Read Online The Deserter's Tale by Joshua Key - Free Book Online Page B

the charge of C-4 plastic explosive on the door. Then we dashed around to the side of the house so we wouldn’t blow ourselves up. You wouldn’t want to be standing anywhere near that door when we blew it in. You’d be fried meat if you were near the explosion. I set off the blast, and then the six of us charged into the house. Jones went first—that skinny, red-haired Ohio boy was always hot to trot. Next went Fadinetz. Then me. After me came Padilla, and then Sykora, who gobbled up professional wrestling like it was going out of style—that, and porn videos; even in Iraq, the man got his hands on porn videos regularly. After Sykora came the other grunt from our squad. It was either Specialist Mason or Private First Class Lewis—I can’t remember which of them was with me on that first raid.
    With Jones leading the way we burst into the house. We were armed to the hilt. Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, machine guns, combat boots, the whole nine yards.
    I’d never been inside an Iraqi’s house before. We charged through a kitchen. I had been told by squad leader Padilla to check everything, so I even opened the fridge. Perhaps, I thought, I would find guns or grenades hidden inside. No such luck. In the fridge, all I saw was a bit of food. In the freezer I found big slabs of meat, uncovered. No wrapping. No plastic. Frozen, just like that. We ran into a living room with long couches, one along each wall. In this room with the abundance of couches we found two children, a teenager, and a woman. We also found two young men in the house. One looked like a teenager and the other was perhaps in his early twenties—brothers.
    We hollered and cussed. I spat dip on the floor and screamed along with the other soldiers at the top of my lungs. I knew they didn’t understand, but I hollered anyway.
    â€œGet down,” I shouted. “Get the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.”
    They didn’t know what “get down” meant, so we knocked the two brothers to the floor, facedown. We put our knees on their backs, pulled their hands behind them, and faster than you can bat an eye we zipcuffed them. Zipcuffs are plastic handcuffs that lock on tight. They must have bit something fierce into those young men’s skin. There was no key, nothing—the only way to get them off was to slice them with cutters.
    We pushed the brothers outside, where twelve other soldiers from our platoon were waiting. Some loaded the Iraqi men onto the back of a truck. Others were “pulling perimeter,” which meant keeping guard to make sure that nobody entered or left the house or the surrounding area.
    The Iraqi brothers were taken away to an American detention facility for interrogation. I don’t know what it was called, and I don’t know where it was. All I know is that we sent away every man—pretty well every male over five feet tall—that we found in our house raids, and I never saw one of them return to the neighborhoods we patrolled regularly.
    Inside, we kept on ransacking the house. The more obvious it became that we would find no weapons or contraband, the more we kicked the stuffing out of the house. We knocked over dressers, sliced into mattresses with knives, kicked our way through doors, raiding the three bedrooms on the second floor, then raced up to the third floor. Would we find terrorists or nasty weapons stashed there? Nope. It was basically just a landing that led to a rooftop area where the family had washed clothes and hung them to dry.
    We turned over everything we could and broke furniture at random, searching for contraband, weapons, proof of terrorist activity, or signs of weapons of mass destruction. We found nothing but a compact disc. Soldiers initially said it showed proof of terrorist activity, but it turned out to have nothing on it but a bunch of speeches by Saddam Hussein.
    I figured the terrorists had managed to dance out of our way that night, but