The Deserter's Tale (6 page)

We have an expression in the army: Drink water, drive on. It means that when things get bad, you just have to suck it up and keep going. When I learned that I was in a combat-ready army company and that I might be sent to war at any point, I believed I had no choice but to take it and keep going. I felt humiliated to be taking abuse from every man in my platoon. I wanted to fit in and be respected. I wanted, one day, to be promoted to the rank of sergeant. I wanted them to see how fast and steady I was with my hands. Whether it came to shooting rifles, planting bombs, defusing mines, or driving trucks, I knew that I had fantastic hands and sensed that the only way to earn their respect was to show them how good I really was. I could put a mine in the ground and take it back out within a minute or so.

Sure enough, the abuse and insults continued until we were out on a demonstration range a week or two after my arrival in Fort Carson. The fall weather had turned cold and we were using a heater to stay warm in the field. But the heater stopped working. After I fixed the alternator and restored heat for my platoon buddies, I earned the name MacGyver—after the inventive television character—and was never called a “shit bag” again. I drank water and drove on.

I could never quite follow my instructions to rank the army first, God second, and family third in my own personal priorities, but I did my best to fit in and prove myself in the six months that passed before we were told to say good-bye to our families and pack our bags for war.

3

Early Days in Iraq

I BELIEVED THE REASONS THAT PRESIDENT GEORGE W.
Bush gave for beginning the Iraq War on March 20, 2003. I had faith in my country and accepted what I was told: Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States. I accepted the argument that it was time to overthrow Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. I wasn't eager to fight, but I would follow my commanders. As I've stated, I thought it was better for me to help stomp out terrorism and defend America than to leave the job to my own children.

When Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I was a private first class in the U.S. Army, stationed in Fort Carson, Colorado, with the 43rd Combat Engineer Company. Although our tanks and other military equipment had been shipped to the Middle East long before the offensive began, I suspected that we might not be sent into action. Soldiers in my platoon talked all the time about how, in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, it had taken the American ground offensive only one hundred hours to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

Sergeant Padilla, one of the noncommissioned officers in my squad, said not to worry about going to war. He said he had gone to the first Persian Gulf War, but then had simply waited for months in the Arabian desert, far from combat at all times. It would probably be more of the same this time, he told me.

I gave my wife similar reassurances. “It will be over before they can lift our butts into the air,” I told Brandi.

But Padilla and I were both wrong. On April 10, just three weeks after the American offensive began, I left for war with my company. We flew from Colorado Springs to Frankfurt, Germany, and then to Kuwait. I barely slept on the flights and kept wondering what I would be doing in Iraq. I expected I'd be using my military training in explosives, clearing the Iraqi desert of land mines so that American tanks could roll safely by. Leaving the plane in Kuwait, we boarded buses on the tarmac. En route to the military camp, I couldn't keep my eyes from drifting to the television screen on the bus.
Teletubbies
was playing—in Arabic. This was the first of many surprises during my time in the Middle East.

We stayed about two weeks at Camp Illinois in the Kuwaiti desert. We were rationed to one MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) and one liter of water per day, but Sergeant Lindsay—who was in charge of my platoon—ordered us to steal water left at night outside tents belonging to other army companies. I wondered about the surprise and anger that would break out among the soldiers who woke up to discover that they had no water in the desert. But as a private first class, I was on the bottom of the chain of command and anxious to prove myself. I took the water without getting caught. Shortly thereafter, Lindsay gave me a similar order. At night, when others were sleeping, I was to steal lights from other companies. Once more, I managed to do it without getting caught. After stealing them, I hooked up the lights to generators so that we could see inside our own tents at night.

During our time in the camp, I was sent to Kuwait City to help unload Abrams tanks from ships and get them lined up on flatbed trucks to be taken across the desert. I was excited to see a bit of the city—especially all the people driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis—and I got carried away while driving the tanks. In a stupid moment, I tried spinning a tank around in a circle, just to feel how well it maneuvered. In so doing I crashed into another tank. An air force officer saw the crash, but she then looked the other way. Luckily for me, the last thing she wanted was to be dragged into writing accident reports. I got away from there as fast as I could, walking with one hand on my chest—directly over my name and rank—so that I couldn't be identified and disciplined later.

On April 27, we packed up our things at Camp Illinois and began a fourteen-hour journey across the desert to Iraq. Our long convoy consisted of hundreds of flatbed trucks carrying about one thousand men from various military companies, as well as Humvees, Abrams tanks, and armored personnel carriers (APCs). We moved at a snail's pace—about twenty miles per hour. I sat up with one of the truck drivers, and along the way looked out at blown-up tanks and discarded vehicles with bones strewn about them.

Somewhere inside Iraq, our convoy divided into smaller pieces. Our company of 120 men was sent alone into Ramadi. It would be our job to relieve the 82nd Airborne Division and to take control of the city of some 300,000 people. I was terrified and expected that we would be driving straight into a war zone. I imagined Iraqi soldiers launching grenades and spraying bullets, and it didn't seem possible to me that such a small group. of Americans could defend themselves in the city. However, on entering Ramadi, we were greeted with waves and cheers. Children racing up toward our vehicles shouted for food and water. So far, at least, this was the last thing I'd expected from a war zone.

I traveled with my six squad mates in our armored personnel carrier. It was about the length of a four-door car and the width of a lane of traffic. Made of steel, it lacked the thickness of a tank and the durability to resist rocket-propelled grenades. There was room for four or so men below, and for another two or three up top to operate machine guns. From the moment I entered Iraq, I was obsessed with the thought of being caught inside a burning tank. I preferred to sit on top of the vehicle and risk sniper fire. In Iraq, whenever I traveled on our APC, I always took my position on top, monitoring the streets and the rooftops with my M-249 automatic weapon ready. The M-249 weighs thirty-six pounds fully loaded. It is formally called a squad automatic weapon, but we called it a SAW for short, because—at two thousand rounds a minute—it would saw right through any person it hit.

I was scared out of my wits that first day in Ramadi. Our own air force had just finished bombing these people, but as soon as we got out of our vehicles we began patrolling their streets, on foot. With nearly a hundred pounds of weaponry, equipment, and clothing on my back, I was about as mobile as a cow. It was just my platoon, twenty guys, walking single file through streets full of Iraqis. I could not stop thinking that anywhere, at any time, some half-starved sniper on a roof could have taken me out in no time flat. Iraqi kids surrounded me in swarms, hands out, asking for water and food.

I kept hearing the last words Brandi said to me before I flew out of Colorado Springs: “Don't you let those terrorists near you, Josh. Even if they are kids. Get them before they get you.” I also kept thinking about my officers' repeated warnings: “If you feel threatened, kill first and ask questions later.” I had army chants buzzing through my head, too, those chants we'd picked up in Fort Carson while we learned the ins and outs of blowing things up with C-4 explosives.

Take a playground

Fill it full of kids.

Drop on some napalm

And barbecue some ribs.

On that first day in Ramadi, when I saw kids coming at us from every direction with noses running and hands outstretched, I felt surrounded by Muslims, terrorists, bomb throwers, and killers. They came in all sizes, of that I was sure. Why not children too?

In Ramadi, my platoon set up camp in a bombed-out palace just a stone's throw from the Euphrates River. There was marble everywhere: the floors, walls, and pillars. I saw a destroyed elevator and a tiled mural of Saddam Hussein. The former groundskeeper ran up to us and said the palace had once belonged to Saddam Hussein himself. He was an older man who didn't appear to have anything to do, or any work to keep him going. He stayed near our troops to run errands and fetch drinks for the sergeants, for what I presumed was a little pocket change. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor, about one hundred feet from an unexploded U.S. bomb that sat half-buried in the floor, sticking out about six feet. It didn't seem like a safe place to be, but at least I had a roof over my head.

I ate my ration—beef enchilada—and tried to smother the flavor with Tabasco sauce. Most of the other soldiers had no interest in the one-ounce shots of hot sauce that came with their MREs, so I scooped them up and used double and triple doses every time I ate. Oklahoma isn't far from Mexico, and an Oklahoma boy needs his hot sauce. Sometimes, in the boredom and fatigue of life in Iraq, hoarding and gulping down Tabasco sauce became a diversion in itself. I remember still being hungry when I went to sleep that first night in Ramadi. There were no bombs dropping or mortars falling, but I was awakened at three a.m. and told to get my ass up quickly because in one hour we were going to raid a house full of terrorists.

We had a few minutes of orientation on the grounds of the palace. Captain Conde and some sergeants showed me and my squad mates a satellite photo of a house and a drawing of the layout of the inside. Our assignment was to blow off the door, burst into the house, raid it fast and raid it good—looking for contraband, caches of weapons, and signs of terrorists or terrorist activity, then rounding up the men and getting out of there damn fast. The longer we stayed in any one location, the longer somebody would have to put us in the sights of a rocket-propelled grenade or lob mortars at us.

I had no idea what to expect. Would I charge through the door, only to be blown to bits by a grenade? Would somebody with an AK-47 knock my Oklahoman ass right back out that door? Would some six-year-old terrorist with two days of gun training be waiting to put me in his crosshairs? The minutes ticked on, and I wanted the hour to speed forward so we could get to our destination and get on with it.

One or two of the guys did push-ups to pump themselves up. I borrowed Specialist Mason's portable CD player and bombed out my eardrums to the beat of Ozzy Osbourne. It got me going. High and ready for action. I topped that up by knocking back one or two more bottles of Tabasco sauce, which gave me a nice jolt. In Iraq, Tabasco sauce became my wake-up call.

I checked my watch, wished it would accelerate, and stuck some dip—Copenhagen, bourbon flavor—behind my lip. You can't manage a cigarette when you've got an M-249 automatic weapon on your arm. So dip was best. Makes your mouth black as sin, and rots the roots right out of your gums, but dip was my nicotine hit of choice going into that raid.

I committed our preraid instructions to memory. I knew the angles of the house, what door I would help blow down, how many floors were in the house, and who would do what when we busted inside. I would be third in the door, which means I was the second most likely to get shot if anybody had a mind to take us down, and I'd head to the left. Always, for every raid, I would be third in, heading left. I gripped my M-249. Yes, it could belt out two thousand rounds a minute but only in theory. You couldn't really hold your finger down that long. When you were blazing away like that, the bullets turned the barrel as hot as Hades. And if you held your finger down too long, it would warp the barrel.

It was time to go. We went out into the cool Iraqi night. We took a civilian vehicle—a white Toyota truck—so that the Iraqis would not suspect we were coming. Sergeant Fadinetz was at the wheel. He had a map with exact directions, including information about where to park the truck. Also in the truck was our squad leader, Sergeant Padilla, as well as Sergeant Jones, Specialist Sykora, another grunt, and me. We had our basic moves plotted out, like a set play in football. We drove into an upscale Iraqi neighborhood, passed a mosque, and parked near an attractive three-story house.

We ran out. It took thirty seconds for Jones and me to put the charge of C-4 plastic explosive on the door. Then we dashed around to the side of the house so we wouldn't blow ourselves up. You wouldn't want to be standing anywhere near that door when we blew it in. You'd be fried meat if you were near the explosion. I set off the blast, and then the six of us charged into the house. Jones went first—that skinny, red-haired Ohio boy was always hot to trot. Next went Fadinetz. Then me. After me came Padilla, and then Sykora, who gobbled up professional wrestling like it was going out of style—that, and porn videos; even in Iraq, the man got his hands on porn videos regularly. After Sykora came the other grunt from our squad. It was either Specialist Mason or Private First Class Lewis—I can't remember which of them was with me on that first raid.

With Jones leading the way we burst into the house. We were armed to the hilt. Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, machine guns, combat boots, the whole nine yards.

I'd never been inside an Iraqi's house before. We charged through a kitchen. I had been told by squad leader Padilla to check everything, so I even opened the fridge. Perhaps, I thought, I would find guns or grenades hidden inside. No such luck. In the fridge, all I saw was a bit of food. In the freezer I found big slabs of meat, uncovered. No wrapping. No plastic. Frozen, just like that. We ran into a living room with long couches, one along each wall. In this room with the abundance of couches we found two children, a teenager, and a woman. We also found two young men in the house. One looked like a teenager and the other was perhaps in his early twenties—brothers.

We hollered and cussed. I spat dip on the floor and screamed along with the other soldiers at the top of my lungs. I knew they didn't understand, but I hollered anyway.

“Get down,” I shouted. “Get the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.”

They didn't know what “get down” meant, so we knocked the two brothers to the floor, facedown. We put our knees on their backs, pulled their hands behind them, and faster than you can bat an eye we zipcuffed them. Zipcuffs are plastic handcuffs that lock on tight. They must have bit something fierce into those young men's skin. There was no key, nothing—the only way to get them off was to slice them with cutters.

We pushed the brothers outside, where twelve other soldiers from our platoon were waiting. Some loaded the Iraqi men onto the back of a truck. Others were “pulling perimeter,” which meant keeping guard to make sure that nobody entered or left the house or the surrounding area.