It might explain why I emerged from the womb ready to fight. If any kid so much as looked at me funny, I’d start throwing punches.
My grandmother, bless her heart, recognized my plight and tried to find a solution. Before I was old enough to walk, she placed a large coin over my belly button, covered the coin with a sash, and tied it to my back. I wore the coin and sash for two years with no improvement to my apple-sized protrusion.
Then a friend advised my grandmother to pray to the disciples of Mashhad—the city where she grew up. Together, she, my mother, and I went on a pilgrimage to Mashhad, also known as Farsi Ziarat. I remember watching my grandmother drop the coin I had been wearing into a sacred well, retrieve it, and replace it over my belly button. I also distinctly remember the dirty, smelly mullah praying by the well who asked my mother if she wanted to have sex with him.
I wanted to punch him in his ugly bearded face, but my grandmother held me back. The experience planted in my young mind a mistrust of all so-called holy men that continues to this day.
After a week of wearing the blessed coin, my belly button receded to normal size. Make of that what you will, but it’s true, so help me God.
The belief that truth is the only way to wisdom was drilled into my head by my parents, who followed the teachings of the Prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra). Zoroastrianism espouses that the purpose of existence is to be among those who renew life and help the world progress to perfection. Among its main tenets are Humata, Hukhta, and Huvarshta—good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.
Despite what people think, a large percentage of Persians aren’t Muslim zealots. My family, though nominally Muslim, never went to mosque. Like many Persians, my parents and grandparents advanced a set of values that were more in line with Zoroastrianism, which had been the most prominent religion in Persia before the Arab invasion in the seventh century.
When I was five years old, the Iranian government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi transferred my father to Abadan—the port city on the Persian Gulf. The Shah had assumed absolute control in 1953 after the CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh had made the mistake of nationalizing the British-controlled oil industry.
To the chagrin of many Iranians, out went the democratically elected Mossadegh and in came the autocratic Shah, who relied on SAVAK, the dreaded secret police, to suppress all forms of opposition. My father worked for the urban police, known as the Shahrbani.
When I grew up in Abadan during the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was a bustling city of 200,000 residents and the site of the world’s largest oil refinery. In 1986, after being besieged by Iraqi forces led by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraqi War, the population fled to the point that the official census for that year recorded a mere six people.
Luckily I lived there during a time of relative peace and prosperity, in a neighborhood that resembled a sleepy suburb of postwar Florida. It was a place where the Euphrates, Tigris, and Karun Rivers flowed together into the Persian Gulf, and where British order and discipline met with the rich peculiarities of Iran’s multiethnic population. The people I met were warm, progressive, and athletic, which suited me perfectly. I was an energetic, active kid and spent as much time as I could in some kind of physical activity—swimming, wrestling, boxing, soccer.
By the time I reached ninth grade, my father’s career took us back to Tehran. It was the mid-1960s and the pro-Western Shah had launched a massive program of modernization known as the White Revolution, whose object was to drag the country into the twentieth century. Women no longer had to cover themselves in chadors and were granted the right to vote. Marriages were banned for people under the age of fifteen. Divorce was legalized. Free secondary school education was extended to all citizens, and new schools, colleges, and libraries were built.
The scenes I saw on the streets of downtown Tehran as a young teenager probably weren’t much different from those of Washington, London, or Paris at the time. Young women wore miniskirts, tight pants, and modern fashions. Men sported mustaches, bell-bottom pants, and long hair. Ford Mustangs and other American-made cars cruised the wide boulevards.
But that modernity didn’t extend past a few major cities: The rest of Iran remained undeveloped, and the majority of Iranians were illiterate. The contrast was dramatic, and when visiting the countryside I’d see camels, donkeys pulling carts, women covered from head to toe, and kids with no shoes.
As a young boy I dreamed of moving to the United States. Part of that had to do with the image of America I had gotten from watching Hollywood movies on the weekends in large movie theaters in downtown Tehran. Big John Wayne became my hero, especially in Westerns like The Searchers and Rio Bravo, and of course The Green Berets.
Also, my family had a strong connection to the States. My Uncle Alex, who also happened to be my godfather, moved there in 1956 and opened a gas station south of San Francisco. My oldest brother, Iradj, followed twelve years later, and two of my uncles joined Alex in ’69. My ambition was to move to the US and become a pilot.
Soon after we moved back to Tehran, my oldest aunt and her husband asked my father if I could live with them in Abadan and help look after their ten-year-old son. Since I had many good friends there, I jumped at the offer, and ended up spending the next two years in Abadan, through high school graduation.
I never became a great student, and was known more for my mischievous sense of humor and the trouble I caused than my academic achievements. I was a cocky kid with even features, light Mediterranean skin, and jet-black hair. When I received my high school diploma, I shook it in front of me and said, “It took me twelve years to get you, now you come with me!” Then I had it laminated, attached it to the back of my bike, and rode proudly (and with a big smirk on my face) down the streets of Abadan with the diploma flying behind me. That got a lot of laughs.
I was headstrong and always up for a good time. When my father came to visit for my high school graduation, I insisted that he take me to the American consulate to get a visa to go to the States so I could work in my Uncle Alex’s gas station.
Me being a brash teenager and having learned a little English, I told the US consular officer that I wanted to be sent to Vietnam so I could kick the asses of the communists.
He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Lahidji, but I can’t approve that.”
“Why not, sir?”
“Because to join the military you have to be a citizen or be in possession of a Green Card first.”
I got pissed off. “What?” I asked. “To kill communists, you need to be a citizen?”
“At the very least you have to be a legal resident.”
I walked away with a tourist visa, and the understanding that I had to serve in the Iranian military before I could get permission to leave the country. So at the age of eighteen, I was bused 1,500 miles south of Tehran with another 350 recruits to begin basic training for the Iranian military. Sixteen weeks later, I was sent to airborne school, and then qualified for ranger training.
As a member of the elite Iranian Special Forces, I was deployed to Shiraz near the ancient city of Persepolis, where the Shah was staging a massive festival in celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. Spanning five days in October 1971, the festival was meant to remind the world of Iran’s proud history and showcase the modern advances brought to the country by the Shah.
I considered it a massive waste of money. Hundreds of millions were spent building an elaborate tent city around the ruins of Persepolis, which had been looted and partially destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., to house visiting dignitaries from around the world. Built in a star pattern with a central fountain and surrounded by thousands of specially planted trees, each luxury tent was equipped with direct phone and telex lines. The massive Banqueting Hall tent accommodated 600 guests, who were feted with a lavish five-and-a-half-hour banquet served on dinnerware created by Limoges and with
wine and food provided by Maxim’s of Paris.
Foreign dignitaries were shuttled back and forth to the airport in 250 identical red Mercedes-Benz limos and included Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia; the kings of Denmark, Belgium, Jordan, Nepal, and Norway; the emirs of Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait; Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace of Monaco; twenty presidents; First Lady Imelda Marcos of the Philippines; and US vice president Spiro Agnew.
My unit trained six months for the festival in elaborate wool uniforms in the blazing heat and helped provide security. After the celebration, which was criticized for its excess in Iran and throughout the world, I was assigned to one of three special Shah units known as the Sepah-e Danash, Sepah-e Teb, and Sepah-e Qesha Barzi. While the Sepah-e Teb’s mission was to provide medical assistance to poor villages, and Sepah-e Qesha Barzi’s was to assist in agriculture, the role of the unit I joined, the Sepah-e Danash, was to spread literacy and basic education.
I received two months of training, and at the age of nineteen was shipped to northwestern Iran to work with Kurdish tribesmen in a village near Sufian. Unlike modern Tehran, this was an area untouched by the Shah’s White Revolution and only reachable by a four-wheel-drive vehicle, horse, or camel.
I’d get up at six every morning, do PT with the kids and farmers, and then set off for a little mud schoolhouse. Since I was responsible for fifty students, ranging in ages from five to twelve, I split them between two classrooms and went back and forth between the two teaching reading, spelling, Farsi, and math. The other two Sepah-e Danash members with me taught the kids’ parents how to read and write.
After a year and a half, I was transferred to a base in the same area to train Kurd militiamen who were trying to stop Iraqi soldiers from sneaking across the border to steal food and sheep and rape their women—which I found particularly detestable. During these eight months, I met and befriended the man who is the current president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani. As two young guys patrolling the hills around Sufian at night looking for Iraqi raiders, we had no idea how history would unfold and how we would find ourselves on the same side of conflict several times in the future—first against the Iranian Revolution and later opposed to Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Before leaving the Shah’s army, I trained with US Special Forces units at a base outside Tehran, learning free-fall parachute jumps and counterinsurgency tactics. At the end of 1973, I was honorably discharged from the Iranian army and back in Tehran, living with my family, working in a record factory, and saving up money for a plane ticket to the States.
Despite Iran’s economic growth throughout the early 1970s, the new social freedoms, and its standing in the international community, the gap between the urban rich and rural poor had continued to grow. Educated elites in Tehran and other major cities lobbied for social reforms and a voice in the government, while people in the countryside scrounged for food and regarded the excesses of the Shah and his family with disgust. The only thing that seemed to unite the two groups was abhorrence of the brutal tactics of the Shah dictatorship.
The situation reminded me of the opening lines from one of my favorites books, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, when he described France before the revolution:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Most people I knew sensed that change was coming, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good.
Finally, in January 1974, I boarded a flight from Tehran to Frankfurt, Germany, then Frankfurt to New York, and New York to San Francisco. My twenty-three-year-old head was filled with fantasies. Believing that I had the darkly handsome looks of an Italian movie star, I expected beautiful blondes to pick me up at the San Francisco airport and shower me with kisses.
Instead, my uncle and brother met me with a beat-up pickup truck. They drove me to Santa Clara and immediately put me to work in their Mobil stations, making $2.50 an hour pumping gas and washing windshields for as many as fifteen hours a day. Iradj’s station was located in Santa Clara and Uncle Alex’s in San Jose, so I’d bike from one to the other.
Gas at the time was 25 cents a gallon, and there was no self-service. I spoke so little English that when customers said, “Fill it up with high test,” I didn’t know what they meant. All I understood was “regular” and “premium.”
Because of my meager English and the high cost of flying school, my dreams of becoming a pilot were immediately crushed. Still determined to make a life for myself in the US, I enrolled at San Jose City College and West Valley College and earned credits at night.
To earn extra money and get closer to aviation, I took a job cleaning Boeing 707s at San Jose Airport, working the graveyard shift and making $7.50 an hour. One night, as I was towing a Pan Am 707 that had just landed from Hawaii from the taxiway to the gate, the passenger door of a fuel truck swung open, and before I could stop, the door embedded itself in the nose of the jet. The plane’s crew and over a hundred passengers waited an hour as repairmen separated the truck door from the nose. I was blamed for the incident and fired.
But it wasn’t all bad, because a few months later my Uncle Alex helped me secure a Green Card, and also helped me get my own ARCO station in Palo Alto. In those days, gas companies would give them out for free to people with experience. All you had to do was pay for a truckload of gasoline. I had saved enough for two loads at $2,500 a pop.
I ran the station alone for six months, then hired a helper. I was netting around $2,000 a month, but still yearned to be a pilot.
After a year of owning the station, I came to the conclusion that running a business wasn’t my calling, and sold the place for $10,000. A day later I walked into the Army-Navy-Marines recruitment office on Stevens Creek Boulevard in San Jose. A huge African American man in an Army uniform rose to greet me. He said his name was Sergeant Thompson.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. My name is Changiz and I was in the Iranian military. Now I want to be a Green Beret, or an Army Ranger.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Ranger training is very difficult, and it’s a dangerous job.”
“I’m in shape. I’m ready.”
“Okay. We have to do a background check on you first. You could go delayed entry. We have no openings for infantry now, but you could go in as a medic.”
“Fine with me.” It was November 1977, and I was psyched.
In January 1978 I went to Oakland for induction with fifty other recruits. A few days later we were flown to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for nine weeks of basic training. We arrived in the middle of a cold spell with temperatures dropping to 20 below zero. I froze my ass off.
After completing basic, the Army sent me to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for three months of medical training. I had a bitch of a time, because my English still wasn’t up to speed and I had difficulty learning the medical terms. Also, because of my accent, guys were constantly busting my balls.
I sucked it up, made it through, and was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for airborne school. Having already done static-line and free-fall jumps in the Iranian Special Forces and enjoying them, the training came easily. But during Tower Week, while practicing landings from 250 feet, I landed funny and sprained my ankle. No one except my jump buddy knew what had happened.
That night my ankle swelled up badly. Not wanting to be held back, I went to the PX, bought a load of elastic bandages, wrapped my ankle as tight as I could, and suffered through the last day of Tower Week. Then it was time to jump from an airplane. The first day I managed to get through two jumps from a C-130 at 1,250 feet and withstand the pain. Day Two, we jumped with a rucksack on our backs from a C-141. I landed fine, but my ankle hurt so bad I thought I was going to pass out.
The final day we did what was called a Hollywood
jump, meaning we only had to wear a parachute and reserve, but no rucksack and no weapon. I figured: no problem, and landed smoothly. But when I got up I was limping badly and struggled over to the line to stand at attention.
The captain in charge of airborne school stopped in front of me and slammed a pair of brass wings into my chest. The pin stung like hell.
I shouted, “Airborne!”
I was an Army Ranger. A day later, a group of us were bused to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for Special Forces training. I remember the excitement I felt as we stopped in front of the World War II–era buildings that housed our unit, called IMA (Institute for Military Assistance) and now called SWC, Special Warfare Center, for the start of Pre-Phase training.
Tall, square-shouldered First Sergeant Finney walked up to me and asked, “How do you pronounce your name?”
“La-heed-gee, sir.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“I’m from Iran.”
“Have you been in the military before?”
“Yes, sir. I served three and a half years in the Iranian Special Forces.”
“Welcome,” he said as he patted me on the shoulder.
Pre-Phase lasted six weeks and consisted mainly of classroom instruction that covered SF history, organization, patrol orders, and troop-leading procedures. It ended with 275 of us lined up on the 82nd Airborne’s field for a PT test. I stood five-ten and 165 pounds amidst a row of much bigger, taller guys. One of them turned to me and asked, “Hey, Changiz, you think you got a chance of making it?”
“We’ll see,” I answered.
I was one of 185 who passed and entered Phase One, the start of roughly a year of SF training. Phase One was run by a short, tough sergeant from Delta Force named Maxum, who loaded us into cattle trucks and drove us to nearby Camp Mackall on a steamy, hot day in August 1979. We were packed so tightly together we could barely breathe.
Full Battle Rattle Page 3