Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan

SERGEANT JOSH WYLY

110 SERGEANT JOSH WYLY ROSES “Cowboy” made his living pimping women, such as my mother, who were in bad situations. He was smart. He got his girls out into the city by having them sell roses in nightclubs like the Blue Diamond and Crystal’s Hideout. Every day hundreds of roses arrived at his house, and the working girls, including my mother, would spend their afternoon cutting stems, pruning leaves, and tying each rose with a satin bow. A sequined heart on a stick finished off the arrangement. At night in the clubs the women made contacts with johns and left Cowboy’s number to arrange visits. A hooker’s three boys did not fit into Cowboy’s business model, so my two brothers and I were treated as you might expect, locked in the dank basement for days at a time. The dusty light that filtered into the dingy room through the narrow, barred windows illuminated the drained face of my older brother, Kevin. He was ten at the time, but somehow felt responsible for us. We slept on a torn, cushionless couch or on piles of dirty hooker clothes. The ever-present roaches crawled across our torn shoes to nibble our toes. And there was the hunger. On one occasion my mother took off with a guy to Florida for over a week. We were left with no food whatsoever. We could hear Cowboy’s heavy boots pounding the floor over our heads, but neither banging on the locked basement door nor yelling until our throats hurt brought help. The first couple of days we ate ketchup and mustard packets somebody had thrown into an old refrigerator in the basement. And there were a few expired cans of condensed milk. We found a rusty knife under the couch in that godforsaken room, and starving, we banged on the can and then tried using the knife as a dagger on its metal lid. Kevin and I still share identical scars in the webbing between our thumb and forefinger from where our aim at the top of the can missed. My mother had been raped when she was fifteen, an incident that ignited a powder keg of rampant drug use. I am the middle of three boys. Kevin is older by four years and the product of my mother’s rape, and Corey, father unknown, is younger by eight ROSES 111 Sergeant Josh Wyly after patrol in the Garmsir district of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2008. (Courtesy of Sergeant Josh Wyly) years. I never really had a man in my life who wasn’t a pimp or a john. Kevin and I had finally overcome the fear of being beaten by Cowboy. We planned our escape. We used the same knife we had stabbed ourselves with in our effort to open the condensed milk to unlatch the fly hook between the door frame and door that led to the stairs and then the first floor of the house. We finally flipped the hook! We were terrified. Cowboy was prone to violent outbursts. He had once whipped us with a wire hanger because we were making too much noise playing hide-and-seek in the house. We crept up the stairs straining to hear the telltale clop clop of Cowboy’s boots on the hardwood floor of his bedroom. We were starving. We held our breaths as we took small steps through the front room, opened the door, and ran to the house next door. Kevin banged on the door. We could feel Cowboy’s phantom hands grabbing our forearms and dragging us back to our dungeon. The lady who answered bent over our blood-crusted hands. I can’t remember what we said, but she quickly took us inside and fed us chicken soup and sandwiches, and she phoned the authorities. 112 ROSES While at the neighbor’s, we played with her son’s Erector set as if it were our own. We were in a dream, playing with toys as though we hadn’t a care in the world. We lay on our stomachs with our feet in the air like regular kids. But in an hour Officer Eastwood arrived. It would be the last day I would ever spend with my brother Kevin. Officer Eastwood—weird to remember that name and yet filter out so much—let me ride shotgun in his cruiser while he drove what...