The Deserter's Tale Read Online Free PDF

taking a swing at a police officer who tried to stop me from going to help my mother during a forest fire. My grandmother nearly got herself charged for barging into the police station, swearing at all the officers, and demanding my release.
    In court, the judge suspended the charges when he heard that the police officer had ganged up with other cops and roughed me up. My only requirement was to attend a few classes on anger management. I took the classes with two men who had gotten into all sorts of trouble. One of them had beaten up his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Not long after the anger management instruction ended, I discovered the two classmates yet again pounding the snot out of the ex-wife’s boyfriend. At the time, I thought that anger management was a bit of a joke. Looking back, however, I think that everybody would have been better off if a few soldiers I know had been sent to anger management class instead of Iraq.
    * * *
    These days, Brandi and I don’t let our children play with toy guns. I see the irony in that. Zackary, our eldest, is nine years old. When I was his age, one of my favorite pastimes was to stand alone in the backyard, blasting apart beer bottles with a .22 rifle. Because he’d come from another country, had an American accent, and took some time fitting into his new Canadian school, Zackary became the target of a bully. One of my biggest challenges as a father was not to tell him to cock his arm and slug the bully in the mouth. But I know that Zackary will do better things in life and that the world will be a better place if he learns to use words to solve his problems.
    My first experience with terrorism was in my home state of Oklahoma, and I know that 168 lives would not have been lost if a man named Timothy McVeigh had been taught to use words instead of force. In 1995, when the ex-soldier and war veteran blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, we felt the blast in our high school some twenty miles away. McVeigh used a truckload of ammonium nitrate—cow shit fertilizer, basically—to kill all those people, including nineteen children. A boy in my school lost his dad in the explosion, and a girl lost both of her parents. Before the explosion, some of the kids in school had teased this girl about coming from a poor family. The teasing stopped after the explosion. I had no idea what to say to a person who had lost both her parents, so I just felt sorry for her and said nothing at all. Classes were canceled as soon as we got the news. We assembled in school for the rest of the day to watch the television reports. Within forty-eight hours, the police had charged Timothy McVeigh with blowing up the building. I couldn’t believe it. I had figured it was the work of a foreign terrorist. But it was an American—a former gunnery sergeant in the 1st Infantry Division in the Persian Gulf War—who had blown up his own people.
    When I started going out with Brandi, she knew that I had gotten into my share of fights down by the Cimarron River, but her background was just as rough as mine. She had plenty of fights under her own belt and had also been warned that she’d face consequences at home if she lost a fight in the streets. I told her I had seen my mother get beaten too much, and that I would never beat a woman. She liked that about me. She liked everything about me. She was so like me that there was barely anything that needed explanation. We were both poor, had grown up with way too much violence in our family lives, and wanted to put the worst of our lives behind us. I knew, within five seconds of meeting her, that she wanted to be a good person and to lead a good life. I believe she felt the same way about me.
    Brandi and I were both eighteen when we met. I was still in twelfth grade but she had already graduated from high school and was working in a dollar store. The day after we met, I stopped by the store to ask her out to dinner. She accepted the date