The Deserter's Tale

Joshua Key, a young husband and father from a conservative background in Oklahoma, enlisted in the United States Army in 2002, to get training as a welder and to lift his family out of poverty. He believed he would not be deployed unless World War III broke out. A year later. President George W. Bus [...]
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Joshua Key, a young husband and father from a conservative background in Oklahoma, enlisted in the United States Army in 2002, to get training as a welder and to lift his family out of poverty. He believed he would not be deployed unless World War III broke out. A year later. President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. In spring 2003, Key was sent to Ramadi as part of the 43rd Combat Engineer Company of the Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry. The war be found himself participating in was not the campaign against terrorists and evildoers he had expected. Key saw Iraqi civilians beaten, shot, and killed or maimed for little or no provocation. Nearly every other night, he participated in raids on homes he was told were harboring terrorists. He and his company arrested all the men inside, then ransacked the homes while frightened women and children stood by. They never found evidence of terrorist activity. He witnessed a seven-year-old girl killed while attempting to scrounge leftover Army rations as food for her family, and a car full of apparently unarmed Iraqis whose dead bodies provided sport for U.S. soldiers. After seven months in Iraq, Key was home on leave, and knew he could not return. So he took his family and went underground in the United States, finally seeking asylum in Canada after fourteen months in hiding. The Deserter's Tale details life as part of the occupying force--it is not an expose of terrible atrocity, but an account of an experience where human rights abuses and impunity for committing them were routine. It is the story of a conservative-minded family man and patriot from Oklahoma who went into the war believing unquestioningly in his government'scommitment to integrity and justice, and how what he saw in Iraq transformed him into someone who could no longer serve his country.