understand. At the end of the night he touched my hand, and I felt that warmth again, and I knew. I didn’t try to take him home- he had a wife and I have a conscience, plus he had that mustache- but I knew the truth, and it set me free.
The next day, I read in the paper that the American Psychological Society had passed a resolution against telling patients that their sexual orientation could be changed. Of course, I’d never thought to thumb through the research, or even the APA’s prior policies, or I might have found the Shidlo and Schroeder study. They found that out of 202 men who had gone through reparative therapy (as conversion had been called in its youth), 88% failed conversion, and only 3% reported a successful shift in orientation.
And for me, that sealed it. I made an appointment with my counselor, an (to use their parlance) ex-gay minister. I told him everything, and he said that there was another, less-traveled path: celibacy. I smiled at his naivety, and asked, “What kind of living would that be?” He didn’t have an answer, but as I turned to leave, he told me I’d be damned to Hell. I said, “Here I’m damned if I do or don’t- but yours ain’t the only shop in town.” He started to mumble about how the Unitarians, Episcopalians and others were going to Hell, too. I nearly called him the bigot he was proving himself to be, but I thought better of it; after all, we still had the same God, and the same savior who we wanted to emulate. I decided the best victory would be to beat him at that game instead, and bid him a good life, and left.
Fighting Mad
I don’t like talking to the press, not even on deep background, but there seems to be a lot that’s happened lately my conscience says I need to comment on. By now everybody and their racist old grandmother has heard about Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan. He graduated from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in ‘97, and spent six years working at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center; Virginia Tech and Walter Reed: the gifts that keep on giving.
I’m not sympathizing, in any way, shape, or form, but it can be tough, asking a Muslim soldier to fight and potentially kill members of the Ummah, the community of believers. The Muslim faith has very strict guidelines on when it’s all right to take up arms against a member of the Ummah, and it’s a request we can’t and shouldn’t make lightly. When a Muslim soldier has doubts, uncertainties, maybe we should take those into account. I’m sorry. My thoughts are still, they’re jumbled. If there’s a specific section you need me to restate more succinctly, let me know. I’m still kind of in shock.
But back to the facts of the matter. Hasan was a coward; Anwar al-Awlaki, inciting violence from half the world away, doubly so. Hasan shot non-combatants, women, the aged, and a child. He shot and killed an unborn child in its mother’s womb- it doesn’t get more innocent than that. I wonder how Allah looks on that; actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly how he looks on that.
I don’t call a man a coward lightly. But if Hasan weren’t a coward, he could have found any number of armed soldiers. Instead, he attacked a medical processing facility, where staff and patients were prohibited from being armed. I’m a marine first, doctor second, and by God and Allah I’d have shown him what a real soldier can do.
But what sickens me is that as a doctor, it was his job to care for his fellow soldiers and fellow men. And as a soldier and as a man, it was his duty to defend those who can’t defend themselves. He failed on all three counts, and most everybody would agree he failed as a Muslim, too.
I often fear we’re failing our soldiers, our Muslim soldiers doubly so. We don’t always have the resources and the expertise and the manpower. Sometimes we just lack the forethought to do things right. One of my colleagues, Dr. Manion, a civvie shrink, got fired from Camp Lejeune for saying as much about PTSD to the higher ups. Though I think it was more how he said it than that he said it; the military is sensitive to the mental well-being of her soldiers, we’re just… not used to being sensitive. We don’t always think it through, and take the criticism constructively.
That’s why they were building a treatment center in Lejeune. But they were building it where the sounds of the rifle and explosive ordinance ranges are pervasive; the last thing a soldier with PTSD needs is to be surrounded by the sounds of combat. And the marines they treat at Lejeune are meant for active duty. We can’t send them back to war without putting their heads back on straight, or we will reap the whirlwind when they go bad- Muslim or otherwise.
And I understand why there are some who can’t reconcile being a Muslim soldier fighting members of the Ummah at all- though there’s about 20,000 Muslims in the armed services who see it different. A few of those are marines, but they’re marines first, because Allah ain’t going to pull their fat out of the line of fire- their brother marines will. At the same time, their morals don’t come into conflict with duty, cause their morals are pretty in sync with the codes of conduct; being a good soldier and being a good Muslim are usually about the same thing- with one unique caveat.
I counseled a marine who tried his damnedest to live to Islamic standards; for the sake of confidentiality, we’ll just call him Javed. There’s a passage in the Qur’an that describes killing another Muslim, and according to that passage, since they were at war with us, to make things right, he had to free a believing slave to make up for the killing. Believing slaves are harder to come by these days, but he used contacts within the State Department in Sudan, and a friend at Interpol, to keep on the lookout for Muslim slaves. But he was having trouble balancing the sheet, and the pressure was getting to him.
He was dreaming of Hell every night, convinced that if he couldn’t free a slave for every Muslim dead on his head he’d end up there. But the world where he woke up, at odds with his god, that was worse. I try not to worry for my patients outside of office hours, but every late night call I’d get I thought would be because he ate the gun.
A boy, not quite seventeen, found out that Javed had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tried to stab him on the steps of the mosque they both attended. Javed’s a marine, so he got the knife off the kid no problem, but there was a moment there when they were struggling, the knife between them, and Javed told me he thought maybe this was Allah’s will, that he should let it happen. But he reasoned if it was Allah’s will, Allah would have sent a stronger kid, or a stealthier one. Letting the kid stab him wouldn’t have been a servant’s submission, but suicide- and that was not Allah’s will.
I spoke with Javed, and he came to realize there was another kind of slavery in the world, an ideological one that was perhaps even more personally destructive than physical bondage. So he and his Imam went down to the cell where the boy was being held. The Imam tried to explain the difference in fighting in a war and killing someone who turned out to be a Muslim, and stabbing a soldier on the steps of his mosque; it was a Qur’anic subtlety, but one that made a world of difference. It took them hours, and I don’t think they completely de-radicalized him, but it was a start, enough that Javed pled for the police not to press charges.
That session, Javed was animated, even happy. But by our next session, he was more dour, said it wasn’t the same. He didn’t feel like he had when he’d bought that girl bound for Saudia Arabia and sexual slavery, and returned her home to Kuwait. I said it wasn’t. That girl was delivered from physical slavery, her life saved in a stroke; but the boy was still battling ideas and demagogues who would be his masters. To free him- really free him- it was going to take time and follow through. He said it sounded like I was giving him an order. I told him as a ranking officer, it was, and that as a Muslim, I think he knew it was Allah’s will, too. I’m confident that on both counts he’ll do us proud.
But I guess, to wrap all this together, what I’d like to see is a Corps and maybe a military that understands what asking a Muslim to fight in the Muslim world means, and maybe even to give them the out. Because the status quo is holding a good man’s hand in the flames, and if he screams out he’s a coward or a traitor, and if he doesn’t, he’s damned. This is no apology for what an evil m
an has done. Hasan will burn in his hell if there is any kind of god. But I want to be in the business of stopping men like him- not creating more of them.
Cowgirl Up
My grandmother had cancer, and for a long time it didn’t seem real; she was sick, but she wasn’t dying, at least, not in any way you could see. Suddenly you could see it: in her eyes, in her skin, in the way she moved, sat, breathed.
Sitting by her bedside, I remembered her telling me a story, back when we thought it was just a lung infection, how when she was a girl, she joined in the fight to have a girl’s basketball team. At the time I remembered being shocked, that it had been so recent as that. That story was her whole life, not always fighting for equality, but always fighting, fiercely, for the right to be herself.
She smoked for years, lifetimes, in the way I’ve counted mine so far. She owned a bar, raised livestock on a ranch. She lived most of my life in Wyoming and Colorado. And even in those last days, as her body failed her more by the day, her mind remained sharp. I remember sitting with her at the kitchen table, a twinkle in her eye as she threw her brown pills