Faith and War

[~*Dorothy*~ 2]

Just thought that you may enjoy reading this article.

Faith and War

From Head Scarf to Army Cap, Making a New Life

Dorothy

[~*Dorothy*~ 2]

I am not sure why its not working. It is a great article that I found at nytimes.com...I think that it deals with some important issues and I was wondering how you feel about the story...

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Here you go.

December 15, 2006

Faith and War

From Head Scarf to Army Cap, Making a New Life

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Tex. — Stomping her boots and swinging her bony arms, Fadwa Hamdan led a column of troops through this bleak Texas base.

Fadwa Hamdan belongs to the rare class of Muslim women who have signed up to become soldiers trained in Arabic translation.

Only six months earlier, she wore the head scarf of a pious Muslim woman and dropped her eyes in the presence of men. Now she was marching them to dinner.

“I’m gonna be a shooting man, a shooting man!” she cried, her Jordanian accent lost in the chanting voices. “The best I can for Uncle Sam, for Uncle Sam!”

The United States military has long prided itself on molding raw recruits into hardened soldiers. Perhaps none have undergone a transformation quite like that of Ms. Hamdan.

Forbidden by her husband to work, she raised five children behind the drawn curtains of their home in Saudi Arabia. She was not allowed to drive. On the rare occasions when she set foot outside, she wore a full-face veil.

Then her world unraveled. Separated from her husband, who had taken a second wife, and torn from her children, she moved to Queens to start over. Struggling to survive on her own, she answered a recruiting advertisement for the Army and enlisted in May.

Ms. Hamdan’s passage through the military is a remarkable act of reinvention. It required courage and sacrifice. She had to remove her hijab, a sacred symbol of the faith she holds deeply. She had to embrace, at the age of 39, an arduous and unfamiliar life.

In return, she sought what the military has always promised new soldiers: a stable home, an adoptive family, a remade identity. She left one male-dominated culture for another, she said, in the hope of finding new strength along the way.

“Always, I dream I have power on the inside, and one day it’s going to come out,” said Ms. Hamdan, a small woman with delicate hands and sad, almond eyes.

She belongs to the rare class of Muslim women who have signed up to become soldiers trained in Arabic translation. Such female linguists play a crucial role for the American armed forces in Iraq, where civilian women often feel uncomfortable interacting with male troops.

Finding Arabic-speaking women willing to serve in the military has proved daunting. Of the 317 soldiers who have completed training in the Army linguist program since 2003, just 23 are women, 13 of them Muslim.

Ms. Hamdan wrestled with the decision for two years. Only in the Army, she decided, would she be able to save money to hire a lawyer and finally divorce her husband. She yearned to regain custody of her children and support them on her own. She thought of going to graduate school one day.

But when Ms. Hamdan finally enlisted, she was filled with as much fear as determination. There was no guarantee, with her broken English and frail physique, that she could meet the military’s standards or survive its rigors.

“This is different world for me,” she said at the time.

‘This Is the Army’

It was around midnight on May 31 when a yellow school bus brought Ms. Hamdan and 16 other new soldiers to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, a spread of parched grass and drab, low-lying buildings.

Ms. Hamdan had not scored high enough on the required English examination to go directly to basic training, so she was sent here for intensive language instruction.

At Lackland, soldiers enlisted in the Army linguist program known as 09-Lima have 24 weeks to improve their English and pass the exam. In that time, they follow a strict military regimen. They rise at 5 a.m. for physical training. They march to class. They drop to the ground for punitive push-ups.

When the bus arrived at the barracks that evening, Ms. Hamdan said, she hopped out first, her camouflage cap pulled low on her head.

Standing by the metal stairs was Sgt. First Class Willie Brannon, an imposing 48-year-old man with a stern jaw and a leveling stare. He ordered the soldiers to change into shorts. Ms. Hamdan explained softly that she was Muslim and could not do this.

“This is the Army,” he replied. “Everybody’s the same.”

Ms. Hamdan burst into tears.

The issue had arisen at the base before, and some of the Muslim women had been permitted to wear sweat pants instead of shorts. Officially, it would be Ms. Hamdan’s choice.

But from the sidelines came two opposing directives, one in English and the other in Arabic. The drill sergeants wanted Ms. Hamdan to get used to wearing shorts, while several of the male Muslim soldiers tried to shame her into refusing.

“You’re not supposed to show your legs,” they told her.

For three weeks, she wore the blue nylon shorts, hitching up her white socks. Then she switched to sweat pants, even as the summer heat surpassed 100 degrees.

It helped, Ms. Hamdan thought, that there were so many similarities between Islam and the Army.

The command “Attention!” reminded her of the first step in the daily Muslim prayer, when one must stand completely still.

Soldiers, like Muslims, were instructed to eat with one hand. The women ate by themselves, and always walked with an escort, as Muslim women traditionally traveled.

The Army taught soldiers to live with order. They folded their fatigues as women folded their hijabs, and woke before sunrise as Ms. Hamdan had done all her life. They always marched behind a flag, as Muslims did in the days of the Prophet.

Nothing felt more familiar than the military’s emphasis on respect. Soldiers learned to tuck their hands behind their backs when speaking to superiors.

When Ms. Hamdan tried this with Sergeant Brannon, she thought of her father. Her eyes automatically dropped to the floor, with customary Muslim modesty.

“Look me in the eye,” the sergeant said. It was a command he had learned to deliver with care.

Sergeant Brannon, an African-American Baptist from North Carolina, had never met a Muslim before coming to Lackland. He soon concluded that the Muslim women in his charge had survived greater struggles outside the military than anything they would face inside it.

“They’ve been through a lot,” he said.

Life Before the Service

Fadwa Hamdan was always a touch rebellious.

One of seven children, she was raised by her Palestinian parents in Amman, Jordan. Her father worked as a government irrigation official while her mother stayed at home with the children. They expected the same of their daughters.

But as a teenager, Ms. Hamdan rejected her many suitors. She wanted to see the world. At 19, she said, she secretly volunteered as a nurse with the Jordanian police, infuriating her parents. That same year, a visiting Palestinian doctor who lived in New York spotted her in the street.

He tracked down her home address, and spoke to her father. The next day, Ms. Hamdan learned she was engaged.

“Your dream has come true,” Ms. Hamdan recalls her mother saying. “You’re leaving Jordan.”

Ms. Hamdan joined her husband in Staten Island in 1987. She felt nothing for him. He was 10 years her senior, and she found him stiff and dictatorial. He only let her leave the house with him, she said. If she upset him, he refused to speak to her for months.

She had children to fill the void. She became more religious, and began wearing the face veil known as a niqab. Eventually, the family moved to Saudi Arabia.

Weeks after Ms. Hamdan delivered her fifth child in 2000, she learned from her mother-in-law that her husband was taking a second wife in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Ms. Hamdan was shocked.

“I couldn’t talk,” she said.

The next summer, on a family vacation in Amman, her husband disappeared one evening with three of their children, she said. Days later she located two of her boys in Saudi Arabia, and learned that the new wife would be joining them.

Ms. Hamdan’s 8-year-old girl had been left with her grandparents in Ramallah. She tried to get the girl back, but her husband had kept the child’s passport, she said.

When reached by telephone in Saudi Arabia, a man answering to her husband’s name said, “This is her choice and I don’t have anything to do with it,” apparently referring to her decision to join the Army. Then he hung up.

It never occurred to Ms. Hamdan to seek a divorce. She feared that it would bring shame to her family. From Jordan, she fought for legal custody of the children. In 2002, a judge ruled that she could keep the three youngest children, but allotted her a meager alimony, not enough to cover their schooling. Reluctantly, she returned them to their father.

Alone in Amman, she felt like an outcast.

“The neighbors, they look at me,” she said.

In September 2002, she moved to Queens to live with her brother and his wife. She returned to wearing a regular head scarf, or hijab, and started classes at a local community college. One night she came home late, she said, and her brother told her to leave. “She did not follow the rules of the house,” the brother, Sam Saeed, said in an interview.

Ms. Hamdan did not know where to turn. Her father had refused to speak to her since she left Jordan. Over the next 10 days, she rode the subway at night and slept on a park bench in Queens. Finally, she walked into a hair salon in Brooklyn and approached a Lebanese Muslim woman.

“She was hysterical crying,” said the woman, Helena Buiduon.

Ms. Hamdan stayed with Ms. Buiduon until she found her own apartment. She taught the Koran to children and worked in a doctor’s office while earning an associate’s degree in medical assistance.

Her life remained a struggle. She lived in a small, drafty apartment in the Bronx. Other Muslim immigrants found her puzzling.

Some people suggested that she was a “loose woman,” she recalled, a notion that amused her given how little she wanted another relationship.

“I can’t feel anything for anybody,” she said. “I lived like jail. Just imagine you have a bird and the door is open. You think he will go back to this jail again? Never. He’s just flying.”

In 2003, she spotted an ad for the Army in an Arabic-language magazine. She met with a recruiter but cut the conversation short after learning she would have to remove her head scarf before enlisting.

Secretly, though, she kept imagining a new, military life. In March, she made up her mind.

“I broke the law with God,” she said of her decision to remove her hijab. “I had to.”

She put her belongings in storage. She began lifting 20-pound weights. She slipped off her veil in public a few times. She felt naked.

Two days before she left, she stopped by her brother’s video shop in Queens to say goodbye.

Mr. Saeed was kneeling in prayer, as a Spanish rap video blasted from a television set. He stiffened at the sight of Ms. Hamdan, then kissed her on the cheek. They had not seen each other all year. Within minutes, an argument began.

“She’ll never make it,” Mr. Saeed said, looking away from his sister.

“Oh yeah?” she replied, her eyes widening.

“A Muslim woman is not allowed to travel alone,” he said.

“What about working?” she said, her voice quivering. “Look at your wife, she works!”

“She likes to spend time here,” he said.

Ms. Hamdan ran from the store crying.

“She won’t make it,” Mr. Saeed told a reporter after she left. “Woman always weak. She need a man to protect her.”

Later, when Ms. Hamdan heard what her brother had said, she was silent.

“Why didn’t he protect me?” she said.

What Happens Next

Life at Lackland — where soldiers cannot chew gum, wear makeup or leave the base — reminded Ms. Hamdan of her marriage.

“Sometimes, when I’m by myself, I wonder how I have stayed here for six months,” she said as she sat outside her barracks one recent evening. “But I did it.”

She was among 39 men and women in the Army linguist program, in a company of 119 soldiers. The rest were immigrants from around the globe, there to improve their English in the hopes of entering boot camp.

Everyone, it seemed, had a sad story.

The women talked quietly after the lights went out. A Sudanese woman had come to the United States after most of her family died in a bombing in Khartoum. A 23-year-old woman had lost her Iranian mother in an honor killing.

A teenage Iraqi girl cried herself to sleep every night. She, like many other soldiers, began referring to Ms. Hamdan as “Mom.”

“They come into my arms,” said Ms. Hamdan, who was older than most of the others.

She missed being a mother, yet she rarely talked about her own children. She was learning not to cry, and that was a subject that broke her down. Privately, she called them in Saudi Arabia twice a week with 20-minute phone cards, four minutes per child.

As the summer wore on, it became clear that Ms. Hamdan was floundering in her English studies. She failed the exam repeatedly.

Physically, though, she was growing stronger. Push-ups and sit-ups no longer scared her. She found she was a fast runner.

On Aug. 10, she won the one-mile race for female soldiers in seven minutes flat, in sweat pants. The next week, she became a squad leader and bay commander, directing a column of soldiers during marches and keeping order in the female barracks.

Days later, she decided to wear the shorts again.

“What, we have a new soldier here?” Sergeant Brannon called out as she walked deliberately down the stairs.

“I am going to show the men I’m like them,” she told him later. “I’m a man now.”

“No, you’re not a man” he said.

“Yes, I’m a man.”

“No,” he said. “You’re a strong-willed woman.”

That became his nickname for her: strong-willed woman.

As Ms. Hamdan’s status rose with the drill sergeants, so did her standing among the soldiers.

“Sometimes I’m tough on them,” she said one recent weekday as she patrolled her floor. The women smiled from their bunk beds. “I like everything clean.”

Another morning, she sat in the mess hall, eating her daily breakfast of Froot Loops followed by nacho-cheese Doritos. A drill sergeant called out that the group had three minutes to finish, just as a clean-shaven soldier walked past Ms. Hamdan with a tray full of food. She shot him a hard look.

“Three minutes,” she repeated. “You hear that?”

The greatest shift for Ms. Hamdan came in her relationship with the male soldiers. They stopped taunting her about wearing shorts. When she gave orders, they listened.

“It seems like a heavy burden has been lifted from her,” Sergeant Brannon said.

Yet even as she felt herself changing, she remained steady in her faith. She never stopped praying five times a day. She attended the base’s mosque each Friday and fasted through the holy month of Ramadan.

On a recent Friday, she sat with her eyes closed on the mosque’s embroidered carpet, wearing a white veil and skirt over her Army fatigues.

“Staying on the straight path is not an easy matter, except for those who Allah helps to do so,” the Egyptian imam said in Arabic over a loudspeaker.

In November, Ms. Hamdan’s English score was still too low, by 11 points, even though she was performing better on the weekly quizzes. She was given a one-month extension, and one more chance.

She took her last exam in December, and failed again. She ran from her classroom.

“Don’t come looking for me,” she recalled telling a startled drill sergeant.

By herself, Ms. Hamdan began walking across the base. Tears streamed down her face as she reached the two-story, concrete building that had long been her refuge.

She climbed the stairs of the mosque. Alone, she knelt on the carpet and prayed. Finally, she sat in silence. She felt at peace.

Ms. Hamdan will be discharged on Dec. 15. She is unsure of what the future holds. She may stay in Texas and look for a job. She may no longer wear a hijab in public. All she knows is that she is different now, and no less a Muslim for it.

“I can face men,” she said. “I can fight. I can talk. I don’t keep it inside.”

She thought for a moment.

“I changed myself,” she said. “I’m a new Fadwa. Strong female. I like this.”

[~*Dorothy*~ 2]

Thank you...I guess one day I will find out how it is done...any guidance?

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Thank you...I guess one day I will find out how it is done...any guidance?

1. Google

2. Copy is control-C and Paste is control-V

3. When you post on VJ, see all those controls above the area you type your text in? Learn them well.

[lilofdevine 0]

super strong story. It goes to show u that this world is changing and hopefully for the better. She had a lot of faith to do all that she did

[~*Dorothy*~ 2]

1. Google

2. Copy is control-C and Paste is control-V

3. When you post on VJ, see all those controls above the area you type your text in? Learn them well.

Thanks for the enlightment...your assistance is greatly appreciated...

[~*Dorothy*~ 2]

super strong story. It goes to show u that this world is changing and hopefully for the better. She had a lot of faith to do all that she did

That is how I felt after reading it...

There is also a question that lingers on the back of my head...

Would any of the husbands who are here and have the GC ever consider exploring such "opportunity" as presented in the article?

Edited December 16, 2006 by Lost in NY

[MrsAmera 41]

My husband was offered a position by a contracting company in Iraq to work there - the pay was close to $200,000 a year. We talked about it and thought about it but with a new baby and a life starting together we both really didn't think it would be the best choice for us. He's talked about the army but I don't think his conviction in the US Army is enough to go through with it.

[lilofdevine 0]

thats a good question, honestly i dont see them doing it. I do know someone that took this risk and I have not heard from him in 3 months. He signed a 1 year contract for just about $200,000 and he told me he was doing it so that he can take this money and go back to egypt and live like a king. hmmmmmmmmm