The Deserter's Tale (4 page)

Although I tried to have as little as possible to do with J.W., I liked his father a little better. His name was Bill Church, and he had fought in the Korean War. He had been sprayed with tear gas in Korea and lost an eye. I tried to ask him about Korea, but he never wanted to talk about it. The last time I spoke to him was just before leaving for Iraq. He cried to hear the news that I was going to war. He said he understood that I had to go but warned me to be careful.

I have seventeen cousins and various aunts and uncles and Brandi has relatives too, but we have hardly spoken to any of them since I deserted the army. With the exception of my mother and my brother, most of them are scandalized by what we have done. I believe they fear they'll have trouble with the law if they talk to us, and so have written us out of the family. Brandi and I lost more than just our country when we came with our children across the border at Niagara Falls, New York. We lost our families too.

* * *

Brandi and I agree that it was love at first sight. We were inseparable from the day we met. Within two weeks we made plans to get married. We wanted to have a decent wedding, but we couldn't save enough to pay for it.

Brandi and I took an apartment together after I graduated from high school. We worked at every imaginable kind of job. Wherever we went, Brandi worked as a waitress and I held down jobs as a welder, general laborer, roofer, cook, salesperson, or pizza delivery man. I usually made about $7 or $8 an hour. We moved all the time in search of better jobs and better pay. When things got too hard in Guthrie, we tried our luck in Oklahoma City. Then we tried Madison, Wisconsin. And then we moved back to Oklahoma City.

Zackary, the first of our children, arrived in 1998 when we were both twenty. In February 1999, Brandi and I gave up on our dreams for a family wedding and eloped to Arkansas. We were married by a justice of the peace. We had a crowd of four: Zackary, Brandi's sister, and her father and stepmother. Brandi's folks took care of Zackary during our one-night honeymoon. We stayed in a hotel in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and ordered in pizza for dinner.

By the time Adam came along in October 1999, Brandi and I were finding it hard to live on her tips and my salary. Changing cities and jobs never led to better pay. I picked up some welding work on a few of the jobs but got no formal training. To cut down on costs, we bought clothes at secondhand stores and stayed in run down apartments. Our place in Oklahoma City had holes in the floor and in the windows. The water didn't run and the toilet didn't work. The place didn't even have a stove. Brandi had to go to her grandmother's home to cook for us.

Brandi had Oklahoma state health insurance for herself and our children, but I had no health insurance. One day, I felt stabbing pains in my back and started urinating blood. I drove to a hospital in Oklahoma City, but they turned me down because I had no insurance. The next hospital I tried let me in and X-rayed the kidney stone but couldn't get it out. In that first of four hospital visits for kidney stone problems I was billed more than $2,000. I couldn't pay it. Our debts piled up while our credit rating sank. I still have the stone in me and it still acts up.

By the year 2000, when we were both twenty-two, Brandi and I had become desperate. With two young boys, we didn't even have money to see the dentist. Our families were too poor to help much, but Brandi's grandmother sometimes gave us food. We never had as much as $50 in the bank. When we were living in Wisconsin, Brandi and I started talking about the military as a way to get out of poverty. I tried to enlist in the U.S. Marines, but they turned me down because I had two children and too many debts.

Brandi and I managed to keep going. By 2002 we were back in Oklahoma City. Brandi was looking after Zackary and Adam, and Philip—our third child—was on the way. I had a job delivering pizza and was allowed to take home as much as I wanted for dinner. We got sick of pizza awfully fast. I decided to try my luck once more with the military. This time I would try the army. Maybe their standards wouldn't be as high. In March, I drove to the U.S. Army recruiting station in Moore, Oklahoma. At last, I found some good luck. Or so I thought.

2

Recruitment and Training

I HAD DRIVEN PAST IT MANY TIMES BEFORE.
The U.S. armed services recruiting station was located in a strip mall in Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, not far from where Interstate 240 meets Penn Street.

I didn't dress up to make an impression on that first day in the recruiting station. I felt better in my T-shirt and jeans. I had only ten dollars in my pocket—just enough for milk and cigarettes—and Brandi had forty dollars at home, and that just about summed up our life savings on that day. So even if I had wanted to dress up, there was no money for it.

Outside the recruiting station someone had plastered posters promoting life in the armed forces. Every word of those posters seemed designed for people like me. I had no money, I had dreams of getting formal training as a welder, I needed to get my teeth fixed, and I wanted to have my kidney stone removed. If I only joined the military, the posters suggested, I would be on easy street. The armed forces were offering money for college tuition, health insurance, and even a cash bonus for signing up. To top it all off, military service would give me a chance to travel and discover a new way of life.

Brandi and I didn't like being in Oklahoma, and we wanted to get out. 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.

He was a tall white man, heavyset, and he looked like he was in his late twenties or early thirties.

“I'm thinking of joining the army,” I said.

Van Houten stood up and shook my hand. “What's your name?”

“Joshua Key.”

“Can I call you Josh?”

I grinned. “Everybody does.”

“Good Oklahoma boy, are you? Me too. Grew up not far from here.” He did have an Oklahoma accent. He pointed to a chair. “Sit down, son, and make yourself comfortable. Hungry? Thirsty? We've got lots of stuff around here.”

“No thank you, I'm fine.”

“Well, how about just coffee then?”

“All right, coffee would be good.”

“What do you take in it?”

“One milk and five sugars.”

“You like a drop of caffeine with your sugar, do you?”

I grinned again. He called for someone to get me a coffee, just the way I had asked for it, and within a minute the steaming cup was sitting in my hand.

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.”

“That's good,” he said. “'Cause I have a lot of them.”

“Fine with me.”

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.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And whatever you do,” he said, “don't mention it to the commanding officer here.” Van Houten offered to swing by my home to speak to Brandi about all the family benefits associated with life in the military, but he warned me to keep Brandi away from the recruiting station so that no superior military officers would notice her pregnancy. I got the message loud and clear.

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.

Van Houten gave me the impression that, as a favor to me, he was leaving out all the details that might hurt my chances of getting into the military. He became my coach, my guidance counselor, my adviser, and my personal biographer, as well as the provider of coffee, doughnuts, and submarine sandwiches over the next five or six weeks.

I had imagined that it would be possible to apply, be tested and checked out, and sign up in a day or two, but the process stretched out for the better part of six weeks.

After completing the initial questionnaire, Van Houten told me to return at five-thirty in the morning a few days later to take an aptitude test.

“Have a good meal, get a good night's sleep, and eat breakfast before you come in for the test,” he said. “You'll do better that way.”

I showed up on time and spent two hours on a question-and-answer test dealing with math, English, mechanical understanding, and general knowledge.

There were about thirty young men and women in the room, and we all got our scores as soon as we finished the test. I was told that 30 was the passing score and that 99 was the highest score possible. I got a 49, then saw to my amazement that not a single other person in the room had passed the test.

Van Houten told me that 49 was a good score, but that if I wanted I could take the test one more time to see if I could get a 50, which would give me more choices about where to go in the military. I took the test again but got the same score.

One of Van Houten's colleagues, a short, thin, middle-aged government employee in civilian clothes named Daniel Russell, told me that I had three options. I could become an infantryman, a multiple-launch rocket systems driver, or a bridge builder.

“Can I join the army without having to go overseas?” I asked. “I don't want to leave Brandi and the kids.”

“Absolutely,” Russell said. “I can give you the bridge-building position in the continental United States. That means right here on the continent. You wouldn't even have to go to Hawaii or Alaska.”

“Bridge builder sounds good to me.”

Russell leaned forward over his desk and looked into my eyes. “I can get you a seven-thousand-dollar signing bonus if you pick one of the other two options.”

I asked for more details. Russell explained that working as an infantryman or as a multiple-launch rocket systems driver would involve combat duty. I made it clear to him that I did not want to leave my country or go into combat.

“Think about it,” he said. “Seven thousand dollars.”

“I don't have to think anymore on that one, sir. I don't want to do combat duty. Not even for seven thousand dollars. Tell me more about bridge building.”

Russell told me that the army employed many men to fix bridges in the continental United States. I would not receive any signing bonus, but the advantage was that I would be allowed to choose to go to a “nondeployable” military base. “Nondeployable,” Russell explained, meant it was a base that did not send men to war.

When I pressed for more information, Russell said that if I wanted to do bridge building, the closest military base was at Fort Carson, Colorado. I told him I had never heard of it. Russell explained that Fort Carson was in Colorado Springs and was home to a military unit called the 43rd Combat Engineer Company.

“But that sounds like combat,” I said.

“It sounds like that, but it isn't what you think,” Russell said. “It's a nondeployable base, and you will be put to work building bridges in the United States. It's called Combat Engineer because you have to blow up bridges, sometimes, before you can build new ones.”

“So this means I can stay with my family and don't have to go overseas?” I asked again.

“Soldier, it will be as easy as cheesecake. You're going to be building bridges from nine to five every day and spending every evening at home with your family.”

It sounded too good to be true. But Russell promised to write “CONUS,” short for “Continental United States,” right on my contract if it would help put my mind at ease.

Our conversation ended there, and I felt a little more relaxed about my future in the army.

A week or two after I first showed up at the recruiting center, Van Houten came to my home and immediately won Brandi over. Life on the military base was secure, he said. We wouldn't have to worry about violent criminals breaking into our home and hurting our children. We would stay in clean, decent accommodations that any working American would be proud of, he said. The rent would be free on base. (I learned later that this was not true, that about $700 would be docked every month from my paycheck for the rent.)

The whole family would have access to comprehensive health insurance, he said, and I would be able to get up to $20,000 in tuition for college studies. I told Van Houten that I wanted to get training as a welder, and he said the money could be used for that, and that I could even begin college studies while posted to my military base.

Over the next several weeks I had to see Van Houten nearly every day to take additional tests and to fill in more paperwork. Every time I came into the recruiting station he offered me something to eat. What is more, he offered to take me along when he went jogging or did weight training in the gym of nearby Tinker Air Force Base. I accepted, joining him some thirty times at the gym. On each trip, he bought me coffee and a sandwich. Van Houten offered up a little information about himself. He was married and had three children and came from Lawton, Oklahoma. He was looking forward to returning to his regular military job as a surveyor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, but for the time being he was stuck recruiting young Americans and working on a quota system. I can't remember exactly how many men he said he was required to recruit, but I believe it was about one person per week. He was stressed out about it and said he couldn't wait to return to his former job as a military surveyor.

“They rip up my ass if I don't make my quota,” Van Houten said.

For my medical and physical tests, I peed in a cup, gave blood, and was made to walk like a duck—knees bent and squatting low with my butt near the ground. I asked about that and was told the test would indicate if I was flat-footed. Apparently, you could not get into the military with flat feet. It seemed that they gave me every vaccination known to mankind, including eight shots against anthrax.

I was almost twenty-four when I applied, and I felt old compared to the bulk of the applicants, who appeared to be teenagers. Young men and women who were just seventeen were allowed to join if they had permission from their parents. I would say that about three-quarters of the applicants were men and one-quarter were women.

One day, a teenage girl entered the recruiting station and began to apply for entry to the army. A little later, a lieutenant colonel in military apparel burst through the door. All the soldiers and noncommissioned officers in the room jumped to their feet to salute him. Somebody whispered to me that he was in the marines. He swept by us all, grabbed his daughter by the arm, and shouted for all of us to hear, “There is no goddamn way that any daughter of mine is joining the fucking army.” He dragged her out the door and that was the last I saw of her. I had heard that marines and soldiers hated each other, but this was the first time I saw the emotion expressed openly.

Another time, at a military entrance processing station—a separate building to which I often had to go as my application inched forward in the army bureaucracy—I saw a poster on a wall that read: “Desertion in the time of war means death by a firing squad.”

I watched a young man and woman standing under the poster.

“Oh my God,” she said, “can they really do that?” I wondered the same thing as I was made to sign a paper saying that I had read and understood the poster.

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.

One last time, before signing, I asked Van Houten for reassurance that I would not be sent into combat and that I would be allowed to live with my family and work for the army in the United States.

“If World War Three breaks out and they are sending everybody overseas, then you could be required to do duty as well,” he said. “But even then, it would be unlikely. Because of your growing family, you would be the last person to be sent overseas.”

That seemed reasonable to me.

To seal the deal, Staff Sergeant Van Houten looked me in the eye, man to man, shook my hand, and said, “Soldier, you ain't got anything to worry about. You're going to be building bridges in the continental United States and home with your family every evening.”