Free The Deserter's Tale by Joshua Key Page A

night. The houses we raided were ordinary, one- or two-story homes in residential areas. They were far more attractive, spacious, and comfortable than the trailer, apartments, and houses I had inhabited in Oklahoma. Most of the houses in Iraq looked neat, tidy, and well arranged—before we showed up. Our raids always took place in the middle of the night, in order to catch people sleeping and to intimidate them.
    My whole platoon, consisting of about twenty officers and soldiers, would take part in the house raids. Twelve or so soldiers would place themselves outside, six positioned as guards and another six stationed at the trucks used to take away all the men—or any boys over five feet tall—that we found inside. It was always the job of my squad of six or seven men to begin the raid itself. I was usually the one to put the plastic explosives on the door, set the charge, and blow down the door. I never saw a person killed in a house raid, but if any Iraqi had been standing just inside his front door at the moment I blew it off, he certainly would have been killed.
    When we burst in the door, sometimes we raced through the house and found people in bed. At other times men and women were standing or sitting inside, looking completely stunned. Sometimes their hands would fly to their mouths. Sometimes they would start screaming. We would scream at them to get down and knock down the men as quickly as we could so they could be zipcuffed and taken out to our waiting trucks. Any male who took his time about getting to the floor or who protested loudly would be given a quick rifle butt to the head or the stomach. I dished out my fair share of licks in those first raids.
    Although I lived in terror in the first month or two that somebody would ambush us in the midst of a house raid—throwing grenades or lighting us up with machine-gun fire—nobody ever resisted with as much as a finger. Looking back, with twelve American soldiers stationed outside and six more charging into the house, each one armed to the hilt and ready to shoot, I can see that resistance would have been suicide for any Iraqi. Even though not one person tried to shoot us or made any effort to hurt us, it was common for American soldiers to beat the civilians. At least every two or three days during my time in Iraq, I saw our soldiers kicking Iraqi civilians in the ribs and punching their faces until blood ran from their noses, mouths, or eyebrows. I’m not proud to say that I participated in these beatings, but I was far less extreme than some of the soldiers. As time went on I lost any appetite for the beatings and refrained from them entirely.
    We got the men outside as fast as we could, and it usually took longer to round up the women and children. The women would sometimes scream at us, and we would shout right back at them to “shut the fuck up.” Sometimes they spoke English and sometimes they didn’t. Often, we had no idea what they were saying and the only language of ours they understood were our pointed machine guns.
    Inside the houses, we knocked over wardrobes, kicked in doors, ripped through mattresses, and threw bookshelves to the floor. We busted locks, threw over refrigerators, and broke lanterns and lamps. Radios and televisions were thrown around and smashed.
    In the first raid, the second, the third, and the fourth, I wondered why we never managed to find anything. We tore the hell out of those places, blasting apart doors, ripping up mattresses, breaking locks off furniture, and ripping drawers from dressers. With all of our ransacking, we never found anything other than the ordinary goods that ordinary people keep in their houses.
    We commonly found AK-47s in the course of our raids—just as commonly as one might expect to find guns in houses in Guthrie, Oklahoma—and we didn’t consider this unusual or evidence of terrorism. Initially, we confiscated every weapon we found. But after several