The Deserter's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He wasn’t a bad teacher, but he had an irresistible mailbox. Each time I smashed up his mailbox he put in a new one. Finally, he installed a rubber mailbox. The baseball bat didn’t do any good, so I—using a recipe from The Anarchist Cookbook— cooked up homemade napalm on my friend’s kitchen stove, carried it in an old paint can, and poured it all over the mailbox, which melted. Once more, my shop teacher couldn’t get his letters delivered.
    Some of the men in my life—my grandfather and J.W. in particular—had a lot of prejudices about blacks and Asians. One time, I was working in a doughnut store run by one of my aunts and my grandfather happened to be there when a number of black college students walked through the door. I was mortified to hear him mumble aloud about how he wished the Ku Klux Klan would come back. I noticed one of the students giving him a withering look, as if to say, “You are one pathetic loser.” I was relieved that he and his buddies got out the door without incident and—even though I loved my grandfather deeply—resolved not to be like him in that respect. I brought black friends by the house, and kept doing it even after he asked me to stop. “Grandpa, you’ve got to get out of the 1950s,” I would tell him. “It’s the 1990s now.”
    I think that the fear of the unknown—blacks and Asians, in this case—led my grandfather to hold those prejudices, and I would say that the very same fears made it easy for too many American soldiers—myself included—to abuse Iraqi civilians. In our training, our commanders taught us to demonize and hate Iraqis and Muslims. Looking back, I am sorry to admit that some of the negative parts of my own upbringing climbed from the darkness of my soul and shook hands, in a way, with my army training. It took some time in Iraq before I could put the hateful thoughts behind me.
    During my childhood in Guthrie, folks used to say that one day there would be another war between the North and the South. People sometimes wish they could bring back the past, but I don’t think they truly want war in their own backyards. If they had any idea of what war meant—if they could picture blood spilling from white, black, or any other bodies—I am quite sure they wouldn’t want it. I learned this the hard way, at war in Iraq. The first time an innocent civilian died before my eyes, I didn’t ask myself questions about her racial or ethnic background. The only question to ask was why she had to die in the first place. When I look back at my childhood in Guthrie, I think all the talk about bringing back another war between the North and the South was just a way to let out hot air, and no more than an ignorant way to shoot the breeze. I think that deep down all such people really wanted was to pass the time by watching—or joining in—an old-fashioned fistfight. The summers were hot and god-awful boring, and there wasn’t much to do in Guthrie except get drunk and start fighting. In that respect, I quickly became a model citizen.
    I got in my first fight when I was eight. A thirteenyear-old boy started picking on a kid in my grade, so I kicked the bully in the face. He was a foot taller and a whole lot bigger. He blacked both of my eyes and busted my lip. I had another stepdad back then, and I feared that I would get a whupping for coming home beaten in a fight. I had been at a football game, and when my stepdad came to pick me up I pointed out the boy I had fought. My stepdad noticed the size of the older boy and said I had done enough for the day.
    I fought through junior high and kept fighting in high school. I fought black kids and I fought white. I even fought teammates on my football team. I fought so many times that my jaw still locks up on occasion from having taken so many punches.
    When I was about seventeen, I got arrested for