by Joshua Key
I believe some people will say that Americans faced a nasty, unconventional war in Iraq, and that we had no choice but to take the war to our enemy in unconventional ways. My feeling is that we lacked the information, the skill, and the experience to find our true enemies in Iraq. We liked to think of the Iraqi fighters as inhuman and stupid, but the fact of the matter is, they outfoxed the American military wherever I went in Iraq. They threw mortars and grenades our way and we never even saw them running away. My fellow combatants and I never once put an armed enemy in our gun sights. They were on the run and gone while we were still diving for cover against flying shrapnel. We fought back by lashing out at civilians who had no means to defend themselves. It seemed the only way we could fight back—but it was wrong.
I don’t think that senior American military commanders made soldiers raid thousands of civilian houses because they truly believed we would nab terrorists or find weapons of mass destruction. I think they did it to punish and intimidate the Iraqi people. In the eyes of the American military, Iraqis were not people at all—they were terrorists, suicide bombers, sand niggers, and ragheads. We had to think of them as less than human in order to keep doing the things we did. We were taught to think of Iraqis in degrading ways during military training, and those attitudes crossed the oceans with us when we flew into battle.
The Geneva Conventions are international agreements—which the United States and almost all other nations have signed—that aim to limit the barbarity of war by protecting civilians and prisoners of war. Basically, they set out the dos and don’ts of war. The most significant don’ts are not hard to imagine: soldiers are not to steal from, beat, torture, rape, or kill civilians or prisoners of war. I won’t go on and on about all of the Geneva Conventions violated in Iraq, but I do want to quote one in particular: “Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives . “
I would not have deserted the U.S. Army, left my country, or chosen to speak out against the war in Iraq if American soldiers in my company had limited themselves to fighting enemy combatants. I left the war in Iraq because the American army made no distinction between the two. We were taught in training to see all Iraqis as enemies and we were encouraged to keep thinking this way, and acting accordingly, from the first day that the 43rd Combat Engineer Company pulled into the city of Ramadi.
I had not read about the Geneva Conventions before setting foot in Iraq. But all I had to do was think of the teachings of my own grandfather at home to know that what we were doing there was wrong. I hold my army in judgment for the repeated abuses of Iraqi civilians, but I hold myself in judgment too.
When Nazi war criminals were brought to justice at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46, an important principle was established: claiming that one was just following the orders of a superior does not relieve one from the responsibilities of international law, provided that a moral choice was possible.
I am responsible for the things I did. And my commanders were even more responsible for putting us there and ordering us to do the things we did. It was bad enough that we had nobody monitoring our behavior in Iraq or holding us accountable for it. But the situation was made worse because we had tacit approval from our commanders to shoot first and ask questions later. If a soldier beat up or shot somebody, all he had to say—if he said anything at all—was that he felt threatened. As a result, our behavior at war was completely unchecked. That’s why it was possible for American soldiers to decapitate Iraqis by means of machine-gun fire and then use their heads as objects of play.
In Iraq, I did not witness the equivalent of the American massacre of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese citizens in the hamlet of My Lai in 1968—for which I am glad. I hope that American soldiers have not committed such staggering atrocities there. Instead, I saw a steady stream of abuse and individual killing—a beating here, a shot there. Collectively, however, these incidents added up. Sometimes I wonder how the world might change if with my own eyes—and perhaps with a movie camera on my shoulder—I had witnessed every civilian beating and murder that American soldiers have carried out in Iraq. I wonder what would happen if every atrocity were compressed into the same day and the same city, still with my eyes watching and my camera at the ready. Then, I suspect that the total number of victims would shock and astonish Americans just as profoundly as did the discovery of the My Lai massacre. Alone, I cannot paint such a picture, but I know what I have seen. I shudder to imagine the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi families who this very day are struggling still with the loss of a loved one who died, completely innocently, at American hands.
When American soldiers beat up, stole from, and killed Iraqi civilians during my six and a half months at war, I saw them do so with complete impunity. We were far more than soldiers fighting enemy insurgents. To the civilians of Iraq, we became police officers, prosecutors, jailors, and executioners. We claimed to be bringing democracy and good order to the people of Iraq, but all we brought were hate and destruction. The only thing we gave to the people of Iraq was a reason to despise us—and perhaps to want to kill us for generations to come.
In my last months in Iraq, I met soldiers who felt the same way I did about the abuses we were dishing out day after day. For the most part we kept our mouths shut. We lived in a military culture that had already taught us that although we could get away with beating or even killing Iraqi civilians, punishment would be swift and harsh if we even questioned our commanders. By remaining silent, we made it possible for the abuses to continue. I do not know what all of the other companies of the American armed forces were doing while I was busy with the 43rd Combat Engineer Company. But since coming to Canada I have read accounts of convictions against members of my 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment for the abuse of Iraqi civilians and the torture and murder of at least one prisoner of war. I never met the people who have been convicted, and I did not know of them when I was at war. Sadly, it does not surprise me that they belonged to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.
On November 26, 2003—just two weeks after I’d left Iraq—an Iraqi major general by the name of Abed Hamed Mowhoush died while being interrogated and tortured by members of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Mowhoush had surrendered to American soldiers in my regiment in a vain attempt to obtain the release of two of his sons who had been captured earlier. Water was poured down his throat in order to choke him. He was also stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag and wrapped in electrical cord during one interrogation. Subsequently, a U.S. military court convicted Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer—also from Fort Carson, by the way—of negligent homicide in Mowhoush’s death. Welshofer’s only punishment was a reprimand and a $6,000 fine. I wonder what punishment a court would have meted out if the victim had been an American citizen. And Captain Shawn Martin—who, like Welshofer, was part of the 3rd ACR—was charged on accusations that he had used a pistol, his fists, and a baseball bat that he called his “Iraqi beater” to threaten and abuse civilians and his own troops in an Iraqi town by the name of Rutbah. Martin was eventually convicted of three counts of assault against Iraqi civilians. His lawyer claimed that Martin was a good soldier who was authorized to use tough techniques. Martin’s punishment: a $12,000 fine and forty-five days behind bars.
After I left Iraq and came to Canada, it came to light that American soldiers had been humiliating and abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Two soldiers—neither of them members of the 3rd ACR—were jailed for taking photographs of prisoners in forced poses. When I was in Iraq I had no idea where our troops sent all the men and boys I detained in house raids. Every single male we found who was over five feet tall was zipcuffed, head-bagged, and tossed onto the back of the five-ton truck waiting dutifully outside each house we raided, ransacked, and plundered. I still shake my head in shame and wo
nderment when I think of the Iraqi man who had the guts to shout out in anger—as he was being seized by my squad mates—when he saw me stealing one hundred dollars in American bills that I had found in his house.
“Why are you taking that money? It’s not yours.”
I kept the money, and for a good while I held the attitude that Iraqis had no rights in their own country. It was an attitude I had picked up from my commanders, and it took me an embarrassingly long period of time before I began to question and then reject it.
When I fled to Canada, I was required to make a deposition to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, stating why I was seeking official refugee status. In this book, I have addressed all the facts set out in that deposition, and have written for the first time about a number of other incidents that I also witnessed in Iraq. However, there are two details in the deposition that I wish to correct, for the record.
The first has to do with the killing of a child in al-Habbaniyah shortly after my platoon raided a home inhabited by two disabled men. The deposition says that the victim was a boy. That is an error. The child was a girl. I am not sure how it came to be recorded incorrectly in the deposition, but I remember all too well that young girl in her school uniform, and I always will.
The second detail relates to the number of houses my platoon mates and I raided in Iraq. The deposition says that I conducted about 75 raids. At the time that I prepared the deposition, I was anxious to avoid any possibility of overstating the number of raids. However, after making that first statement, I have had many more months to reflect on the matter and to do a tally of our raids. I now realize that two hundred raids is a far more accurate figure, and I believe that this estimate is still conservative.
If we detained an average of one male per home—and that would be a conservative estimate—that means that the men in my squad alone sent two hundred men into detention centers and prisons. I can only imagine that some of them ended up at Abu Ghraib.
Some people will say that the terrible things I have described seeing in Iraq were exceptions to the rule. This might be comforting, but it would also be naive to think so. Because I saw fundamental violations of basic human rights every day or two for six and a half months in Iraq, and since I never saw one soldier or officer criticized or disciplined for carrying out such violations, I tend to fear the opposite. I fear, and believe, that what I saw was only the tip of the iceberg in Iraq. I know that on two occasions when I did encounter other military companies in Iraq, I also witnessed the murder of Iraqis I believed to be civilians. I am thinking of members of the 82nd Airborne Division who shot and killed twelve civilians in Fallujah. And I am thinking of the members of the Florida National Guard who shot up four Iraqis so mercilessly. “We fucking lost it, we just fucking lost it,” one American soldier of the guard hollered when I came upon him and his buddies as they stood near the decapitated bodies. By a fluke of timing, I had caught him in a moment of complete honesty. He said it when the heads had just been severed and the blood was still fresh. He said it before he knew enough to shut his mouth. And as far as I could tell, he was speaking the ugly truth.
In our military training and in our daily experiences at war, American soldiers were taught to show no regard for the lives of Iraqis—not even for civilians. This will go on until one of two things happens: the people of America no longer tolerate it or the people of Iraq find their own ways to strike back at us. In my opinion, the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were cowardly and despicable crimes. On that day, the terrorists had no right to take the lives of American civilians. But I fear that our own behavior in Iraq has invited more of the same. The young Iraqis who survive our raids, abuse, and detentions have all the motivation they need to seek revenge. I am not looking forward to the day they get organized. Whenever I remember standing with three hundred military trainees in Missouri shouting, “Kill the sand niggers” as loud as we could while stabbing and slashing with our bayonets at straw dummies, I say to myself that I hope the Iraqis who survive our war prove to be more civilized than we were.
When I was in high school, I would have scoffed if one of my friends had predicted that I would one day become an antiwar activist. If anyone had suggested that newspapers, magazines, and documentary films in North America, Europe, and Japan would be examining my role in the war in Iraq and talking about why I had run from it, I would have thought that they were out of their mind. I grew up a patriot, I entered the American army as a patriot, and I commenced duties raiding homes, patrolling streets, and checking cars in Iraq as a patriot. I hated to read and write as a child, but if somebody had forced me to predict—maybe in my school yearbook—what would happen in my future, I would have written that I’d have a family, believe in my country and my government, and become a workingman in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Perhaps I would have become a mechanic, or a welder if I was lucky.
Going off to war in Iraq and then going AWOL—first in my own country and then fleeing to Canada—forced me to give up many things. I had to give up my innocent and unexamined belief that my country and my army were a force only for good in the world. I had to give up my assumptions that leaders of my own country would speak the truth when they spoke to me. I learned the hard way that it was not true that I could sign up for the military and choose to become a bridge builder in the continental United States. The way the military reeled in the other recruits and me—many black and Latino, and all poor—I now call the poverty draft. It was not true that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And it was not true that every man, woman, and child in Iraq was an evil terrorist who deserved American hatred, bombs, and occupation. All I had to do was look in the eyes of a seven-year-old girl who ran to me to ask for my rations, day after day until she was shot dead, to know that the people we intimidated, beat, detained, and killed were human beings with the same hungry stomachs as my American-born children.
When I finally abandoned my country and entered Canada, I had to continue to leave behind a number of attitudes I barely knew I had. My grandfather—the man who had passed on the good values that helped me find my own conscience in Iraq—was not a perfect man. He was an out-and-out racist, as a matter of fact, and he believed that Asian people were the enemies of Americans. When Brandi, the children, and I crossed the border at Niagara Falls, New York, we drove to Toronto and stayed for six months—at no charge—in the home of Winnie and Eugene Ng, two Asian Canadians.
I hadn’t known many gentle caregivers in my early years in Oklahoma. In a way, Winnie and Eugene became caring parents to Brandi and me. Our own boys called them “Grandma Winnie” and “Grandpa Eugene.” All I had to do was spend one hour at the table of Winnie and Eugene to realize how sadly mistaken was my grandfather in his blind hatred of Asian people. Grandfather Elmer, too, had been to war. He had fought in Korea. I imagine that he had found it necessary to demonize and hate the people he fought. But I don’t have to keep my grandfather’s demons alive. And I don’t have to nourish the prejudices I was taught in my own training in the American army.
Because I fought an unconventional war in Iraq, and because that war brought me into close contact with ordinary civilians who were struggling to survive—in the very ways that Americans would be struggling to survive, if the tables were turned—I was able to slowly awaken to the humanity of the very people I was told to despise. Coming to Toronto and staying with Winnie and Eugene moved me along the same path. It showed me how easy it was to put my grandfather’s demons to sleep. That is one less demon for me to pass on to my children.
If every American soldier set aside his or her M-249 automatic rifle and sat down to dinner with an Iraqi family, I believe that the house raids the next day would be a tad less brutal. If the dinners continued, perhaps the house raids would come to an end. I believe that even the most patriotic soldiers in my company would hesitate to beat up, zipcuff, and arrest a sixteen-year-old boy if they discovered that the teenager lik
ed falafels and mint tea and studied trigonometry in the hope that one day, if the universities open up again, he might be able to learn from the brightest minds still alive in his country.
The War Resisters Support Campaign is a Toronto-based group with volunteers around the country. They help out the thirty or so deserters who, like me, have applied for refugee status in Canada. They provided food for my family during our first several months in their country. I did my best to pay them back by speaking at public events about my experiences in Iraq.
I will never forget the first time I was asked to speak in public. It was at a meeting of the Canadian Labour Congress, just a month or so after we arrived in Toronto. I was so terrified that I could barely open my mouth. Eventually, I grew into public speaking. In the summer of 2005, Brandi, the children, and I drove from Toronto to the Pacific Coast and back, stopping for me to give talks in some twenty towns and cities along the way. I spoke in churches, mosques, libraries, and community halls. I met with journalists everywhere I went. All I wanted to do was tell people what I had seen and done and why I had chosen to desert the American army in Iraq.
I especially liked speaking in mosques. I was worried the first time that I might be received with hatred and accusations. But each time I have visited a mosque, I have been received warmly and encouraged to speak about my experiences at war and why I deserted the army. I can never undo the things I did in Iraq. I will always have to live with them. But I live with them a little easier when I reach out and speak to Muslims in Canada. I tell them that I am sorry about what I did to their brothers and sisters, and that I hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive me. Prospects for peace do not look good in the world, but I believe that individual citizens can make a difference. For my part, I speak to as many people as I can about the things I did and saw in Iraq. I am grateful to break bread with Muslims when they invite me to meet with them.