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Book Review: The Deserter's Tale
By Mark Biskeborn
Created Feb 21 2008 - 2:45pm
A Memoir: The Story of An Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in
Iraq
By Joshua Key
Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, NY; 237 pp., 2007
Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn
When a soldier returns from war, normally he keeps his mouth shut. It's one
of those unwritten rules of the military, part of some arcane code of honor.
But those rules only hold if you return to the States with hopes for "a
normal life" with career opportunities. But now days, for many veterans,
that's not the case.
Joshua Key was a typical recruit. [1] A good old boy with patriotic and
conservative values, he comes from Guthrie, Oklahoma. Backed into a corner
by economic necessity, he joins the Army only to face broken promises from
recruiters that he would obtain training as a welder building bridges.
"The way the military reeled in the other recruits and me-many black and
Latino, and all poor-I now call the poverty draft."
Recruiters assure him of not being sent to Iraq because he is the father of
three kids with one on the way. After years of moving around with wife
Brandi, chasing low-income jobs, Key gives in to the bait 'n switch methods
of the U.S. Army, and with the help of a recruiter who coaches him to lie
his way through an application (e.g. don't mention the wife with the
expectant baby), he enters the military.
"They were smart men, those recruiters. They didn't waste time at the
doors of doctors and lawyers but came straight for me."
The Deserter's Tale breaks into three parts: Key's poverty leading to his
decision to join the army, then his moral awakening in Iraq, and then the
aftermath of his desertion. When he comes home on leave, he decides he can't
return to Iraq because of moral repulsion, not because of cowardice. By far
the most gripping portion of the book recounts his gradual crisis of
conscience as he reflects on his own behavior, the madness of tactics that
the military applied in Iraq, and America's crumbling moral standing in the
world.
Growing Up Tough, Patriotic, and Conservative
Key grew up tough. Always below poverty's radar, his mother sank beneath
desperation. Violent stepfathers passed through his life. His only anchor
was his grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War. Through a confused
adolescence, he settled down with a good woman. Key hoped for modest
expectations: becoming a welder, raising his kids and loving his wife. But
modern American economics makes that impossible. Before he turns around, he
passes through boot camp, ready to serve his country and believed he was
saving democracy, liberating a nation and doing his patriotic duty.
"Growing up poor in Oklahoma also prepared me mentally for the war to
come."
Despite his deception by recruiters, he keeps his head down, follows orders,
serves his country, and hopes to return home to his family. As a private in
one of the first divisions to enter Iraq, spring of 2003, Key participates
and observes first-hand the breaking of promises made to Iraqis, the
spiraling hatred of Americans and the self-defeating tactics the chain of
command encourages among his fellow soldiers as they move throughout Iraq.
Conscience Catches Up
And then he pulls himself out of the hell his country condemns him to: his
grandfather's role-model helps him to rise above the military's and the
country's own unraveling.
"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."
Boot camp trains him to treat all Iraqis as terrorists. Following orders,
Key's most common duty adds up to more than 200 night raids to ransack
houses in residential neighborhoods, terrifying the occupants, and beating
males over five feet tall and sending them away, never to be seen again. At
the end of so many raids, he reports that he and his comrades find not one
weapons cache, not one cabal of terrorists. It unleashes the worst in him
and his comrades as they terrorize innocent men, women, and children. He
realizes that he and his comrades become evildoers, terrorists.
"... the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had
become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of
the machine."
The officers terrorize the grunts too, as Key reports, with daily briefings
of presumed intelligence being passed along to them about how the troops
were the next target in a well-planned campaign by terrorists that never
appeared. And when a new commander takes over the company, his best pep-talk
to inspire the grunts is to urge a suicide mission on them:
"Your dangers don't matter to me. If one hundred of you walk out that
door, as long as seventy-five percent of you walk back inside I'm a happy
man because it's an acceptable fatality rate."
Months pass, Key's group moves around Iraq, and morale hits new lows. No one
gets more than two hours of sleep at a time. Mortars fall all around
nightly. With the heat high, water supplies low, they bunk down in places
that other American forces have already bombed, buildings furnished with
unexploded materiel.
As a private, Key's can never object to the brutality soldiers around him
practice. The chain of command responds harshly to any act of
whistle-blowing. In the thick of war crimes around him, he witnesses his own
officers participating in crimes. He has no access to any form of justice.
He is swallowed up in a swamp of daily injustice and war-crimes against
innocent civilians.
He can only resign to a passive resistance. When his weapon breaks down, he
carries it with him nonetheless, useless as it is.
"I had not fired my M-249 since it had stopped working a month or two
earlier. I had taken part in about two hundred house raids but had months
earlier lost any belief in the cause. Most of my buddies felt the same way.
The house raids were nothing but an excuse to insult, intimidate, and arrest
Iraqis. They gave us a convenient target to vent our frustrations, never
having any real enemies to kill in battle."
He and a few of his comrades begin talking about shooting themselves in the
foot as a ticket back home. Desperate, one grunt from another company tries
this, the commander of Key's unit declares that
" 'Any soldier who shot himself would be patched up in Germany and sent
right back into action.'
I believed he was serious, and stopped thinking so much of hurting myself,
but I often considered another strategy and tried it a few times. While we
took cover from flying bullets and shrapnel, sometimes I stuck out my arm in
harm's way, hoping that an enemy bullet might smash into it."
When our troops blow the brains out of a 10-year-old girl whom he befriended
by giving her rations, the war's absolute immorality punches him in the gut.
Added to this, other horror scenes arise. He recounts other incidents in
nightmarish detail: coming upon American soldiers in the middle of the
night, he sees them playing soccer with the heads of four Iraqi civilians
they had just killed.
Deserter
When he finally gets sent home for a two-week leave, he wrestles with the
following:
"I ... tried not to think about which was worse: beating up and killing
the civilians of Iraq or refusing to do it any more and becoming a
criminal."
In the end, by a SNAFU (military slang for bureaucratic screw up), a
three-day delayed flight back to Iraq for which he reports (and then doesn't
report back), he chooses desertion.
Bitter irony paints his story of how he lays low in America. He moves his
family from place to place in the Northeast and he and his wife survive
hand-to-mouth, sleeping in rest stops and cheap motels.
"Here is how I avoided detection," he tells readers, "by following every
word of training that I received in the army."
As he becomes a criminal fugitive from a criminal war, he reflects:
"How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a
tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right
up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to
blow up the occupiers.
America felt like a dreamland. It seemed to me that not a soul in the
country had the faintest clue about what I had been living through every day
in Iraq.... Walking about the city, a person visiting from another country
would have had no idea that the United States was at war in Iraq.
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."
Finally, Key and his family sneak into Canada, hoping for asylum.
"Ordinary Iraqis have paid very dearly for this war, and ordinary
Americans are paying for it too with their lives and with their souls."
Meanwhile us civilians dream about how we might upgrade our social class. We
measure the value of our real-estate in a slow market. Some of us holy
rollers even scare ourselves about the second coming, the rapture. Some of
us are still pro-war and pro-life. We drive gas guzzling SUV's to work from
nine to five, fret about our kids, plan our retirement, and occasionally
watch vague CNN reports about insurgents. We change our opinion about the
war. It's only created more terrorism than ever before and in places like
Iraq where once there was none. But the war continues. So it goes. And so it
goes.
By Mark Biskeborn
Created Feb 21 2008 - 2:45pm
A Memoir: The Story of An Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in
Iraq
By Joshua Key
Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, NY; 237 pp., 2007
Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn
When a soldier returns from war, normally he keeps his mouth shut. It's one
of those unwritten rules of the military, part of some arcane code of honor.
But those rules only hold if you return to the States with hopes for "a
normal life" with career opportunities. But now days, for many veterans,
that's not the case.
Joshua Key was a typical recruit. [1] A good old boy with patriotic and
conservative values, he comes from Guthrie, Oklahoma. Backed into a corner
by economic necessity, he joins the Army only to face broken promises from
recruiters that he would obtain training as a welder building bridges.
"The way the military reeled in the other recruits and me-many black and
Latino, and all poor-I now call the poverty draft."
Recruiters assure him of not being sent to Iraq because he is the father of
three kids with one on the way. After years of moving around with wife
Brandi, chasing low-income jobs, Key gives in to the bait 'n switch methods
of the U.S. Army, and with the help of a recruiter who coaches him to lie
his way through an application (e.g. don't mention the wife with the
expectant baby), he enters the military.
"They were smart men, those recruiters. They didn't waste time at the
doors of doctors and lawyers but came straight for me."
The Deserter's Tale breaks into three parts: Key's poverty leading to his
decision to join the army, then his moral awakening in Iraq, and then the
aftermath of his desertion. When he comes home on leave, he decides he can't
return to Iraq because of moral repulsion, not because of cowardice. By far
the most gripping portion of the book recounts his gradual crisis of
conscience as he reflects on his own behavior, the madness of tactics that
the military applied in Iraq, and America's crumbling moral standing in the
world.
Growing Up Tough, Patriotic, and Conservative
Key grew up tough. Always below poverty's radar, his mother sank beneath
desperation. Violent stepfathers passed through his life. His only anchor
was his grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War. Through a confused
adolescence, he settled down with a good woman. Key hoped for modest
expectations: becoming a welder, raising his kids and loving his wife. But
modern American economics makes that impossible. Before he turns around, he
passes through boot camp, ready to serve his country and believed he was
saving democracy, liberating a nation and doing his patriotic duty.
"Growing up poor in Oklahoma also prepared me mentally for the war to
come."
Despite his deception by recruiters, he keeps his head down, follows orders,
serves his country, and hopes to return home to his family. As a private in
one of the first divisions to enter Iraq, spring of 2003, Key participates
and observes first-hand the breaking of promises made to Iraqis, the
spiraling hatred of Americans and the self-defeating tactics the chain of
command encourages among his fellow soldiers as they move throughout Iraq.
Conscience Catches Up
And then he pulls himself out of the hell his country condemns him to: his
grandfather's role-model helps him to rise above the military's and the
country's own unraveling.
"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."
Boot camp trains him to treat all Iraqis as terrorists. Following orders,
Key's most common duty adds up to more than 200 night raids to ransack
houses in residential neighborhoods, terrifying the occupants, and beating
males over five feet tall and sending them away, never to be seen again. At
the end of so many raids, he reports that he and his comrades find not one
weapons cache, not one cabal of terrorists. It unleashes the worst in him
and his comrades as they terrorize innocent men, women, and children. He
realizes that he and his comrades become evildoers, terrorists.
"... the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had
become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of
the machine."
The officers terrorize the grunts too, as Key reports, with daily briefings
of presumed intelligence being passed along to them about how the troops
were the next target in a well-planned campaign by terrorists that never
appeared. And when a new commander takes over the company, his best pep-talk
to inspire the grunts is to urge a suicide mission on them:
"Your dangers don't matter to me. If one hundred of you walk out that
door, as long as seventy-five percent of you walk back inside I'm a happy
man because it's an acceptable fatality rate."
Months pass, Key's group moves around Iraq, and morale hits new lows. No one
gets more than two hours of sleep at a time. Mortars fall all around
nightly. With the heat high, water supplies low, they bunk down in places
that other American forces have already bombed, buildings furnished with
unexploded materiel.
As a private, Key's can never object to the brutality soldiers around him
practice. The chain of command responds harshly to any act of
whistle-blowing. In the thick of war crimes around him, he witnesses his own
officers participating in crimes. He has no access to any form of justice.
He is swallowed up in a swamp of daily injustice and war-crimes against
innocent civilians.
He can only resign to a passive resistance. When his weapon breaks down, he
carries it with him nonetheless, useless as it is.
"I had not fired my M-249 since it had stopped working a month or two
earlier. I had taken part in about two hundred house raids but had months
earlier lost any belief in the cause. Most of my buddies felt the same way.
The house raids were nothing but an excuse to insult, intimidate, and arrest
Iraqis. They gave us a convenient target to vent our frustrations, never
having any real enemies to kill in battle."
He and a few of his comrades begin talking about shooting themselves in the
foot as a ticket back home. Desperate, one grunt from another company tries
this, the commander of Key's unit declares that
" 'Any soldier who shot himself would be patched up in Germany and sent
right back into action.'
I believed he was serious, and stopped thinking so much of hurting myself,
but I often considered another strategy and tried it a few times. While we
took cover from flying bullets and shrapnel, sometimes I stuck out my arm in
harm's way, hoping that an enemy bullet might smash into it."
When our troops blow the brains out of a 10-year-old girl whom he befriended
by giving her rations, the war's absolute immorality punches him in the gut.
Added to this, other horror scenes arise. He recounts other incidents in
nightmarish detail: coming upon American soldiers in the middle of the
night, he sees them playing soccer with the heads of four Iraqi civilians
they had just killed.
Deserter
When he finally gets sent home for a two-week leave, he wrestles with the
following:
"I ... tried not to think about which was worse: beating up and killing
the civilians of Iraq or refusing to do it any more and becoming a
criminal."
In the end, by a SNAFU (military slang for bureaucratic screw up), a
three-day delayed flight back to Iraq for which he reports (and then doesn't
report back), he chooses desertion.
Bitter irony paints his story of how he lays low in America. He moves his
family from place to place in the Northeast and he and his wife survive
hand-to-mouth, sleeping in rest stops and cheap motels.
"Here is how I avoided detection," he tells readers, "by following every
word of training that I received in the army."
As he becomes a criminal fugitive from a criminal war, he reflects:
"How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a
tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right
up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to
blow up the occupiers.
America felt like a dreamland. It seemed to me that not a soul in the
country had the faintest clue about what I had been living through every day
in Iraq.... Walking about the city, a person visiting from another country
would have had no idea that the United States was at war in Iraq.
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."
Finally, Key and his family sneak into Canada, hoping for asylum.
"Ordinary Iraqis have paid very dearly for this war, and ordinary
Americans are paying for it too with their lives and with their souls."
Meanwhile us civilians dream about how we might upgrade our social class. We
measure the value of our real-estate in a slow market. Some of us holy
rollers even scare ourselves about the second coming, the rapture. Some of
us are still pro-war and pro-life. We drive gas guzzling SUV's to work from
nine to five, fret about our kids, plan our retirement, and occasionally
watch vague CNN reports about insurgents. We change our opinion about the
war. It's only created more terrorism than ever before and in places like
Iraq where once there was none. But the war continues. So it goes. And so it
goes.