by Sam Farran
That seems trivial, I guess, at least on the surface.
But when I walked into the dentist’s office that first week of having health insurance, the receptionist behind the desk froze cold. Our eyes locked together. Neither of us moved.
It was Zainab.
After about a minute of utter speechlessness, one of her coworkers came into the room. Zainab stood up and, without saying a word, put her hand to her mouth and fled to some back room in the office.
I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know what to think. I was a little mad still. It had been six years, but the Dear John letter from her still hurt, like a wound that somehow always stayed raw.
I filled out the normal dental paperwork and sat in the lobby, waiting to be called to have my tooth examined.
Zainab came back in.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Are you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“It’s the way of things.”
“Yes.”
I could tell she wanted to say more, but she didn’t have a chance. I got called back just then and had to sit there, chair tilted back, jaws open, blinded by the dentist’s overhead light, my mind stunned, blinded just like my eyes, by seeing Zainab again. I could feel my anger in the way I gripped the armrest of the dental chair. I could feel my sadness every time I blinked under that harsh light. It felt like sand had gotten caught in my eyelashes or like I’d spent a long time, a really long time—maybe even six whole years—crying. That’s not an easy thing for a Marine to say. And really, the crying part, the part of me that was deeply and forever hurt by Zainab’s being married off to another man so suddenly and without explanation, that part had hidden for six years under veils of anger and indifference. I’d gone about my life, but it was a life that lacked flavor and spark. It was a normal life. A life expected of me.
I got up from the chair feeling woozy, unable to speak clearly. I walked from the dental room to the lobby again.
Zainab was waiting. We were alone.
“If you would like to talk to me, call,” she said. “Just call the number here at the office.”
Those days we didn’t have cell phones. And calling her at home was, obviously, not going to be allowed. I didn’t know what to say to this. She was married. I was married. I had two children. Mo was two years old then, and Ali had just been born.
I had no words, and with my mouth numb I couldn’t pronounce words anyway.
But she said the only thing that I needed to hear right then: “I still love you, Sam.”
The numbness in my mouth seemed to shoot down my arms and then sparkle from the tips of my fingers and toes.
“What?”
“I love you,” she said again, just a whisper. Then she added, “I’m getting a divorce.”
It took me about a week to call her.
A year later we were married.
I’d like to say that there was an affair or that something illicit occurred. That might be easier to explain. But that’s not what happened. We were too good to each other and too traditional.
We started to see each other, having lunches and dinners, driving around in the car. Just like high school all over again.
And then we got married, the traditional Muslim way. Muslim men are allowed four wives. And I’ll admit both Zainab and Wafa’ were victims of our cultural marriage practices.
I didn’t ask for a divorce, and I wasn’t about to have an affair.
I got married to Zainab and then brought Wafa’ to Zainab’s house.
Wafa’ was surprisingly okay, at least at first. She said, “You’re married to her, fine. You’re married to her. That’s your right.”
The two women, my wives, seemed—at least on the surface—alright with this arrangement.
Wafa’ at least endured the situation, but before long her family got involved. They gave me an ultimatum: “Either divorce Zainab or divorce Wafa’.”
Wafa’ had been a good wife to me. I had no issues with her. But facing this decision and feeling, with Zainab, a spark and a fire I had never felt with Wafa’, I made my choice.
That’s when Wafa’ went crazy.
We were in my father’s house. She screamed, “How can you do this to me?”
The fight moved from the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bedroom we used at my father’s house. It wasn’t a hot fight. But it was words, lots of words, torrents of words. I stayed the course. I’d made my decision. If I had to choose between the two of them, the choice was easy.
That day in 1989 we went to the mosque, to the sheik, and divorced in the traditional way, following it up thereafter with the paperwork required in Michigan. It was Zainab then, Zainab alone for me, just like it should have been from the beginning.
▪ ▪ ▪
IN 1990 I BECAME a warrant officer, an unusual rank structure used mostly for people with special technical skills. Pilots are often warrant officers. A lot of maintenance supervisors for heavy equipment hold the WO rank. That’s what I became with my Engineer Reserve Unit. But the military often employs the WO structure with one other specialty: intelligence.
Also in 1990, six months before Desert Storm, my father died of a sudden stroke.
We were able to conduct traditional Muslim funeral rituals for him, praying over him, reading the Quran, bathing him in a manner similar to how we perform wudu before prayers. After that we wrapped him in a burial shroud called the kafan. Then we laid him to rest in a special section of the cemetery in Plymouth, Michigan, designated for Muslim burials, all the graves facing Mecca. I performed the bathing ritual myself, with one assistant, washing his body for the last time.
My mother was a new widow.
I was the head of the family, running the family business and thinking occasionally about the few lira I had shared with my cousins and siblings back in Tebnine. Our way of running the gas station and the convenience store followed that same mentality. It was a true family business. Six months later, when I was called to do my duty and fight in Desert Storm, everyone in the family came together to support me, so leaving wasn’t as hard as it could have been, even though my father had so recently passed, and even though, by this time, Zainab and I had brought a daughter, Marcelle, into the world. Having spread the wealth of the convenience store and the gas station around, as I had spread my tobacco earnings around my friends at the Friday market, I now had plenty of hands to help and allow me to concentrate on getting ready to fight for the USA.
My colleagues at the Social Services Department were all supportive as well. I was the only reservist on staff, so my departure was hailed as patriotic, and the staff supported me with kind words and extra help as I prepared to leave, transferring my cases. The mood of the country had certainly changed since Vietnam too. People still protested the war. They protested the policy. But they managed to separate the men and women serving America from that policy. No more were Marines and soldiers, corpsmen and ensigns and airmen subjected to taunts and humiliation for conflicts they had not started.
▪ ▪ ▪
IN THE ARAB COMMUNITY in Dearborn, because America was preparing to go to war against an Arab nation, the mood was a little tenser.
“How can you go and fight against a person who everyone thinks”—at least back then—“is a hero?” some would ask.
“Saddam is just sticking it to selfish Kuwait,” others would say. “Kuwait has been stealing oil by drilling under Iraqi land.”
My standard answer was that I was a Marine and had signed up to serve and obey the commands of the president of the United States. That was pretty high-flying for some people, though, so occasionally I’d give more rationale. And this, combined with my commitment to serve and to honor my oath, is what I really thought of Desert Storm: “Iraq invaded a country that it had no right to. Doesn’t matter whether Arab or non-Arab, and the country that was invaded pleaded for help from the United States and Gulf count
ries.”
People respected that. Most everyone respected that.
For the ones who didn’t, and for my family, in private moments, when I had time to really think and express myself more fully, I would recall the way our village, Tebnine, behaved during the difficult years of the Lebanese Civil War, years my family thankfully had missed while we were making our new home in Dearborn, but incidents and issues of which we followed very closely.
“You know,” I said, to no one and everyone in particular, at least once or twice during this time when I was preparing to go to war, “in Tebnine some of our neighbors are Christian, some are Shi’a, some Sunni. And it doesn’t matter. All of the neighbors behind my grandmother’s house, on the hill, only a five-minute walk from my grandfather’s house, are Christian. We lived together, never had any problems. In fact, if you recall, a militia came to behead the Christians, but the village, the whole village, took up arms and defended them. Church bells rang whenever there was a death in the village, and the mosque would start reciting the Quran at the same time, no matter whether the person was Christian or Muslim.” What I meant by this: It didn’t matter. Religion wasn’t the definition of a person. It wasn’t the reason, the sole reason, to go to war or stay out of war. I had learned religion as a personal endeavor, a private endeavor, and one that didn’t affect my outward allegiances.
I drew on my roots, on Tebnine, when getting ready to fight for America and against Saddam.
When my engineering unit got the call, we mobilized to a staging base in Yuma, Arizona.
My roommate, Captain Bill Black (now a retired colonel), who was the officer in charge, went into the headquarters of Marine Wing Support Group 17 (MWSG17) one day. This was the group we had been assigned to support.
Captain Bill Black ratted on me.
Just like in 1982, messages were coming out daily looking for Arabic speakers. The colonel in charge of MWSG17 called me into his office and said, “Well, Gunner, pack your bags. You’re flying out.” “Gunner” is what we call warrant officers in the Marines. After my unit returned to Michigan, I was tapped by the Defense Intelligence Agency to join them, so I left without my unit and went on to become a translator/interrogator working out of Kuwait and Iraq for the six months it took us to build up our forces and then win the war.
▪ ▪ ▪
I RETURNED TO DEARBORN in the fall of 1991.
Coming back we were treated to a hero’s welcome. By that time the “support the troops” mentality was so strong that anybody who did not was looked upon as a traitor. This tamped down the voices of people opposed to the policies of the war, but it meant our welcome home was wholehearted, in terms of both tickertape and parades and also more substantial things, like how our community accepted us, even the Arab community in Dearborn. It is tough to be sour about success, and most people in Dearborn, regardless of race or religion, identified strongly as American and celebrated together as Americans. I didn’t experience any resistance after the war from within Dearborn. Nobody dared to speak up, if they did have such feelings, because of that strong swell of patriotism at the time. Nobody really wanted to be that person.
For the next couple years, I went back to work for the Engineer Reserve Unit. I also restarted my social work position with the state of Michigan and continued managing the family store and our gas station. Zainab and I had another daughter too, Amira, bringing my brood of children to four: Mohammad, Ali, Marcelle, and the new baby. I certainly enjoyed that time and look back on it fondly as a period of domestic quiet, a calm before the storm that the rest of my life became, for the Marines and the Middle East weren’t done with me yet. Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER 4
INTERROGATOR AND ATTACHÉ
ABOUT A YEAR AFTER Amira’s birth, I happened to be reading the Marine Corps Reserve Officers Association magazine and stumbled on an advertisement for Arabic-speaking personnel to apply for work with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as interrogators. My previous work with DIA during Desert Storm had been rewarding, and while I loved being an engineer, I’d done that for quite a while. I thought I might finally put my language skills and cultural background to better use. The sting of my first attempt at using my language to help the Marines—and being called a liar because of that native skill—had never completely faded, but it had faded enough. I was ready to help in a new and more specific way.
I applied. DIA flew me out to Washington, DC, for a single interview and hired me on the spot. From that moment on, instead of spending my one weekend a month drilling with a local engineer unit in Michigan, I traveled wherever DIA needed me. Some of the work happened in DC. Often, though, I’d be sent to substations around the country and around the world to work on active interrogations. In the mid-1990s, we had a lot of former Ba’athist personnel who had taken refuge from Saddam’s retribution after the First Gulf War. These people—especially when spoken to cordially and in Arabic—provided us with reams of useful information that helped us better understand (and plan against) Saddam’s communication, leadership, and military capabilities in the future, for a war none of us knew was coming.
Although working with and interrogating these asylum-seeking Iraqi personnel formed the bulk of my duties during this time, it’s important to step back just a bit and discuss the real catalyst for this call by the Marine Corps (and many other agencies) for Arabic-speaking personnel: the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, less spectacular than the 9/11 attacks and less successful, but a harbinger of things to come.
I was in Michigan then, attending to my family, my businesses, and my work with the state, as well as doing weekend duty with the engineer unit, when a truck loaded with explosives detonated beneath the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The explosion was meant to cause the North Tower to collapse into the South Tower. It didn’t work but did end up blowing a hole through several layers of the parking garage, killing six people and injuring thousands.
This attack was financed by the radical Muslim cleric Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—who continued to finance terror, including the 9/11 bombings of the World Trade Center. It was carried out by a group of al-Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew. During his trial for the bombing, Ramzi Yousef justified the legitimacy of targeting the United States by stating that it had introduced terrorism to the world by killing innocent people with the atomic bomb, by using Agent Orange in Vietnam, by imposing economic embargoes on various locations, including Cuba and parts of the Middle East, and, of course, by supporting Israel. Ramzi Yousef even provided forewarning of future attacks, like 9/11, in a letter he sent to the New York Times: “If our demands are not met, all of our functional groups… will continue to execute our missions against the military and civilian targets in and outside of the United States.”
In Dearborn, 90 percent of the Arab community was very upset about the bombing. Everyone had been working hard to assimilate and become part of the American community. It was, and is, felt that every event, big or little, associated with al-Qaeda or other militant groups results in a backlash against Arabs and the Muslim community in general, even though the vast majority of us denounce these crimes and many of us actively work to prevent them. The results of this showed up tangibly in our community: guys like me and some of the friends I have mentioned by name, among many others left nameless here, volunteered to serve in the military, in the government, and in our communities. Just like other American communities, Dearborn gave, and still gives, back to the United States.
But, on the other end of the spectrum, even back then, we had demonstrators come up from down south, mainly Christian evangelicals. They’d protest in Dearborn against the Islamic population. They’ve got a right to protest—a right protected by the Constitution—but we also have rights, to our religion and to our membership in the idea and the community of America, rights directly attacked by these demonstrators. We were aware that their chants of “Go back to your country” were w
rong because America had become our country, and so those types of insults just sounded stupid to us. But we took it less well when they’d throw around pejorative phrases, based on hate and misunderstanding. Their favorite phrase from that time, no doubt—I heard it a million times, I think—was “camel jockey.”
I could laugh at that a little since camels were no part of my experience in Lebanon. But still I felt the menace of these groups. They’d set up all over Dearborn—in parking lots, in front of stores, in front of the city hall—as was their right. But when they hurled racial and religious epithets at us, they showed their true colors: their belief in a false and dangerous idea of America as a place for white, Christian evangelicals only, which I believe was never the intent of our Founding Fathers. Though discrimination of this sort has sometimes been legalized in misguided laws, I believe the moral arc of the United States toward greater inclusion and freedom for all people truly makes this country a beacon for the world.
So I overcame, or at least ignored, those insults. And my work as an interrogator provided me with more proof of the good intentions of Arabs who came to America (despite the horrible actions of a radical, militant minority).
Doing this work reinforced for me the balance of what was happening. Yes, every once in a while, we’d catch someone with bad intentions, or at least with suspicious indicators and associations. But for every one or two of these individuals, who mostly proved harmless after more thorough vetting by our sister agencies, we’d screen hundreds and even thousands of normal people without a blip, people coming from all over the Arab world (and all over the world as a whole). The percentage of wrongdoers or even of people with unfortunately coincidental names or weird connections in their families or backgrounds was infinitesimal. It made the search for nefarious intent akin to the proverbial search for the needle in a haystack, but one in which, if you did find a needle among all that innocent hay, you also had to spend some serious time looking into the needle’s soul (or at least deeply into its history). Otherwise how could you tell whether it might prove harmful?