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

believed what I was told. I was a bloody fool to do so.
    On April 13, 2002, I entered into a contract with the U.S. Army. Eighteen days later I was sent to basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
    * * *
    I took a commercial flight from Oklahoma City to St. Louis. At the airport, I met up with about 150 other new recruits. We boarded a number of military buses. It was a long drive to Fort Leonard Wood, but at least I was on the military payroll now. Brandi—who went to live with our boys in Checotah, Oklahoma—would be able to buy the children some clothing, and we would all eat a little better.
    We pulled into the fort around three a.m. As we prepared to disembark, a long line of drill sergeants awaited us. They shouted that we had to get off the bus immediately, screamed that we were worthless assholes, and hollered that anything could be changed in the contracts we had signed and any promises made to us could now be thrown out the window.
    The drill sergeants held megaphones as we all scrambled to get out. “Get the fuck out!” they screamed right in our faces.
    Like the others, I was nervous and scared, but I knew—even amid all the pushing and the shouting—that they were just trying to break us down mentally, and that more of this would come.
    We had to give up our cigarettes, lighters, scissors, and nail files. We were taken to the barracks, allowed to sleep for an hour, then rushed to a mess hall and given one minute to eat. And I mean one minute. I wolfed down the scrambled eggs as fast as I could.
    A day after our arrival I was allowed to call Brandi. I had only a minute or two on the telephone with her, and I wouldn’t be given another chance to call her for seventeen weeks. Quickly, I told her that they did not let us have coffee or tea in boot camp and that she should send me some over-the-counter uppers called Yellow Jackets. You can’t get them any longer but back then they were perfectly legal, and you could buy them at any gas station or drugstore in Oklahoma.
    Ever the dutiful wife, Brandi slipped the Yellow Jackets inside a box of Zest soap, repackaged the bar of soap, and sent me the uppers by mail. Every morning I swallowed a pill to jolt myself awake.
    Within a day or two of arriving at Fort Leonard Wood, while I stood at attention with three hundred other recruits, a drill sergeant hollered out that we had been put into the 35th Combat Engineer Company and that we would learn to be “the most devious goddamn killers on the battlefield.”
    I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it sure didn’t sound like bridge building. I tried not to worry about it because I still believed that after boot camp I would be sent to a nondeployable military base. So, to my way of thinking, it did not matter if I learned about grenades and mines because I wouldn’t have to use them in combat anyway.
    I turned twenty-four just a few days after arriving at boot camp. I didn’t tell anybody, because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. If anybody notices you or stops to speak to you at boot camp, it’s bad news for sure. The name of the game is to stay out of sight of anybody in any position to rain down punishment. When sergeants blew horns and banged trash cans at two in the morning, hauled us out of bed and made us each do a hundred push-ups, I tried to struggle through it and to stay under the radar.
    I shared a bunk bed with a private named Babbit, who was steaming over a lie he had swallowed during recruitment. The poor sucker had been told a story like mine—but even more ridiculous. A recruiter in Lawrence, Kansas, had promised Babbit that if he signed up for service, the army would reward him and his girlfriend with a holiday to Korea. When Babbit got to Fort Leonard Wood and found out that his Korean junket had disappeared about as fast as my bridge-building promise, his girlfriend dumped him.
    â€œWhen I get back home I’m