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The gunner and the spotter made their way north and west, avoiding major thoroughfares in favor of streets and lesser traveled highways. Those roads were familiar, traveled many times for work and to prepare for this day. Given everything suddenly facing law enforcement, the men weren’t overly concerned about encountering checkpoints. Highway 28 wound them into the Maryland countryside, beyond Point of Rocks to the rural acreage where Chancy Maple and Darrell Stickman had lived for years.
They were homegrown terrorists, deeply committed to waging their own private war on the United States. Several things set them apart from many other radical jihadists: One was patience. Another, that they did not wear their extremist views in public. Combined, those qualities enabled them to hone their terrorist skills without attracting the attention of neighbors, workmates or law enforcement. That anonymity, in turn, had helped them tackle riskier and riskier targets. Also, Stickman and Maple were not suicidal, weighing risk against the value of living to attack yet again. It was not lost on them that suicidal jihad usually was carried out by the young on orders from the old. Much the same was true for war not carried out in the name of religion, with politicians and generals framing the noble causes that sent the young to early graves.
Stickman, the spotter at the Russian Embassy, was by training a creative tech guy, a product of Silicon Valley. All things being equal he could have developed as a top-flight computer programmer or industry executive. As things were, he had no trouble finding well-paid jobs with computer firms that often contracted with the government. Maple was blue-collar, with a knack for quickly grasping how things work. He was proficient as electrician, plumber, mechanic, heavy equipment operator and more. He grew up in the Midwest, primarily the Detroit area. Both came from families rooted in the U.S. for generations, hybrid Caucasians of Western European descent. If pulled aside for additional screening by the TSA, racial profiling would not be an issue.
As children, they were introduced to their parents’ respective Christian religions. But as Maple made the transition from child to teen, he questioned and then refused the leap of faith necessary to accept the Lutheran doctrine of the Trinity. With that gone, following his parents’ faith became hollow. Stickman’s fall from the Catholic Church was more dramatic, spurred by a priest’s clumsy attempts to seduce him. Failing to engage the social issues of the day – particularly sex and drugs – the religious institutions of their youth became stunningly irrelevant.
As that irrelevance was dawning on Maple, his father, who owned a small dry cleaning chain, ran afoul of the Internal Revenue Service. He could not pay the several thousand dollars the IRS insisted was owed. Neither could he afford an effective attorney. Those he hired charged large up-front fees and then, it seemed to Maple, buckled to IRS pressure. The business was lost and Maple’s father had to settle for jobs little better than minimum wage. Maple’s college plans faded. He enrolled in a vocational school that, in truth, best fit his skills. But he had soured on the government.
Stickman had his own anti-government testimonial, one he fiercely believed but could not prove. It involved a beloved uncle, only a decade older, whose goal was career Army. As quartermaster of his unit he was held responsible when supplies went missing, later to be recovered on the black market. The uncle insisted he was the fall guy for his corrupt superior, a lieutenant. But the testimony of the black market thieves in exchange for leniency spelled jail time and the end of the uncle’s career. Stickman could see only a rigged system, and perhaps he was right.
He also experienced a taste of how brutal authority could be. Driving home after a bachelor party, he was pulled over after a cop saw his car toying with the center line. A fun evening laced with too much alcohol had turned ugly. He never remembered what he said or did to royally piss off the L.A. cop. Maybe nothing. Maybe the cop’s gout was inflamed. Maybe Stickman reminded him of his own ingrate son, again living at home. The cop swung his nightstick, maybe because he was simply mean. Stickman woke up in jail and, after repeatedly passing out, in a hospital. A fractured skull and severe concussion were diagnosed. He couldn’t work for several months. A lawsuit went nowhere. The department’s successful stonewall was infuriating, leaving Stickman with a smoldering anger.
While talented in different ways, both Maple and Stickman were uncommonly curious. Falling from their churches left voids and, if only because their respective circles of friends included Muslims, exposure to Islam sparked interest. For Maple, viewing the prophets of Islam as human, not divine, had appeal. The Islamic teaching that God is eternal – “He begetteth not, nor is He begotten,” as found in the Quran – was as easy for him to accept as scientists’ Big Bang explanation of creation. Stickman was attracted by the direct relationship Muslims have with God, one that removes the intermediary role of the clergy.
Both young men had grown up expecting to explore life’s full range of pleasures. Maple was in his late teens, just sampling various rites of passage, and Stickman was scant years older when, independently, they were exposed to Islam. It was not the best time for a young man to adhere to tenants of a faith.
Add to that the attacks of 9/11. Maple and Stickman were as horrified as the rest of America, recoiling from the images of planes exploding into the Twin Towers. They were stunned as the death count neared three thousand fellow citizens. As it became evident that the terrorists were Muslim, they despaired. With rare exception, brothers in the mosques shared their feelings of betrayal.
But in their broader communities the reaction was starkly different. Friends fell silent and sullen. Suspicion hung in the air. They were no longer welcome in favorite haunts they had frequented for years. Former classmates quit seeking them out. They saw with dismay the hypocrisy of their parents’ Christian churches, standing largely silent as bigotry and discrimination were heaped on Muslims. They, too, felt the sting of prejudice and hatred, not just from people they knew, but from some they didn’t.
The worst involved Maple’s older brother, who led by example as a committed elementary teacher in one of Detroit’s inner-city schools. He was picking Maple up at the Muslim community center one evening when a motorist stopped at the end of the block. A man got out, raised a pistol and emptied a clip. In the spray of shots, Maple’s beloved brother was killed. Investigators called the shooting a hate crime. The murderer was never caught.
Had they known each other then they would have agreed that the treatment of Muslims by fellow Americans was horrible and disappointing, nothing short of life-altering. Unjust blame, felt acutely, planted ominous seeds. As months passed, the anti-Muslim fallout of 9/11 persisted and remained deeply troubling. Perhaps overreacting, both Maple and Stickman came to view themselves as victims. Failed relationships and perceived slights were traced to bias against their fledgling religion.
The United States saw Afghanistan’s Taliban government as a safe harbor for terrorists responsible for 9/11, for al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. When President George W. Bush declared war on the Taliban, a victorious outcome was of limited interest to Stickman, on the West Coast, or Maple, in the Upper Midwest. Later, they discovered, both had most closely followed reports of Afghan civilian casualties. The second war against Iraq spurred a similar reaction, plus growing distaste for a U.S. foreign policy that smacked of being a global bully. Stickman harkened back a decade, when he was soft and chubby and an easy target for bigger and stronger boys.
Seeking adventure and answers more than careers, they made their separate ways to Europe – Maple to London and Stickman to Brussels. Each found relative tolerance among the general populations. In both cities, they met Muslims who were already radicalized to greater or lesser extent. Their new friends encouraged the Americans to broaden their Islamic experiences, and paved their respective journeys to Afghanistan.
There, they met so-called collateral damage victims of U.S. airstrikes. They saw the physical destruction inflicted on villages believed to harbor al-Qaeda operatives. They befriended, and were befriended by, people who had little hunger for American-style democracy.
Maple and Stickman met at an al-Qaeda training camp, a remnant of the bin Laden organization that mostly had been driven into Pakistan by the U.S.-led war. They were struck by the similarities of their experiences, both in the U.S. and since venturing overseas. They found their personalities compatible – relatively quiet, willing to listen and learn from others, patient, committed to long-term goals. In conversations lasting deep into the night, they found compatibility, too, in what became hatred for their birth-home. Unlike many young men committed to Islam, they did not recoil from the permissiveness of America. That was, after all, the culture in which they grew up.
Rather, they were repulsed by the expansiveness of America, policies that imposed its will upon nations too weak to resist. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of America professing a commitment to self-determination while using its wealth to prop up corrupt regimes. While their government insisted its motives were altruistic, Stickman and Maple came to believe the underlying driver was greed. Cheap oil, cheap labor, cheap manufactured goods, cheap whatever was the motivation, depending on the country or continent. When not financial, they perceived the driving force to be gaining the political or strategic military advantage needed to impose the priorities of the world’s only superpower. It really didn’t matter whether a country supported or opposed Western values. The important thing was whether it would acquiesce to America’s demands.
In the camp, the imam they most consulted fed a growing sense of purpose – pursuing jihad against the United States. Purpose, though, did not necessarily correlate with knowledge. Only vaguely did they appreciate that waging jihad was not restricted to war, that it also could reflect commitment to an inner struggle. Such teachings of Islam, which would have shaped a more benevolent approach to life, were of scant interest.
But exposure to the tools of terrorism became invaluable, the camp experience that shaped their priorities. Lessons in hand-to-hand combat were relished. They felt the power of firing an AK-47 in automatic mode, seeing its awful destructive capacity. They soaked up knowledge needed to wire and detonate C-4 and other explosives. Using a rocket launcher gave Maple, in particular, almost a sexual pleasure. Admittedly, that exposure was cursory. But they eagerly picked up the basics and left with a voracious appetite for mastering tools of destruction. Even more important was a growing confidence in their abilities to successfully wage violent jihad.
At the camp they prayed five times a day. But at night, in their private conversations, they confided to feeling little need to draw strength from prayer. Instead, prayer could be a casual, even infrequent, exercise, as it had been in the Christian faiths of their youth. Whispered talks revealed that, for them, many facets of Islam did not need to be seriously embraced. Neither felt a need to strictly observe Ramadan or to make the pilgrimages of true believers. While not heavy drinkers, neither cared to observe the ban on alcohol. The curiosity that propelled much of what they did faltered at the doorstep of religious dogma. Neither Stickman nor Maple steeped himself in Islam enough to know whether to practice as a Shia or a Sunni or one of the other Muslim doctrines. They settled on being non-denominational Muslims, sometimes drawing respite and strength but without the commitment typically seen in others. They were struck, pleasantly so, by how much they were in agreement. For them, Islam was a marriage of convenience. The self-radicalization borne of their experiences in America became crystalized by their experiences overseas. They did not fully understand or appreciate all the parts, but firmly grasped the bottom line, and it was radical jihad.