The Deserter's Tale by Joshua Key

Author:Joshua Key
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2012-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

6

al-Habbaniyah

NEAR THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST 2003, THE 43RD combat Engineer Company left Ramadi and moved about ten miles east to al-Habbaniyah. It was a small, dusty town of no more than ten thousand people, set on the banks of the Euphrates River. Close to al-Habbaniyah, there was a village named Khaldia. In this book, when I write about events in al-Habbaniyah, I mean the area including it and Khaldia. We spent the next six weeks there raiding houses and patrolling streets and guarding munitions depots as well as our own compound.

The Bible says that the Euphrates River was one of four flowing out of the Garden of Eden. I wish we had found peace by the calm waters bordering the town, but by this time tensions in Iraq had escalated so much that we were under regular attack from fighters we could never see.

As a group of soldiers, if we stopped in any one place and stayed more than twenty minutes, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades would start raining on us. When I found myself alive at the end of a dangerous day, I sometimes imagined that, just like a cat, I had been granted nine lives. Even so, they were being used up quickly. Around this time, my squad mates and I were on foot patrol on the streets of al-Habbaniyah when rocket-propelled grenades started falling on us. I could hear them whizzing through the air. They were about half the size of a football but something of a blur as they flew nearby just above my head. I would have been injured if any of them had blown up within thirty yards of me, and dead if it happened within ten yards. I dashed for the cover of a concrete wall. Before I could make it, a grenade flew by me and hit the ground just inches away. I expected to be shredded by red-hot shrapnel but the grenade bounced, rolled, and failed to explode. I kept running and took shelter behind the wall. There was no wake-up call more brutal than a close encounter with a grenade. It was nastier than ten shots of Tabasco or five cups of coffee. As my pounding heart slowed I thought that sooner or later my time would come.

Being attacked so often by invisible enemies made all of us in the squad more and more anxious. We didn’t like being shot at, didn’t like not having anybody to shoot back at, and we wondered if we would ever get home alive.

I didn’t get to call Brandi often. About five weeks went by in Iraq before I could make my first call home, and usually three more weeks would pass before I’d have another chance to call. Sometimes I would stand for hours in line, waiting for my turn on a military telephone. Some days, I would get my two minutes on the line and get through to my wife. Other times, before I could make it to the front of the line, I would have to report back to duty.

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