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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Fighting Mad
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I don’t like talking to the press, not even on deep background, but there seems to be a lot that’s happened lately my conscience says I need to comment on. By now everybody and their racist old grandmother has heard about Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan. He graduated from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in ‘97, and spent six years working at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center; Virginia Tech and Walter Reed: the gifts that keep on giving.
I’m not sympathizing, in any way, shape, or form, but it can be tough, asking a muslim soldier to fight and potentially kill members of the Ummah, the community of believers. It’s a request we shouldn’t make lightly, and when a muslim soldier has doubts, uncertainties, maybe we should take those into account. But the facts of the matter is Hasan was a coward; Anwar al-Awlaki, inciting violence from half the world away, doubly so. Hasan shot non-combatants, women, the aged, and a child. He shot and killed an unborn child- more innocent it doesn’t get. I wonder how Allah looks on that; actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly how he looks on that. If weren’t a coward, he could have found any number of armed soldiers. I’m a marine first, doctor second, and by God and Allah I’d have shown him what a real soldier can do. As a doctor, it was his job to care for his fellow soldiers and fellow man. And as a soldier and as a man, it was his duty to defend those who can’t defend themselves. He failed on all three counts, and most everybody would agree he failed as a muslim, too. I often fear we’re failing our soldiers, our muslim soldiers doubly so. One of my colleagues, Dr. Manion, a civvie shrink, got fired from Camp Lejeune for saying as much about PTSD to the higher ups. Though I think it was more how he said it than that he said it; the military is sensitive to the mental well-being of her soldiers, we’re just… not used to be sensitive. We don’t always think it through. That’s why they were building a treatment center in Lejeune. But they were building it where the sounds of the rifle and explosive ordinance ranges are pervasive; the last thing a soldier with PTSD needs is to be surrounded by the sounds of combat. And the marines they treat at Lejeune are meant for active duty. We can’t send them back to war without putting their heads back on straight, or we will reap the whirlwind when they go bad. There are some who can’t reconcile being a muslim soldier fighting members of the Ummah at all- though there’s about 20,000 muslims in the armed services who see it different. A few of those are marines, but they’re marines first, because Allah ain’t going to pull their fat out of the line of fire- their brother marines will. At the same time, their morals don’t come into conflict with duty, cause their morals are pretty in sync with the codes of conduct; being a good soldier and being a good muslim are usually about the same thing. I counseled a marine who tried his damnedest to live to Islamic standards; for the sake of confidentiality, we’ll just call him Javed. There’s a passage in the Qur’an that describes killing another muslim, and according to that passage, since they were at war with us, he had to free a believing slave to make up for the killing. Believing slaves are harder to come by these days, but he was using contacts with the State Department in Sudan, and a friend at Interpol, to keep on the lookout for muslim slaves. But he was having trouble balancing the sheet, and the pressure was getting to him. He was dreaming of Hell every night, convinced that if he couldn’t free a slave for every muslim dead on his head he’d end up there. But the world where he woke up, at odds with his god, that was worse. I try not to worry for my patients outside of office hours, but every late night call I’d get I thought would be because he ate the gun. But a boy, not quite seventeen, found out that Javed had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tried to stab him on the steps of the mosque they both attended. Javed’s a marine, so he got the knife off the kid no problem, but there was a moment there when they were struggling, the knife between them, and Javed told me he thought maybe this was Allah’s will, that he should let it happen. But he reasoned if it was Allah’s will, Allah would have sent a stronger kid, or a stealthier one. Letting the kid stab him wouldn’t have been a servant’s submission, but suicide- and that was not Allah’s will. I spoke with Javed, and what he came to realize was there was another kind of slavery in the world, an ideological one that was perhaps even more personally destructive than physical bondage. So he and his Imam went down to the cell where the boy was being held. The Imam tried to explain the difference in fighting in a war and killing someone who turned out to be a muslim, and stabbing a soldier on the steps of his mosque; it was a Qur’anic subtlety, but the difference was for all the world. It took them hours, and I don’t think they completely deradicalized him, but it was a start, enough for Javed to convince the police not to press charges. And in our next session, Javed said it wasn’t the same. He didn’t feel like he had when he’d bought that girl bound for Saudia Arabia and sexual slavery, and returned her home to Kuwait. I said it wasn’t. That girl was delivered from physical slavery, her life saved in a stroke; the boy was still battling ideas and demagogues who would be his masters. To free him, really free him, it was going to take time and follow through. He said it sounded like I was giving him an order. I told him as a ranking officer, it was, and that as a muslim, I think he knew it was Allah’s will, and I knew on both counts he’d do us proud. |
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