by Joshua Key
Twice during my time at boot camp, a drill sergeant by the name of Johnson made me get up from my bed in the middle of the night, collect one or two aides, and beat up recruits who were falling behind in their duties or failing to comply with orders.
Sergeants, I was told, were not allowed to beat up trainees. So they used me to do their dirty work, and I, stupidly, felt honored to do exactly as they said.
The first time, Sergeant Johnson sent me to beat up a trainee named Taylor, who had lunged at a drill sergeant and tried to start a fight with him. My buddies and I threw a blanket over his head and beat his chest and ribs with a sock stuffed with soap. I whacked him hard while he cried out in pain. “You been making trouble for all of us and there will be more of this tomorrow if you keep it up,” I said.
After taking his licks, Taylor didn’t try to start any more fights with noncommissioned officers.
A little while later, Sergeant Johnson sent me out again, to beat up a recruit by the name of Armstrong who had been refusing to take orders. Once more, my buddies and I jumped on him in the night, covered his head, and pummeled his body. Armstrong screamed during the whole beating and kept on screaming when we left. I had to run back and threaten to beat him again if he didn’t shut up. He fell silent after that, but in the morning I saw that my intimidation tactics had not worked.
When we were awakened in the morning, Armstrong began shouting to anyone who would listen that he would not get out of bed and that he would not follow orders. The drill sergeants took him away, and I never saw him again. I heard that he was let out of the army, although I don’t know if that is true. At the time, I thought of him as a weakling and a coward who was an embarrassment to the army.
I enjoyed boot camp. I liked the challenge involved in setting and defusing land mines. It was fun to learn how to set off bombs using plastic explosives and TNT. One day, well into our training, we were rewarded for our hard work with the opportunity to set off a bomb consisting of about two hundred pounds of C-4 explosives. After hiding inside a bunker at a distance of a few hundred yards, we ignited the bomb. The blast roared in our ears, and the earth shook. I felt the vibrations rolling through my body. Dirt and debris flew through the air. I had never witnessed such a powerful explosion in my life, found the experience exhilarating, and hoped I would get to make another bomb and see it explode.
I loved shooting on the practice range, and I earned a pin for my good marksmanship. When we were tested in rigging and defusing bombs, I got top grades in my company. After nine weeks of basic training, five weeks of sapper training, and three more weeks of training in how to drive tanks and armored personnel carriers, I moved to my permanent military station at Fort Carson, Colorado.
In October 2002, Brandi, the boys, and I moved into a modest row house on the new base. I still believed that Fort Carson was a “nondeployable” base, one that did not send soldiers to war, but that last bubble burst within minutes of my arrival.
A specialist named Abby was sent to pick me up at the reception area on base. When he showed up, he said that I would be joining the 43rd Combat Engineer Company.
“Since the nineteenth century, we’ve been in every major war the United States has fought and we’re proud of it,” he said.
I was shocked, but I said nothing as he drove me to my barracks.
Over the next days, I learned that I had been placed in the third squad of the first platoon of the 43rd CEC, as it was called. Each squad had six or seven members, so there were about twenty people in a platoon. There were six platoons in the 43rd CEC, for a total of about 120 men. Most of us were combat engineers, trained in how to make and defuse bombs and mines. Our company was part of the second squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The 3rd ACR had its own distinguished wartime history. Known also as the “Brave Rifles,” soldiers with the 3rd ACR’s precursors had fought in the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both world wars, and the Persian Gulf War, among others. One of the 3rd ACR’s most famous and colorful generals was George S. Patton Jr., who during World War II favored ivory-handled Colt .45 revolvers and traveled with a bull terrier named Willie.
Shortly after arriving at Fort Carson, I paid a visit one afternoon to the office of Lieutenant Joyce and found him sitting in his chair.
“Do I have permission to speak, sir?”
“Yes, soldier.”
“Sir, when I joined the military I was told I was being sent to a nondeployable base. But I hear that the 43rd Combat Engineer Company is a combat company. Is there some way we can fix this problem, so I can be sent to a nondeployable unit?”
“Soldier, you obviously don’t understand the military way of life. Get the hell out of my office.”
I felt that everything was lost, and that I should get out of his office before I made matters worse for myself. I paid for that complaint.
The next morning my squad leader, Sergeant Padilla, shouted in my face.
“You broke rank by speaking to Lieutenant Joyce and you’re a fucking piece of shit.”
The team leader at the time, Specialist Abby, continued with the endless stream of insults. I was “smoked,” as they say, for several days. They made me do push-ups, duck walks, crawl around on my hands and knees, and stand at attention while every man in my platoon hollered that I was a “useless asshole” and a “stupid shit.”
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 terror
ist 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.