The Dilemma of Pvt. TIM GRAY
Tim Gray entered the army at the age of 17
and seventeen hours after signing on the dotted line, he was on a plane to boot
camp. Less than one year later, he is still moving fast. On September 4, 2001
Tim Gray left his unit out of fear for his life. He is AWOL, army jargon for
Absent Without Leave.
The life of Tim Gray would make a great rap
song for EMINEM. His father was a sailor in the Navy and was away most of the
time. Tim was five when he died and he hardly even knew him. His mother was
forced to take on any job she could to make ends meet. Tim grew up in a
predominately African American community in Decatur, Illinois. When he was 12,
his mother remarried, moved to a small farm town in Indiana, and found a job in
a factory.
Tim was picked on all his life, "I guess
because everyone always looked at me as 'a punk'" he says. When he arrived
at his knew home he found out what it really means to be "Punk"
because most of his adolescent community were skinheads. "I was white, but
they still wanted to beat on me, because I wasn't from there." Tim
relates. But he learned the ropes and always fought back.
He went to high school with hopes of one day
going to college and studying to become an architect. But he was expelled
at the age of 16 for having 17 fights in 19 weeks. A job at MacDonalds
"wasn't cutting it" so he hit the streets and got involved in the drug
scene. Caught once for petty thievery, he was put on probation. Tim knew right
then that his future "was either prison or the military", so he chose
the latter.
"Join the infantry," the recruiter
said, "its the biggest and the best," and Tim had dreams of becoming
a Ranger. "No one would be able to mess with me after that" he
thought. His parents agreed to give him the written permission needed to join
the Army at age 17. He went home and said his good-byes, and was soon at Fort
Benning, Georgia for Basic Training.
Drill sergeants have a knack of
singling out strong-willed individuals like Tim. They are the wild horses that
have to be broken in order to show the rest of the group that the army has to
function like a machine. "The training was hard" Tim says,
"and especially for me" Why? "because they just picked me out of
the crowd, they didn't like my face...and everyday you just get smoked, get
smoked, get smoked." They made basic a double challenge for Tim, and he
had his first inclinations to just pack up and leave. But he wanted to learn,
"be all that you can be", as the recruiting commercials say, and
after completing basic he still had hopes of starting a new life with a clean
slate. One thing he knew however: he didn't want to be a Ranger anymore.
B Company, Second Platoon of the 1-26th
Infantry at Ledward Barracks in Schweinfurt, Germany became his new home in
July, 2001. "I liked the army still" he says, but the first day he
reported to duty they singled him out again. Life became hell for Tim, it was a
day-to-day package of hassle and stress. He began to drink a lot to ease the
boredom and pain, which was nothing new since, in his words "everyone in
the unit is into drugs and drinking just to survive the b.s.(bullshit) in the
Army". However where other soldiers slipped by disciplinary actions
for not upholding the regulations, Tim had to "go down" for push-ups
for the smallest speck of dust on his uniform. He received a lot of counseling
statements, "just about for anything", and had been caught once for
leaving without permission. "I was always restricted to the
barracks," he says, "if I wanted to get out to party like the other
guys, I had to sneak out."
Soon everybody on the base knew his name,
"the lieutenants, the captains, even a colonel, they would see my name tag
and say 'oh, this is Gray, we all heard about you.'" What did they hear?
Tim is what is known as a 'sidebarer', someone who always questions what his
commanders told him to do and after asking for permission to speak, would
criticize what he didn't like or simply ask more questions. "They don't
like to hear that they are wrong," Tim says, "...and I have a free
spirit. I'm not a machine and they see that...I will do my job to best of
standards and apply the standards to my abilities but when you don't want to
hear my side of the story, you don't even want to try to listen, then I am
going to cut in and I'm going to tell you."
Official means of discipline soon turned into
violent ones. His sergeant asked Tim into his office sometime in August and
told him to write a 10,000 word essay about why he wanted to be in the
military. After little or no sleep, he appeared the next day with a 1,000
word essay. The six foot three inch muscle-bound sergeant told everyone else to
leave the room, then grabbed Tim by the throat and slammed him against the
wall. Tim stayed cool as he was trained. He was dismissed and told the
next day that he still had to write the 10,000 words. Again he was only able to
turn in 2,000 and his sergeant was furious. He got into Tim's face, yelling and
screaming, then beat him to the floor and hit him twice with a metal chair. Tim
left shaking, "I was afraid he was going to kill me," he says,
"and only by staying cool and getting up at parade arrest did I prevent
any further bodily harm."
The next day Tim filed a complaint through
the proper channels of the command. Every step of the way, however,
higher ranks ignored his rights, and told him to get back to his job. His
lieutenant tried to talk him out of asking for a JAG(Judge Advocate
General)lawyer, and his captain threw him out of his office without even
listening to him. His sergeant laughed in his face, stating, "Who the hell
is going to believe that I hit you. I have 13 years in the Army, you have just
6 months."
When the rest of the platoon found out that
Tim was determined to go through with the complaint, things got worse. He
received verbal threats from soldiers that he better be careful because he
might just fall down the stairs
some night, or slip in the shower and get his
head busted open. "One soldier even told me," Tim says, "that
the next time your parents see you, you might be at the bottom of a dumpster
with your throat slit." Tim believes that the higher ranks were coaching
the rest of the platoon to take matters into their own hands to 'get him back
into line'. His requests to be transferred to another unit or platoon were
denied.
One evening while Tim was taking a shower
after duty, six soldiers came up behind him and sprayed something into his eyes
so that he could not see, and then proceeded to rough him up, kicking and
punching him.
Tim sneaked out that night and got drunk but
after coming back to his base, he stopped before entering and knew that if he
entered the gates, he was in a very dangerous situation. "I was
afraid," he says, "people had keys to my room. I thought that they
were going to kill me...so instead of going back to my barracks I began to
sleep in the park." He has been on the run ever since. One week
after he went AWOL the horrors of the World Trade Center became a personal
horror for him. He punched a guy out for laughing about it but he knew, from
that day on, his situation was going from bad to worse.
He would turn himself in today if he was
certain that he would be safe. But he doesn't believe that the Army would
uphold any promises. He is a 'Grunt'(foot soldier) and according to him,
infantry soldiers are disposable. "In the army no one will listen to
you. The only way anyone will listen to you if you have a lot of money or a lot
of rank....They don't care about your opinion, they don't care about what the
hell you are, or who you are, as long as you go out there, stand on the front
lines, and become a shield just to die." Asked if other soldiers thought
like him, he replies, "Sure, there are all kinds of guys at my base who
feel like I do, they're just afraid to speak up."
Tim Gray is in a dilemma. He is faced now
with death threats in his unit or death in war for a cause he does not believe
in. "I think the war is over money and land," he says. "I think
that it is all a set up...There is more to the story then they are letting out
and a lot of people are going to die just over money."
He remembers what his superiors told him when
he arrived in Germany which was in sharp contrast to what he had been told in
Basic Training, "In Basic they said that if you run away you'll get 5
years in prison and a $25,000 Fine, you have to sign some papers...and then
when you get here to your unit … They tell you if you desert, you get the death
Penalty." he remarks. The
Uniform Code of Justice states explicitly: "Any person found guilty of
desertion or attempt to desert shall be punished, if the offense is committed
in the time of war, by death, or such other punishment as a court-martial may
direct..."(885.ART 85. Desertion (c).
Tim Gray entered the service to avoid going
to jail or to be killed out in the streets, but after less than one year in the
U.S. Army, he faces prison and death again. He laughs when he thinks about the
irony of it all. Then he gets very serious and ends our conversation with a
profound statement that sums up his experiences in the military.
"People in prison have more rights than I did. You can quote me on
that."
Stop The War Brigade & Vietnam
Veterans Against the War-AI (Germany)
Tel: 49/ (0) 177/ 481 6128
Email: stopthewarbgde@hotmail.com
Web: STWB
http://angelfire.lycos.com/jazz/stwb
VVAWAI http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/index.html
