The Conscience of Joe Darby
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| Wed, 09-01-2004 - 4:50am |
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

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