Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (7 page)

 

Nineteen seventy-two was as turbulent a year for the region as it was at home. The United States under President Nixon, preoccupied with its overtures to China, ceased most diplomatic activity aimed at mediating a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Egypt and Syria, impatience over the stalemate was growing. Anwar Sadat, who had succeeded Nasser as president of Egypt in 1970, declared in a speech in late March, “War is inevitable.” In September 1973, Sadat and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad agreed to coordinate a simultaneous attack on Israel so both could regain territory they had lost in the 1967 war.

On October 6, 1973, Egyptian troops attacked the Sinai while Syrian forces targeted the Golan Heights. After recovering from the surprise attack, three weeks into the war the Israeli forces gained the upper hand. Though neither Sadat nor Assad had informed my father of their war plan, Jordan was drawn into the fray as the whole Arab world supported the war. My father’s priority was Jordan’s safety. He put Jordanian forces on high alert, and sent the 40th Armoured Brigade to support the Syrian army in the Golan Heights rather than risk opening a third front by crossing the border into the West Bank. Three days later Jordanian forces briefly engaged Israeli forces and one company suffered heavy losses. A cease-fire was declared on October 22. The war did not change the status quo; if anything, it cemented it. That would be the last war between Israel and its neighbors for nearly a decade. Four years later, in November 1977, President Sadat would become the first Arab leader to visit Israel. In September 1978, Egypt and Israel signed the historic Camp David Accords, which were partly brokered by President Jimmy Carter. A year later, the two countries signed a peace treaty. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. In exchange, Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel.

 

Although the conflict was five thousand miles away, its reverberations managed to reach as far as the hills of western Massachusetts. One of Eaglebrook’s cherished traditions was for the younger students to help out at mealtimes. Shortly after the war began, I was in the dining hall when the headwaiter, one of the older students, stared at me and told me to come over. As I walked up, he hit me. The dining hall was bustling with students, and I stared at him in disbelief. He said, “You’re an Arab, and I hate you!” and then turned and walked away. When I returned to Amman for the holidays, my mother asked me about my time at school, and although I would sometimes say I was not enjoying it that much, I never got into the specifics. I had been brought up to believe that you never told tales, and that you should fight your own battles.

While back in Jordan on holiday, I hurt my wrist in a boating accident. After the local doctor patched me up, putting my arm in a sling, I walked into the house feeling sorry for myself. I saw my father and was about to tell him all about the accident, when he gave me a look that said, “What are you whining about?” He was from that generation that believed in being personally tough. Not wishing to appear weak, I took the sling off, which caused my arm to swell up badly. Three days later I got it X-rayed and discovered that it was fractured and required a cast.

That accident finally established me at Eaglebrook. With my broken wrist I could not take part in ski classes. When the cast came off there were about three weeks left to the term, and I was thrown in with the wrestling team. My father, a physical fitness buff, had given me some exercises to do called Commando 7, based on a Canadian army training program. I took to wrestling and discovered that I could be good at it. The next year, as I began to get stronger and fitter, I joined the wrestling team. While they may not have respected titles, my fellow students greatly respected sporting ability. In addition to wrestling, I took up track and field. In those days I was a pretty good sprinter, and I would eventually become captain of both my high school track and wrestling teams. Sport provided me with a way to escape the narrow prejudices of some of my classmates and gave me an early opportunity for leadership.

Though I may have had bumpy times with my fellow students at Eaglebrook, the same was not true with my teachers, who were excellent. I thrived under their care and still have fond memories of many of them, especially the dorm masters, my French teacher, and my wrestling coaches. They taught me a lot and helped me acclimatize to the United States.

 

When it came time to go to high school, I went down the hill, to Deerfield Academy, while Feisal, who was a year and a half younger than me, stayed behind at Eaglebrook. Although only about a mile away, it was a different world. With two hundred years of tradition behind it, Deerfield was dedicated to high academic standards but also to personal development. There was an atmosphere of genuine respect and tolerance and a strong sense of community among the students. I can truly say that the years I spent at Deerfield were some of the happiest of my life.

I had good sports credentials for a new boy and made it onto the school wrestling team in my sophomore year. But not without a struggle. In those days, wrestling was very regimented by weight. The coach told me that if I could get down to 118 pounds, I would make the team. The problem was, I weighed 130 pounds and was in good shape. I realized that the only way I could lose all that weight was to stop eating, so for three weeks I ate nothing but wafer crackers and diet Jell-O. I made the team, won all my matches, and in the third match pulled off a victory by pinning my opponent in a record eleven seconds. But my success was short-lived. Because I had been undereating, I could not concentrate in class and my grades took a sudden turn for the worse. Also, I started passing out and went on sick leave for a time. As a result, they took me off the team and put me on the backup squad.

Although it was hard being so far away from home and from my family, the egalitarian spirit of America was refreshing. Back in Jordan I would always be the eldest son of the King, and this would bear on all my interactions, whether with teachers or fellow classmates. But at Deerfield it did not matter whether you were the son of a chief executive officer, a scholarship kid from Chicago’s South Side, or one of the Rockefellers—everyone had the same tasks to perform and the same opportunity to shine. Each day at mealtimes some students acted as waiters, serving their classmates. At one point, when it was my turn to serve, I was not doing a very good job. Jim Smith, who ran the dining hall and was also the football coach, good naturedly yelled, “Abdullah, I don’t care if your father is the King of Jordan, I am the king in this dining hall!” I got the message and my performance improved. Smith was quite popular with the students. He had a large family himself, several boys and a girl, and looked on the school as an extension of his family. He would frequently break out into song in the dining hall—and although he had a fine voice, the students enjoyed pretending that it reminded them of the sound of fingernails on a blackboard.

At Deerfield I made my first close American friends: George “Gig” Faux, from outside Boston; Chip Smith, a preppy New Englander; and Perry Vella, who had come on a scholarship from Queens, New York. My classmates knew my background, but they did not stand on ceremony. To them, I was just Abdullah or, as they more often called me, “Ab.” Deerfield allowed me to have a normal childhood and gave me the tools to turn into the man I needed to become. To this day, some of my closest friends are my old Deerfield classmates.

Since Jordan was too far to go for anything but the longer holidays, I spent many vacations with Gig and his family. Halfway around the world from home, I valued the chance to spend time in a family atmosphere. Back then you had to schedule an international phone call days in advance, so I managed to speak to my father only once or twice a semester.

My security guards lived close by, in a house on the edge of campus. They gave me an early taste for “covert action”: I used to delight in finding new and innovative ways to escape from the dorm at night without being observed. Although we did not often succeed, it provided great training for Gig and me when in our senior year we became dorm proctors. By that point we knew most of the tricks, sometimes the hard way. Gig’s father was an air force fighter pilot, and Gig had somehow managed to get his hands on a military distress flare. Curious to see how it worked, one night we snuck out of our dorms along with two other friends and set the thing off. The flare soared through the New England night, illuminating the campus with a bright red glow, and headed toward the white-pillared entrance to the Old Gym, a magnificent, sturdy building that housed the squash courts and wrestling facilities. Panicked that it would burn down the gym and maybe hit the neighboring dining hall, we sprinted toward the building as fast as we could. I can still remember my relief when we figured out that the flare had shot over the roof of the gym and landed in the playing field.

Although my guards had not been terribly useful in protecting me from the other students at Eaglebrook, they did have one overwhelming virtue: their own car. Gig and I would ask them to take us to his parents’ house whenever we had a long weekend. The first time we visited, Gig’s parents were a little nervous to see us pull up in a car accompanied by armed bodyguards. Thankfully, Gig’s younger brother Chris broke the tension as I got out of the car—by shooting me with a BB gun. After that, we all laughed and relaxed into the chaotic family atmosphere of the Faux home. Gig’s mother, Mary, an Italian American, had cooked a delicious lasagna that I would come to know well. After each visit, she would give us a large tray to take back with us to Deerfield, and to this day I cannot eat anyone else’s lasagna.

One of my favorite teachers was Dan Hodermarsky, the exuberant, white-bearded head of the art department. He was a warm, gregarious character and beloved by many of the students. Like so many of the Deerfield teachers, “Hodo” looked after us as if we were his own, often delighting in our antics but reeling us in with gentle admonitions.

When it came time for him to go to high school, Feisal, not wanting to forever be known as “Abdullah’s younger brother,” decided not to follow me to Deerfield. When we were children he was determined to do everything the opposite of me. If I wore a T-shirt and jeans, he would wear a suit. Very academic and gifted at math, he went to high school at St. Albans in Washington, D.C., before studying electrical engineering at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After Brown, he forever differentiated himself from me by attending the Royal Air Force College in Cranwell, England, graduating top of his class and winning five of seven possible awards for cadets. He later joined the Jordanian Air Force as a pilot.

My time at Deerfield passed quickly, and before I knew it I was coming to the end of my senior year. I was planning to attend Dartmouth with Gig, but my life was about to take a quite different turn. Shortly before graduation I sat down with my father, and he asked me how school was going and what I planned to do next. I told him about my plans for university, and how I wanted to study law and international relations. After listening quietly for some time, he said, “Have you ever considered the military?” Coming from my father, this was more of a command than a suggestion. So I began to look at options. I went to visit the Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, but was put off by the thought of four years of its strict, Prussian-style curriculum. When I walked through the dining hall, the cadets seemed very stiff and formal. It was a long way from what I had experienced at Deerfield.

Back in Amman one evening I was watching a movie with my father and Feisal. Sensing that I was not excited by the thought of an American military education, my father said, “What about Sandhurst? It’s where your grandfather and I went. Why don’t you go there?”

T
he gravel crunched beneath the car’s tires as I pulled up to the gate. I got out of the car, picked up my bag, and walked through with the academy adjunct, who was responsible for welcoming new students. Back in the United States in the fall of 1980 my Deerfield friends were discovering the delights of pop, dancing to Fleetwood Mac and the Blues Brothers. Some of my peers in the UK were engaging in body piercing and dyeing their hair purple. But I was about to undergo quite a different experience. Walking through the gates of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, I was in for the shock of my life.

The first five weeks were hell. We marched for hours on the parade ground, woke up before dawn to go running in the pouring rain, and shined our boots endlessly, with color sergeants shouting at us constantly. I thought, “What the hell have I got myself into?” All my classmates from Deerfield were freshmen at places like Dartmouth, Brown, and Columbia, where the toughest thing they had to contend with was another freezing winter. And here I was running around the Barossa training ground, mud on my face, carrying a rifle. It was surreal. Alongside the training ground was an old Roman road nicknamed Devil’s Highway. After a couple of hours out there in the cold I had a pretty good idea how it had gotten its name.

In those days most incoming cadets were high school graduates, all about eighteen. I do not think most of us had any idea of what was in store. Half of the cadets dropped out of my platoon within the first five months. The training course was designed to be tough, and the military brass fully expected people to quit. They were weeding us out and wanted to keep only the ones who would not cave in. I remember training one afternoon under the watchful eye of Color Sergeant Lawley. He ran us down to the main gate, from where we could see the Staff College at Camberley, which provided postgraduate military education for senior officers. It looked like a little palace. He made us all do push-ups, and as we lay facedown in the mud, he said, “That is Staff College over there. And looking at the bunch of you, this is about as close as you are ever going to get!”