The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  No, all I could see then was my dad’s big red Eldorado, how it had worked wonders in impressing my girl. I didn’t want to stop there with impressing her either. Zainab had a few more years left of school. So I followed through on the most manly and amazing thing I could think of, upping the ante once more and keeping myself (I thought) firmly bedazzling in Zainab’s eyes: I took myself down to that Marine recruiter’s office and signed up to devote my life to Uncle Sam.

  CHAPTER 3

  MARINE DUTY

  ONE AFTERNOON DURING my senior year at Fordson High School, I walked into my parents’ restaurant, not alone this time, not coming to work to bus tables or wash dishes or cook through the long hours of the night shift. I brought company with me that afternoon, a new friend, the local Marine recruiter. I’d been visiting the recruiting center pretty regularly for the past month, comparing the deals I could get with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. At that time, I thought I wanted to start as a jet mechanic and later parlay my experience into becoming a pilot, which meant the Army was more or less out as an option. And the more I investigated, the more I kept coming back in my mind to the Marines, to the image of that first Marine guard at the embassy in Tripoli, to his immaculate uniform, to the esprit de corps I’d started to absorb and respect, all reinforced by the stickers I’d been collecting on my silver jacket.

  When I brought that recruiter with me to the restaurant, my parents thought at first that I’d gotten in trouble and was being escorted by a police officer. But, in truth, I was still only seventeen years old and needed at least one of my legal guardians to sign my enlistment papers. The recruiter had come with me to cinch the deal, even though it had been one of my best and lifelong friends, Faisal Salamey, who, having joined up a few months earlier and already returned from boot camp to serve a stint as a recruiting assistant, convinced me at last to take the big leap.

  Faisal, as much as I love him, got me what must have been the worst-ever deal for joining the Marine Corps—a three-year “open contract,” with my exact military job dependent on how I scored on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test (ASVAB). When Faisal convinced me to take this deal—though in hindsight, the term “indentured servitude” seems more appropriate—all I could see was his crisp uniform, the goal and object of all my thoughts since Tripoli. I lost sight of my plan to become a pilot, and I didn’t even care that this open contract meant that the Marines could decide what specialty I got, allowing them to put me into the worst sorts of jobs if they so wanted or needed. I could easily become just a normal infantry man, what we call a “grunt” or “cannon fodder.” Worse, they could make me a cook, and it would be like I was back in the restaurant all over again, only without my family or friends around me. (Things didn’t turn out quite that bad. I scored well enough on the ASVAB to become a heavy equipment operator in the Engineers, which at least gave me some meaningful, skill-based training.)

  Anyway, I sat down in one of the booths, and when my parents came over to see what was happening, I introduced them to the recruiter, who wore the chevron stripes of a staff sergeant on his uniform. I also boldly proclaimed my intention to join the Marine Corps.

  My father’s back straightened a little. He seemed about to speak, but my mother, whose tongue was always faster, cut him off.

  “What!” she said. “No way.”

  Her voice rose to a dangerous pitch. She began to wag her finger at me, then at the recruiter. “No way, no way, no way.”

  All hell broke loose then as my father took my mother by the arm and my mother wrenched herself away from him, breathing fire and wagging that finger still. Father then did something dramatic, grabbing her around the waist in a giant bear hug, picking her up, throwing her over one shoulder, and carrying her, still screaming, “No way,” through the carousel doors to the kitchen.

  All this happened in front of about twenty astonished guests.

  One man, a family friend just like most of the diners, began to clap a little, first in the direction of my parents, whose squabbling could be heard over the normal racket of pots and pans, then toward me and the staff sergeant in the booth across from me. The staff sergeant took this all in stride. Maybe he hadn’t seen quite this level of Lebanese passion. Maybe he hadn’t seen a protesting mother picked up bodily and carted off to the kitchen of a restaurant. But he’d been through plenty of iterations of the same sort of argument, the mother often resisting and the father a bit sad, maybe shocked, but also proud. He took a sip of his coffee and was ready, more ready than me, to meet my father’s gaze when he came back into the dining area.

  “We need to discuss this,” my father said, though I knew from the look in his eyes that he was ready to sign. Anything additional, all the talking and cajoling that evening and the next day, he did just to ease my mother’s mind, to convince her, and to make me demonstrate that I, myself, was committed enough to stand up in front of my mom and face her.

  I did that. I succeeded.

  I think it was my first real venture into manhood, more so than stealing my dad’s Eldorado to impress Zainab. This was about me. This was about my choices for my life. And I wasn’t going to back down.

  So on November 2, 1978, I officially enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, with a scheduled “ship date” to boot camp immediately following the end of my senior year. Thus, on June 15, three days after graduating, I was on my way, along with another one of my Dearborn friends, Moussa Sareini, to the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot (MCRD) in San Diego for “Boot.”

  Moussa and I arrived in San Diego at 0100 in the morning.

  As we stepped down from the bus that took us from the airport to the MCRD, we were immediately surrounded by yelling, screaming, spitting drill instructors (DIs). Leading from the bus, the famous yellow footsteps painted onto the pavement and followed by a million other recruits brought us front and center toward those waiting DIs. In my mind, over and over, I remember repeating just a single phrase, as if my thoughts got stuck in a loop and just couldn’t break free: What the f@!% did I get myself into?

  They shaved our heads, a process that took less than a minute each and turned us into skinheads.

  They gave us big camo-green duffle bags, our seabags, and loaded them with gear, linens, uniforms, and boots.

  Each of these things happened at a different station.

  And each time, between stations, we returned to the yellow footsteps where the DIs waited, yelling and cussing at us, making us stand straighter, keep our eyes glued forward, and requiring us to answer in short, precise blasts of “Yes, sir!” or “No, sir!” I remember looking for Moussa during this time but not being able to turn my head an inch side to side or to distinguish him, with his newly shaved head, from anyone else. He might have been right next to me, toeing the line on a nearby set of footsteps. He might have been somewhere else, in one of the other lines, or getting yelled at, or already quitting—I didn’t know. I didn’t have time to ponder it. It seemed like all the world had dropped out from under my feet. And all my mind could say, over and over, was What the f@!% did I get myself into?

  This continued for about three hours.

  Then we were marched off to the barracks for less than two hours of sleep, before being awakened suddenly and loudly by the sound of trash cans being thrown across the open squad bay and our new drill instructors beating the lids with sticks. They yelled and screamed for us to get out of the rack and gave us two minutes—and two minutes only—to dress in our new uniforms, which none of us knew how to wear right, and get into formation outside the barracks. And God help the last man out of the bay!

  Disheveled, mind foggy from short sleep, body tired from the long flight the previous day as well as all the activity of getting our heads shaved and our seabags filled, we stood in our first platoon formation, about eighty of us. Our DIs stood out in front of us, pacing like angry tigers.

  “I have never seen such fucking lowlife maggots in my life,” said senior drill instructor Staf
f Sergeant Boxely. He was spitting mad. He talked for two, three, maybe five minutes. It felt like forever, and in the predawn chill—even in June in San Diego—my fingers started to go numb at my sides. He told us, among many other things, how unfit we were to be part of His. Beloved. Marine. Corps. He didn’t promise to whip us into shape. No, he said nothing so positive as that. He threatened us, saying he’d run any lily-livered weakling out of the platoon as fast as he could. Then, looking weary, he turned to the other two instructors, Gunnery Sergeant Steffek and DI Sergeant Garbowski, and asked, rhetorically, “Whatever have we done to deserve such trash as new recruits?”

  Steffek and Garbowski informed us they’d collectively be our “mommy” and our “daddy” for the next thirteen weeks. Both Boxely and Steffek were Vietnam veterans, and you could just see it in their eyes: a deadness and coldness demonstrating, more than words could ever say, that they’d been to hell and back.

  It was the mission of these three instructors, over the coming weeks, to break Fox Company, Series 2061, Platoon 2064 down completely and then build us back up, systematically, via routine, physical exhaustion, and a thorough reprogramming of our formerly lily-livered brains. All of it was designed not just to teach us what it meant to be a Marine but to mold every reflex into the automatic, expected, mandated Marine response. To make us act and think together as one single machine. To ensure, no matter how hard the physical work might be, that the mental part would start to flow as we lost our earlier identities and adapted to, then adopted and came to live, the expectations and patterns of Marine life.

  I think all the major training events during Boot—the marksmanship, the ruck marches, the obstacle courses, the physical training, the medical first aid, the KP duty, the work with radios—all of that stuff mattered, but less than the overall mission of molding us into Marines. That was the first and most important aspect of Boot. All the rest was just the means, the icing on the cake, necessary stuff but wholly without value if it wasn’t done to build up the core identity and distinction of this new mindset.

  We got through it.

  And we learned, almost, to love it. Certainly looking back on it, I can remember the pain of it, the challenge. But all the bad parts tend to fade, and what remains is pride and camaraderie and even humor, dark humor, that helped bond us one to another and get us through the worst of our shared experience. Every time I want to remember boot camp, I simply watch Full Metal Jacket.

  September 12, 1979, was the proudest day of my life as I marched on the parade deck for the first time in my green uniform with the eagle, globe, and anchor on my chest. I had earned the title of United States Marine, and the only thing I could picture at that moment was the Marine security guard at the embassy gate in Tripoli, high and tight in his dress blues with the very same eagle, globe, and anchor on his collar. What would he think, I wondered, if only he knew what a difference he had made in one little Lebanese boy’s life. Semper Fi, I say, whoever and wherever you are.

  From MCRD in San Diego, I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri—which we affectionately call Fort Lost-in-the-Woods—for engineer school. This lasted several weeks and qualified me to handle the heavy machinery my “open contract” specialty required me to operate. Then, after Boot and engineer school, I got ten days of leave to visit my family in Dearborn in December 1979.

  My dad made me wear my uniform every day. In my green Alphas (I hadn’t been issued Blues yet, so didn’t look exactly like the Marine security guard from my memory), dad took me everywhere, to see friends and family, to show me off to relatives.

  Of course, I got to see Zainab too.

  While I was gone, my father, who knew Zainab’s father from Tebnine, talked to Zainab’s uncle. He said, “Talk to your brother. When Haisam returns from Marine training, we want to come and ask for Zainab’s hand the old-fashioned way.”

  So things were organized for this major event while I was gone. I returned to find that I had a very special occasion to wear my Alphas for: the visit—along with all of my family—to Zainab’s father’s house, where all her family gathered in the living room. Mother, father, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, all these people crammed around me in my hot uniform and around Zainab, who sat on the far side of the room in a demure dress with her eyes cast down. Even my Uncle Ali, the tobacco farmer, happened to be visiting. He came along to lend support.

  The discussion focused on the future, what it would look like for Zainab and me.

  After a while, in the normal fashion for these formal gatherings, the conversation was put to an end. “Let the girl think on it,” said Zainab’s father.

  “We’ll get back to you,” Zainab’s mother added.

  Turns out, this was a bit of subterfuge. I was flying to Japan the next day for my first assignment in the Marine Corps. Zainab’s family knew this.

  “We’ll wait until he’s back from Japan,” Zainab’s mother said.

  But the following summer she secretly flew Zainab to Lebanon, took her to her own family’s village of Shahoor, and forced her to marry one of her cousins.

  This was, and still sometimes is, the way of things in Lebanon.

  In Iwakuni, Japan, I received a Dear John letter informing me not only that I would not be marrying Zainab but that she had already married another man. A man she had not previously known. A man chosen for her by her family.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  THE NEXT FEW YEARS went by in somewhat of a blur for me. But one incident in 1982 remains a painful memory and goes a long way to explaining why I would eventually leave the active-duty Marine Corps.

  Lebanon was restless in 1982, just before the bombing of the US Embassy. Leaders in the military could tell that something was brewing, and so a call went out for anyone, anyone at all in the Marine Corps, with Arabic language skills. I had come back from Iwakuni and was stationed at Camp Pendleton north of San Diego then. I saw the announcement requesting Arabic speakers and volunteered.

  There weren’t many of us then, really just a few random enlistees like me and Moussa and Faisal Salamey from Dearborn, so we were offered reenlistment bonuses six times greater than normal to join the linguist program. The Marines (and other services) had a long history of sending people without perfect language skills but with proven aptitude or desire to the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. There they would study intensely, eight to ten hours a day, every day, for six months, a year, and even eighteen months for more difficult languages like Arabic or Chinese. This was the linguist program. Only problem: I already spoke Arabic.

  At Pendleton I was made to take a battery of language tests, even though I told them I was fluent. The Marines have their rules. I’d learned it isn’t wise or a good use of energy to fight those rules. So I took the test. I was even prepared, if required, to go to DLI. Maybe they would train me in another dialect or in Farsi or Russian or something cool. I was pretty interested in seeing what the future had in store for me along this new career path, and so I went into the test trying my best at it.

  Out of about one hundred questions, I missed two. This less-than-perfect result pissed me off. I should not have missed a single answer.

  I was a sergeant then. A staff sergeant was in charge at the testing center for the intelligence branch. This staff sergeant looked at my result and immediately accused me of cheating.

  “You’re accusing me of cheating,” I said, laughing, “but I’m mad at myself for missing these two questions… I’m a native speaker, not a DLI graduate.”

  But the staff sergeant wouldn’t let it drop. “Where did you get the answers from?” he said.

  “What do you mean, where did I get the answers from?”

  “Nobody scores this high.”

  “Are you actually accusing me of cheating?” I asked, ice creeping into my voice.

  “No,” he said. “But I’ve never seen a score like this, so you must have known the answers.”

  I told him to keep the test. We exchanged a few more words, l
ess and less pleasant ones. I left and walked out, went back to my command, and dropped the subject, never saying a word to anyone about my decision.

  The Marine career planner kept calling me, but I only put him off, now uninterested. My battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, summoned me to his office because he was receiving a lot of pressure to find people to go to Lebanon as translators and interrogators. But I was really pissed off, more pissed off than I’d ever been at the Marine Corps. That staff sergeant questioning my honor cut to the very center of my identity, my respect for what the uniform represented.

  Not only did I thumb my nose at the call for translators, but I actually started thinking about getting out of active duty altogether—that’s how sour a taste the episode left in my mouth.

  Events between that moment and Desert Storm in 1991 conspired to bring me full circle, and in the meantime I had bigger things to worry about.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  I CAME OFF ACTIVE duty in 1984 and went with my family for a visit to Lebanon. There, just like for Zainab, it was somehow arranged for me to marry one of my cousins, Wafa’, who was eight years younger than me. She moved back to Dearborn with me. We had a son in 1986, Mohammad, whom we call “Mo.” And then another child, Ali, two years later.

  But Wafa’ and I—though close, though family—never felt the flames. We were in love but love of a different sort.

  I worked in my family’s businesses again. I kept my military affiliation by enlisting in the local Engineer Reserve Unit, drilling with them once a month for a weekend and then for a couple weeks in the summer. And I went to school to get a job as a social worker with the state of Michigan. This was a fateful decision on a couple levels. First, it meant that I got a degree, later enabling me to qualify to become a warrant officer (WO) in the Reserves. Second, and more immediately, I had health insurance for the first time, and just in the nick of time because I had developed one heck of a toothache.