by Joshua Key
I got drunk at a bar in Colorado Springs. Brandi says that I started shouting at her about how she and the children lived like royalty in comparison to the people of Iraq. Families over there had nothing to eat and nowhere to live, I hollered, and Brandi stared at me, wondering why I appeared to be blaming her.
“Just be thankful that our family doesn’t have to live like that,” Brandi said, pulling me from the bar. Deep down, I worried about just exactly how we would be living if I paid attention to the thoughts of escape swirling in my mind.
During the second week of my vacation, I settled down enough to help Brandi and the children move off the military base at Fort Carson and into a private apartment in Colorado Springs. It wasn’t part of any plan to go AWOL or to run from the military. It was simply that Brandi hated living on the base and being surrounded by army life.
We spoke only once or twice about the possibility of going AWOL. I didn’t say much. I only said that innocent people were dying at the hands of American soldiers and that I didn’t want to go back to the war.
“If I run from duty, we would have to go far away,” I said.
“Where would we go?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Brandi didn’t get angry, and she didn’t try to tell me what to do. But neither of us had clear ideas about what would happen if I didn’t return to Iraq. If I ran from duty, where would we live? How would we eat? How would we take care of our three boys? All the time I had been in Iraq, Brandi had been receiving my $1,200 monthly check. But with rent, clothing, diapers, and food bills, my salary had been barely enough to keep the family going. We had no savings in the bank and less than $200 in our pockets.
My conscience told me that it was wrong to return to Iraq and to keep on doing things I knew to be wrong. But the very thought of going AWOL overwhelmed us. It was clear that we could never go home to our families. They had no means to support us or to protect us from the army officers who would most surely be lying in wait. We had nowhere to run and nobody to advise us, so we dropped the subject of my running from army duty before we had even discussed it seriously.
I spent the second half of the vacation unpacking boxes in our new apartment and sticking close to Brandi and the boys. They were the only people in the world I wanted to see. I barely went out and barely saw a soul. I made no contact with anyone at Fort Carson, and I did not even see or call the wives of the men in my company. I spoke with my mom and a few other relatives by phone but didn’t tell them anything about my problems. In fact, I was so overwhelmed by daytime anxieties and bad dreams at night that I did not even know that President Bush came to speak at Fort Carson one day while I was huddled at home with my family.
Much later, when I learned of his visit, I went online to see what the president had said on November 24, 2003, to the troops at the Butts Army Airfield in Fort Carson.
“We’re at war with terrorists who hate what we stand for: liberty, democracy, tolerance, and the rights and dignity of every person. We’re a peaceful nation, yet we are prepared to confront any danger. We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other parts of the world so that we do not have to fight them on the streets of our cities. And we will win. In this war, America depends on our people in uniform to protect our freedom and to keep our country safe.”
I can imagine this speech being televised live to the troops in Iraq. I can imagine returning at four in the morning to Saddam Hussein’s bombed-out palace in Ramadi after raiding and ransacking a house and detaining its male occupants—even a fourteen-year-old boy who stood as tall as his father. If my buddies and I had sat in our bloodstained desert camouflage uniforms and watched a live broadcast of our president’s speech, we would have thrown our rations at the TV screen. If our president stood for the rights and the dignity of every person, why had he allowed American soldiers to repeatedly abuse Iraqi civilians?
I was required to check in with U.S. Army officials in the Dallas airport on December 2, 2003. I didn’t want to go back to Iraq, but Brandi and I saw no way around it. My wife was even more upset to see me leave after the two-week vacation than she had been when I’d left the first time, some seven months earlier. It would have been horrible to say good-bye under any circumstances. But it must have terrified her to see me like that—having lost a quarter of my weight and half of my mind—flying back to a war I did not believe in.
Brandi cried at the airport, but I did my best to hold back the tears. I could not have other soldiers seeing me like that.
I got on the airplane and flew south to Dallas, and I did not have one sip of beer. I was completely sober. I looked out the window at 32,000 feet. I felt that I had been out of my mind to get on that airplane and resolved to do something about it.
My stepfather, J. W. Barker, and my brother Tyler had arranged to drive from Oklahoma to see me off at the airport in Dallas. I met them when I got off the plane. Tyler gave me a big hug and J.W. shook my hand as if I was a war hero. J.W. went on so much about how I was serving my country and stomping out terrorism that I finally had to tell him to shut up. I didn’t tell him what I had seen in Iraq. I just told him to be quiet.
While J.W. waited in a lounge, Tyler stood with me as I checked in at the U.S. Army counter at the Dallas airport.
“Your flight to Kuwait has been delayed two or three days,” an officer told me. He began to give me information about a hotel room the army had arranged for me, but in my mind the switch had finally clicked. I was not going back to Iraq.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll stay with my brother in town.”
The officer gave me details about the delayed flight, but I didn’t hear a thing he said. As Tyler and I walked away from the desk I barely looked at the papers I had been handed.
I called Brandi from the airport and told her that my flight had been delayed. We lamented about having been cheated of a few more days together. I promised to call her back that evening.
J.W., Tyler, and I drove to a restaurant. I ordered a steak.
“How about a beer?” J.W. asked.
“Just a Coke,” I said.
J.W. raised his eyebrows. He could not drink any longer because of his liver transplant, but to him it didn’t seem right for an off-duty soldier to pass up a drink. We didn’t stay long at the restaurant. J.W. and Tyler wanted to hurry back to their hotel to catch an Oklahoma Sooners football game on TV. Funny: in Iraq, I had talked constantly with Connor about the Oklahoma Sooners, but now that I had returned from war I had completely lost interest in football and other sports. Once I had been a sports fanatic, but it spoke to me no longer. It would have been nice to be able to knock back a beer and lose myself in a few hours of televised sports, but three other things teemed in my brain: I wanted to hold my wife and children; I had the blood of men, women, and children on my hands; and I couldn’t live with myself if I had to fight again in Iraq.
I called Brandi from the hotel room while Tyler and J.W. watched the Sooners game. Though my mind was made up, I couldn’t tell J.W. I feared that if he heard I was planning to go AWOL he might turn me in to the military police at the airport. That night, after J.W. retired to his own room, I spoke privately to my brother.
“I’m not going back,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Tyler asked.
“Just what I said. I’m not going back to Iraq.”
“What’s going on over there?” he asked. Tyler was nineteen at the time. Back home in Guthrie, he had a job with a landscaping company.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “It’s fucked up. Innocent people are dying over there. It’s not the war you think it is. I’m not going back.”
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“Go back to Brandi and the kids.”
“But what are you going to do when you get there?” “I really don’t know. But don’t tell anybody, okay?”<
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“I’m your brother, Josh. I’m not going to say a word.”
At six in the morning, I persuaded J.W. to drive me to the airport and to pay for my one-way flight back to Colorado Springs.
“Do you have authorization to go back home?” he said.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Do you know when you have to be back?” he said. “Yes.”
I called home again from the Dallas airport and told my wife I was coming home. She didn’t ask for an expla nation and I was comforted that my wife would be happy to see me.
I caught the first flight to Colorado Springs, took Brandi into my arms again when I landed, and told her I was not going back to Iraq. That day, I called the office of the judge advocate general—a sort of military lawyer who is paid to advise soldiers in distress.
I didn’t identify myself. I just said that I was thinking about not returning to duty in Iraq. He told me to think hard on the matter and to call him back the next day. When I called him back and explained that my conscience would not let me return to war, he became hostile: “Soldier, you can do one of two things. Either you get on that plane and get back to Iraq or you go to jail.”
I hung up the telephone.
Brandi and I had to lie low until we could find some money. We put off paying every bill that came due—rent and everything else. We bought nothing but basic food for our family: bread, peanut butter, noodles, canned sauce, and milk. I stayed away from Fort Carson and knew it was a lucky stroke that we had moved off the base. The people at Fort Carson had no idea where I was, and I wasn’t about to let them find me now. I stayed in our apartment as much as possible to avoid being seen on the streets. It helped that my entire company was at war in Iraq and that nobody on the base knew my face.
I stayed in hiding for close to two months in Colorado Springs. I needed a bit of money before we could leave. Early in January, I prepared my tax return, took it to an H&R Block office, and got a refund of about $500. That was what I had saved in taxes as a result of serving my country overseas. My mother sent us some money. Brandi had made a friend in Colorado Springs during my time at war, and they had quickly become close. Without her support and her money I don’t think we ever could have made our escape.
Our Ford Aerostar van was falling apart, so I sold it to a neighbor for $100. I bought a broken-down, twenty-five-year-old Camaro for $700 from the son of an air force colonel. I put a minimal down payment on a rent-to-buy Compaq Presario laptop computer, took it with me, and never made another payment. Both Brandi and I were almost completely inexperienced with computers, but if we were going to go on the run, I knew that I would need to scout for information on the Internet. Using my military ID I arranged to rent a U-Haul for five days.
Finally, in early February 2004, Brandi, her friend, the children, and I took off. I drove the U-Haul with Philip in a car seat, and the women took the Camaro with Zackary and Adam. The Camaro ran, but that is about all I can say for it. It had holes in the floorboard and in the tailpipe. Exhaust spilled into the car, which forced them to drive with the windows down.
Our first stop was Louisville, Kentucky, but I felt nervous staying there because it was too close to the Fort Knox army base. So we didn’t even spend the night in Kentucky. We drove to Trenton, New Jersey, but I was anxious and nervous and the city seemed too run-down for my liking. Still, run-down was exactly what we needed. I had come to the conclusion that a city in the northern states was where we had to hide. It had to be a city where nobody knew us. It had to offer countless places to get lost. It had to be a city that was rife with crime. It had to be a city with plenty of people passing through so that license plates from Colorado wouldn’t attract attention. It had to be a city with so many thefts and murders that the police would have bigger things to worry about than a poor family in a broken-down Camaro. We picked Philadelphia and spent the first night in a highway rest stop outside of town.
I found a storage facility for all the stuff in our rental truck and abandoned the U-Haul in the parking lot of a suburban mall. Then I got on friendly terms with a security guard who kept watch over the highway rest stop where we slept in our car. Until we could start making money, we couldn’t afford to pay for lodging. I didn’t tell the security guard anything about my problems except that we were a family that had fallen on hard times. It’s lucky for me that from time to time people have looked kindly on my family and me. He was an older black man, and he seemed to understand—without the need for explanation—that we could use a little help. The guard said he would let us camp out at the rest stop during his night shift but that we would have to be gone by seven in the morning.
Our friend found a job within two days as a waitress for a restaurant called the Dining Car. Brandi found a job just as quickly, also as a waitress, at the Olympia Cafe. It paid two bucks an hour plus tips. They pooled their slim earnings to keep us going. I spent my time watching the kids and being paranoid. It was not easy to keep an eye on my kids at a highway rest stop, or to move from rest stop to mall and back to another rest stop while Brandi was working. Somehow, I made it through enough days until we had money to pay for a room in the cheapest, sleaziest hotel we could find. We were given one room for $350 a week. All six of us slept in it together. We had to pay the money up front, but at least that kept me off the streets for a while.
While the women worked, I took care of the children in the hotel room. I made them stay quiet and played games with them. For entertainment, I let them play in the back parking lot, while I sat close by on some steps. But even that was a risk, and before I let the children outside I peered out every window for signs of men with crew cuts, four-door sedans with Colorado plates, or military stickers on cars or license plates. And I kept myself ready to run in case I spotted somebody on my trail. At all times, I had a knapsack within arm’s reach, with a few clothes, a bit of food, some money, and maps of the city. I memorized bus and subway routes. And I never left any room without first peeking through the curtains.
I felt paranoid each time someone looked at me in the street and guilty about making fugitives out of my wife and my boys. The children spent most of their days locked inside hotel rooms, and I was sure that I had ruined their lives. Still, Brandi stuck with me. She never doubted me, never questioned my decision to run from military service, and never demanded detailed explanations. About Iraq, I said very little except that innocent people were dying and that I would not take part in victimizing civilians anymore. That was enough for Brandi, who would take my hand when I spoke. “If they are doing bad things, then you can’t go back there” was all she said about it. I’m not sure if she understood that by helping me run she was doing far more than standing beside a fugitive husband. She was helping to keep me alive, and keeping me from mental collapse.
We changed hotels every month. A hotel needed certain qualities to be suitable for fugitives. It had to be cheap. It had to have staff who would take our money without asking for ID, who didn’t care who stayed there, and wouldn’t complain about six of us staying together in one room. They had to be willing to overlook the fact that we hooked up a microwave and a toaster oven wherever we went.
Our breakfasts consisted of cold cereal and milk. I’m addicted to coffee, but we didn’t even have that. Lunches and dinners were always the same: bread, sandwich meat, peanut butter, and potatoes, which we bought in large, economy bags. We baked the potatoes in the microwave or sliced and toasted them in the tiny oven.
Most of the hotels offered Internet hookups, and I started punching words such as “AWOL” and “soldier needs help” into various search engines. For the longest time I found nothing at all. I saw details about the G.I. Rights Hotline, but I couldn’t imagine that any American organization would be of help to me now. Still, I kept on believing that somebody, somewhere might be able to help us.
Not long after we arrived in Philadelphia, our friend told me that the owners of the Di
ning Car were looking for a dishwasher. I began working there at night, after Brandi had finished her restaurant shift. I changed my route every time I drove to work. I looked constantly in the rearview and side-view mirrors. Once or twice police officers followed my broken-down Camaro, but I had planned a strategy that worked in the short term: when I was being tailed, I drove into a wealthy neighborhood, parked in the driveway of a pleasant house, got out of the car, and walked to the door. I did my best to act like I belonged and the cops seemed to buy it, the few times they tailed me.
The dishwashing job paid about $7 an hour, and I kept it for almost two months. We continued living by the skin of our teeth, and when money was too tight to pay for a hotel room one week in advance, we returned to the highway rest stop with the sympathetic security guard. We could camp out in our car there from time to time, as long as we arrived after ten in the evening and left before seven in the morning. Rental apartments, no matter how cheap, were out of the question. We did not want to give our identification or our social security numbers to anyone, if it could be avoided.
It was lucky for me that no police ever pulled me over in the Camaro. The license plate stickers had expired and so had my driver’s license. I had no automobile insurance. If anybody had punched my name into a police computer, I would have had handcuffs around my wrists in no time at all. Brandi, however, was pulled over twice, and once she was given a ticket for driving without an inspection sticker proving that the vehicle was mechanically worthy. Fortunately, I was not in the car on either of the occasions. When I heard about her encounters with the police, it made me even more determined to keep my head low. Every night, I watched the television news to see if the American government had begun some sort of crackdown on war deserters.