The Deserter’s Tale
The Story of An Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq
By Joshua Key as told to Lawrence Hill
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York, 2007
The way the military reeled in the other recruits and me—many black and Latino, and all poor—I now call the poverty draft.
With the Washington Post’s revelatory two-part series on how our wounded soldiers are being parked in outpatient facilities replete with "mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses," it’s clear this country needs to have a national dialogue about who is doing the fighting in this war and what our responsibilities are to them.
Joshua Key was a typical recruit, hailing from Guthrie, Oklahoma, backed into a corner by economic necessity and broken promises of being trained to build bridges – with an assurance of not being sent to Iraq – because he was the father of three kids with one on the way. After years of moving around with wife Brandi chasing low-income jobs, Key succumbed to the misleading seduction of the U.S. Army, and with the help of a recruiter who coached him to lie his way through an application (don’t mention the wife with the expectant baby), he entered the military.
They were smart men, those recruiters. They didn’t waste time at the doors of doctors and lawyers but came straight for me.
Key’s childhood was tough. Always living on the border of poverty, his mother sank beneath depression, and a series of brutalizing stepfathers passed through Key’s life, with the only anchor being his grandfather, who was a veteran of the Korean War. Through an adolescence of drinking, driving pick-up trucks, shooting beer bottles in the back yard and settling down with a good woman, Key set his expectations modestly. All he ever wanted was to become a welder, raise his kids and love his wife. But the economics of modern America made that impossible, and he soon found himself in boot camp, ready to serve his country and believing he was on his way to saving democracy, liberating a nation and doing his patriotic duty.
Growing up poor in Oklahoma also prepared me mentally for the war to come.
Even when it became apparent he’d been misled by recruiters and would be going to Iraq, he vowed to keep his head down, do his job, serve his country and come home to his family. As a private in one of the first divisions to enter Iraq in the spring of 2003, Key participated and observed first-hand the breaking of promises made to Iraqis, the spiraling hatred of Americans and the self-defeating anarchy let loose in himself and his fellow soldiers as they moved throughout Iraq.
And a funny thing happened: A truly moral conscience was born from the pressure of its own unraveling.
My own moral judgment was disintegrating under the pressure of being a soldier, feeling vulnerable, and having no clear enemy to kill in Iraq. We were encouraged to beat up on the enemy; given the absence of any clearly understood enemy, we picked our fights with civilians who were powerless to resist. We knew that we would not have to account for our actions.
Boot camp prepared him to view all Iraqis as the enemy, and once on the ground in Iraq, he and his fellow soldiers were cautioned to avoid "fraternizing with the enemy" -- any Iraqi. Key wound up participating in what he estimates now to be more than 200 night raids on houses in residential neighborhoods, terrifying the occupants, destroying furniture, yelling, rounding up all males over five feet tall and sending them away, never to be seen again – and reports that at the end of these hundreds of raids, not one weapons cache was found, not one cabal of terrorists was disrupted. It unleashed the worst in himself and his military comrades, and terrorized innocents.
The Deserter’s Tale is broken down into three parts: the first leading up to Key’s decision to join the army, the story of his moral awakening in Iraq and the aftermath of his desertion, when he came home on leave and decided he couldn’t return, not out of cowardice or fear, but out of moral repulsion. By far the most gripping portion of the book recounts his gradual heeding of conscience as he faces brutal facts about himself, the madness of tactics the military was using in Iraq, and America’s moral standing in the world.
... 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.
The grunts too, as Key reports, were terrorized in a fashion by their own superiors, with daily briefings of presumed intelligence being passed along to them about how the troops were to be the next target in a well-planned campaign by some nebulous terrorist army that never seemsedto appear. And when his company is assigned a new commander who urges a suicidal mission on the troops and a sergeant objects, American soldiers sit still and hear this:
"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."
As the months pass and Key’s group is moved around Iraq, morale hits new lows. No one gets more than two hours of sleep at a time. Mortars are falling all around nightly. Water is lacking. The heat is horrible. It seems nearly every place in which the troops are quartered has been bombed to smithereens by American forces and is a death trap, with unexploded materiel lying ten feet from their heads.
Key manages to survive the nightmare by shutting up most of the time and making use of his mechanical ingenuity by rigging up air conditioners, hot wiring cars and dreaming of getting home. As a private, he’s in no position to raise objections to the brutality he sees perpetuated by soldiers around him – and this perhaps is the most devastating realization for him. Not only will he probably be disciplined if he speaks up, any act of whistleblowing in the environment would be totally disregarded. In the thick of it as he is, with no access to higher personnel and his own officers participating in lawbreaking, he is in the grip of an ethical dilemma that eats away at him in small pieces daily.
His solution is to fall back on passive resistance, almost without planning. When his weapon becomes dysfunctional, he doesn’t have it repaired but carries it with him nonetheless, useless as it is.
I had not fired my M-249 since it had stopped working a month or two earlier. I had taken part in about two hundred house raids but had months earlier lost any believe in the cause. Most of my buddies felt the same way. The house raids were nothing but an excuse to insult, intimidate, and arrest Iraqis. They gave us a convenient target to vent our frustrations, never having any real enemies to kill in battle.
Desperately demoralized and depressed, he and a few of his fellow soldiers begin talking about shooting themselves in the foot to get sent back home. After one grunt from another company tries this, the commander of Key’s unit declared that "Any soldier who shot himself would be patched up in Germany and sent right back into action."
I believed he was serious, and stopped thinking so much of hurting myself, but I often considered another strategy and tried it a few times. While we took cover from flying bullets and shrapnel, sometimes I stuck out my arm in harm’s way, hoping that an enemy bullet might smash into it.
The two events that crystallize for him the absolute immorality of the war is the killing by our troops of a 10-year-old girl he befriended by giving her MRE’s, and a scene he reports in nightmarish detail: coming upon American soldiers in the middle of the night playing soccer with the heads of four Iraqi civilians they had just killed.
When he finally gets sent home for a two-week leave, he wrestles with the following:
I ... tried not to think about which was worse: beating up and killing the civilians of Iraq or refusing to do it any more and becoming a criminal.
In the end, by a fluke of a three-day delayed flight back to Iraq for which he reports (and then doesn’t report back), he chooses desertion. His account of laying low in America holds an irony, as he moves his family from place to place in the Northeast and he and his wife get low-paying jobs to survive hand-to-mouth, sleeping in rest stops and the occasional cheap hotel room. "Here is how I avoided detection," he tells readers, "by following every word of training that I received in the army."
His reflections as he moves around the country are devastating.
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.
**
America felt like a dreamland. It seemed to me that not a soul in the country had the faintest clue about what I had been living through every day in Iraq.... Walking about the city, a person visiting from another country would have had no idea that the United States was at war in Iraq.
**
A lot of ingenuity goes into killing, and it seems to me now a sad waste of money and intelligence.
**
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.
Ultimately, Key and his family made it to Canada, where they are awaiting word on whether they will be legally accepted for asylum. But the questions he raise, coupled with the Washington Post stories about treatment of veterans, will not go away. Why does the flesh-price of war always fall disproportionately on those with lower income? How much ingenuity and promise of these young men and women are being wasted on destruction? How much longer can we sweep the damaged under the rug so the American public doesn’t have to see the consequences of the actions of its leadership? And even for those not wounded, and not officially handed a PTSD diagnosis, how smooth a transition back into civil society can reasonably be expected from those who have been ordered to perpetrate atrocities – or bear silent witness to them?
As Key puts it near the end of his book:
Ordinary Iraqis have paid very dearly for this war, and ordinary Americans are paying for it too with their lives and with their souls.
How many lives and souls will we squander as a nation before the madness ends?