My letter to the Editor that didn’t get published

I noted with no small amount of interest your article regarding Joshua Key entitled “Canada has cooled its welcome for U.S. deserters” dated March 10. Tracking the various lies and distortions of Mr. Key and his friends has become a full time hobby for me of late. As an honorably discharged veteran of the War on Terror, having served as an Infantryman in Operation Enduring Freedom, stories such as those which Mr. Key and his ilk deal in do irreparable damage to the honor which we have rightly earned for our service, by sullying all that we did.

Perhaps one of the reasons for his higher support among the masses of Canadians as opposed to the various tribunals hearing his claims is that anyone actually looking into the veracity of his stories comes away wanting. Take for instance this vignette found in his execrable fantasy “autobiography” which he entitled A Deserter’s Tale:

My sergeant let loose with his .50 cal Machine Gun. Blasting away with bullets about 6 inches long, he shot the car and brought it to a halt. I saw a trail of gas leaking from the car. The sergeant shifted his gun, aimed at the trail of gas, and shot again. The line of gas caught fire, and flew back toward the truck, and when it hit the gas tank, the truck exploded in a ball of fire.

Putting aside the fact that a .50 cal round is not 6 inches long, it is obvious from this story that Mr. Key either doesn’t watch MythBusters which specifically debunked this particular fable in Episode 88, or the laws of physics operate differently in his presence. Even were it possible to get the gas to catch fire, presumably from a tracer round, even then the story is impossible:

Through small scale tests, the MythBusters discovered that gas burns at just over 3 miles per hour, which is as fast as a brisk walk. Next, they lit leaking gas trails from both a remote control car and a regular pickup, and the flame did not catch up to either. A car going at the low speed of 20 miles per hour could easily outrun the stream of fire. Finally, they let the gas catch up to the tank, and it did not explode. In order to create an explosion, the Mythbusters filled the tank with enough gasoline to get an ideal fuel/air mixture for combustion. Even so, they could not make the gas tank explode so this myth was completely busted.

And yet this is just one story which I have encountered where the truth and Mr. Key were locked in a death match. Mr. Key’s other stories include a hospital in which baby fetuses were spread haphazardly across the floor, and another in which his fellow soldiers decapitated an Iraqi civilian in order to use his head as a soccer ball. Mr. Key does for the truth what cannibalism does for cuisine.