The True Enemy
WES BRYANT
I was finally on the ground in Baghdad to make my own fight against ISIS a little more up close and personal. Perhaps a bit serendipitously, before I had left Bahrain I’d found myself in another kind of battle altogether—one that would prepare me to mount an even more intelligent campaign against ISIS once I pushed into Iraq.
Manama, the capital of Bahrain, was well known for its grand and lavish shopping malls. There were several large malls in the downtown region, all considerably upscale, which turned out to be the best bet for a westerner like me to get food more palatable to my taste (I’d never been a fan of Middle Eastern cuisine).
There was one smaller and quieter than the others, and I preferred that. I still felt uncomfortable in the Muslim kingdom full of people that looked exactly like those I’d grown a deep distrust and hatred toward over the years. It didn’t matter that I’d never fought against any Bahrainis and that they were, in fact, our allies in the war on terror. My experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan had given me a deep suspicion of all Arabs and Middle Easterners—all Muslims, really—even if I knew deep down that it was irrational to feel that way.
I found a gourmet chocolate café fitting with my cardinal rule of never missing an opportunity to enjoy the finer things. I ended up having time to go a couple times before I left for Baghdad. There I enjoyed a favorite dish, simple, but decadent—a flavorful dollop of vanilla bean ice cream paired with a small ceramic full of freshly melted house-made milk chocolate. I coupled it with a rich, smooth espresso. I felt like I was in a scene from the Pixar film Ratatouille as I took bites of the ice cream-dipped warm chocolate. That was some of the best dessert I’ve ever had.
One evening, in my last few days before heading out for Baghdad, I hit the café after dinner. I looked out into the common area below from my table in the second-story café, and casually people-watched. Couples strode by in no hurry. Moms and dads whisked through on one-minded shopping missions. Children played and ran around while their parents took solace from an exhausting day out. Periodically, a miniature train chugged by full of joyous kids as it winded its regular route through the mall. Truly, it could have been a scene from a mall in America, minus a few slight differences.
Most of the men were dressed in modern style clothing, with the occasional wearing traditional Muslim garb. Saudi Arabian men, known to frequent Bahrain on vacation or business, were the easiest to pick out with their pristine white robes and red and white headdresses. Most of the women were dressed in wholly modern clothing with the sole exception of a hijab—a large scarf covering the neck and back of the head—and were typically well made with hair and make-up. Women in full burkhas—robes and headdresses covering all but their eyes—could be seen here and there but were not quite as commonplace. Pretty much all the children wore modern, western clothes.
I nursed my coffee and dessert at a small, two-seat table. Thoughts raced through my mind, alternating between missing my family back home and the mission in Baghdad, when a group of about eight young teenage girls came into the café and sat at a long table next to mine. They were hard not to notice because they were so giddy—giggling with one another just like any group of young girls might do in the States.
I smiled to myself. It was a bit of joy to see that happiness, especially with my mind so immersed in the gravity of the mission in Iraq. But the girls had one stark difference from a group of American teens: they all wore traditional black burkhas with just their faces showing. The burkhas were made of high-end material, and their faces were extravagantly made-up as if they had just come from some sort of formal event.
A thought flashed through my mind. Maybe the contrast of their well made-up faces with the rest of them being completely covered exemplified some sort of internal struggle with their religious mandate to wear the burkhas? Was it possible that making up their faces as glamorous as possible was the one method of self-expression they had within the confines of the subjugating dogma of their religion? I was probably projecting my own cultural and religious biases onto the situation, but the thought flashed through my mind nonetheless.
The group gathered at the end of their table. One of them raised a selfie-stick with an iPhone on the end of it. They posed and made funny faces, laughing together as they snapped pictures. In their youthful innocence they seemed not to have a care in the world for anything other than the fun they were having at that very moment.
Maybe it took that blend of West and Middle East that Bahrain seemed to embody to allow me to see our similarities in that moment, but a torrent of emotion suddenly overcame me. I glanced at the black-clad group of young women next to me and then looked around at all the other people going about their day. Somehow, I suddenly recognized what I had been carrying inside me for years.
How can I hate these people simply because of what they wear, how they look, or the religion they follow?
I realized within the span of a few moments how much hate I had been harboring—the prejudices I’d developed and how unjustified those prejudices had been. Admittedly, my combat experiences had made me hate Middle Easterners, the Arab world, and all of Islam. I’d harbored contempt toward such people for years. But as I sat in that café I had the sudden awareness that they were not really any different from the rest of us.
These people are not my enemy. They are not our enemy.
My wife and I had named our daughters, London and Berlynn, after key cities of World War II. We loved the names, but we also did it as a sort of homage to our lives together consumed with war. We wanted their names to also be a lesson for them when they got old enough to understand. I had always found myself in a dichotomic struggle of at once recognizing the need for war while at the same time wishing none of us had to do it. But that just wasn’t my reality, and it wasn’t the world’s reality. My wife and I had resolved that our daughters would be taught to appreciate the reasons, implications, and costs of our nation’s wars.
Strangely, it was in that epiphanic moment in the chocolate café in Bahrain that I realized I probably wasn’t on my way to becoming the example for my daughters that I’d always wanted to be—the example that I had set out to be from the moment we’d named them. I knew I harbored a lot of hate, anger, and bitterness inside. I had only seen the bad in that part of the world, and it had shaped me accordingly.
I didn’t want my girls to grow up harboring the prejudices I’d developed over the years. I wanted to raise them to know that even though we may look different from one another, speak different languages, follow different religions, and hold different perspectives toward the world—most of us are fundamentally the same. Our enemies cannot be defined by a single ethnicity, race, religion, or part of the world.
I noticed a shelf in the café laden with gifts. One of them was a small, white teddy bear cloaked in an elaborately decorated black and gold burkha. I bought it for my girls back home with the thought that, when they got older, I could tell them the story of this illuminating day in the chocolate café in Bahrain right before I pushed into Baghdad to wage the war against ISIS.
As time went on, and long beyond my tour in Iraq hunting ISIS, I would work on letting go of the blind hate that I realized since that moment had dwelt in me for so long and was creeping through the depths of my being like a demon. It was a personal battle that I would share with almost no one. In time I would prevail—and I would become a better husband, more loving father, and far less angry person. And in the fight against ISIS, I would be a more even-tempered warfighter.
As I sat in that café I knew that, only a few hundred miles to the northwest, ISIS was terrorizing innocent people across the Middle East—Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, and anyone who didn’t bow down to them and their extremist ideologies.
As the warrior learns to do, I compartmentalized my dramatic sentiment and emotions—I had to keep my mind on the mission against ISIS. The Bahrainis hadn’t yet been affected directly, but I knew that if they ever were, the same innocent young people in front of me would quickly become hapless victims of ISIS’ reign of terror.
I was on the ground in Baghdad within a few days....