by Joshua Key
After a few months in Philadelphia, a job advertisement in the newspaper led me to try my luck at the Curtis Elevator Cab Company. I asked if they still needed a worker and was told to return the next day. In June 2004, I began working for $12 an hour—more money than I had ever earned in civilian life—making the insides of elevator cabs. Two brothers—Rich and Bob Andrews—ran the company and seemed to be happy with my work. I am a good worker, when I put my mind to it, and I do like to use my hands. For the Andrews brothers, I made the insides of elevators: the paneling, the railings, the boxes that held the buttons, and the light fixtures. I was employed as a general laborer and machinist: welding, using shearing machines and presses, and working with wood and glass. I made myself as useful as possible. I wanted to keep the job and make money and didn’t want to have to look for another job until we knew what we were going to do in the long term. I had already chosen to give the brothers my real name and social security number. It was a calculated risk, but I knew that by working legally I would be entitled later to a tax refund because of my large family. But I sure didn’t want to give my social security number to another employer. The more people who had it, the more likely it seemed that somebody would find me.
At the new job, the Andrews brothers didn’t ask too many questions and I didn’t offer many details about myself, other than that I had been a soldier in Iraq and that I had moved with my family from Oklahoma.
I soon had one more reason to keep my employers happy: by the summer of 2004, Brandi was four months pregnant with our fourth child and had decided to quit her job. We didn’t have the money to send her to a doctor and we feared that any contact with the medical world could lead to my arrest. As a result, Brandi had no checkup until the seventh month of her pregnancy. Thankfully, she and the baby seemed healthy, so all we had to do was keep the children quiet as we stayed in hotels and remain working until we could find a way to safety. Our friend stayed in Philadelphia and kept working, and I don’t believe we would have survived our long time in hiding without her friendship and support—particularly with babysitting and spotting us money. When we were broke, she never let us do without food and she never let us down. Twelve dollars an hour seemed like very good money to me, but it still wasn’t enough to keep my family going.
My employers were kind to me. However, they were Republicans and we argued furiously about the presidential election in the fall of 2004.
“Of course you like Bush,” I told them. “You guys are getting richer and richer.”
We argued about Bush and we argued about the war in Iraq, but I did not tell them the things I had done or the things I had seen.
Sometimes human kindness comes at the most unexpected moments. Not long after President Bush was reelected, I told my bosses that my twenty-five-year-old Camaro had broken down so badly that even I couldn’t fix it. When Rich and Bob said they had to step out to lunch they asked me to mind the shop. An hour or two later, they returned with a gift for me: a 1994 Buick Skylark, complete with new license plates. It was ten years old but better than any car I had owned before. It must have cost them a good two thousand dollars, and I would have liked to return the favor by staying a long time on the job. I accepted the gift because we needed it desperately, but I took it with a sense of guilt. It was dawning on me that to have a shot at a decent life we would have to leave the United States.
I continued to look online for information about war deserters and people who could help me. I had no experience with Internet searches but finally, after typing something like “war deserter needs help” into the Google search engine, I came across details about an American army deserter named Jeremy Hinzman. Apparently, Hinzman had left the United States and was applying for refugee status in Canada. If he was in Canada and hoping to find help, I figured there might be a chance for my family and me in that country too.
In October, using the address [email protected], I e-mailed Jeffry House, the Toronto lawyer who was representing Jeremy Hinzman. I didn’t give him my name. For all I knew, he could have been an army agent posing as a lawyer to catch fugitives like me. I said I was a war deserter and asked if he could help. He gave me the e-mail address and telephone number of a Toronto group called the War Resisters Support Campaign. I called a woman there by the name of Michelle Robidoux and described my situation without giving my name. Michelle promised that her group would help me if I got across the border. At Brandi’s urging, I repeated that I would be traveling with a wife and four children. Michelle reassured me that they would find a place for our whole family to stay. I didn’t call her again for months and I hoped she wasn’t setting a trap for me.
Christmas came and went and we had no money for presents for the boys or for ourselves. Thankfully, however, Brandi had been able to get free health coverage from the state of Pennsylvania for the last part of her pregnancy and her delivery. When the labor began, two days after Christmas, our friend stayed with our three boys while I drove Brandi to the hospital. I had always wanted to have a girl, but now I could barely think about it because I was terrified that I would be nabbed in the hospital delivery room. While I looked out windows for government cars in the hospital parking lot, Brandi had our baby after four hours of labor. We had a girl and named her Anna. She nearly died on her first day. She had aspirated meconium in the womb and developed pneumonia after she was born. On December 27—the same day that she came into the world—Anna had to be rushed to another hospital for emergency care. But Anna recovered and we were able to take her back to our hotel three weeks later. As poor as we were, it seemed a miraculous gift to have a baby daughter. It struck me, as we drove back to the hotel where our friend was camped out again with our boys, that the gift of a daughter might never have been mine if I had returned to fight again in Iraq. Rather than helping to create a new life, I might have ended that of somebody else.
It seemed unbelievably risky to leave the United States and enter a foreign country with nothing more to go on than a promise that a stranger had made over the telephone. But staying in my own country was even more dangerous. If I stayed, something would eventually go wrong and I would get caught. And if I stayed I was condemning my wife and my children to a never-ending life on the run. I finally concluded that going to Canada offered the only real chance for me to avoid going back to Iraq or serving time behind bars. I knew almost nothing about Canada. I had heard that Canadians spoke English and French, but I didn’t even know the name of Paul Martin, who was prime minister at the time.
I knew we needed to have some money in case things went terribly wrong for us in the new country. And the only way I knew then to get money was to file a tax return in early 2005, knowing I was likely to get a big refund. It was a risky thing to do. But I had to hope that the IRS and the U.S. Army had bigger fish than me to fry and that, even if they did decide to put their heads together and nail me, it would take them some time to get around to it.
As soon as I got the necessary forms from my employer, I took my tax return to an H&R Block office in Philadelphia. I had to give an address, so I gave that of the hotel where we had been staying. As a precaution, we then moved into an apartment our friend had rented so that we could no longer be found at the address on the tax return. The six of us stayed in a one-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t comfortable, but we lived better than most Iraqis under American occupation. We had all the water we needed and no bombs were falling through our roof nor soldiers busting down our door.
In March, I received a federal check for about $3,000. It was the most money I had ever had in my life, and it would have to be enough for our trip to Canada. I gave our friend the car we had been using because it wasn’t big enough for a family of six. To replace the Buick Skylark, I bought a 1992 Dodge Caravan—with 202,000 miles on the odometer—for $600.
I called Michelle Robidoux one last time at the War Resisters Support Campaign office in Toronto. Michelle warned us that a border official might ask for de
tails about where we were staying in Canada. In that case, she said that we were to give the name, address, and telephone number of a person in Toronto who was a friend of the war resisters movement. Michelle also instructed us to say that we were coming to Toronto to see the musical Mamma Mia! She gave me the name and address of a man and woman who would let us stay for free in their home. I asked once more if she knew that I was coming with a wife and four children. Yes, Michelle said, that would not be a problem. I then told her the day that I would be entering Canada, and I told her that I would do so at the border at Buffalo. But I was lying. I did not cross that day, and I did not take that crossing, because I felt there was a chance I was being set up by U.S. Army officials. Two days after I said I was coming, we drove to the border at Niagara Falls, New York, with Brandi at the wheel. My driver’s license had expired but hers was up to date.
Sucking up the courage to drive to the border of my own country was the hardest thing I had ever done. It would have been easier in some ways to go back to war and serve my time. It would have caused me a lot less stress to sit in a jail cell. But I didn’t want to participate in an unjust war, and I didn’t believe it was right that I should become a prisoner in my own country for refusing to act like a criminal in Iraq. I felt that the only right choice was to move forward, and I did so with my wife and my children beside me.
I could hardly breathe during the drive to the border. Brandi and I cooked up an insane plan about how, if it looked like officials were going to arrest me, she would try to distract them and give me an opportunity to run away or even jump from a bridge. But in my heart I knew there was no escape in my own country. This was the moment of truth. Either I would get out or I would be arrested. And if I was arrested there was always the chance that Brandi would be arrested too for assisting in my escape. And then what would happen to our children? I also knew that if we somehow managed to make it across the border with no passports and no up-to-date identification, I would never again be able to return to my country.
Brandi and I had already lost touch with our families. With the exception of my brother and my mother, most of our relatives saw me as a traitor and a coward. From what I’d heard, Brandi’s family felt that I had ruined her life and turned us all into criminals. We had just said good-bye to our one true friend, who would finally be returning to her home after over a year away.
We arrived at the border around the noon hour, hoping that the officials would be in a hurry processing traffic and unlikely to take a close look at us.
“Citizenship?” the border guard asked.
“American,” Brandi said.
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a waitress and my husband is a welder.”
“Where are you heading?”
“Toronto.”
“What’s going on there?”
“We’re going to visit a friend for the weekend,” Brandi said.
“Why do you have all that stuff along with you?” “You know what it’s like, traveling with kids,” Brandi said.
“Have a nice visit,” he said.
We said good-bye to our country and drove into Canada.
Epilogue
MY GRANDFATHER ELMER PORTER HAD A BLACKOUT RECENTLY. It was the summer of 2006, and his tour of duty as an American soldier in the Korean War had finished more than half a century earlier. He had retired long ago from his job as a mechanic at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma and was living quietly on his forty-acre farm. One day, for no particular reason, he thought he was under attack. He thrashed and fought to the limit of his strength, and when he snapped out if it he discovered that he had trashed his own living room.
A Canadian psychiatrist told me that you never truly emerge from post-traumatic stress disorder, that you simply learn to live with it.
There are certain things that I avoid these days, such as alcohol and crowds, because I fear they will trigger more of my own blackouts. I know that thousands of American soldiers have abused drugs or committed suicide after returning home from war. It would be easy to follow in the steps of many in my own family and drown my shame and my sorrows in alcohol. Alcohol, however, could lead to the very problem of suicidal depression that has plagued vets for generations. I won’t go down that road. I have a wife and four children who need me, and they are the single greatest reason why I want to stay alive and to lead a good life. As for the big city, well, I remain an Oklahoma boy at heart, and I like wide-open spaces, so I have fled Toronto and settled in the Canadian prairies.
I am not a man to lead countries or direct armies. I have my high school diploma from Guthrie, Oklahoma, and if I am lucky I will move one day with my family closer to a school where I can learn the trade of welding.
When I was still a soldier in Iraq, I heard that many of the sappers who were discharged from American military service went on to defuse mines in war-torn lands such as the former Yugoslavia. I think of the countless children who have died, or who have had to learn to go on living with missing limbs, because they stepped on a mine—sometimes years after war officially ended in their country. I think of all the land that can’t be trespassed on or safely used simply because men who passed that way earlier were trying to kill one another. Mines do more than endanger people; they also poison their future. In my military training in Missouri and Colorado, I loved the challenge of setting and stripping a mine and learned to work with nimble fingers under pressure. But I sure wouldn’t want to live anywhere near the place where a soldier like me had been busy at work. A lot of ingenuity goes into killing, and it seems to me now a sad waste of money and intelligence. Somebody has to clear minefields in countries where men have stopped fighting, but I am not in any shape to join the brave sappers who have taken on that work.
War took all the fun and the challenge out of guns and bombs for me. Given what I’ve seen of what guns and bombs do to people, I can’t go back to them now and hang on to my sanity. These days, my personal and family ambitions are simple yet hard to obtain. I would like to be able to dream without nightmares about the people I traumatized in Iraq. I would like to have a few acres of land and make a steady living as a welder so that my children can grow up decently clothed and properly fed. I want to be a good man to my wife, who gave up her family and her country to support me in my flight from the war in Iraq.
I grew up drinking and fighting and placing beer bottles on my rifle range, and I rarely stopped to imagine life outside Oklahoma. I expected to grow old and die in the very place I was born. When I first met Brandi, I told her that I loved Guthrie and never wanted to leave it. I was not a political man. In fact, when I was a child and a teenage boy the most political thought that entered my head came from the words of my grandfather Elmer, who told me that in the United States, the Republican Party stood for the rich and that everyone else should vote for the Democrats.
I’m glad I had Elmer in my life. A lot of men moved in with my mother and out again, and I still cringe at the memory of her body being flung against the wall of our two-bedroom trailer. They say that you end up doing what the people in your family have done. I’m determined that this will not be true for me. No way. My grandfather was the only person I ever knew who told me that no man had any business beating his wife. I’m glad I had that one good voice in my childhood. His is the voice I have chosen to hear.
I like to think it was my grandfather’s voice—the voice of right and wrong—that woke me from the long sleep I fell into during military training and the first months of war.
There is no excuse for the things I did in Iraq, or for the beatings I delivered—on orders from my drill sergeant—while training with the American army in Missouri. Looking back, I am filled with shame that I beat up other recruits just to please my drill sergeant. I am disgusted to think that I tried to break a man’s ribs by swinging away with a soap-filled sock just because he resisted an order. In the end, the man I beat up was the
one with the brains. He had the courage to stand up to an institution bent on breaking him and recasting him as a killer, and I heard in the end he managed to get out of the military. That would be good for him, and good for Iraq.
My commanders had told me that it is army first, God second, and family third, but I’ll never buy into that way of thinking again.
If you have beaten or killed an innocent person, and if there remains a shred of conscience in your heart, you will not likely avoid anguish by saying you were only following orders. We each have to find what we believe to be the right way to live. When we prosecute an unjust war, or commit immoral acts in any war at all, the first victims are the people who were unfortunate enough to fall into our hands. The second victims are ourselves. We damage ourselves each time we violate our own true beliefs, and the wrongs we commit weigh on our shoulders to the grave.
I cannot say exactly what would have happened if I had refused to blow apart the homes of Iraqis; if I had refused to send every male over five feet in height to American detention centers. I imagine that I would have been humiliated and punished by my superiors. I may have been beaten. Perhaps they would have sent me home to prison or disgrace. But if every single soldier in the American army had refused to blow off the doors of houses in the residential streets of Iraq, I will bet you that the generals and colonels and captains who commanded us—and our president and commander in chief, George W. Bush—would not have volunteered for the job.
I am ashamed of what I did in Iraq, and of all the ways that innocent civilians suffered or died at our hands. The fact that I was only following orders does not lessen my discomfort or ease my nightmares. After I came across the four decapitated bodies by the side of the road in Ramadi, and saw soldiers in my own army kicking the heads for their own amusement, I began to dream of the incident and of the rolling heads. Though I had arrived after the murder, the very fact that I saw the results and was part of the machine that committed the act weighed on my soul and weighs on it still.