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The Sunday Times — Magazine
August 27, 2006
Report
You wouldn’t catch me dead in Iraq
Scores of American troops are deserting — even from the front line in Iraq. But where have they gone? And why isn’t the US Army after them? Peter Laufer tracked down four of the deserters
JOSHUA KEY
43rd Company of Combat Engineers, at Fort Carson, Colorado. Age: 28
We was going along the Euphrates river,” says Joshua Key, detailing a recurring nightmare that features a scene he stumbled into shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
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Dead baby, Iraq invasion, 2003
The illegal invasion of Iraq 2003, by the US military, the American government, its Congress, President, Vice-President, Rice, Rumsfeld, Democrat and Republican leaders, and its people. Photo: www.robert-fisk.com/ |
“It’s a road right in the city of Ramadi.
We turned a sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies.
The heads laying over here and the bodies over there and US troops in between them.
I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what in the hell happened here?
What’s caused this?
Why in the hell did this happen?’
We get out and somebody was screaming, ‘We f***ing lost it here!’
I’m thinking, ‘Oh yes, somebody definitely lost it here.’”
Key says he was ordered to look for evidence of a firefight, for something to explain what had happened to the beheaded Iraqis. “I look around just for a few seconds and I don’t see anything.”
Then he witnessed the sight that still triggers the nightmares.
“I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like soccer balls.
I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and thought, ‘I can’t be no part of this.
This is crazy.
I came here to fight and be prepared for war, but this is outrageous.’”
He’s convinced that there was no firefight.
“A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells.
There was never no shells.”
He still cannot get the scene out of his mind:
“You just see heads everywhere.
You wake up, you’ll just be sitting there, like you’re in a foxhole.
I can still see Iraq just as clearly as it was the day I was there.
You’ll just be on the side of a little river running through the city, trash piled up, filled with dead.
I don’t sleep that much, you might say.”
His wife, Brandi, nods in agreement, and says that he cries in his sleep.
We’re sitting on the back porch of the Toronto house where Key and his wife and their four small children have been living in exile since Key deserted to Canada.
They’ve settled in a rent-free basement apartment, courtesy of a landlord sympathetic to their plight.
Joshua smokes one cigarette after another and drinks coffee while we talk.
There’s a scraggly beard on his still-boyish face; his eyes look weary.
Key rejects the American government line that the Iraqis fighting the occupation are terrorists.
“I’m thinking, ‘What the hell?’
I mean, that’s not a terrorist.
That’s the man’s home.
That’s his son, that’s the father, that’s the mother, that’s the sister.
Houses are destroyed.
Husbands are detained, and wives don’t even know where they’re at.
I mean, them are pissed-off people, and they have a reason to be.
I would never wish this upon myself or my family, so why would I wish it upon them?”
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Wounded child, Iraq invasion, 2003
The illegal invasion of Iraq 2003, by the US military, the American government, its Congress, President, Vice-President, Rice, Rumsfeld, Democrat and Republican leaders, and its people. Photo: www.robert-fisk.com/ |
On security duty in the Iraqi streets, Key found himself talking to the locals.
He was surprised by how many spoke English, and he was frustrated by the military regulations that forbade him to accept dinner invitations in their homes.
“I’m not your perfect killing machine,” he admits. “That’s where I broke the rules. I broke the rules by having a conscience.”
And the more time he spent in Iraq, the more his conscience developed.
“I was trained to be a total killer. I was trained in booby traps, explosives, landmines.”
He pauses. “Hell, if you want to get technical about it, I was made to be an American terrorist. I was trained in everything that a terrorist is trained to do.”
In case I might have missed his point, he says it again. “I mean terrorist.”
Deserting seemed the only viable alternative, Key says. He did it, he insists, because he was lied to “by my president”.
Iraq – it was obvious to him – was no threat to the US.
Key feels that some of his unit were trigger-happy. He recalls another incident that haunts him.
He was in an armoured personnel carrier when an Iraqi man in a truck cut them off, making a wrong turn.
One of his squad started firing at the truck.
“The first shot, the truck sort of started slowing down,” Key recounts. “And then he shot the next shot, and when he shot that next shot, it, you know, exploded.”
Key watched the truck turn to debris. “It was very strange. He was just going along and because he tried to cut in front of us... No kind of combat reasons or anything of such…”
| Dead babiesDue to USBombingIraq2003 |
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Key seems still in shock at the utter senselessness of it all.
“Why did it happen and what was the cause for it?
When I asked that question, I was told, basically, ‘You didn’t see anything, you know?’
Nobody asked no questions.”
Assigned to raid houses, Key was soon appalled by the job.
“I mean, yeah, they’re screaming and hollering out their lungs.
It’s traumatic on both parts because you’ve got somebody yelling at you, which might be a woman.
You’re yelling back at her, telling her to get on the ground or get out of the house.
She don’t know what you’re saying and vice versa.
It got to me.
We’re the ones sending their husbands or their children off, and when you do that, it gets even more traumatic because then they’re distraught.
Of course, you can’t comfort them because you don’t know what to say.”
While the residents are restrained, the search progresses.
“Oh, you completely destroy the home – completely destroy it,” he says.
“If there’s like cabinets or something that’s locked, you kick them in.
The soldiers take what they want.
Completely ransack it.”
He estimates that he participated in about 100 raids.
“I never found anything in a home.
You might find one AK-47, but that’s for personal use.
But I never once found the big caches of weapons they supposed were there.
I never once found members of the Ba’ath party, terrorists, insurgents.
We never found any of that.”
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Child amputated arms, Iraq invasion, 2003.
The illegal invasion of Iraq 2003, by the US military, the American government, its Congress, President, Vice-President, Rice, Rumsfeld, Democrat and Republican leaders, and its people. Photo: www.robert-fisk.com/ |
A soldier’s life was never Joshua Key’s dream. He was living in Guthrie, Oklahoma, just looking for a decent job.
“We had two kids at the time and my third boy was on the way,” he says.
“There’s no work there.
There wasn’t going to be a future.
Of course you can get a job working at McDonald’s, but that wasn’t going to pay the bills.”
The local army-recruiting station beckoned.
Shortly after he finished basic training, he was en route to the war zone.
After eight months of fighting, he received two weeks’ leave back in the US. At the end of that, he was due for another Iraq tour.
He didn’t report for duty. Key and his wife packed up, took their children and ran, with the intention of getting as far from his base in familiar Colorado as possible.
The family ran out of money in Philadelphia, and Key found work as a welder.
They lived an underground lifestyle for over a year, frequently checking out of one hotel and into another, worried that if they stayed too long at one place they would attract attention.
“I was paranoid,” Key says, and he contemplated deserting to Canada.
The research was easy. He went online and searched for “deserter needs help to go Awol”.
Up popped details about others who had escaped across the border. He and Brandi decided to opt for a new life as Canadians. George W Bush should be the one to go to prison, says Key.
“On the day he goes to prison, I’ll go sit in prison with him. Let’s go. I’ll face it for that music. But that ain’t never going to happen,” he laughs.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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