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

going to find that recruiter and tell him that he’s a lying piece of shit,” Babbit fumed.
    Among the three hundred recruits, about a third of us were white, another third black, and another third Latino. There were just two women. As we went through the seventeen weeks of basic training, we were all shouted at, insulted, awoken abruptly, and kept off balance by sergeants whose job it was to break us down and build us back up in their own mold.
    If somebody failed to do something properly, every recruit in the company would be punished. That quickly taught us to hate laggards and people who just couldn’t follow orders quickly enough.
    I must say that I loved boot camp. I was good with guns, didn’t mind the exercise, and felt myself swell with patriotism and pride when our commanders told us that Americans were the only decent people on the planet and that Muslims and terrorists all deserved to die.
    One day, all three hundred of us lined up on the bayonet range, each facing a life-size dummy that we were told to imagine was a Muslim man.
    As we stabbed the dummies with our bayonets, one of our commanders stood on a podium and shouted into a microphone: “Kill! Kill! Kill the sand niggers!”
    We, too, were made to shout out “Kill the sand niggers” as we stabbed the heads, then the hearts, and then slashed the throats of our imaginary victims.
    While we shouted and stabbed, drill sergeants walked among us to make sure that we were all shouting. It seemed that the full effect of the lesson would be lost on us unless we shouted out the words of hate as we mutilated our enemies.
    I shouted as loud and stabbed as mercilessly as any man on the range, and I slowly began to feel that I was somebody important. I was no longer a fast-food delivery man earning a pittance for a wage plus tips and all the pizza I could eat. I was no longer wondering how I could possibly put enough food on the table for Brandi and the boys. I was now an American soldier, and proud to think of myself as a perfect killing machine. I felt patriotic and invincible. I believed every word I was told, including that it was the job of the American army to keep order in the world. Our commanders told us that people who were not Americans were “terrorists” and “slant eyes.” They said that Muslims were responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on our country, that the people of Afghanistan were “terrorist pieces of shit that all deserved to die.”
    Commanders drilled these beliefs into us by making us memorize and call out various chants. I have trouble remembering the precise words of all of these chants, but one of them went something like this:
    One shot
    One kill
    One Arab
    One Asian
    Another of our chants had to do with putting our skills as sappers, or makers and defusers of bombs, to good use:
    Who can take a shopping mall
    And fill it full of people?
    The sapper daddy can,
    â€˜Cause he takes a lot of pains
    And makes the hurt go good.
    Who can take all the people in the mall
    And chop ‘em up with Uzis?
    The sapper daddy can,
    â€˜Cause he takes a lot of pains
    And makes the hurt go good.
    Iraqis, in the mouths of the officers and soldiers of the United States Army, were never Iraqis. And Muslims were never civilians. Nobody once mentioned the word “civilian” in the same breath as “Iraq” when I trained to become a soldier. Iraqis, I was taught to believe, were not civilians; they were not even people. We had our own terms for them. Our commanders called them ragheads, so we did the same. We called them habibs. We called them sand niggers. We called them hajjis; it wasn’t until I was sent to war that a man in Iraq explained to me that hajji was a complimentary term for a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In training, all I knew was that a hajji was someone to be despised. The hajjis, habibs, ragheads, and sand niggers were the enemy, and they were