The Conscience of Joe Darby

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Registered: 06-15-2003
The Conscience of Joe Darby
2
Wed, 09-01-2004 - 4:50am
When he saw the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Joe Darby knew

he had to blow the whistle. But coming forward would change his life—

as well as his family's—forever, and for the worse. Because back in

his own community and in the small towns of America, handing over

those photos didn't make Joe Darby a hero. It made him a traitor.

The Conscience of Joe Darby

By Wil S. Hylton

Gentlemen's Quarterly

http://us.gq.com/features/general/articles/040727feco_03


They shut him up. Fast. You never even saw him. No footage of him

coming off the plane, no flags or banners waving, no parade in his

honor. He came home from Iraq in May, but there wasn't even a formal

announcement. In fact, you're not supposed to know he's here.

He lives in a secret location. It might be just down the street, or

it might be halfway to nowhere. Maybe he was sitting at the next

table last night, having dinner right beside you. You have no way of

knowing: Nobody knows what he looks like. The only picture most of us

have seen is the one from 1997, the high school yearbook portrait,

with his hair parted in the middle and the impish smile on his face.

That was before he lost the hair, before he gained the weight and his

chest filled out, before he got married and became a man. But that

was the picture that ran in all the papers when the scandal broke. It

was the only one that slipped out.

He hasn't done any interviews or made any statements since it

happened, hasn't talked publicly about what he saw in Abu Ghraib

prison or what made him turn in those pictures on that January night

in Iraq. All we know is that he did turn them in and that everything

changed because of it. The rest is speculation. He's been under a gag

order for three months.

He wouldn't mind talking, actually; he wants you to know the truth.

The desire to tell the truth was how he got into this thing in the

first place. He was the guy who stood up to evil when everyone else

fell silent, the guy who put himself on the line when nobody else

would. No wonder they won't let him talk. No wonder he can't say what

he knows. It would be easier if he could, if Joe Darby could tell you

himself, but this will do for now.

+++++

He came off the plane changed. He was smaller, somehow, and thinner,

and his face was drawn and gray, and as he descended from the roaring

C-5 to the shimmering tarmac in the afternoon light, a sea of

military brass surrounded him and pushed him into a van as the jet

rolled on to the gate without him, with the other soldiers inside

going home.

Joe Darby wasn't going home. That much he knew. He didn't know where

he was going, or who would be there, but he knew that home was out of

the question. Nothing would be that simple anymore. That was the

irony of it. In Iraq, everything had been less complicated. He had

been cut off from all the television news and the Internet buzz and

the e-mail, even from his DVDs and video games, cloistered away in

some private orbit with only his thoughts and memories. Now, in the

States, in the van, in his desert fatigues with his day bag in his

lap and his tired eyes flattened by the long hours of flight, he

stared out the window at the air base whizzing by, and he knew that

the easy part of his journey was over.

Coming back was like parachuting into a jungle with only glimpses of

what lay below. What would people think? The military had been kind

to him; but then, the military knew the truth. It was easy to be kind

when you knew the truth, when you knew what else happened at Abu

Ghraib, how far the abuse had gone, how much farther than all those

photos in the news, farther than all the rumors and gossip, farther

than almost any decent person could imagine. It was easy to be kind

when you knew the depths of the depravity he had found in that cold

concrete prison with the fresh coat of yellow Coalition paint and the

slow fans chopping overhead. But the public didn't know all that. The

public didn't know the truth. Oh, they knew about the piles of naked

prisoners, and the hooded figure attached to electrical wires. They

knew about the inmates being forced to imitate sex acts, and being

terrorized by attack dogs. But how would they feel when they knew the

rest? That was the real question.

As the van pulled up to a building, the officers told Joe to get out.

He slung his day bag over his shoulder and stepped down, into the

light. There was a glass door in front of him, but he couldn't see

inside. One of the officers told him, "Open it."

Joe Darby was about to step into the rest of his life.

+++++

No marriage is perfect, but Bernadette and Joe were trying. They had

married right after high school and moved from the Appalachian

Mountains to the D.C. suburbs for a fresh start—until, after a few

years, they realized that being close to home was more important than

any adolescent notion of escape. So in the spring of 2001 they moved

back, packing their bags and boxes into a U-Haul van and taking a

small apartment in Corriganville, Maryland, just across the border

from their families in western Pennsylvania.

From the beginning, Bernadette and Joe wore down the road with their

visits home. For one thing, Joe's mother had fallen sick with cancer,

so he felt a responsibility to be around as much as possible, cooking

and cleaning and helping with the bills. But also, he and Bernadette

just liked being around their families, especially Bernadette's.

The Mains family was close by any standard, but after Bernadette's

mother died in 1998, they had only grown closer. There were three

sisters—Virginia, Maxine, and Bernadette—and together they made a

complete set. Bernadette was the youngest, beautiful and headstrong.

The other sisters called her "Tut." Virginia was the oldest and most

reserved, a wellspring of sensible advice her sisters often ignored,

then wished they had followed. The family called her "Wood." And the

middle sister was Maxine, the centerpiece of the family in many ways,

the one who kept everyone else laughing with her biting, honest

humor. Maxine could talk Bernadette out of something, and Virginia

into something. Her nickname was "Bean." All three sisters looked up

to their father, Dave, with a deference that bordered on anachronism.

He was the intermediary in every squabble and the first to hear good

news.

For Joe, Bernadette's sisters were almost like sisters of his own. At

times he and Maxine might trade sharp words about whose pasta sauce

was better or who knew jack and who didn't, but even this was more

like a sibling rivalry than anything else. When Joe and Bernadette

would get into a spat or Maxine and her husband, Clay, would grate on

each other's nerves, you could find Joe and Clay an hour later at

Hooters, drinking beer and cooling off while their wives got together

to gossip about them, about what a pain they were, what a couple of

overgrown boys, even while secretly wishing they would hurry home and

sit on the floor and play their stupid PlayStations again with the

volume cranked up and Maxine's daughter, Vanessa, climbing all over

her favorite uncle, Jo-Jo. In the summers, they would all barbecue

together or scoot out of town to the Maryland coast, where the girls

would take long walks and play with the kids while Joe and Clay

headed off on deep-sea-fishing trips, coming home with flounders and

five-pound sea trout that either Joe or Maxine would fry for dinner,

depending on who won that argument. Things were pretty good.

In fact, before Abu Ghraib tore their world apart, the biggest

problem in Bernadette and Joe's life, aside from the occasional

shortage of cash or the dumb squabbles that bubble up in any normal

relationship was the problem of Joe being in the military. Bernadette

hated the military. That's the word she uses. "I hated the military,"

she snaps. "I despised the military. I fought with Joe to get out. I

hated the deployments."

It was a fair way to feel. For a guy in the Reserves—a young guy from

the sticks, without any money or a jump on life, a guy hoping to

start a family and wanting a little cushion of cash, a guy struggling

to make ends meet as a big-truck mechanic, for a guy who signed up to

spend one weekend a month and two weeks a year running exercises at a

military base near home—Joe was spending an awful lot of time doing

an awful lot more than that. Like, for example, going to Bosnia. For

eight months. Or, you know, Iraq. For another sixteen. With only

eight months in between. Actually, by the time Joe arrived at Abu

Ghraib last fall, he had spent the better part of three years

deployed, away from Bernadette, her family, his friends, and even his

own mother, whose health wasn't getting any better with time. He and

Bernadette were just 24 years old, and the last time they had really

been together, they had been only 21. If Joe had known back then what

it meant to enlist, he never would have done it. Even if he'd wanted

to, Bernadette wouldn't have let him.

Being married to an active reservist, she discovered, was almost like

not being married at all, except scarier and lonelier and more

frustrating, and you had to hurry home from your sister's house after

dinner sometimes just to sit around and wait for the phone to ring.

So really, when Bernadette says she hated the military, what she

means is that she loves her husband. It was simple: Joe was hers, and

the military took him, and so what Bernadette hated was not the

military so much as what it had done to her, what it had done to

them, what it took away and wouldn't give back, which was not only

Joe but time itself...

Read the entire article at

http://us.gq.com/features/general/articles/040727feco_03

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 09-01-2004 - 8:52pm
I've thought about Joe Darby and John Kerry. Both fought in a war, both did what their conscience told them to do, and some people will never forgive either one for telling the truth.

I hope Darby runs for office some day. Kid's got guts. Same as Kerry.

Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Thu, 09-02-2004 - 3:31am
ITA! _

C