by Terence Ward
Born of Donegal immigrants, Pat had served as an altar boy, and by the sixth grade he had read every book in the Bayonne, New Jersey, library. Even though he was the top student in St. Henry School, he was denied the annual scholarship award. It went instead to the son of the rich man who had secretly pledged to donate a new wing to the school. Thank God for this injustice: the scholarship that broke his heart would have whisked my father off to Ireland to follow the path of a priest. And nothing of what I am about to tell would have come to pass.
At sixteen Patrick walked away and began organizing apprentice welders in the taverns and wooden warehouses along the Hudson River, where he cut his eyeteeth as a union activist on New York’s waterfront. His politics and wavy ginger hair earned him the nickname Paddy the Red. It was the Depression. Everyone’s world had collapsed, few had jobs, pay was meager, the future looked grim. Strikes led to battles with police. When my father was arrested, my grandfather came to bail him out of jail, with the simple question “Patrick, but why?” Young Pat looked up with conviction and pain: “Because we have to.” His father never truly understood. He was a quiet man who worked the night shift at “the Hook,” Bayonne’s refinery. His real voice was in his fiddle, which came alive for feasts and weddings.
The world then plunged into savage war, and a generation was sent overseas. In December 1941, with his welding torch in hand, Pat headed west for Hawaii to patch up the crippled Pacific fleet still floating in Pearl Harbor. Like Yossarian in Catch-22, he signed up with the U.S. Air Corps and became a bombardier. By 1944, he was in a creaking B-17 Flying Fortress, searching for German targets. He watched raiding Focke-Wulfs circle their prey, sending planes spiraling earthward in flames with his friends trapped inside. On the ground, he drank heavily with his crew, while fresh faces arrived like clockwork after each mission to step into dead men’s shoes.
But, like Yossarian, he survived. His brother Sean was badly wounded and frostbitten in the Battle of the Bulge, and his brother Jimmy faced down banzai charges on the bloody beaches of Guadalcanal. Never a great believer in the system, Patrick was certain their Irish luck had something to do with it. At the final hour, as he was released from active duty, Berlin lay in smoldering ruins. On a misty night in June, as he stood outside an aerodrome in Kettering, England, ticketed and bound for America, an airman begged him for his seat.
“Hey, buddy, I’m tryin’ to get back to my doll. Our wedding’s planned! Come on, Red, be a pal, let me take your place.” Sympathy overcame my father. The teary-eyed airman grabbed his gear and rushed to board the plane. Pat walked back to the pub to wait for his name to be called for the next available flight. A few hours later, news circled with a hush. The B-17 had crashed into the Irish Sea. No survivors.
Once the war was over, Pat ran to the farthest place he knew on the American continent, the majestic Rocky Mountains. He found the granite flatirons of Boulder that shielded the green lawns of the University of Colorado, and there he met Donna Jean Ball.
* * *
My mother’s earliest awareness of the world and her place in it came from a huge map of the United States in her elementary school classroom. Hutchinson, Kansas, she learned, was the geographic center of the nation and, for her, the center of the world. As a young girl growing up in a small town near her grandparents’ farm, she dreamed of emerald-green jungle outposts and a dark, slow-moving river called Congo, where her uncle Otto and aunt Gladys served as missionaries. Each year, she waited in vain for her promised gifts: a scarlet-colored sassy parrot and a swinging silver-haired gibbon. When her father picked up and moved the family west to Colorado, everything would change for Donna. Lured onto the university stage by a sorority girlfriend, she was cast in a forgettable production of Josefina Niggli’s Red Velvet Goat. When she confidently strode out as a señorita during an evening rehearsal of a south-of-the-border crowd scene, she came face-to-face with Patrick Ward, playing the part of a mustachioed boisterous Mexican señor, sporting a broad New York Irish accent. He was, in her words, “unintentionally hilarious.”
Apart from being a unique character on campus—a side-splitting actor in theater and an honors student in economics—he was the most impoverished human being she had ever met. Almost immediately, she decided to desert her secure life and join him in a true adventure. Pat was a veteran, nine years older than she. He was irresistible. Suddenly her orderly life evaporated, and she became an avid interloper and a political activist in his world, a heady mix of idealistic dreamers unlike any she had known before. She was captivated. Donna chose their companionship even though she was never sure they really trusted her. By day, she and Patrick drove food supplies to striking miners in the mountain village of Louisville, and by night he acted in and directed plays, while she designed sets. Pat was drama critic for the college paper; she became society editor. The world was fresh and new. They were in love.
Penniless, Pat borrowed a hundred dollars for the wedding. With only his air force uniform to his name, a much ridiculed wedding present—an Irish Sweepstakes ticket from his sister Sue—proved to be the next miracle. It was a winner. Not the big money, but with $500 in fresh loot, the newly married couple bought a thirdhand ’39 Oldsmobile and blazed east, to New York’s 98th Street. One end of the street led to Madison and Fifth Avenues, and the other end was blocked by emerging subway trains. At night, bonfires blazed in vacant lots across the street, and the sounds of Latin music and drumming on car hoods filled the air.
Patrick enrolled at Columbia University, landed a job and even found time to coach the neighborhood Puerto Rican baseball team to their first league championship. When Donna strolled past men lounging under the yellow-splashed bodega awnings, they greeted her with smiles, proud of their victory. Pat was earning his master’s degree and Donna studied at Hunter College. On weekends, friends from Greenwich Village gathered to sing, discuss theater or play charades; every now and then a young writer named Norman Mailer joined them.
The mood in Washington, D.C., however, was less jovial. The witch hunt had begun. Senator Joe McCarthy’s hearings on “un-American activities” raised anti-Communist hysteria to fever pitch as the country followed the fate of the Hollywood Ten. At the University of California, Berkeley, loyalty oaths were demanded. Dozens of professors resigned in protest. And there was the blacklist. On it were Zero Mostel, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson and many others. Old friends at the University of Colorado were caught in the net of suspicion and careers were destroyed.
Freshly graduated, my father landed a job at the staid Bureau of Labor Statistics in Manhattan. Soon gruff, chain-smoking FBI agents began to appear at his office. J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men were relentless, full of distrust and, above all, humorless. They peppered him with questions.
“At Colorado, were you a member of the Social Science Reds?”
“I played third base and batted lead-off. Almost won the championship.”
“Were you in San Francisco with Harry Bridges in ’39?”
“Along with about ten thousand other union men.”
“As drama critic at Colorado, you wrote about street scenes with tenements?”
“Our theater had a motto: Art should be real.”
“Are you sure you didn’t use it for social activism? Weren’t some of your friends members of the Communist Party?”
“I had lots of friends.”
In truth, Pat and Donna had stopped seeing those colleagues whose fanaticism denied the reality of the Korean War. The faithful were adamant: the North did not invade the South. Dogma bred denial. Pat felt there was no point in contesting their beliefs. Instead, he continued to organize relief for striking miners trapped in the frigid mountains above Boulder’s bucolic campus.
In those heady days, my mother said to Patrick, “There’s only one way for us to fit in. We have to move to someplace like Afghanistan.” Betrayal, suspicion, treason, blackmail and espionage were shrill new buzzwords of the advancing Cold War. Pamphlets like Red Chann
els had surfaced listing Communist Party members. Fingers were pointed. Rumors were started. Doors slammed shut on anyone with a past.
His old socialist friend at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Harry Lawson, had warned him to say—if ever questioned—that they never met. The next morning, two agents escorted Harry down the bureau’s long hall. Pat watched silently from his office as Harry was whisked out the door. Inside Pat’s desk drawer lay a fat wallet forgotten by the young FBI agent during his previous visit. Pat tossed it into the hall. The relieved agent reappeared an hour later, sweat on his brow, thanking everyone. “Oh, thank God. If I’d lost that badge, I’d’ve lost my job. How can I ever pay you guys back?” Pat didn’t ask him for the obvious favor. After the visits by FBI agents and the resignation of Lawson from the bureau, Pat knew it was time to move on. The decision became more urgent because Donna was pregnant, and as another icy winter gripped Manhattan, she knew the city was no place for their new baby.
Reading the New York Times one dreary afternoon, she came across a job listing that would change their lives. She tore it out and rang the number from a pay phone across the street. A telegram arrived soon after. The next morning, Pat and Donna entered the Park Avenue office of Aramco—the Arabian American Oil Company—and were quickly questioned by a bespectacled interviewer. He asked Pat if he knew anything about Saudi Arabia. Pat bluffed. Donna studied the posters on the walls: lovely white bungalows, blue skies and grinning expatriates in the sun. The site lay half a world away striding the Persian Gulf, in a province called Al-Hasa, where temperatures soared above 100 degrees in the summer. My mother’s allergy to the sun was never raised. They left the office, contract in hand and a list of necessary tropical gear that resembled a summer camp directive. They imagined balmy desert breezes as they shopped in cruise wear departments for summer outfits, including a white dinner jacket that spent many years in splendid isolation.
One week later, Pat slipped into exile. It was 1952. That same year Charlie Chaplin sailed from New York and was informed at sea that, as a politically unacceptable foreigner, he could never return to America. Pat, a voluntary expatriate, boarded an Aramco plane headed for Lebanon, where he studied Arabic for a month in Sidon before finally landing on the barren sands of Saudi Arabia. My mother followed later with her new baby, Kevin.
In the sandy wastes along the Gulf, their footsteps would mark the beginning of a twenty-year journey. At Aramco, Pat sent the first Saudi employees to American universities and pushed for workers’ rights—unheard-of in the oil companies operated by British colonials in neighboring Kuwait, Bahrain and Iran. There, English bureaucrats fresh from liberated India still clung jealously to their imperial practices of social apartheid and exclusion. In the Gulf and Iran, Victoria’s raj was very much alive.
In the American compound, raucous theater and homemade hooch were de rigueur. Pat’s performance in South Pacific and his production of Night Must Fall riveted the culture-hungry crowds, while the fierce shamal sandstorms pounded the frontier town of Dhahran. Most of the Yanks were in their twenties and thirties, Ivy League and Stanford graduates, a thin slice of the best and the brightest. Pat shone onstage and off-, co-writing Blue Flame, a do-it-yourself company-issued guide for brewing alcohol in your kitchen.
Then one day a young doctor from Huntington, New York, warned Pat that the company’s chief of security had boasted that he had a file on Pat Ward from the FBI. Envious of Pat’s friendship with the camp doctor whom he fancied, the chief proclaimed that my father was a “security risk to American interests.”
Furious, Pat pleaded with his manager to strike back. His boss quietly advised, “Let it pass. There’s no need to concern yourself. It will only create a tempest, and I may not be able to protect you. After all, he is head of security.” So the matter rested, but with a certain smoldering resentment. Years later, Pat requested his government files under the Freedom of Information Act. The search revealed a completely blank record.
After John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, Pat again decided to move on. A brief visit to Tehran had seized their imaginations. Tears swelled in Donna’s eyes when she gazed upon snow-capped peaks as grand as her Rocky Mountains. Then she entered an elegant Persian garden brimming with fountains. The next day, Pat accepted a post as economic adviser to the National Iranian Oil Company.
When we all stumbled out into the crisp mile-high air of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, Kevin was only seven years old, I was five, Chris was four and little Richard had just turned two. The Shah on his peacock throne had adopted a brassy new title, Aryamehr, Light of the Aryans. Across the Caspian Sea, Stalin’s fresh corpse lay in state in Moscow’s Red Square.
2. A Second Coming
Flee, then, to the essential East.
—GOETHE, “HEGIRA”
Bahrain’s airport, April Fools’ Day 1998, was an unlikely site for a reunion of the four Ward brothers. Richard had dutifully driven over from his home in Saudi Arabia to pick us up after a grueling New York–London–Bahrain flight. But we had to find him first amid the chaos.
Without warning, we were engulfed by oncoming waves from Pakistan International and Air India 747s that disgorged a sea of guest workers, maids, nannies, laborers, clerks, accountants, grandmothers and boy Fridays, whose massive influx from South Asia kept the Gulf economies afloat. At the mention of Iran our request for seventy-two-hour transit visas was met with suspicious looks. The inquisitive eye of Colonel Abdullah, in his smart khaki uniform, signaled to Kevin that he wanted to know more.
“Why, sir, are you wanting to go to Iran? Business?” he asked through the transit visa window.
“No, for pleasure.”
He laughed. His stamp crashed down.
Swept up again in the boisterous human tide, we passed a rose-colored Mercedes with shining gold hubcaps raised on a revolving platform in the spanking-clean marble arrival hall, the prize in this month’s airport raffle. Overhead, flashy advertisements winked seductively about Silk Cut cigarettes, Rolex watches and Chanel perfume.
It was Kevin’s and Chris’s first time in the Middle East since we all gathered in Egypt fifteen years before, when I was studying pharaonic history and singing in a jazz band led by Leonidis, my Greek classmate from Alexandria. Back then, we all scaled Cheops’s pyramid at dawn to watch the sun rise over the timeless Nile Valley, clambered down into the dusty Old Kingdom tombs of Saqqâra and lost ourselves in medieval Cairo’s labyrinthine Khan al-Khalili souk.
The flashy Gulf, Kevin and Chris soon discovered, was wildly modern, cut from those achingly poor and antiquated Arab neighbors to the north: Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. As Kevin drank in the strange cocktail of quick wealth, glossy construction and raffle prizes, he announced that Bahrain felt more like Las Vegas. Chris agreed. Then a black-masked woman passed by, silencing them both. Jet-lagged and exhausted, we waited until Rich finally strode in through the sliding glass doors. His loud whoops of joy drew the immediate scrutiny of airport security as Rich bear-hugged us in his massive arms. Giddy, tense and a bit shaken, we climbed into his waiting van, parked illegally outside the arrival hall.
* * *
The teardrop-shaped island of Bahrain illustrates the demographic rift that divides Islam’s two major sects, Sunni and Shia. Bahrain’s population, I knew, was overwhelmingly Shia, as are more than 98 percent of Iranians. Yet all political power rested with Bahrain’s ruling family, and the security apparatus remains in the hands of the Sunni minority. Democracy had not come to this part of the world. Sheikdoms and hereditary kingdoms were the rule.
Bloodied and bowed, the Gulf’s Shia Arabs have forever been persecuted as heretics by their Sunni hereditary rulers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Ancient fears and mistrust fueled the hatred of these Arab rulers. In Riyadh—the Saudi capital in the Wahhabi heartland—a senior oil company executive calmly assured me once that the Shia “had tails.”
Clustered around the Gulf in settlements, these Arab Sh
ia had a natural affinity for Iranian believers across the Gulf through their common faith. Many see them as a fifth column with hidden Iranian allegiances. During the explosive days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Saudi princes feared they would suffer the same fate as Iran’s Shah. In nearby Bahrain, explosive student protests periodically signaled discontent.
I had grown fond of these Shia Arabs, having conducted many management training seminars in Gulf countries for eight years. Like most persecuted minorities, they held a quiet dignity and a yearning for justice. There was no sense of entitlement among them. In the Gulf, American diplomats took great pains never to criticize any petro-kingdoms over human rights abuses. Silence kept the oil flowing.
* * *
In the back of Rich’s minivan, surrounded by my brothers, I felt liberated from the impending gloom of another round of consulting projects in Disneyesque desert sheikdoms. During a decade of self-imposed exile from Ronald Reagan’s America, I had lived in Athens and traveled down to the Gulf as a consultant to companies with a multicultural work force. The awkward mix included Japanese, French, Saudis, Egyptians, Bengalis, Filipinos, Yanks and Greeks, reluctantly thrown together in golden-cocoon Arabian city-states, sprinkled on shifting sands and pounded by blazing sun.
In the Gulf, strangely enough, no one was exposed to the natural elements anymore. Everything was indoors. The sound of wind on a tent flap had been replaced by the perpetual hum of air-conditioning. Cases of pneumonia brought on by the artificial chill reached epidemic levels in summer.
Social life and entertainment had been reduced to marathon video viewing and, of course, drinking liters of the banned but ever-flowing alcohol. Meanwhile, women in purdah—otherwise known as “bimos,” or black independent moving objects—scurried through enclosed marble shopping malls, keeping their exposed ankles one step ahead of the dreaded Mutawas, the religious police. The ancient Bedouin culture of Arabia had traded in its camels for Cadillacs, gained a huge waistline and an obsession for Louis XV furniture and, somewhere along that superhighway to the modern age, lost its charm and mortgaged its soul.