked like officials were going to arrest me, she would try to distract them and give me an opportunity to run away or even jump from a bridge. But in my heart I knew there was no escape in my own country. This was the moment of truth. Either I would get out or I would be arrested. And if I was arrested there was always the chance that Brandi would be arrested too for assisting in my escape. And then what would happen to our children? I also knew that if we somehow managed to make it across the border with no passports and no up-to-date identification, I would never again be able to return to my country.

Brandi and I had already lost touch with our families. With the exception of my brother and my mother, most of our relatives saw me as a traitor and a coward. From what I'd heard, Brandi's family felt that I had ruined her life and turned us all into criminals. We had just said good-bye to our one true friend, who would finally be returning to her home after over a year away.

We arrived at the border around the noon hour, hoping that the officials would be in a hurry processing traffic and unlikely to take a close look at us.

“Citizenship?” the border guard asked.

“American,” Brandi said.

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I'm a waitress and my husband is a welder.”

“Where are you heading?”

“Toronto.”

“What's going on there?”

“We're going to visit a friend for the weekend,” Brandi said.

“Why do you have all that stuff along with you?” “You know what it's like, traveling with kids,” Brandi said.

“Have a nice visit,” he said.

We said good-bye to our country and drove into Canada.

Epilogue

MY GRANDFATHER ELMER PORTER HAD A BLACKOUT RECENTLY.
It was the summer of 2006, and his tour of duty as an American soldier in the Korean War had finished more than half a century earlier. He had retired long ago from his job as a mechanic at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma and was living quietly on his forty-acre farm. One day, for no particular reason, he thought he was under attack. He thrashed and fought to the limit of his strength, and when he snapped out if it he discovered that he had trashed his own living room.

A Canadian psychiatrist told me that you never truly emerge from post-traumatic stress disorder, that you simply learn to live with it.

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.

I am not a man to lead countries or direct armies. I have my high school diploma from Guthrie, Oklahoma, and if I am lucky I will move one day with my family closer to a school where I can learn the trade of welding.

When I was still a soldier in Iraq, I heard that many of the sappers who were discharged from American military service went on to defuse mines in war-torn lands such as the former Yugoslavia. I think of the countless children who have died, or who have had to learn to go on living with missing limbs, because they stepped on a mine—sometimes years after war officially ended in their country. I think of all the land that can't be trespassed on or safely used simply because men who passed that way earlier were trying to kill one another. Mines do more than endanger people; they also poison their future. In my military training in Missouri and Colorado, I loved the challenge of setting and stripping a mine and learned to work with nimble fingers under pressure. But I sure wouldn't want to live anywhere near the place where a soldier like me had been busy at work. A lot of ingenuity goes into killing, and it seems to me now a sad waste of money and intelligence. Somebody has to clear minefields in countries where men have stopped fighting, but I am not in any shape to join the brave sappers who have taken on that work.

War took all the fun and the challenge out of guns and bombs for me. Given what I've seen of what guns and bombs do to people, I can't go back to them now and hang on to my sanity. These days, my personal and family ambitions are simple yet hard to obtain. I would like to be able to dream without nightmares about the people I traumatized in Iraq. I would like to have a few acres of land and make a steady living as a welder so that my children can grow up decently clothed and properly fed. I want to be a good man to my wife, who gave up her family and her country to support me in my flight from the war in Iraq.

I grew up drinking and fighting and placing beer bottles on my rifle range, and I rarely stopped to imagine life outside Oklahoma. I expected to grow old and die in the very place I was born. When I first met Brandi, I told her that I loved Guthrie and never wanted to leave it. I was not a political man. In fact, when I was a child and a teenage boy the most political thought that entered my head came from the words of my grandfather Elmer, who told me that in the United States, the Republican Party stood for the rich and that everyone else should vote for the Democrats.

I'm glad I had Elmer in my life. A lot of men moved in with my mother and out again, and I still cringe at the memory of her body being flung against the wall of our two-bedroom trailer. They say that you end up doing what the people in your family have done. I'm determined that this will not be true for me. No way. My grandfather was the only person I ever knew who told me that no man had any business beating his wife. I'm glad I had that one good voice in my childhood. His is the voice I have chosen to hear.

I like to think it was my grandfather's voice—the voice of right and wrong—that woke me from the long sleep I fell into during military training and the first months of war.

There is no excuse for the things I did in Iraq, or for the beatings I delivered—on orders from my drill sergeant—while training with the American army in Missouri. Looking back, I am filled with shame that I beat up other recruits just to please my drill sergeant. I am disgusted to think that I tried to break a man's ribs by swinging away with a soap-filled sock just because he resisted an order. In the end, the man I beat up was the one with the brains. He had the courage to stand up to an institution bent on breaking him and recasting him as a killer, and I heard in the end he managed to get out of the military. That would be good for him, and good for Iraq.

My commanders had told me that it is army first, God second, and family third, but I'll never buy into that way of thinking again.

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. But if every single soldier in the American army had refused to blow off the doors of houses in the residential streets of Iraq, I will bet you that the generals and colonels and captains who commanded us—and our president and commander in chief, George W. Bush—would not have volunteered for the job.

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.

I believe some people will say that Americans faced a nasty, unconventional war in Iraq, and that we had no choice but to take the war to our enemy in unconventional ways. My feeling is that we lacked the information, the skill, and the experience to find our true enemies in Iraq. We liked to think of the Iraqi fighters as inhuman and stupid, but the fact of the matter is, they outfoxed the American military wherever I went in Iraq. They threw mortars and grenades our way and we never even saw them running away. My fellow combatants and I never once put an armed enemy in our gun sights. They were on the run and gone while we were still diving for cover against flying shrapnel. We fought back by lashing out at civilians who had no means to defend themselves. It seemed the only way we could fight back—but it was wrong.

I don't think that senior American military commanders made soldiers raid thousands of civilian houses because they truly believed we would nab terrorists or find weapons of mass destruction. I think they did it to punish and intimidate the Iraqi people. In the eyes of the American military, Iraqis were not people at all—they were terrorists, suicide bombers, sand niggers, and ragheads. We had to think of them as less than human in order to keep doing the things we did. We were taught to think of Iraqis in degrading ways during military training, and those attitudes crossed the oceans with us when we flew into battle.

The Geneva Conventions are international agreements—which the United States and almost all other nations have signed—that aim to limit the barbarity of war by protecting civilians and prisoners of war. Basically, they set out the dos and don'ts of war. The most significant don'ts are not hard to imagine: soldiers are not to steal from, beat, torture, rape, or kill civilians or prisoners of war. I won't go on and on about all of the Geneva Conventions violated in Iraq, but I do want to quote one in particular: “Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives . “

I would not have deserted the U.S. Army, left my country, or chosen to speak out against the war in Iraq if American soldiers in my company had limited themselves to fighting enemy combatants. I left the war in Iraq because the American army made no distinction between the two. We were taught in training to see all Iraqis as enemies and we were encouraged to keep thinking this way, and acting accordingly, from the first day that the 43rd Combat Engineer Company pulled into the city of Ramadi.

I had not read about the Geneva Conventions before setting foot in Iraq. But all I had to do was think of the teachings of my own grandfather at home to know that what we were doing there was wrong. I hold my army in judgment for the repeated abuses of Iraqi civilians, but I hold myself in judgment too.

When Nazi war criminals were brought to justice at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46, an important principle was established: claiming that one was just following the orders of a superior does not relieve one from the responsibilities of international law, provided that a moral choice was possible.

I am responsible for the things I did. And my commanders were even more responsible for putting us there and ordering us to do the things we did. It was bad enough that we had nobody monitoring our behavior in Iraq or holding us accountable for it. But the situation was made worse because we had tacit approval from our commanders to shoot first and ask questions later. If a soldier beat up or shot somebody, all he had to say—if he said anything at all—was that he felt threatened. As a result, our behavior at war was completely unchecked. That's why it was possible for American soldiers to decapitate Iraqis by means of machine-gun fire and then use their heads as objects of play.

In Iraq, I did not witness the equivalent of the American massacre of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese citizens in the hamlet of My Lai in 1968—for which I am glad. I hope that American soldiers have not committed such staggering atrocities there. Instead, I saw a steady stream of abuse and individual killing—a beating here, a shot there. Collectively, however, these incidents added up. Sometimes I wonder how the world might change if with my own eyes—and perhaps with a movie camera on my shoulder—I had witnessed every civilian beating and murder that American soldiers have carried out in Iraq. I wonder what would happen if every atrocity were compressed into the same day and the same city, still with my eyes watching and my camera at the ready. Then, I suspect that the total number of victims would shock and astonish Americans just as profoundly as did the discovery of the My Lai massacre. Alone, I cannot paint such a picture, but I know what I have seen. I shudder to imagine the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi families who this very day are struggling still with the loss of a loved one who died, completely innocently, at American hands.

When American soldiers beat up, stole from, and killed Iraqi civilians during my six and a half months at war, I saw them do so with complete impunity. We were far more than soldiers fighting enemy insurgents. To the civilians of Iraq, we became police officers, prosecutors, jailors, and executioners. We claimed to be bringing democracy and good order to the people of Iraq, but all we brought were hate and destruction. The only thing we gave to the people of Iraq was a reason to despise us—and perhaps to want to kill us for generations to come.

In my last months in Iraq, I met soldiers who felt the same way I did about the abuses we were dishing out day after day. For the most part we kept our mouths shut. We lived in a military culture that had already taught us that although we could get away with beating or even killing Iraqi civilians, punishment would be swift and harsh if we even questioned our commanders. By remaining silent, we made it possible for the abuses to continue. I do not know what all of the other companies of the American armed forces were doing while I was busy with the 43rd Combat Engineer Company. But since coming to Canada I have read accounts of convictions against members of my 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment for the abuse of Iraqi civilians and the torture and murder of at least one prisoner of war. I never met the people who have been convicted, and I did not know of them when I was at war. Sadly, it does not surprise me that they belonged to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

On November 26, 2003—just two weeks after I'd left Iraq—an Iraqi major general by the name of Abed Hamed Mowhoush died while being interrogated and tortured by members of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Mowhoush had surrendered to American soldiers in my regiment in a vain attempt to obtain the release of two of his sons who had been captured earlier. Water was poured down his throat in order to choke him. He was also stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag and wrapped in electrical cord during one interrogation. Subsequently, a U.S. military court convicted Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer—also from Fort Carson, by the way—of negligent homicide in Mowhoush's death. Welshofer's only punishment was a reprimand and a $6,000 fine. I wonder what punishment a court would have meted out if the victim had been an American citizen. And Captain Shawn Martin—who, like Welshofer, was part of the 3rd ACR—was charged on accusations that he had used a pistol, his fists, and a baseball bat that he called his “Iraqi beater” to threaten and abuse civilians and his own troops in an Iraqi town by the name of Rutbah. Martin was eventually convicted of three counts of assault against Iraqi civilians. His lawyer claimed that Martin was a good soldier who was authorized to use tough techniques. Martin's punishment: a $12,000 fine and forty-five days behind bars.