by Joshua Key
Almost every night I could hear the mortars being lobbed toward the former Iraqi military compound that my 43rd Combat Engineer Company had moved into for lodgings. The most frightening thing about being mortared was watching the flying bombs become a little more accurate each time. A mortar comes in different sizes, and some of them flying toward us were the size of a football, with little wings on them. I thought of them as long bombs, lobbed by Iraqi quarterbacks who walked just a little closer to us each time they let one go. Clearly, the Iraqi fighters had people stationed near us to indicate how close the mortars were coming to their targets—us. The second round would come a little closer, and the third round even closer, and this we described as the Iraqis “walking the mortars in on us.” Wherever they were—and we could never see them—they were moving their launchers a little closer.
Initially, the mortars were terrifying. Sometimes I could make out a faint whir as they sailed through the air. We called it a “splash” when the mortar exploded, and the kill zone had a radius of some thirty yards. The small, falling bombs kept us jittery and got on our nerves. None of them was big enough to blow up a building. But any one of them, if it landed close enough, could kill us in a second.
Eventually, I learned to sleep through at least some mortar attacks, but not everybody was so lucky. Sergeant Fadinetz, for example, a divorced, thickset man in his mid-thirties who had been in the military for years and had served overseas in South Korea, tried to talk a good game during the day. Sometimes he would lift up his chin and say, “Key, I never want to see you or any of the other sons of bitches in this company once we get out of this war and go home. Once I’m a civilian, as far as I’m concerned, you guys are history. Don’t come looking for me, because I won’t want to see you.” But Fadinetz wasn’t as tough as he sounded. He rode with me on top of our armored personnel carrier, told me that he was from Rochester and hoped to go to college one day in Colorado, and I sensed that it took a certain effort for him not to complain about the madness of our assignments in Iraq. You get to know the guys you go to war with, and Fadinetz’s fears would come out at night, when the mortars landed and he woke up screaming. I could only imagine the way the sounds of war must have twisted his dreams into nightmares, and I felt for the man as I watched him wake up in terror beside me. Honestly, I didn’t know what was worse for him: the nightmares or waking to the sounds of explosions just a little more than a kill zone away.
For many of us in the platoon, adrenaline jolted through our systems like an electric shock and woke us completely—even if we had been sound asleep and had had only an hour of shut-eye in the past day.
It was a strange way to fight a war. We never saw the people who shot at us, never spotted the mortar launchers, and never located the people who used rockets to propel grenades at us. Because our enemy remained invisible, our fears and frustrations mounted, but we could always take those frustrations out on the civilians.
The duty that frightened me the most, in Iraq, was going out with my platoon on foot patrols. We frequently patrolled the streets of Ramadi, trying to engage the enemy, hoping to lure somebody into a firefight. Fortunately for us, the most common thing that happened on our foot patrols was also the worst: once in a while, a man or a child would throw a rock at us. Still, I felt completely vulnerable in those moments. In the thick crowds of people, sometimes I would catch sight of a grenade riding on the tip of a weapon perched on an Iraqi’s shoulder. At any moment, I feared, someone would lob a grenade at us or take a clean shot from a rooftop while we were making our way through the crowded markets. Now that we were back for our second tour of duty in the city, few people were smiling at us, and a number made no effort to mask their hatred of us. One day, when a butcher in the market caught me looking at him, he raised his knife and held the sharp edge close to his own throat as I walked by. I swept the rooftops with my eyes, keeping my weapon ready in case I pinpointed a sniper.
Our foot patrols often went on for hours and took place in sweltering heat. Some days in July, I would estimate that the temperature exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The breeze provided no relief at all; it felt like a gust from a blow-dryer smacking me in the face. Between the uniform, backpack, and M-249, I carried one hundred extra pounds with each step; I would finish the patrols soaked in sweat. Some of the men struggled gravely in the heat. Specialist Sykora became so dehydrated during one long foot patrol that he began to rock back and forth on his heels, like a boxer caught on the chin, and then he crumpled to the ground. We surrounded him to keep him safe and radioed for backup. A Humvee rolled up within minutes. We carried him out to it. He recovered quickly after a medic hooked him up to an intravenous unit.
One day, my platoon mates and I were walking single file through a crowded Ramadi market. Thousands of people were milling about, and I could not stop thinking about the warnings I had been issued by my superiors: the Iraqis were Muslims, and Muslims were terrorists, and I was therefore at risk of attack at any moment. The fruit and the meat stalls were close on either side, and with all of the marketgoers it was hard to stay in contact with the soldier walking in front of me. Suddenly, an Iraqi man cut in front of me, separating me from the soldier ahead of me in our single file. I feared he would try to plunge a knife into me, so I slugged him in the face, pushed by as he stumbled, and ran forward to join my comrades.
It was always with relief that I made it back to the compound at the end of the day. During our second tour of duty in Ramadi, we no longer camped in Saddam Hussein’s bombed-out palace. This time, my entire 43rd Combat Engineer Company took over a former Iraqi military compound consisting of several one-story buildings. The compound was located close to the Euphrates River, in central Ramadi. Like most buildings we occupied in Iraqi, it had been bombed earlier by our own forces.
When we moved into the compound, we discovered an Iraqi family of thirteen people—a man with three wives and nine children—inhabiting the facility. I assumed that their own home had been destroyed by American bombs. They had been squatting in there with their clothes, pots and pans, blankets, and all their other possessions. The husband reacted wildly when we commandeered his home. Clearly, he was about to lose the little security that his family had. He shouted at Sayeed, our interpreter, who relayed the message to Captain Conde, who led our company. At the time, I happened to be standing about ten feet away with my squad leader, Sergeant Padilla. So I was close enough to hear Conde laugh and tell the man, “You’ve got two hours to get out of here.” The man had no choice but to pack up his things and leave with his family.
On other occasions, distraught Iraqis came to us at the compound. While I stood guard, a man entered with his wife and daughter and complained that his daughter had just been raped. I was not able to tell if they were complaining that Americans or Iraqis had committed the crime. I radioed my commander for instructions and was told to send the man off because we couldn’t get involved in people’s domestic affairs. Another time, a man complained that one of our illumination rounds had crashed into his home and burned his bed. I thought my superiors would send him packing but he was given a small amount of American cash—about $50—and I heard talk among my platoon mates that some officers had a small fund to soothe Iraqis with minor grievances.
As we resumed our regular duties in Ramadipatrolling streets, checking traffic, guarding buildings, and raiding homes—we began to receive nightly reports from our commanders. When my six squad mates were gathered together at night, our leader—Padilla—would usually read us official army notices. They often contained news items about American soldiers who had been recently killed in Iraq. The notices were like haunting bedtime stories that made all of us more nervous as mortars fell and rocket-propelled grenades exploded closer and closer to us. Just two months earlier, President Bush had flown to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of San Diego, to give his “mission accomplished” speech. In Iraq, we had heard about the president’s speec
h. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” the president said. As I listened to the sound of gunfire and explosions, I wished it were true.
Not long into our second tour of duty in Ramadi, I was working at a traffic control point, pulling over vehicles. The standard practice was to order everybody out of the car and to have the driver open the hood and the trunk. A black, four-door Mercedes-Benz pulled up carrying a driver and three male adult passengers. Glancing inside the car, I spotted four grenades tucked between the two front seats.
The driver was a young man, and he didn’t say or do anything to provoke me. However, the mere presence of those grenades set me off. I hauled him from the car and began kicking and punching him. An older man in the car began screaming at me in Arabic. I could not understand a word he said, and he would not shut up, so I beat him badly too. By the time I finished with them, both men were bleeding profusely. With the help of my squad mates, I zipcuffed the men, threw one of them in the trunk, and stuffed the other three in the backseat.
Sergeant Fadinetz got into the passenger seat, I jumped into the front, and we drove ten minutes through Ramadi to the police station, where we turned over the men for arrest. I have no idea what became of them, but I do know what happened to their car: I stole it for the use of my squad. We had no keys, so I hot-wired it and attached a switch to make it easy for my squad mates to start. We kept the Mercedes and used it on our house raids, preferring to arrive in an unmarked vehicle to disguise our approach.
When I beat up the two men, I justified it to myself on the grounds that they had grenades in the car. But the truth was that, strange as it may seem to someone outside the war, grenades were everyday items in Iraq, just like the rifles we routinely left behind on our house raids. Although we always confiscated grenades, I had no good reason to attack the men. 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. Because we were fearful, sleep-deprived, and jacked up on caffeine, adrenaline, and testosterone, and because our officers constantly reminded us that all Iraqis were our enemies, civilians included, it was tempting to steal, no big deal to punch, and easy to kill. We were Americans in Iraq and we could do anything we wanted to do.
At this time, I was stealing money, knives, and sunglasses from cars and houses. Once I found 1.5 million dinars in an Iraqi truck that I had been assigned to drive to a hospital, and I took that money too. I was not sure how much it was worth, but I imagined about $500. It paid for my cigarettes and Coca-Cola for a while. But one day at a traffic checkpoint, when a man with a large family complained about having no job and no other relatives who could help, I tossed the rest of the money in his backseat and sent him on his way.
Another time, I made a man at a traffic control point remove his artificial leg. Inside it, I found $10,000 in American hundred-dollar bills. I know it was $10,000 because I counted every bill. If my superiors had not been present, I would have considered stuffing it in my pockets and sending it home. But I was flanked by my superior, Sergeant Gurillo, and I gave the money to him when I finished counting it. He handed it to his superior, Captain Bower. I have no idea what happened to the money, but the man with the false leg was carrying on angrily in Arabic and I doubt that he ever got it back.
I am not proud of the things I did in Iraq. However, I will say that before my company left Ramadi, near the end of July, I stopped beating civilians and stopped stealing from them, and I did it no more for the rest of my time in the country. As my conscience began to catch up with me, I witnessed American soldiers and officers losing control of themselves more and more often.
Not long after I beat up the men with the grenades, I found myself yet again at a traffic control point. This time it was late in the evening and we had decided to stop all vehicles that were out past our nighttime curfew of ten p.m. For an hour or two, we stopped about forty taxis and forced the drivers to get out of their vehicles. To their distress, we told them that we were detaining them for breaking the curfew. While some laughed defiantly and others swore, we assembled all the drivers and herded them in small groups into the back of a five-ton truck. A couple of my platoon mates then drove them down to the Ramadi police station, where they were arrested. My superiors instructed me to remain behind and hot-wire the taxis so that the rest of my platoon mates could race them to the police station. A captain of our 43rd Combat Engineer Company (I can’t recall for sure which captain it was, as two different captains served during different parts of the month of July) jumped in a taxi and raced with us. For an hour or two that night, my platoon mates had the time of their lives. They bumped and banged the vehicles on their way through the city, but nobody cared. Nobody, that is, in a position to do something about it. I got into the last taxi and took my turn, cranking it up to over sixty miles an hour as I raced through the streets of Ramadi.
We found various other ways to amuse ourselves during quiet moments at the compound. Once again, I earned a few brownie points by hooking up air-conditioning units to the Iraqi power lines. We were supposed to sleep on cots on the main floor, but even with the air conditioners only a small part of the compound was cool enough to sleep in. I often went up to the roof to try to catch some of the evening breeze. Using cinder blocks and an iron bar, I also started weight lifting. Other times, we would hook up portable DVD players to our APC, huddle close together, and watch bootleg movies from our stash, such as The Hulk and House of 1,000 Corpses.
In my downtime, I chain-smoked, swapped cigarettes with my buddy Private Ricky Connor—a twentythree-year-old single man from Amarillo, Texas—and teased him mercilessly about how the Oklahoma University Sooners football team spanked his Texas Longhorns team 73-21 while we were at war. We were not allowed to have satellite telephones but some platoon mates kept them anyway, and one of them was able to tell us football scores twenty-four hours after the games had ended. Connor was a patriotic American who believed and seemed to keep on believing that America was doing the right thing in Iraq. Despite my own doubts about the big picture, I liked hanging out with him to talk about Oklahoma and Texas.
We needed our relaxing moments to hang on to our sanity in an increasingly punishing environment. We rarely slept for more than two hours at a time, and frequently we stood guard and conducted other duties for more than twenty-four hours consecutively. At least once a week, officers told us that we were in grave danger of attack. In Fallujah, for example, the soldiers in my company were made to wait in armored vehicles outside a walled compound of old, bombed-out Iraqi military buildings. We were told that ten thousand Iranian supporters of Saddam Hussein had congregated inside the compound. They were planning to riot, we were told, and we had to be ready for battle. It seemed like a ridiculous story, but I had no choice but to join my fellow soldiers in surrounding the building. We stood outside it for hours while aircraft screamed overhead, Apache helicopters hovered, and Abrams tanks rolled into position. Finally, after hours of waiting and repeated warnings that we were in danger of a riot, the doors were opened. About one hundred unarmed women were let out. There had been no rioters, no weapons, no Hussein sympathizers who had appeared miraculously from Iran, and no threat to our safety.
I believe that the repeated warnings of danger were meant to keep us off guard, and to keep us frightened enough to do exactly what we were told. But what I witnessed was that after a month or two in Iraq, the other soldiers and I could not help but take the warnings less and less seriously, as if they were coming from the boy who cried wolf.
Still, some Iraqis were certainly trying to kill us. We couldn’t see them but they were there. A man named Sergeant Taylor, who worked with another platoon in my company, was driving across Ramadi in a Humv
ee when a bomb blew up under the vehicle. My squad mates and I had been guarding a bank at the time, and we were ordered to race across Ramadi in our APC to help out. We found Sergeant Taylor—who was overdue to return home to the States—with an eye hanging out of his face and shrapnel wounds across his body. He was evacuated for medical care, and as far as I know he lived. The next night, we were told to raid houses in the neighborhood in retaliation for the attack on the Humvee. One of my sergeants said, “Tonight it’s retaliation time against the city of Ramadi.”
We carried on with our house raids, ransacking houses and detaining every man we could find.
A short time later Sergeant Padilla woke me up at about one a.m. to tell me to climb out of my sleeping bag and get ready for action. Our platoon was designated a Quick Reaction Force, and our orders were to rush to help out American soldiers from the 124th Infantry Division who were said to be caught in a firefight with hundreds of Iraqis. I did not believe the story. I had yet to see one Iraqi militant rioting and shooting, so it seemed unlikely to me that I would now find hundreds doing so.
My six squad mates and I jumped in our APC, and I took my usual position on the top left of the vehicle, training my machine gun on rooftops as we drove in formation with the other two APCs in our platoon.
I rode up top with Fadinetz and Padilla. Down below, Mason drove the APC while Jones, Sykora, and Lewis sat inside with him. Sergeant Jones shouted that we were on our way to face hundreds of rioting Iraqis in an alley. Fadinetz and I shared a private laugh over this, because we both felt it was highly unlikely. We rode slowly for about ten minutes. We made two turns in our APC and, while traveling at just a few miles an hour, moved toward the banks of the Euphrates River along a small road that we called “the red route.” I could make out the sounds of a firefight.