by Joshua Key
I wouldn’t wish my childhood on anyone, and I want to protect my own children from a life like mine. But I will say one thing for it: learning to cope day after day with harshness gave me the strength to push through the nightmare in Iraq and the stubbornness to find a way out. Perhaps my childhood outrage rekindled after some months in Iraq and made it possible for me to do the one thing a soldier must never do: think for myself and question my commanders.
The Oklahoma summers were hotter than hell. My brother and cousins and I would make mud pies and watch them dry out in the sun. It never took long in 115 degree heat. My cousins liked to swim in the pond, but I mostly stayed out of the water because I lived in fear of cottonmouth snakes. We dug pretend war tunnels underground and shot paint balls at one another until, at thirteen, we graduated to whiskey and beer and racing down country roads in pickup trucks.
We called the spring “beer-drinking weather,” and early on we found two more ways to amuse ourselves. After drinking late into the night we would go out cow-tipping in farmers’ fields. Cows fall asleep standing on their feet, and we would sneak up and knock them over real fast. They had no balance at all and would topple like bowling pins. Farmers didn’t like our pranks, and we had to clear out as fast as we could before someone caught sight of our license plates.
Our second amusement was mailbox crashing. A friend and I would go tearing down the road in my 1992 Nissan pickup. While he drove, I leaned out the side window with a baseball bat, swinging at the country mailboxes. You can get in a decent pop at thirty miles an hour.
Three miles down the road lived my junior high school shop teacher. Mr. Smith was a heavyset man with gray hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He wasn’t a bad teacher, but he had an irresistible mailbox. Each time I smashed up his mailbox he put in a new one. Finally, he installed a rubber mailbox. The baseball bat didn’t do any good, so I—using a recipe from The Anarchist Cookbook—cooked up homemade napalm on my friend’s kitchen stove, carried it in an old paint can, and poured it all over the mailbox, which melted. Once more, my shop teacher couldn’t get his letters delivered.
Some of the men in my life—my grandfather and J.W. in particular—had a lot of prejudices about blacks and Asians. One time, I was working in a doughnut store run by one of my aunts and my grandfather happened to be there when a number of black college students walked through the door. I was mortified to hear him mumble aloud about how he wished the Ku Klux Klan would come back. I noticed one of the students giving him a withering look, as if to say, “You are one pathetic loser.” I was relieved that he and his buddies got out the door without incident and—even though I loved my grandfather deeply—resolved not to be like him in that respect. I brought black friends by the house, and kept doing it even after he asked me to stop. “Grandpa, you’ve got to get out of the 1950s,” I would tell him. “It’s the 1990s now.”
I think that the fear of the unknown—blacks and Asians, in this case—led my grandfather to hold those prejudices, and I would say that the very same fears made it easy for too many American soldiers—myself included—to abuse Iraqi civilians. In our training, our commanders taught us to demonize and hate Iraqis and Muslims. Looking back, I am sorry to admit that some of the negative parts of my own upbringing climbed from the darkness of my soul and shook hands, in a way, with my army training. It took some time in Iraq before I could put the hateful thoughts behind me.
During my childhood in Guthrie, folks used to say that one day there would be another war between the North and the South. People sometimes wish they could bring back the past, but I don’t think they truly want war in their own backyards. If they had any idea of what war meant—if they could picture blood spilling from white, black, or any other bodies—I am quite sure they wouldn’t want it. I learned this the hard way, at war in Iraq. The first time an innocent civilian died before my eyes, I didn’t ask myself questions about her racial or ethnic background. The only question to ask was why she had to die in the first place. When I look back at my childhood in Guthrie, I think all the talk about bringing back another war between the North and the South was just a way to let out hot air, and no more than an ignorant way to shoot the breeze. I think that deep down all such people really wanted was to pass the time by watching—or joining in—an old-fashioned fistfight. The summers were hot and god-awful boring, and there wasn’t much to do in Guthrie except get drunk and start fighting. In that respect, I quickly became a model citizen.
I got in my first fight when I was eight. A thirteenyear-old boy started picking on a kid in my grade, so I kicked the bully in the face. He was a foot taller and a whole lot bigger. He blacked both of my eyes and busted my lip. I had another stepdad back then, and I feared that I would get a whupping for coming home beaten in a fight. I had been at a football game, and when my stepdad came to pick me up I pointed out the boy I had fought. My stepdad noticed the size of the older boy and said I had done enough for the day.
I fought through junior high and kept fighting in high school. I fought black kids and I fought white. I even fought teammates on my football team. I fought so many times that my jaw still locks up on occasion from having taken so many punches.
When I was about seventeen, I got arrested for taking a swing at a police officer who tried to stop me from going to help my mother during a forest fire. My grandmother nearly got herself charged for barging into the police station, swearing at all the officers, and demanding my release.
In court, the judge suspended the charges when he heard that the police officer had ganged up with other cops and roughed me up. My only requirement was to attend a few classes on anger management. I took the classes with two men who had gotten into all sorts of trouble. One of them had beaten up his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Not long after the anger management instruction ended, I discovered the two classmates yet again pounding the snot out of the ex-wife’s boyfriend. At the time, I thought that anger management was a bit of a joke. Looking back, however, I think that everybody would have been better off if a few soldiers I know had been sent to anger management class instead of Iraq.
* * *
These days, Brandi and I don’t let our children play with toy guns. I see the irony in that. Zackary, our eldest, is nine years old. When I was his age, one of my favorite pastimes was to stand alone in the backyard, blasting apart beer bottles with a .22 rifle. Because he’d come from another country, had an American accent, and took some time fitting into his new Canadian school, Zackary became the target of a bully. One of my biggest challenges as a father was not to tell him to cock his arm and slug the bully in the mouth. But I know that Zackary will do better things in life and that the world will be a better place if he learns to use words to solve his problems.
My first experience with terrorism was in my home state of Oklahoma, and I know that 168 lives would not have been lost if a man named Timothy McVeigh had been taught to use words instead of force. In 1995, when the ex-soldier and war veteran blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, we felt the blast in our high school some twenty miles away. McVeigh used a truckload of ammonium nitrate—cow shit fertilizer, basically—to kill all those people, including nineteen children. A boy in my school lost his dad in the explosion, and a girl lost both of her parents. Before the explosion, some of the kids in school had teased this girl about coming from a poor family. The teasing stopped after the explosion. I had no idea what to say to a person who had lost both her parents, so I just felt sorry for her and said nothing at all. Classes were canceled as soon as we got the news. We assembled in school for the rest of the day to watch the television reports. Within forty-eight hours, the police had charged Timothy McVeigh with blowing up the building. I couldn’t believe it. I had figured it was the work of a foreign terrorist. But it was an American—a former gunnery sergeant in the 1st Infantry Division in the Persian Gulf War—who had blown up his own people.
When I started going out with Brandi, she knew that I
had gotten into my share of fights down by the Cimarron River, but her background was just as rough as mine. She had plenty of fights under her own belt and had also been warned that she’d face consequences at home if she lost a fight in the streets. I told her I had seen my mother get beaten too much, and that I would never beat a woman. She liked that about me. She liked everything about me. She was so like me that there was barely anything that needed explanation. We were both poor, had grown up with way too much violence in our family lives, and wanted to put the worst of our lives behind us. I knew, within five seconds of meeting her, that she wanted to be a good person and to lead a good life. I believe she felt the same way about me.
Brandi and I were both eighteen when we met. I was still in twelfth grade but she had already graduated from high school and was working in a dollar store. The day after we met, I stopped by the store to ask her out to dinner. She accepted the date but persuaded me to forget the restaurant and settle on fast food. Why waste money when we could park the pickup by a quiet creek, talk, look out at the water, and let the night grow late?
Brandi liked my mother, but she could read J.W. like a book. She knew the score. When Brandi was three her mother was murdered. At the time, her father had been doing a seven-year jail term. J.W. tried to tell Brandi and me what we could and couldn’t do in bed, but we didn’t listen to him. It wasn’t his trailer anyway, it was my mother’s. To hell with his instructions that Brandi sleep on one side of a bedsheet and that I sleep on the other.
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 comf
ortable. 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.