Fort Hood killings seen as setback

An effort to recruit Middle Eastern and Central Asian immigrants has bolstered the number of soldiers who understand the language, culture and religion in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the 09 Lima program also has exposed divisions between those immigrant populations and the U.S. military, recruiters say — a gulf that might have widened when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly killed 13 people this month on the base at Fort Hood, Texas.

“It’s a huge setback,” Capt. Richard Jones, who heads the Nebraska National Guard’s recruiting program, said of Hasan’s alleged killing spree. “When something like that happens, it’s easy for everyone to draw back, to become even more isolated.”

The 09 Lima program recruits immigrants to serve the U.S. military as interpreters and translators; its name refers to that job classification.

The Nebraska Guard’s recruiting program has attracted 11 recent immigrants in the past year who speak Arabic, Dari or similar languages.

The plan is to deploy these recruits as military interpreters and cultural advisers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since those wars began, the military has heavily relied on highly paid civilian contractors to fill these roles.

The number of recent recruits might seem small, Jones said, but the effort has more than doubled the total number of Nebraska guardsmen who hail originally from the Middle East, Central Asia and East Africa.

Jones put that number at 18 — less than 0.5 percent of the state’s 3,770 guardsmen. There are many reasons for the low total, say recruiters, soldiers and members of the local Muslim community.

Many recent immigrants, even those who have graduated from college in their home countries, have a hard time passing the Guard entrance tests in English, said Basim Mohammed, one of the program’s recruiters.

And many first- and second-generation immigrants, no matter where they are from, tend to spend more time worrying about providing for their children than thinking about joining the military, said Dr. Syed Mohiuddin of the Creighton University Medical Center and a local Muslim leader.

“It’s a matter of settling down and getting comfortable first,” he said.

Another problem might be the sheer isolation of being a Middle Eastern and a Muslim soldier.

Shoaib Yosoufzai, an Afghan citizen, won a scholarship to study at West Point and graduated from the military academy in May.

Yosoufzai, now a University of Nebraska at Omaha engineering graduate student, said he had an overwhelmingly positive experience at West Point and felt free to observe his Islamic faith.

But of the 1,280 soldiers in his West Point regiment, Yosoufzai was the only Muslim, he said.

“It is tough, no doubt,” he said of an Afghan-American joining the American military. “You must think twice about it — maybe three times.”

Guard recruiters attempted to adapt to the Sudanese, Iraqi and Afghan communities they recruited from in Lincoln and Omaha.

They often wore street clothes to the homes of immigrant families who might be frightened by a military uniform. They learned the nuances of the communities themselves.

The Sudanese community in Omaha, for example, is made up of dozens of different groups — some Christian, some Muslim — who have fought the Sudanese government or each other during various civil wars in the past quarter century.

“Your average Nebraskan would walk by and say, ‘Hey, there are three Sudanese guys.’ And their tribes may have been mortal enemies in the Sudan,” Jones said.

But even the best recruiting effort can’t erase the antipathy that some immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries feel about the current wars.

“People will say, ‘You are a Muslim, and they’ll send you to Iraq to kill Arab people,’” said Esmael Burhan, who heads a program at the UNO Center for Afghanistan Studies to train American soldiers and contractors on Afghan culture.

“Other people will say, ‘No, you are a U.S. citizen. They’ve given you a job, and you are performing that job.’

“It’s a tricky situation.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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