Dispatch: From the Journal of a Navy Foreign Area Officer
It’s an hour until midnight on September 11, 2010, and I am on board a plane bound for Jordan. The small monitor embedded in the headrest of the seat in front of me displays a GPS map of the East Coast of the United States. Location names are written in yellow Arabic script, making the familiar geography seem like a foreign land. After a few seconds the screen switches over to a graphic of the plane with an arrow pointing toward Mecca, to aid the observant with their prayers. Mothers in hijab are trying to keep restless children happy during the red-eye, but there will be some crying through the night; it can’t be helped. As I recall my multiple Navy-mandated moves, flying and driving across the country with children in tow, my heart goes out to the parents.
I’m a foreign area officer now, one of fewer than 250 naval officers who specialize in foreign languages, culture, and history. This subspecialty was created in the wake of 9/11 because the admirals and generals who advise political leaders couldn’t find a junior officer who spoke two languages, much less one who possessed the cultural awareness necessary to counsel decision makers. Although my ticket into the community was specialization in Iranian social media, the needs of the Navy summoned me to an Army desk in Rosslyn, Virginia, as an operations officer for United Nations Peacekeeping. There aren’t many U.S. military members involved in UN peacekeeping. In fact, there are only slightly more than thirty. I handle administration and support for the officers sent on one-year IA (individual augmentation) assignments to Israel, Iraq, and Egypt.
Amman is an intermediate stop en route to Iraq, where I’ll be visiting two of the four U.S. military members serving as UN peacekeepers there. The previous day marked the end of Ramadan, which could have been a more dangerous time to fly. On the other hand, flying to the Middle East on a September 11 feels a bit surreal, especially since the flight had originated in Washington, D.C., and laid over in New York. On the TV in the lounge, President Barack Obama was trying to smooth over the tensions caused by a pastor in Florida threatening to burn a Quran.
Despite news reports of unrest in New York City and Afghanistan, JFK airport was quiet, and security was relatively pain free. Dinner on the plane was good—some kind of spiced chicken. I couldn’t quite place the flavor, but washed it down with a free Corona. I spoke at length in broken Arabic with the guy in the seat next to me about Jordanian weather, the job market in America, the difficulties for him making money as a mechanic, and the sacrifices we make for our children. I have four; he has five. We both congratulate each other with “Alf mabrook!” (a thousand congratulations). As our conversation wanes and the night deepens, I can’t help but reflect on the September 11 nine years before and marvel at the course my life had since taken.
I had been on my way to a creative writing class, one of my favorites as an English major at the Naval Academy. I’d finished breakfast early with my squad and was making a beeline down Stribling Walk, headed for Mahan Hall. The weather, as I recall, was typical Annapolis fall fare—beautiful and crisp. A youngster walked past me. I didn’t know him, but he called out to me, “Hey, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center.” I assumed he was referring to a low, slow flyer of some kind, a freak accident, but his alarmed tone also gave me the sense that this might be more than news casually passed along at the breakfast table. He obviously felt compelled to share it with me, a stranger, for a reason.
A few minutes later, I arrived at the classroom in the basement of Mahan. I was the first one there and the room was still quiet. The new classrooms had pull-down screens with projectors hooked up to cable TV. I extended the screen and cued up the live news feed just as a few other students came in. They asked what was going on, and I explained what little I knew: A plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. The professor arrived and then the rest of the students a moment later. We all stood and watched in silence as news commentators reported on things they could not see and things that we could see happening live behind them. We watched the impact on the second tower, the fires, the people jumping, and the cascade of smoke and ash as the towers collapsed. We saw confused and grieving news anchors. The hour passed without any discussion, and we wandered to the next class with a vague sense of purpose. A few rooms down the hall, I took my seat in another English class. By then everyone knew. The professor walked in. We opened In Memoriam, Tennyson’s classic poem wrestling with pain and death. She began to read and then stopped as tears came. She left the room. I tore the pages from the book and tucked them away to keep.
Turning toward our final descent into Jordan, I note the bleached landscape. I would later learn that Jordan has the fourth lowest supply of fresh water among all countries. Without massive reserves of oil or gas, indeed, even without enough water, Jordan manages to get by as a safe place to do business. It is the crossroads between several points of commerce and stands to gain the most by supplying one of the world’s most valuable commodities, security.
After a thirty-minute shuttle ride, and another “Alf mabrook” from the driver on hearing of my progeny, I arrive at Le Méridien Hotel in Amman. It is beautiful inside, with turbaned men smoking and talking in the lobby, women in expensive-looking hijabs pushing strollers and corralling large families. When I get to my room, I unpack my laptop and set up Skype. The broadband connection is excellent, and I quickly find myself connected to the world I know. An Army friend of mine, another foreign affairs officer, is in Pakistan at the war college there. We bring up the video and chat about our kids, learning foreign languages, and nuances of Middle Eastern culture. Over Skype, I can hear the call to evening prayer beginning to crescendo. We say goodbye so he can have a virtual date with his wife and five kids, who are in Monterey, California.
My time in Jordan, while filled with valuable experiences, seemed insignificant next to the import of my meetings in Iraq. I was able to sit in on discussions among key leaders at the United Nations’ headquarters in Iraq and the U.S. embassy and with other operational planners plotting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. Our chief concern during the course of that week was to connect the dots between the United Nations, the U.S. embassy, and the military as responsibility and authority was shifting away from the military and toward the State Department. It became clear that the United Nations would be changing its security posture in ways that would make it increasingly difficult to send U.S. military members along on missions. I returned to the States with a number of items to monitor. The situation reports from the field began to carry much more meaning in the context of my visit.
Not long after my return from Iraq, tragedy struck, but from an unexpected quarter. A U.S. Army Reservist serving in Liberia as a UN peacekeeper had tripped and fallen to his death from a rooftop deck. He had been only weeks away from coming home to his career, wife, and children. He had survived tours in Iraq and Afghanistan only to fall prey to the asymmetrical warfare of chance. His fellow peacekeepers returned to the States soon after, shaken not only by the tragedy of his death but also by the heart-wrenching conditions in Liberia. In their debriefing, one of them explained to me how much the rule of law had been degraded since the civil war. The infrastructure for education and governance had been destroyed, but even more tragic, the social fabric had begun to unravel in ways that made progress seem Sisyphean. If you could imagine a state of nature, one of them said, it would be like Liberia. “Lord of the Flies?” I asked. “Of course there are two visions of the state of nature—Hobbes and Rousseau—one is nasty and brutish while the other is noble and good,” I said. I was assured that regarding the Liberian situation, Hobbes would be closer to the reality. I couldn’t help but think back to Tennyson’s analysis of the human condition, as had Hobbes, as “red in tooth and claw” (In Memoriam, section LV).
The many pointless tragedies of life, pummeling us from every side in the news and via social media, raise our awareness certainly, our compassion hopefully, and our defenses inevitably. Bad news cascades like floors of the Twin Towers falling upon themselves, and yet we find a way to survive and even, on good days, to thrive. That is where Tennyson leaves. Like Hobbes, he sees the human condition as lacking something. But by the end of In Memoriam, he has consoled himself with his faith:
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
As I look east in anticipation of a career at the crossroads of culture and language, I continually search for common denominators. I think the Navy, and the Naval Academy, helped develop this personal philosophy. Whatever the human condition may be, and whatever one might think about it, we certainly share it. In addition, I agree with Tennyson that we share in a larger hope, and that in the end the cascade of bad news will not be the end of the story.