Free The Deserter's Tale by Joshua Key Page B

weeks, Sergeant Padilla told us to stop taking them because Iraqis used them for their personal protection. Each family could keep one AK-47, Padilla told us. At the time, I thought that was perfectly ludicrous. I couldn’t see the point of raiding houses if we allowed the very people who were supposed to be our enemies to continue to own automatic rifles. During my entire stay in Iraq, the rules about whether or not to take AK-47s from houses kept changing. One week, we would be told to take every assault rifle we found. A little later, we would be instructed to let families keep a weapon for personal protection. Over time, I expected to find one gun in each house and paid it no more attention than I would a television.
    Other than weapons and people, the only things we found in our house raids were books, clothes, rugs, furniture, and food. When we found money, jewelry, or knives, we helped ourselves to them and to anything else that caught our fancy.
    Not long into my stay in Iraq, I saw $100 in a house. I snapped up the bills and stuffed them in my pocket. A man who was being zipcuffed and led out the door shouted back at me angrily.
    â€œWhy are you taking that money? It’s not yours.”
    â€œThis is American money,” I told him. “You’re not American, and you have no business having it.” The money stayed in my pocket.
    Jewelry. Money. If it looked good, we helped ourselves.
    I stole whatever I wanted in the initial raids, but I stopped doing that after my first few weeks in Iraq. The more uneasy I felt about what we were doing there, the less I wanted to make matters worse. Others in my platoon looted to their hearts’ content. One fellow collected gold jewelry and mailed it home to his wife. Another lugged a television straight out of an Iraqi house. Others took ornate knives, and I saw one soldier make off with a beautiful rug. Who was going to stop us? We were the army of the United States of America, and we would do whatever we pleased.
    I still believed that eventually we would find the terrorists or the weapons that were said to be there, but it didn’t take long before the raids left me feeling uncomfortable. It was easy to see the hatred in the eyes of the Iraqis as we broke apart their houses and arrested their men.
    In the raids, I came to dislike the way Sergeant Jones loved to be the first one to bust into the homes. Jones, a freckled man from Ohio, had already done war duty in Afghanistan. He was just twenty-two, and I resented the fact that a man two years my junior outranked me in the squad. He had no wife or kids. He had been in the U.S. Army for years and talked about staying in it forever. One of the things that upset me about Jones was what he had said to me in Fort Carson, Colorado, the day before we flew into war. He wanted to get my goat and he knew exactly how to mess me up. “It’s a known fact that your wife is gonna start fucking some other guy the moment you’re out of the country. You wait. You’ll see. It happens to them all. By the time you’re back, she will have stolen your money, served you divorce papers, and found herself another man.” I loved my wife to bits. Brandi and I already had three children, and I had never doubted her. But the seed of anxiety that Jones planted grew like a weed during my time in Iraq.
    I thought of Brandi and of our children when Jones and I charged into civilians’ houses. Jones had no family, but I did, and it tore me apart to terrorize families like that. We were finding no weapons of mass destruction or evidence of terrorism. I soon began to feel that breaking apart a house and terrorizing its inhabitants was not something that should be done to any human being. Period.
    One of the things that disturbed me the most in the house raids was having to run into bedrooms and round up sleeping Iraqi children. I couldn’t help imagining how my own children would react if armed soldiers from