by Joshua Key
During our quiet time, some of the men read or listened to music. Most of them played Game Boys. Many times, we gathered together in groups to watch bootleg videos that we purchased from Iraqi street vendors or from Sayeed, a nineteen-year-old Iraqi who had studied in England and who was paid $20 a week to serve as our interpreter and errand boy. On portable DVD players, we watched every kind of film imaginable. Action films. War movies. Porn. One time, Sayeed brought us a porn movie featuring Asian children. While I watched in horror, a teenage girl in the video was tied on a stretcher and raped by two men. In the middle of a war zone, with tanks rolling and jets screaming, I stared numbly at the screen and asked myself what had gone wrong with the world. The other soldiers and I sat there stupidly and watched until Staff Sergeant Lindsay broke up the show, called us all perverts, snatched the DVD, and broke it with his hands.
Our commanders told us it was okay to masturbate, because they wanted us to check if we had any blood in our sperm—which, we were told, might suggest that we had ingested E. coli. For a laugh, some of the men began a competition to see which one could go the longest without masturbating. We worked on the honor system, but it would have been hard to lie anyway.
Because I was eating with, crapping next to, sleeping beside, and busting into homes with the same guys day in and day out, I ended up knowing them all pretty well. There’s barely a thing about them I didn’t know. I knew whose wife has just written him a Dear John letter or, worse, told the poor guy, after he had stood in line for two hours to use a phone, that she had a new man in her bed. I knew who came from Indiana and who hailed from Alaska. I knew who liked video games and who read Dean Koontz novels. I knew which soldier had the biggest penis —measured by socket wrench, while the rest of us looked on—and who wanted to take a course in small engine repair when he got the hell out of Iraq. But one thing I almost never knew were the guys’ first names. We all had our last names written on our uniforms, and our rank clearly marked, so we all went by our last names. Nobody knew me as Josh. Nobody called me Josh. I was Key to one and all of them, and I knew only their last names.
Because I grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and because I was five foot nine and weighed 215 pounds, I got called “fat boy” more times than I care to remember, and I had to listen to a whole lot of nonsense about how people from Oklahoma fucked hogs. My weight dropped fast in Iraq, however, and people stopped teasing me when they realized I was the quickest guy around when it came to using my hands. I can make just about any broken thing work. I may not fix it properly, but I’ll fix it well enough to make it go again, and as a result they started calling me MacGyver again. Under orders, I jump-started Iraqi trucks, taxis, and cars. By making myself useful, I kept the bullshit off my back and I managed to get along with most soldiers.
Specialist Sykora got it into his head to ask Sayeed, our interpreter, about how to make sexual taunts in Arabic. He and a bunch of others learned to say something like sofeeni deeaytcha, which was supposed to mean “show me your tits,” and sofeeni goose goose, which apparently meant “show me your pussy.” On foot patrols he and a few others would shout the words at Iraqi women in the street. I never said those words, and I worried about the safety of the Iraqi women. Sometimes they were walking with their husbands. If their situation at home was anything like my mother’s, I knew that their husbands would beat them just for having been taunted in this manner.
One day, while we were guarding the children’s hospital in Ramadi, Jones—who also enjoyed taunting Iraqi women—stopped a woman doctor as she was entering the building. He made her remove her veil. I told Jones to leave her alone, but it was too late. She removed the veil and stared into Jones’s face. In her eyes I could see liquid fury. Later that day, as she was leaving, she passed us again and said to Jones, “Actually, you asshole, I was born and raised in Boise, Idaho.” She went on to say that she had come to Iraq to help her people during the war. Jones was so embarrassed that he could not speak, and I was pleased for the woman from Idaho.
In the month of May, my platoon was ordered to go to the Ramadi police station to retrieve a truck full of rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. I was told that the truck contained one thousand rounds of live ammunition that had been taken from the Iraqis in battle. Escorted by our platoon, Iraqi police officers drove the truck full of ammunition to an isolated spot fifteen minutes outside the city, but we were ordered to wait for authorization before blowing up the truck. In a display of typical army inefficiency, we left the truck unguarded in the desert and returned to Ramadi. The next day, after receiving the detonation order, we returned to blow up the truck. But it was gone. I shook my head in disgust. Great work, I thought. We just gave a thousand rounds of ammunition right back to the enemy.
After about a month in Iraq, the 43rd CEC was transferred out of Ramadi. We moved to Fallujah for a two-week period. One day in early June, not long into our stay in the new city, my platoon mates and I were standing guard outside a public building. Local Iraqi officials met in this building and held talks there with our own military commanders.
While standing at the back of the compound, I felt the ground shaking under a good thirty seconds of heavy gunfire. The barrage came from the other side of the building, which was being guarded by members of the 82nd Airborne Division. I heard voices crackling on army radios.
“What happened?” my squad leader asked.
“Looks like somebody got trigger-happy,” someone else said on the radio.
It was clear that once one soldier had started shooting, everybody else had joined in. A few minutes later, I saw about a dozen body bags being carried away and was told that the victims were all Iraqi civilians. It was the first time I was aware of Iraqi civilians being killed by American soldiers. I heard no more about the incident. I was struck by the absence of discussion in the aftermath. I kept my mouth shut. Soldiers were not allowed to ask questions; to do so showed insubordination and invited punishment. In my presence, no soldiers or officers asked how or why the civilians had been killed, and no explanations were offered. I came to see that silence usually followed in the wake of a killing.
One of my jobs in Fallujah and elsewhere was to monitor cars at traffic control points. We stopped cars, searched them, and searched drivers. When we found people out driving after the nighttime curfew, we detained them and took their vehicles.
I hated it when people smiled at me at checkpoints. It made me want to punch them. What did they have to smile about? Did they know something I didn’t know? Were they planning some sort of attack?
Early in my stay in Fallujah, while I was on checkpoint duty, one driver got out of his car and told me—in English—to go fuck myself. I felt an explosion of hatred and anger in that moment. I started beating the man. I was even tempted to shoot him. Something about all my pent-up anger and fear craved an explosion of violence in that very moment, but Lindsay—the sergeant first class who was overseeing our platoon at the time—grabbed me and pulled me back.
“Lay off him, Key” was all he said.
He didn’t punish me or say anything more about it. I was angry at the time, but not many minutes passed before I felt thankful that I had been stopped from seriously harming or killing the man.
I backed away from beating people at checkpoints but saw that others continued to hand out beatings just as often as they felt the urge.
While we were still doing traffic control in the first week of June in Fallujah, I saw Sergeant Lindsay join up with Specialist Mason to beat the daylights out of a man. My mouth fell open. Even Lindsay was losing it now. I saw the beating but had no idea what had provoked it. Maybe the man had said the wrong thing, or had smiled the wrong way. One thing was clear: he hadn’t attempted any sort of assault or attack. In my countless days at traffic control points, I never once saw an Iraqi civilian threaten or harm an American soldier. Lindsay and Mason kicked the man in the back and the head and kept on kicking once he f
ell down. They rubbed his face in the sand and then began spitting on him. I remember thinking that it was going way too far, but I knew I didn’t have the rank to stop the attack. Finally, an Abrams tank belonging to another platoon stopped and a sergeant jumped out.
“What the hell are you doing?” the sergeant asked, telling Mason to get away from the man and to stand behind the tank.
Lindsay told the sergeant to mind his own business. “My troops will do whatever I tell them to do,” he said.
The tank sergeant did not outrank Lindsay, so he got back inside and drove on. Lindsay and Mason did not return to their beating, however. They let the man get up, climb into his car, and drive away. We never discussed the incident in our platoon. It was not that far out of the ordinary. Every day or two, I saw American troops beating the daylights out of Iraqi civilians. In our own platoon, all we had to do was look at our highest-ranking sergeant to see that it was okay to kick and punch Iraqis whenever we felt the urge. Fortunately, I no longer felt the urge. But I also knew that I was powerless to stop Sergeant Lindsay from punching an Iraqi civilian. If I had spoken directly to him about the beating, I would have been violating the chain of command. I wasn’t even authorized to speak to a superior officer unless he addressed me first. If I saw something that concerned me in Lindsay’s behavior, the only course of action—apart from keeping my mouth shut—would have been to speak to my team leader, who, if he felt like it, would have had to speak to his squad leader, who, in turn—if so inclined—would have had to go to Lindsay himself. For all that, I was sure, I would have been bawled out for leaving my post and likely docked some of my pay. The simplest thing to do was keep my mouth shut and stay out of trouble, so that is what I did.
The people of Fallujah were so accustomed to bullets flying that some of them walked about oblivious to the dangers. It was as if they felt their lives were so entirely in the hands of God that they believed it would be useless even to bother ducking for cover. One day, I was with my squad mates on our armored personnel carrier, chasing a truck. Somebody said that shots had been fired at us from the truck. As it drove and we gave chase over a bridge, my squad leader—Sergeant Padilla—sat on top of our APC, blasting away with his .50-caliber machine gun. Perched as usual on top of our vehicle, I could see an old man walking toward us. Bullets whistled past him, blasting chips out of concrete walls on the side of the bridge, but the old man kept walking calmly, as if in a dream. I thought it was a miracle that he was not hit, but he didn’t even appear to be thinking about it.
Unfortunately, the violence meted out by American troops was not limited to kicking and punching. One day in our first week in Fallujah, my entire platoon—three squads, consisting of a total of about twenty men—was stationed at a traffic control point. Lieutenant Joyce was the highest-ranking officer with us that day. While the other two squads monitored approaching cars, I was busy with my squad mates searching vehicles and drivers. While I was looking under the hood of a car, checking for bombs and hidden weapons, the ground started to shake. I dropped to my knees but realized that it was fire from my own troops. The hail of gunfire came from M-16 rifles, M-249s, and .50-caliber machine guns. The fire was coming from the first and second squads of my platoon. Even a Bradley tank belonging to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (but not to my 43rd CEC) got into the act. The tank and the other squads were all firing at a white car with yellow stripes that had two people inside.
I noticed that the car had driven too close to the checkpoint, about ten feet past the line at which it was supposed to stop. As a result, it had been brought to a halt in the most murderous way. When the car stopped inching forward and the gunfire ceased, my squad mates and I ran to the vehicle. We found it riddled with bullet holes, each two inches or more in diameter. Inside the car, one man was dead. His head was attached to his neck by only a few threads of flesh, and blood was splattered all over him and the car. Nobody touched him. But then I saw a boy in the front seat. He looked like he was about ten years old. A medic pulled him out. One of the boy’s arms was nearly severed, but he was alive. The boy was conscious, and he was looking at his father. With the help of the medic we put the boy in our APC, raced him to the Ramadi hospital, and dropped him off there. When we got back to the checkpoint, I spent ten minutes searching the vehicle and patting down the dead man. There were no weapons inside it. There was nothing unusual in the car, except all the blood that we had made run.
About twenty minutes later, Lieutenant Joyce got off his army radio and told us all to pack up and leave. We left the car and the driver right where they were, in the middle of the busy road. I couldn’t stop thinking about how we didn’t even put the man in a body bag and take him to the hospital or to our compound, where his family would know to find him. When we got back to our compound I got off my armored personnel carrier, walked behind a building, and vomited. I saw Sykora throw up too, and I heard at least one other soldier in my squad vomiting at the same time. I had never before seen a man shot to death. As far as I could tell, he was killed simply because he hadn’t known where to stop his car.
The next day, as I was stationed on top of our moving APC, I looked out at the spot where the man had been killed. He and his car were gone.
In Fallujah, we stayed in a compound of bungalows located outside the city. In my own mind I called it Dreamland; its artificial lake seemed utterly removed from our day-to-day activities at war in Iraq. In our free time, we tried to forget our troubles and the shooting we had seen by jumping off a sixty-foot bridge, straight into the water. Lewis didn’t want to jump, so we just pushed him off the side of the bridge. Even Sykora, who could barely swim, was forced into the water, and I watched as he dog-paddled back to shore.
Just a few days after we had left the dead man in his bullet-ridden car, the violence began again.
After nightfall our platoon left Dreamland to drive across Fallujah to a traffic control point. I rode as usual on top of the APC, holding my M-249 rifle. One of my sergeants sat up on top with me, positioned to shoot from his turreted .50-caliber machine gun. Specialist Mason was driving. Two APCs belonging to the other squads were directly ahead of us and behind us traveled an Abrams tank.
As we approached an intersection, I saw a small white pickup truck driving in our direction. It looked like a Toyota or a Nissan. It made a quick left-hand turn, cutting in front of us. This split us off from the second APC, but I saw no sign of danger and there were about thirty yards to spare. Nonetheless, my sergeant let loose with his .50-caliber machine gun. Blasting away with bullets about six inches long, he shot the car and brought it to a halt. I saw a trail of gas leaking from the car. The sergeant shifted his gun, aimed at the trail of gas, and shot again. The line of gas caught fire and flew back toward the truck, and when it hit the gas tank the truck exploded in a ball of fire.
We kept on driving. I looked back at the explosion and the fire. I watched our Abrams tank roll right through it and keep following us. It looked like something straight out of Rambo. The boys in my squad let out some hollers of delight.
“Man, did you see that?” someone called out. “Did you see that tank run right over that thing?” another said.
I didn’t see any reason for the sergeant to shoot up the truck. It had enough room to turn without causing an accident. I said nothing to the sergeant, but later that night I heard him tell Sergeant Lund, who was asking questions, “What if the truck was cutting us off?” From what I could see, the truck hadn’t been shot because it posed a danger to us. It had been shot merely because it had annoyed my sergeant. The truck could have been stopped, or even confiscated. But it was quicker and less trouble all around simply to shoot until it exploded, and blow its driver and passengers—if there were any—to bits. Only six weeks had passed since my arrival in Iraq, but I could already see that, for American soldiers at war, it had become too easy to shoot and too easy to kill. We couldn’t catch or see the real insurgents, let alone take
a clear shot at them, so civilians would have to do.
In two short weeks in Fallujah, I had already heard gunfire from another division bring down twelve civilians, and I had witnessed my own platoon members killing at least two others. I had seen more blood and death than I cared for, and I felt that we were wrong to be dishing out such violence against civilians. Still, I thought that our military presence was justified in Iraq. I believed we were there to eradicate terrorism, but that the villains had simply not yet shown their faces. Sooner or later, I thought, we would catch them. In the meantime, my job was to follow orders: stand guard, raid houses, and stir shit. I did what I was told and kept my mouth shut.
4
Return to Ramadi
DURING MY FIRST TOUR OF DUTY IN RAMADI, I had no way of knowing that it would be my quietest time in Iraq. Camped so close to the Euphrates River, my squad mates and I stripped down to our underwear one hot afternoon and jumped in the water. We felt carefree for a while and in no real danger, with our weapons set aside, so we shouted and laughed and dunked one another under the water until we saw some small objects floating past us. They were dull green and cube-shaped, each side about six inches long. Unexploded mines. I had learned all about them in military training. If any one of them had blown up, the Euphrates River would have become our instant grave. We swam to the shore, climbed out on the bank, got back in our gear, and never again jumped into the Euphrates.
About a month later, when we returned to the city after spending two weeks in Fallujah, Ramadi had changed for the worse. It was no longer a quiet place. It had become the war zone I had first anticipated when arriving in Iraq, with one exception—the enemy was never visible.