(2.3.2007) Key may have grown up rough, but he insists he knows right from wrong. Yet even during basic training, he says a drill sergeant ordered him and a few others to beat up fellow recruits who had fallen behind in their duties or hadn‘t obeyed orders, beatings for which he says he‘s now deeply ashamed. „[T]hey used me to do their dirty work, and I, stupidly, felt honored to do exactly as they said.“ He adds that the attitudes he believes led to the atrocities he witnessed in Iraq — which motivated him to desert — were apparent in boot camp: Soldiers were told to visualize the dummies in bayonet practice as Muslims, and that racial epithets and chants („One shot / One kill / One Arab / One Asian“) were a way of life.