Free The Deserter's Tale by Joshua Key

that we’d nab them the next time.
    Once we had everybody outside the house and had done our initial job of ransacking, another squad took over inside. They kept raising hell in there, breaking and turning over more furniture, looking for weapons that we might have missed. Outside, under a carport—a parking space under a roof, but with no walls or enclosure—I was assigned to watch the women and children. We weren’t arresting them, but we weren’t allowing them to go anywhere either. The family members couldn’t go back inside, and they couldn’t wander off into the neighborhood. They had to stay right there while we tore the hell out of their house.
    A girl in the family—a teenager—started staring at me. I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me. Inside, when we had been screaming at her and the others, I’d assumed that nobody understood a word of English. But this young girl spoke to me in English, and her eyes bored holes right through me. She was skin and bones, not even a hundred pounds, not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing.
    I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could, but it was my job to stay right there and make sure she didn’t move. I had my weapon ready. She was wearing a blue nightgown and had a white scarf covering her hair. She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly. Her eyes were coal black and full of hatred.
    In English, she asked me, “Where are you taking my brothers?”
    â€œI don’t know, Miss,” I said.
    â€œWhy are you taking them away?”
    â€œI’m afraid I can’t say.”
    â€œWhen are you bringing them back?”
    â€œCouldn’t tell you that either.”
    â€œWhy are you doing this to us?”
    I couldn’t answer that.
    I hoped she would not raise a fuss. I didn’t want her to start screaming, which could attract the attention of my squad mates. One or two of them, I feared, would be more than happy to use a rifle butt to knock out her teeth.
    I hadn’t been in Iraq more than twenty-four hours and already I was having strange feelings. First, I was vulnerable, and I didn’t like it. Even with all these soldiers and all this equipment, I knew that anywhere, at any time, any enterprising Iraqi with a gun, a wall to hide behind, and one decent eye could pick me off faster than a hawk nabs a mouse. Second, with hardly one foot into the war in Iraq, I was also uneasy about what we were doing there. Something was amiss. We hadn’t found anything in this girl’s house, but we had busted it up pretty well in thirty minutes and had taken away her brothers. Inside, another squad was still ransacking the house. I didn’t enjoy being stuck guarding this girl under the carport, in the cool April air before dawn in Ramadi. Her questions haunted me, and I didn’t like not being able to answer them—even to myself.
    I dared not speak more with her because that would amount to “fraternizing with the enemy”—something about which I would be warned many times in Iraq.
    In the days to come I tried to drive that girl out of my mind. We hadn’t found a thing in her house except slabs of meat in the freezer and a Saddam Hussein CD. No matter. We’d catch the terrorists the next day, to be sure. Or so I told myself.
    We were pumped after that raid. It felt like a pouch of adrenaline was slung on an IV and dripping straight into my veins. It was one of the most exciting things I had ever done. After the first hit I wanted more. I wanted to catch those flicking terrorists, and I figured it was only bad luck that had prevented us from nabbing them the first time.
    We were told that the purpose of the house raids was to nab terrorists and to find evidence of terrorism. During that first month in Ramadi, we usually raided at least one home—and sometimes as many as four—each