Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters

by Lt Col Mark Weber

  This wasn’t some high-handed twist of logic he was throwing at me. Nor was he arguing for Islam. It was what I said I believed, and it was the best explanation I could give after twenty years of what I thought was thoroughly examined religious conviction. It was the “God’s unconditional love with conditions and stunning contradictions” discussion of my youth all over again.

  Because most adults I knew were unwilling or unable to have a discussion that didn’t begin and end with a literal and exclusive read of John 14:6—“I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes unto the Father except through me”—I was ill equipped for the discussion.

  My frustration with Ahmed later turned to acceptance as I saw we were both exercising the same kind of faith with the same kinds of mystery, a conclusion I kept to myself after a family member scoffed at my comparison of Islam to Christianity.

  Not once did Ahmed ask me to consider Islam, nor did he ridicule or mock me for being a Christian. In fact, after several weeks of interaction, he invited me to his home for dinner and treated me like royalty.

  Engaging in dozens of exchanges with a Muslim was an amazing cultural experience in and of itself. But I got the bonus plan from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

  Every week or so, I brought Ahmed a new VHS movie from the massive library of films in OPM-SANG. On one such visit, bringing him the movie Rob Roy, I was approached by the infamous Mutawwa. Their bushy beards, long white robes, and white caps made them stand out among the Western-dressed Riyadh populace, but I had never seen one up close until now.

  He demanded to see what was in my hand. “Ish hada Rob Roy?” the Mutawwa demanded. I knew enough Arabic to know he was asking, “What is this Rob Roy?”

  “That’s the name of the movie,” I replied in English. I think he understood me, but the answer did not satisfy him. Ahmed suddenly appeared and provided some much-needed translation.

  The Mutawwa wanted to know if the video was pornography, which is against the law. He said I was under apprehension and would need to come with him. I knew it was not pornography, so being “taken away” didn’t make me as apprehensive as I now realize it should have made me. Ahmed nervously said he would not leave my side.

  The Mutawwa gently took me by the arm and escorted me on foot across Chop-Chop Square to what looked like a police station.

  Minutes after we took a seat in a small room, a well-dressed interrogator came in and spoke to me as if I were trafficking narcotics. I explained that I was a U.S. Army officer, showed him my military identification, and strategically told him I worked with forces that belonged to the Saudi crown prince. That didn’t seem to impress him.

  After I had been left alone for another thirty minutes, this Saudi Columbo returned again with the same serious attitude. He and “his team” had found a nudity scene in the movie that made the movie pornographic. They decided to let me go, but with a stern warning, “No more American movies of any kind.”

  I wasn’t “reborn” in Saudi Arabia, and I wasn’t converted. Nor did I suddenly doubt everything about my faith or launch my own personal crusade to discover it. I just realized how stunningly ignorant I was about the practice of my faith and life in general. I didn’t know anything about the dominant religions of the world, and I didn’t have a defensible spiritual philosophy.

  This revelation had implications and interests beyond the personal.

  As an army officer, I saw how knowledge and understanding of religion and culture was critical to my profession. The number of fanatical Muslims blowing themselves and others up demanded a closer examination.

  I started watching Oxford-style debates between Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars, and picked up A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun. I felt baffled that twelve years of formal Catholic education hadn’t exposed me to anything remotely close to such lively and intellectually stimulating discussions. I realized those twelve years were just the introduction.

  I learned that wherever a respectful, open-minded religious discussion led, it did not begin with exhortations about exclusive rights of way to the afterlife.

  Most important, I learned that Muslims (and followers of other faiths) were not the aliens I had been led to believe they were.

  Extremist observers of their practices no more represented their religion than Christian extremists represented mine. The majority of Muslims shared common values of peace and love and a desire for morality that was every bit as sincere and imperfect as any Christian’s I ever knew. In fact, followers of other religions had gone or were going through their own violent internal strife regarding the meaning of their religious texts. The struggle is endless.

  More to the point, I began to see we’re all part of a world where global real estate is shrinking but information and trade are exploding, where conflicting ideologies no longer enjoy the benefit of space or distance. Short of a mass extinction or genocide, if even that, it seemed clear to me that we needed to find ways to coexist in peace.

  I didn’t need to agree with other religious practices to understand others’ reasons for practicing them. Knowing this, it seemed wise to develop a conversation that was deeper than exchanges over who was going to heaven and hell, and instead focus on the virtues we have in common.

  When I left Saudi Arabia, I was full of pride about how Ahmed and I had carried ourselves. I was full of hope, too. If the two of us could exercise such a respectable discourse over the practice of our faith, couldn’t everyone else?

  In the several years that followed, I found I had no grand conclusions about what God was or was not. I had questions, and I asked them, but with great caution. Few people seemed willing or able to discuss the topic outside established boundaries, either afraid of or uninterested in tough questions about God or their religion.

  The “mystery of faith” flag, it seemed to me, was being thrown way too soon in discussions, and the practice was unmistakably grounded in fear.

  I began to challenge those who seemed to think they had it all sorted out without asking any tough questions or engaging in thoughtful, nonjudgmental discussions—but I did so mostly for the sake of challenging and developing myself.

  * * *

  Closer to home, and beside the realm and declared virtues of religion, I saw the humility of open-minded wisdom and gentleness of true strength in a most unlikely character. I met Command Sergeant Major Jim Barrett in 1997 at Fort McClellan, Alabama, where we worked side by side—he as the highest and most respected enlisted rank in the army, and I the most junior and least respected officer rank in the army.

  Jim came from a hardscrabble youth immersed in alcohol, drugs, crime, and family turmoil. His parents divorced when he was five, and his forty-one-year-old father drank himself to death when Jim was twelve. His mother remarried, but was divorced again by the time he turned sixteen. Jim dropped out of high school and essentially turned into a troublemaking bum. Had it not been for Paula—his girlfriend at the time, who would become his wife—he would have participated in a robbery that ended in the arrest of his friends.

  One year out of school and seeing his life going nowhere fast, Jim met an army recruiter. But the army doesn’t take dropouts. Armed with a new sense of purpose and direction for his energies, he shed his old ways and old friends, returned to school, and worked with such fever that he actually graduated on time with his class.

  Jim came off as a New Jersey knuckle-dragger, but he was the most competent soldier I’d ever met. And the combination made him intimidating. He was always right, but not in a “you’ve always gotta be right, don’t you?” kind of way. He was the first to teach me that doing your best and making it one’s business to be right wasn’t a vice—it was a reflection of competence that was distressing only to the lazy, insecure, or incompetent.

  Life was painful for those who wanted to try psychoanalyzing his motives. Me? I latched onto him like a student to a master. And he reciprocated without me even knowing it. Years after my written reprimand for crawli
ng through the Kramers’ bedroom window, I found out Jim was my strongest defender.

  “I think it’s commendable that you didn’t just sit back and watch a situation go from bad to worse—you saw a problem and did something about it. Now, in the future don’t go climbing through windows, because you might get hit in the head with a bat.”

  When we weren’t watching WWF wrestling with his two boys, Jimmy and Jeffrey, he was providing counsel on how to take care of soldiers. For years, I saw that the familiarity he mixed in with the discipline of his boys—and his soldiers—did not make him weak or ineffective as a father or as a leader.

  He helped me see nuances in my professional leadership, too. “I don’t believe in ‘NCO business,’ ” he would say, referring to work to be performed solely by sergeants. “There are things NCOs focus on, and there are things officers focus on, and that relationship is unique in every partnership. For me, if an officer has to do something an NCO normally does, it means I’m not doing my job, and I can’t get mad at the officer for that.”

  Jim left Alabama, and we didn’t see each other again for four years, staying in touch by email and phone while he was in Germany. In those four years, he rose to the most senior position in the MP Corps (regimental command sergeant major), and we ended up stationed together again at Fort Leonard Wood.

  As big and important as he had become, our personal and professional relationship picked up right where it had left off. It wasn’t uncommon for us to spend four hours at night talking in our backyards about leadership or his colorful life growing up in New Jersey.

  I came to see that as often as he was right, he was never afraid to be wrong about something or to laugh at himself. Back in the days when dial-up service was the standard, he once asked me to come to his house to help him with an Internet connection.

  “Where’s your phone jack?” I asked.

  “What do I need a phone jack for?” he asked in his intentionally crude voice.

  We laughed together as I told him, “What, you think the Internet signal just jumps out of the wall into your computer?” He laughed at himself then, and he still does.

  Nor was he afraid of or shy about seeking advice. Just before we found out about my assignment to Washington, DC, Jim came and asked me about selling his townhouse, because he knew that we had sold our Virginia home without an agent.

  He had bought his home ten years prior for $130,000. He rented it out for seven years, and as a reward for his renters’ loyalty, he thought it would be nice to just let them assume the $110,000 he still owed and save the hassle of agent fees and sales negotiations.

  I balked. “Look at it this way,” I told him. “Assuming the house is still worth only $130,000—and it’s probably worth more—you’re proposing to pay your renters $20,000 to buy this house from you.” He owed it to himself to figure out the value of the home and how generous he was really being.

  This exchange with Jim told me so much more about him as a person. His single mother worked three jobs to raise him and his brother. And he and his wife, Paula, weren’t exactly rolling in money at the time. I went home and told Kristin about his incredible personal example. It made me want to be a better person.

  About a week later, he called me back. “Dude, you’re not gonna believe this,” he said. “That townhouse is worth $180,000—as is!”

  I chuckled and reminded him that his earlier decision would have given his renters a $70,000 gift. “Were your renters that good?” I asked.

  Still, he settled on a $150,000 price tag. The only thing more stunning than his now-$30,000 discount was the fact that his renters turned him down.

  “Listen, Sergeant Major,” I told him, “if those fools don’t take your offer, I hope you’ll offer me the same deal, because even if the house has problems, it’s the most generous thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.” We bought it without even looking at it and used every penny of the equity to fix it up.

  Four years later when it was time to move again and the housing market was crashing, a real estate agent found out we were trying to sell it on our own and laughed in our face. “There is no way you’ll sell on your own in this market.”

  We sold it in less than two weeks. How?

  We followed Jim and Paula’s example and sold our home $20,000 below market value. We still made every penny we would have by using an agent, and we paid it forward. (I also made a point of visiting that agent to return his laugh in kind.)

  That noisy, vulgar Jersey guy taught me how to do that. And in the process, he taught me another lesson in being open-minded.

  * * *

  The first time I learned to truly appreciate the value of humility in wisdom regarding politics was in 2003. The army sent me to Georgetown University to spend a year doing nothing but studying the art and science of policy making and politics.

  Although soldiers are allowed to express political opinion and even campaign on behalf of candidates, we are restricted from doing so while in uniform, which is harder than it seems. It was far easier to follow the unwritten rule that officers should be politically knowledgeable but entirely nonpartisan.

  I was able to be nonpartisan, but I fell short on being politically knowledgeable. As such, Washington, DC, and Georgetown became the Saudi Arabia of my political awareness.

  One of the first things we learned about policy is that there is no ideal solution—ever. Formulating policy for a nation of three hundred million citizens is rarely about finding the best or most efficient options and almost always about finding the least objectionable options.

  In the end, we all get policies and programs that are more feasible than optimal, more satisfactory than perfect, more tolerable than desirable, and more practical than ideal. No one gets exactly what they want. That’s how it has always been and how it will always be.

  Throughout my year of study, I saw deal making up close and personal. Even the newest politicians seemed to understand the virtual demand that they “trade” their votes (and relax certain convictions) in order to get things done. I saw that compromise wasn’t a virtue as much as it was a necessity.

  Perhaps these observations shouldn’t have been such a shocker to me at age thirty-three, but they were, and finding a conviction and voice about politics was much easier after that.

  Within a few years I gravitated toward my own version of Oxford-style debates by following the debates of learned men like David Brooks and E. J. Dionne, who occupy opposing political philosophies. I found their discussions with each other to be an example of how a person could sustain convictions while finding compromise.

  I also learned to turn off those pundits who carried the verbal and intellectual equivalent of dynamite and fire accelerant in their words.

  Of course, I learned other things about politics, but accepting that policies and laws will always fall short of ideals helped me sort through the chaos of it all.

  I found that politics wasn’t too much different from marriage: to get through it, it’s necessary to lower voices, carefully pick your battles, avoid insults and declarations of absolutes, voice soft lies, and compromise, compromise, compromise.

  Like divorce, perpetual fighting and paralysis are unacceptable results for a diverse population that wants solutions.

  * * *

  In March 2005, word was passed along the grapevine that then–Lieutenant General Petraeus was on the hunt for an army major working on the joint staff. The Iraqi government had selected their chief of defense and most senior military officer. His name was General Babakir Zibari, and Petraeus wanted to provide a U.S. military assistant to help in the transition.

  Not volunteering for such an assignment may seem like an option, but no one I knew in the army saw it that way. Our personnel and performance files were sent to Petraeus’s headquarters in Iraq, and then we waited. About a month later, my boss called me into his office to show me an email he had received from Petraeus:

  … [Mark] will have a tremendous vantage point, a very non-sta
ndard mission with lots of ambiguities and drama, and an incredible opportunity to contribute. Please tell him to check in with me upon arrival.

  As exciting as this was, I was more focused on the details that would affect my family. When was I leaving? What would I be doing? Where would I be working?

  It took another week before I was officially notified, and even then there were few details.

  When I finally met Petraeus in Iraq, I realized his earlier note about “ambiguities and drama” was an understatement. In less than five minutes, he acknowledged he wasn’t quite sure how my assignment would work. He knew what he wanted, but it hadn’t really been done before. He gave me some very basic guidance but told me he was leaving it to me to build a personal relationship with Babakir.

  My job was to provide Babakir with perspective on how the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff was organized and run, provide 24/7 liaison to the coalition forces (and Petraeus), help coordinate travel (since most of it was provided by the coalition), and serve as an aide-de-camp (personal assistant).

  As part of the coalition, it seemed odd to me that Babakir would require such hands-on assistance, but I quickly learned he had great difficulty traveling in and out of coalition checkpoints, landing zones, and airstrips. A big part of my job was to serve as the “grease” that got things done.

  My duties meant I would spend 90 percent of every day living and working where he and his staff lived and worked. I would see and hear everything they did.

  The explanation and the looming unknowns had me excited but also anxious. There were infinite chances to fail, and little or no control over the things that could prevent failures. No shared culture. No shared organizational values. No common language. Few shared life experiences. No shared training practices. Little agreement on how the world turns. And not a single U.S. soldier to my left or right when I performed my work.

  Nothing I had ever done in the army had prepared me for such an experience—not even my deployment to Saudi Arabia. The only way to gain the necessary skills was by doing the job and adapting as I went. The best thing I had going for me was my deep knowledge of civil and military world history—and my curiosity.