When a soldier returns from war, normally he keeps his mouth shut. It’s one of those unwritten rules of the military, part of some arcane code of honor. But those rules only hold if you return to the States with hopes for “a normal life” with career opportunities. But now days, for many veterans, that’s not the case.
Joshua Key was a typical recruit. A good old boy with patriotic and conservative values, he comes from Guthrie, Oklahoma. Backed into a corner by economic necessity, he joins the Army only to face broken promises from recruiters that he would obtain training as a welder building bridges.
The way the military reeled in the other recruits and me many black and Latino, and all poor I now call the poverty draft.
Recruiters assure him of not being sent to Iraq because he is the father of three kids with one on the way. After years of moving around with wife Brandi, chasing low-income jobs, Key gives in to the bait ‘n switch methods of the U.S. Army, and with the help of a recruiter who coaches him to lie his way through an application (e.g. don’t mention the wife with the expectant baby), he enters 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.
The Deserter’s Tale breaks into three parts: Key’s poverty leading to his decision to join the army, then his moral awakening in Iraq, and then the aftermath of his desertion. When he comes home on leave, he decides he can’t return to Iraq because of moral repulsion, not because of cowardice. By far the most gripping portion of the book recounts his gradual crisis of conscience as he reflects on his own behavior, the madness of tactics that the military applied in Iraq, and America’s crumbling moral standing in the world.
Growing Up Tough, Patriotic, and Conservative
Key grew up tough. Always below poverty’s radar, his mother sank beneath desperation. Violent stepfathers passed through his life. His only anchor was his grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War. Through a confused adolescence, he settled down with a good woman. Key hoped for modest expectations: becoming a welder, raising his kids and loving his wife. But modern American economics makes that impossible. Before he turns around, he passes through boot camp, ready to serve his country and believed he was saving democracy, liberating a nation and doing his patriotic duty.
Growing up poor in Oklahoma also prepared me mentally for the war to come.
Despite his deception by recruiters, he keeps his head down, follows orders, serves his country, and hopes to return home to his family. As a private in one of the first divisions to enter Iraq, spring of 2003, Key participates and observes first-hand the breaking of promises made to Iraqis, the spiraling hatred of Americans and the self-defeating tactics the chain of command encourages among his fellow soldiers as they move throughout Iraq.
Conscience Catches Up
And then he pulls himself out of the hell his country condemns him to: his grandfather’s role-model helps him to rise above the military’s and the country’s 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 trains him to treat all Iraqis as terrorists. Following orders, Key’s most common duty adds up to more than 200 night raids to ransack houses in residential neighborhoods, terrifying the occupants, and beating males over five feet tall and sending them away, never to be seen again. At the end of so many raids, he reports that he and his comrades find not one weapons cache, not one cabal of terrorists. It unleashes the worst in him and his comrades as they terrorize innocent men, women, and children. He realizes that he and his comrades become evildoers, terrorists.
… 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 officers terrorize the grunts too, as Key reports, with daily briefings of presumed intelligence being passed along to them about how the troops were the next target in a well-planned campaign by terrorists that never appeared. And when a new commander takes over the company, his best pep-talk to inspire the grunts is to urge a suicide mission on them:
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.
Months pass, Key’s group moves around Iraq, and morale hits new lows. No one gets more than two hours of sleep at a time. Mortars fall all around nightly. With the heat high, water supplies low, they bunk down in places that other American forces have already bombed, buildings furnished with unexploded material.
As a private, Key’s can never object to the brutality soldiers around him practice. The chain of command responds harshly to any act of whistle-blowing. In the thick of war crimes around him, he witnesses his own officers participating in crimes. He has no access to any form of justice. He is swallowed up in a swamp of daily injustice and war-crimes against innocent civilians.
He can only resign to a passive resistance. When his weapon breaks down, he 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 belief 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.
He and a few of his comrades begin talking about shooting themselves in the foot as a ticket back home. Desperate, one grunt from another company tries this, the commander of Key’s unit declares 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.”
When our troops blow the brains out of a 10-year-old girl whom he befriended by giving her rations, the war’s absolute immorality punches him in the gut.
Added to this, other horror scenes arise. He recounts other incidents in nightmarish detail: coming upon American soldiers in the middle of the night, he sees them playing soccer with the heads of four Iraqi civilians they had just killed.
Deserter
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 SNAFU (military slang for bureaucratic screw up), a three-day delayed flight back to Iraq for which he reports (and then doesn’t report back), he chooses desertion.
Bitter irony paints his story of how he lays low in America. He moves his family from place to place in the Northeast and he and his wife survive hand-to-mouth, sleeping in rest stops and cheap motels.
Here is how I avoided detection,” he tells readers, “by following every word of training that I received in the army.
As he becomes a criminal fugitive from a criminal war, he reflects:
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. 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.
Finally, Key and his family sneak into Canada, hoping for asylum.
Ordinary Iraqis have paid very dearly for this war, and ordinary Americans are paying for it too with their lives and with their souls.”
Meanwhile us civilians dream about how we might upgrade our social class. We measure the value of our real-estate in a slow market. Some of us holy rollers even scare ourselves about the second coming, the rapture. Some of us are still pro-war and pro-life. We drive gas guzzling SUV’s to work from nine to five, fret about our kids, plan our retirement, and occasionally watch vague CNN reports about insurgents. We change our opinion about the war. It’s only created more terrorism than ever before and in places like Iraq where once there was none. But the war continues. So it goes. And so it goes.
Book cover via Grove/Atlantic Press
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Nora // Jun 3, 2008 at 1:22 pm
FANTASTIC article! Thank you for the honesty and dismaly gripping details. Makes me want to buy the book RIGHT now.
2 Mike // Jul 8, 2008 at 6:16 am
People need to understand that these people that have deserted were happy with the military life as long as the benefits were free. Now they are asked to fulfill their requirement they want none of it.
Mr. Key knows the reasons for him joining the military were for personal profit and he had no plan on fulfilling his part of the enlistment. He wasn’t drafted, he knowingly joined the military with the belief that he would enjoy all the benefits of service.
He states that he fled because of the abuses he saw first hand in Iraq. Sure it happens I’d be stupid to say that it doesn’t. What makes no since is for someone that is troubled by this to up and run and say nothing to any one until he cowrites a book for profit. Unless his real desire was to remove himself from the possiblity of bodily harm which would effect his Wife and two kids. In that case he should have never joined the military.
To top it all off he co-writes a book full of lies fabricated to generate sympathy.
“Recruiters assure him of not being sent to Iraq because he is the father of three kids with one on the way. After years of moving around with wife Brandi, chasing low-income jobs, Key gives in to the bait ân switch methods of the U.S. Army, and with the help of a recruiter who coaches him to lie his way through an application (e.g. donât mention the wife with the expectant baby), he enters the military.”
This is a complete lie/misinformation by the author/coauthor to generate sympathy. As a former vet/recruiter the military doesn’t care if your married and have kids when you sign up. In fact they like the fact of recruits with families as that fosters the military family.
3 Curt // Jul 8, 2008 at 5:16 pm
The “benefits of service” to which you refer are geared to induce the working poor into joining the military. These bonuses, etc., are only appealing to people who see no other path of promise than taking the leap into joining the military in hopes that they’ll get out alive and whole in order to reap those great benefits. The war is a sham, as was Vietnam. That you were a recruiter of people like Mr. Key for this godawful corrupt enterprise should will rest ill with your soul over time. I can only hope that the “profit” Mr. Key obtains from sales of this book will help him and his family recover from their exile to Canada.
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