Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (26 page)

It was strange and wonderful to be on the street with my little boy and not be thinking about IEDs or being followed or being shot, not looking over my shoulder or wondering whether I might be caught in some accidental crossfire.

I was living my dream. It had taken the better part of a decade and several thousand miles, but I was a human being again.

Son on my shoulders, I walked through the streets until we came to a Target department store. Inside, we went down the aisles filled with clothes and household goods. I hadn’t seen so many things for sale under one roof ever in all my life.

I had to buy something. It was as if I needed to prove myself that this was really happening: if it was
just
a dream, the cash register would explode; I would wake back in my old reality.

Hearing the amount of the bill, counting out the dollars, getting change back—these were all things I had done thousands of times in Iraq, but here it was new. It was a strange triumph, an assertion of who I was and who I would become.

I wasn’t dreaming. I was wide awake, and I was in America.

We landed in California the next day. Four or five SEALs met us at the airport in full uniform. They’d already found us a house to rent. One of their wives took my wife shopping for groceries and household staples, all with money they had pooled among themselves. Their kindness and friendship was unbelievable. It was as if they had adopted us.

Tears were in Tatt’s eyes when I brought my family to his home for a barbecue a few days later. I’m sure they were in my eyes as well.

“If I were to die tomorrow, I’d die a happy man,” he told me. “Because I did one good thing in my life—I got you to safety.”

Chief Tatt has done many good things in his life; his courage and bravery in Iraq made him a hero by any measure you care to use. But I am honored and humbled that he thought so highly of me to think that. And I am surely grateful for the three years and countless hours he spent getting me home to America.

A few days later, I found the beach. I remember walking out to the pier and simply being amazed.

“These people know how to live!” I said aloud, so surprised and happy to see a place that looked as if it came from the pages of a fairy tale. I walked around almost dumbfounded, enjoying the sun and the easy breeze. Since that day, I’ve seen many fancier things and been to many elaborate parks and luxurious settings. But the beach remains a special place for me; five minutes from work, and I can remind myself of the great dream I am privileged to live.

We found schools for the kids. I won’t say that it has been easy for them to adjust to their new lives, even if they all seem content and with new friends. Transitions are difficult, even when you are going from a nightmare to a dream. But they are becoming very American—my boys play the latest video games, and their English is better than mine. The girls know more about fashion than I could learn in a lifetime. I would not be surprised if you couldn’t tell where they were born without quite a bit of questioning.

My accent, of course, marks me as an immigrant. And my background and religion are different from the majority. But while Muslims are sometimes regarded with suspicion in America, religion hasn’t been an issue for us. Partly this is because we live in an area where there are others from the Middle East, and so while we may be a minority in the broad United States, here we are normal. But I think also that most Americans are tolerant about religion when they know a person or interact with them personally. Many simply never ask.

I haven’t often felt that I have to defend Islam. Still, the defense is easy: Islam, as a religion, is not involved with killing. Extremists are the problem, not the religion. Christianity went through a period when people were burned at the stake for their beliefs. Was that because of Jesus’s teachings? Or because of people who misused the religion as an excuse for themselves, their own lust for power or whatever satisfaction they got from killing?

The latter, I think. It is hard to argue otherwise.

I don’t feel the need to go to the mosque very often. God is everywhere; He hears me pray wherever He is and needs no special notice. Prayer itself is not even as important as how you behave—you do as you believe, observing God’s will, fulfilling it. The way you act is the way you understand religion; if you act like a killer, then you do not understand God.

But I am not a religious teacher or anything like an expert. The bottom line for me is that religion is something that comes from the heart. You can’t fake God out, so don’t be so foolish as to try to fake yourself out.

WE’VE HAD MANY
joys since we came to America. Most of them are simple. Friends come over for dinner; we barbecue chicken and sometimes steak on our small propane grill. We plant flowers in the small flowerbed in front of our house. We get a new dog, and friends help us make a doghouse.

When we lived in Iraq, even before the war, Soheila and I tended not to celebrate personal dates like birthdays and wedding anniversaries. It wasn’t because we didn’t think they were important; I think every human being knows that those days are special. But with the difficult economy and the struggle just to stay alive, to find work, to eat, there was very little reason or means to celebrate. When you are struggling for water, you do not think too much about champagne, to borrow a saying from an American friend.

Now, though, things are different. I may not be the richest man when it comes to money, but my life here has given me much to celebrate, and I take the time with my wife and family to commemorate every personal holiday we have.

The celebrations are simple. For my most recent birthday, we went to a shopping mall and department stores—a funny way to spend a special day, you might think, until you remember the poverty we escaped from. The array of clothes, the tools, the furniture, books, toys—walking the aisles is like walking through a dreamland. Being able to buy simple necessities when you need them is a luxury I may never get used to.

And I can never eat enough birthday cake, even though I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.

Soheila gave up her idea of becoming a doctor well before we got married, but she has continued to learn, and lately has been talking about going to college to study political science. She has been following elections and studying up on them. She likes to write and read—and still she writes poetry, now in English as well as Arabic.

In the meantime, she has found a job teaching Arabic.

As have I. With help from my SEAL friends, I have found a job supervising language instruction for active-duty servicemen. While language instruction is our task, our goal is not simply to give our students a few words or phrases they might use in the course of their day. We try to teach them as much as we can about the different cultures they are likely to encounter. Words are only one aspect of understanding. It is all about context—you have to know where the words are coming from if you are to truly understand them.

Though most of what I do now involves supervising others, I still work directly with students from time to time. It’s a job that suits me. My experiences have taught me how important it is to share knowledge. I’ve learned firsthand the value of hope and the importance of passing it on, whether you are doing that with encouragement or a vision of the future.

Teaching is much more difficult than the translating I did during the war. In Iraq, the most immediate translations were of very simple concepts—go here, go there, have you seen this person, etc. Now I have to communicate technical terms, detail sentence structure, and encourage people to have long conversations. I have to talk about customs. I have come to think in English rather than Arabic. It sometimes feels as if a new room has been built in my head.

But it’s a good room.

I am still getting to know the United States. There is much about the country to learn, and many places to see—Washington, New York, the Midwest. I would love to go to Iowa and see the corn growing in the vast fields, and someday I will hunt in Utah.

This has become our country. We are hungry to learn as much as we can about our new history, from the Revolution to the moon launch. But it is not because of the past that I have come to America. It is because of the future. It is because here it is possible not just to be free, but to be free with a purpose—to be free to build things, whether they are houses or buildings or companies or new lives. That should be every human being’s goal: to be creative and productive, not a destroyer, not a person who tears others down or punishes the innocent for his own evil thoughts.

LIVING THE DREAM
does not mean that you are completely protected from the past. I can’t completely forget the habits I learned in war, the precautions that made me safe. If I see a car in my rearview mirror for too long, I often turn off the road I’m on and look for a different route. If a friend sneaks up on me from behind, I have been known to pull a knife from my pocket.

There were good times in Iraq, even during the war, and I try to think of them. We helped a lot of people. But sometimes when I sleep, my mind wanders back into the dark places and the fears return, unbidden.

Living the dream does not mean that you are protected always from sorrow. I miss those I’ve left behind, some very deeply.

I WOKE UP
one morning in 2012 and saw Soheila standing near the bed, her eyes red. She looked as if she hadn’t slept.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head, as if she might keep it secret.

“What?” I said again, this time more gently.

“Your mother.”

My mother had died the night before. Soheila had gotten the phone call while I slept; she spent the entire night in our bathroom, tears flowing. She muffled her sighs so she wouldn’t wake me.

My mom was in her seventies. She was my last link to my older relatives, to the old Iraq before Saddam, before these times. Her death severed my connections to that time. Losing her was like losing my security system and a large part of my history. It’s a sorrow deep within, something that follows from a distance but never leaves, even as I turn toward a hopeful future.

That future is definitely an American one. Every day there are reminders for me. Some are simple pleasures in America, where even being stopped by a policeman for a traffic ticket can remind me how much better off I am here than in Iraq.

Other reminders are tragic: as we worked on this book, an uncle and his son were both killed in an attack in Mosul. Their deaths pained me greatly. And it didn’t help to know that I myself couldn’t go to comfort the family, much less attend their funerals. My presence in Iraq would put many people at risk; anyone who helped me would be a marked man.

MY TIME WITH
the SEALs, my days in the war, affected me in ways I don’t even understand. I am reminded of a sculptor, who works scraping stone for five years, getting his sculpture just right. At the end of that five years, his hands are bent with the exertion against the stone. He has created a great work of art, but what has he done to his hands?

Iraq now has become a dark place to me, a place I saw at night, a place where I worried about my wife and children. Destiny—and the SEALs—took me from there and put me in a place of light.

If you read or watch the news, you know that Iraq is struggling. It’s even worse than the reports say. There is much killing, more than is ever broadcast. Mosul especially has become a place of turmoil, with different groups vying for power and the specter of revenge as well as hate hanging over the city. Sunni versus Shia, Iraqi versus Kurd—the divisions have become sharper as time has gone.

They have taken a great toll. I am looking now at a photo of an area of the city I knew well, a residential and business area of three- and four-story houses, a place where there was once a park and a vibrant street life. Children crowded in the alleys that spread out from the main streets; there was a mosque at one side.

The mosque remains, its walls battered and stained black from fire and explosions. A good number of the other buildings are gone, their only traces rubble at the edge of immaculately bulldozed lots. Some of the surviving buildings lean, their foundations disturbed forever. Others are crumbling. If there is a building that has not been touched by the war, I can’t see it through my tears.

Sometimes I wish had the power to make true changes in Iraq. These are just thoughts, not real desires: I would never become a politician, and I have no plans to run for office anywhere, in Iraq or in America. But if it were possible, if
all
dreams could become realities, then I would first impose martial law on all Iraq, stopping all conflict in the country. I would bring in American and European teachers as well as policemen. I would rebuild Baghdad. It would be a new city, rebuilt from the ground up.

Then I would go to Basra and do the same. Mosul would follow, Tal Afar—one by one, each city around the country would be replaced with a new version, rising from the ashes of the war’s destruction.

I’d rebuild all of Iraq’s institutions—the police, the army, universities, everything. I would start programs to send as many Iraqis as possible to live in the United States for a year or two. When they got back, they would understand the possibilities.

I’d get the money to pay for this from oil—and from ending corruption. Simply taking the money from the thieves’ pockets would do a tremendous amount for the people of Iraq. Money is being siphoned off by corrupt people everywhere. Payments are even going to Iran. Stop this, and there would be plenty of money to build anything you can think of.

Five years, maybe ten, and Iraq would be an entirely different country.

It’s an impossible dream—an idealist’s dream, not something an immigrant should have, since an immigrant needs to be a realist.

Still, there are many realistic things that can be done to make Iraq better. Improving the schools should be a priority. Many of the worst problems in the country stem from the lack of education, a grave fault that the war has made worse. People for the most part are ignorant about many things, most especially the world outside their country’s boundaries. They know little that is real about America, which fosters hatred; they know very little about other religions or even their own, which fosters intolerance. Is it any wonder that violence is the result?