News and Features
The Deserter
By Chris Cannon published Mar 28, 2011
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Rodney Watson spent a year fighting in Iraq with the U.S. Army. Ordered to return, he went AWOL instead, finding sanctuary in a Vancouver church with his new wife and son. Now he's fighting to stay out of an American prison
In February 2006, Rodney Watson-a 28-year-old Specialist in the U.S. Army-was standing guard at the entrance to Q-West Forward Operating Base, north of Tikrit, when an emergency vehicle delivered an Iraqi civilian who'd been shot through the stomach. A tense search found no explosives or weapons, but since the man was not an informant, Watson was ordered to turn him away. He radioed the tower, requesting that someone at least come out and patch the man's wound; the request was denied. Over the next hour, Watson was forced to ignore his cries for help, his pleas to Allah, as he bled out into the dust.
"Before I deployed," Watson says, "I remember seeing on the TV all these soldiers handing out stuffed bears, showing them with children and stuff, helping people. Then I witnessed with my own eyes-they told me to turn a man away who was in need of help. I was not allowed to do anything. No one would help me. I watched that guy die just because we had no use for him."
Watson could not have envisioned such a scenario when, in 2004, he enlisted as a cook. Taught to run a dining facility when he arrived in Iraq, he instead found himself searching vehicles for explosives, detaining prisoners, and operating X-ray equipment-tasks for which he'd never been trained.
His fellow soldiers, he says, were weary, drugged, and violent. One scrawled Bible verses all over his helmet and vest. "He was always wanting to go out there and kill," Watson remembers. "He actually thought he was one of God's warriors. A lot of these guys think they're doing some type of God's will. They were beating these civilians just because they had a bad day. They would call them ‘sand nigger,' kicking and beating them right in front of me. You couldn't be a snitch-if you rat somebody out, you're a dead man. All my life I've experienced being pulled over for being black and having guns put to my head by cops. Now I'm in Iraq, side by side with the same type of people who hate me in my own country."
