Walking in his boots

Basim Mohammed wants to lace up his U.S. Army-issued boots, climb to the top of the Woodmen Tower and shout it to everyone below.

I am not Hasan.

He would like to knock on your front door, shake your hand and wish peace upon your family. Then he'd like to sit at your kitchen table and explain how Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who has been charged with gunning down 13 people this month at Fort Hood, Texas, is no more a true Muslim than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a true Catholic.

I am Hasan's opposite.

Let him talk. He is experienced at translating Arabic into English, Muslim into Methodist, Iraqi into Nebraskan and back again.

Basim, 40, has fought in Saddam Hussein's army, and he has fought against it. He has grieved for one brother kidnapped by Sunni henchmen and mourned another brother slain by Shiite criminals. He has put his own life in danger by going back to Iraq and doing things for the U.S. Army that only an Iraqi refugee could do.

For the past year he has put on his uniform and tried to persuade skeptical Muslim immigrants that they, too, should join the Nebraska National Guard.

Hasan is not the Muslim world. No one person is the Muslim world. What exactly is the Muslim world, anyway?

Basim has navigated the choppy waters of post-9/11 America. He has weathered one storm at the mosque — how could a Muslim join the U.S. military? — and survived another on Main Street: Is this guy an Arab? Is he a terrorist?

Now he sits in his Lincoln apartment, sees Hasan's face plastered across the TV screen, and feels the flood- waters rise again. It makes him want to chuck his TV through the window and smash that pixilated face into a million pieces.

That will do no good, so he has decided to do something else.

He has decided to invite you into his Lincoln apartment — No. 911, in fact — where a giant American map covers one wall and a tiny American flag flies over the television.

He leans forward in his green easy chair. He wants to tell you his story.

“I don't know if it will matter,” Basim said, “but I'm tired of his face. I am something different — not black or white, this or that. Something in between.”

***

Basim wants to start with the dictator. He wants to start with Saddam, whose actions marked Basim's childhood years like birthdays.

One year, the tailor's son would watch the young Shiite Muslims of Najaf, Iraq, rebel against the local police. The next year — poof! — the fathers and brothers and sons of Basim's hometown would vanish, one by one, another candle blown out by the secular Sunni president for life.

They came for Basim's older brother in the mid-1980s, Basim said. His brother left the house one morning and never returned for dinner.

Saddam's henchmen, the neighbors whispered. We know nothing, Saddam loyalists said.

Basim said he tried to enroll in college but was told he wasn't Iraqi enough.

He was, however, Iraqi enough to fight its wars. At 18, he was drafted and sent to Basra with a unit keeping an eye on archenemy Iran.

He served for two years, just another frustrated foot soldier in Saddam's army, until the summer of 1990, when a commander passed along a rumor: Iraq would soon invade Kuwait, its tiny neighbor to the south.

Go home, the commander advised. So Basim deserted, returning to his hometown just weeks before his unit marched across the border.

The Americans and their allies responded in January 1991, pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait and bombarding Baghdad. Then they marched into southern Iraq, a Desert Storm invasion that sparked Najaf's Shiite rebels to again rise up against Saddam.

Basim took his Iraqi-issued rifle and joined a ragtag group of ex-soldiers and teenagers who shot at the Republican Guard, Saddam's elite fighting force.

It ended badly.

After the 100-hour U.S. invasion ended, the rebels lost their cover and Saddam took his revenge on the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south. Chemical attacks. Mass graves. The sort of horror hard to feel when you read about it.

Basim felt it. He felt it when he and five others sped south from Najaf, firing out the windows at the soldiers in pursuit.

The teenager to Basim's left, leaning out the back-seat window, took a sniper's bullet through the neck, Basim said. Another bullet hit the man at his right.

The shooting ended. The screaming quieted. Basim opened his eyes. He saw the driver clenching the steering wheel, still speeding south. Then Basim counted, one, two, three, four corpses riding silently toward Saudi Arabia.

“My friends,” he said.

Basim eventually settled in a Saudi refugee camp, living in a tent and enduring the desert sand and wind and heat for three long years.

Finally, in 1993, a United Nations worker told Basim he was leaving. The United States was accepting the camp's refugees. Where would he like to go?

Basim thought of a movie he'd seen when he was young, a movie that starred a larger-than-life gangster named Capone.

Chicago.

***

Basim would like to tell you what Iraq looked like when he returned in 2004, but it was pitch black. He couldn't see a thing.

He wanted to stare out the plane window and see some of the changes. Saddam rotting in jail. Iraqis on the verge of choosing their new leader at the ballot box. Maybe, just maybe, a better future.

He did not want to see others. A Shiite cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr rising up against the U.S. Army in southern Iraq. His al-Mahdi Army terrorizing Basim's hometown.

The violence came daily now, like the sun. One day it claimed another of Basim's brothers — killed, Basim said, at the hands of one of al-Sadr's men.

Basim had changed as much as his country in the 13 years since he had left Iraq.

He had gotten his green card, married, had two children, moved to Michigan, divorced.

He had worked at a plant that ground the spices that go into a McDonald's hamburger.

And he had done something even more American than divorce or the Big Mac.

He had taken the advice of a man down the street: He walked into a U.S. Army recruiting office in early 2003. He joined up.

Basim will tell you that, on his second tour, he served as a translator for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He returned a third time, as a civilian contractor, and translated for special operations forces.

To learn about that first tour, you'll have to read the Army certificate of merit tucked away in his bedroom in a blue backpack.

“Private First Class (Basim) risked his own personal safety, performing an undercover mission unescorted on the streets of An Najaf, gathering essential intelligence against Sadr's Mahdi militia ,,,”

Basim does not want to talk about this. “It was bad,” he said.

So now things are clear: Iraq is his past, America is his future, and there is no gray to be found here — only red, white and blue.

Except there is still the story of how the new U.S. Army grunt reacted when his plane touched down in the center of a darkened Baghdad that night in 2004.

Basim pushed ahead of the other soldiers, hurried through the airport security checkpoints, busted through the front doors. He felt his knees buckle.

He sank onto a patch of Iraqi dirt. He dug his hands into the soil.

He wept like a child.

***

Basim will tell you, after some prodding, about the man he tried to recruit into the Nebraska National Guard last year.

Basim gave him the sales pitch, one he had perfected after moving to Nebraska in May 2008 as a full-time recruiter to woo Middle Eastern and Central Asian immigrants into the military.

Join the Guard, he said, and help close the gap between your culture and the United States. You can be the bridge.

The man stared at him.

I'm not going to go and fight my own people, he said.

Basim, of course, is uniquely suited to respond.

He speaks fluent Arabic and worships at a Lincoln mosque. He has lived the immigrant experience. He can relate to the stories he has heard on the recruiting trail. Stories of Sudanese families torn apart by war. Stories of Afghan-Americans fearful that if they join the Guard in Nebraska, the Taliban will murder a family member in Kabul.

Basim himself often doesn't use his family name; “Mohammed” is an alias meant to protect his relatives in Iraq.

Basim had some success before a program that recruited immigrants as translators lost its funding this year, say he and Capt. Richard Jones, the program's commander.

Basim can tell Urdu (spoken in Pakistan) from Dari (an Afghan language) and react accordingly. He knows the cultural differences between western and southern Sudanese and the religious nuances between Sunni, Shiite and Wahhabi Islam.

Many of the people he recruited welcomed him, thrilled to converse with someone who looked like them and wore an American military uniform.

But no map is good enough to keep him from taking wrong turns and slamming into walls.

He left a mosque once when the worshippers made him feel uncomfortable about the way he folded his hands to pray.

He learned that certain people from certain communities in Nebraska — he doesn't want to say who — consider him an enemy of religion. They've hissed at him and called him everything short of an infidel.

“There are strict people,” he said. “You know, people who just know good or bad and that's all. When you live like that, it is easy to kill. It is easy to say ‘In the name of God' — bang! — ‘That's it.'

“But of course it doesn't work that way.”

Basim refused to stop, kept right on talking that day to the Muslim man convinced that the Nebraska National Guard was the enemy.

Basim told him he wasn't going to fight his people, he was going to fight people who were hurting his people.

The argument turned into a debate, and the debate morphed into a chat. They parted as friends.

The man did not join the Guard. But maybe, Basim thinks, they changed each other's minds just a little.

***

The day he moved into his Lincoln apartment, Basim went to pick up his keys from the manager.

“Nine-eleven,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Basim said.

She held out the keys and looked up at the Iraqi-American man at the counter.

He stared back at her.

“Apartment nine-eleven,” she said.

Then they both busted out laughing — because sometimes, Basim said, that's all you can do.

He isn't laughing when he sits in apartment 911 and watches news of the Fort Hood killings.

And this is Basim's final point: There is no such thing as a Muslim soldier. And even if there were such a thing, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan would not be it.

But they keep tacking it onto his name, Basim said. He's getting upset now. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Muslim soldier, as if that means everything, as if that's the answer.

But is a Sunni Muslim from Saudi Arabia the same as a Shiite from Iran? A black woman from Chicago? A deranged psychiatrist from Virginia?

Basim is leaning forward in his chair now, and his finger is jabbing the air, and he's shouting.

“He is not a Muslim! He is a criminal! Those are different things!”

Basim calms down, slumps in his chair, studies the carpet for a while.

Beside him sits the certificate that this Shiite Muslim from Iraq earned for risking his life for the United States of America.

“Separate bad people from their ethnicity, their religion,” Basim said finally. “Put them in the corner, at the edge, with the other bad people.

“Please don't compare him to me. Don't compare him to me. That is not right.

“That is what I want to say.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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