Author: Megan I Stack, on the USS
Carl Vinson in the Northern Arabian Sea
Publications: The Indian Express
Dated: October 23, 2001
When Fawaz goes home to Jordan,
his relatives brush him off. They don't want to over dinner with him, don't
care to listen to the tales of his travels. At best they say, he's a man
of questionable politics. At worst a traitor.
"I say, 'I'm just doing my job,"'
he says." But they don't want to talk to me." For 12 years, Fawaz, 38,
has been an enlisted member of the US Navy. The sailor has found a niche
on the sea:- He's the Muslim lay leader of this aircraft carrier. These
days, counselling and rallying the smattering of Muslim sailors is no simple
task. It is a trying time to be Muslim, a draining time to be military
and a wrenching time to be both. The US is assaulting Afghanistan with
a relentless sting of bombing raids. The US government has vowed that the
"war on terrorism" is just that - and not a war on Islam. Nevertheless,
some Muslims regard the campaign as a harbinger of a latter-day holy war.
In this floating American village
in the Arabian Sea, a handful of sailors are caught uncomfortably between
East and West between Judeo-Christian and Muslim, between mutual misconceptions.
They are occasionally assailed by wise-cracks and distrust from their shipmates
- but they don't like to talk about that. "It's no big deal," says a 19-year-old
sailor named Reza. "I don't mind. A lot of people just don't know that
much." Sweating in his turtleneck and camouflage trousers, Reza folds himself
into a chair. It's lunchtime, and he has a break from the vast, clanging
hanger where he orders mechanical supplies for airplane repair "I've seen
a lot more than they have," he says. "They don't know anything about it.''
Reza is a slight San Antonio kid
with a soft hip-hop drawl and a pensive gaze, immigrants' son who washed
cars in high school to help pay for groceries, then graduated to the Navy
because there was no money for college. He speaks three languages, and
sketches in his spare time.
But there is another Reza. The one
who remembers, plain as yesterday, the bombs crashing over the rooftops
of his boyhood neighbourhood in Tehran, Iran, and the panicked, television
voices urging the city to take cover. A young man who grew up Muslim and
knows what it feels like on the short end of a war. "Because of all that
I feel weird," Reza says, studying the floor. "I can feel what the people
feel when their country, gets bombed, and they can't do anything about
- LA Times-Washington Post
