Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist

by Jeffrey Shapiro

  When the Iran and Iraq war ended, Saddam Hussein did something that was even more surprising to me, he invaded Kuwait.

  “Kuwait is low hanging fruit,” commented my uncle. “He knows that they do not have a strong army and there will be little resistance. He’s after their great oil wealth that will heal the wounds from the war with Iran. And all he has to do is to look to the Koran and point out that Kuwait rightfully belongs to Iraq.”

  “Does the Koran say that?” I asked.

  “It says anything he can get a cleric to agree it says. And clerics become quite agreeable when they are looking down the barrel of an AK-47.”

  “But Kuwait is a major oil supplier to the United States,” I answered. “Certainly he didn’t believe that America would just sit back and let this happen.”

  “He doesn’t think the United States will do anything; Hussein isn’t that bright, but if they do he has already committed, and with a bully like Saddam, he can never back down.”

  “What will he do when we come with our weapons? Will he withdraw? If he couldn’t win a war with Iran, he can’t possibly believe that he can win a war with us.”

  “That word retreat is not in the vocabulary of a dictator like Hussein.”

  Just as I predicted, the United States sent armed forces and air operations, code named Desert Storm and drove the Iraqis from Kuwait. Saddam’s short lived alliance with the United States was over and he was now at war with the most powerful nation in the world.

  Over the next six months, Saddam’s conflict with the United States showed the American people many negative points about Iraq and painted a horrible, unfair picture of the general Muslim population. This was the first time that Americans caught up to the rest of the world on the brutality of Saddam. Iraq was now associated with terms such as Scud Missiles and chemical warfare and even the term WMD was being bantered about. There was so much general outrage that the American people wanted the administration to continue their assault into Baghdad and force Hussein from power. My uncle had mixed feelings on the subject.

  “It would be wonderful to remove Hussein, but what will they do? Will they allow us to elect our own government or will we just be puppets of the United States. A puppet government will not work here; it has to be a government of clerics, representing the major religions of our country. What do you think? Do you think we are all going to become Southern Baptists? It has to be our own choosing. It is the only thing that will work.”

  From conversations with my uncle, I was amazed that during Desert Storm, even though bombs were falling on Baghdad, amidst the screaming of sirens and anti-aircraft artillery, the general Iraqi population went about their daily business. Their ideals centered on spiritual outcomes and not the outcomes of two brutal political administrations trying to annihilate each other. Death was just another part of life and suffering a part of resurrection.

  The history lesson I learned during that period of my life was from experience and not the newspaper. My uncle’s commentary made it even more real for me.

  But I have gotten ahead of myself with my story. Let me return to my college years so that you can see how my academic growth accompanied my spiritual growth and confirmed my belief that all was not right with this world.

  .

  Chapter 7

  College Years

  When I finished school in England and returned to the states, I was terribly confused about my future and direction for my life. I kept in contact with my uncle’s family through weekly letters, phone calls and at least one visit a year. I considered moving to the Middle East and continuing my studies in India or Israel, but my parents pushed me to apply to all the prestigious colleges in the United States and cajoled me until I was accepted at Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech. With a 1594 SAT score and my diversified education, including being fluent in 3 languages (thanks to Uncle Tariq), I could have gone anywhere, and I chose Virginia Tech. The reason that I chose Tech was its Hillcrest honors community, a small society within the college that housed the brightest, most diverse technical students that I had ever met. It was a refreshing Mecca of independent, nonjudgmental intellectuals who were willing to explore any avenue of thinking. I had also heard that Tech’s bio-chemical engineering department was working through a grant from the FDA on a genetic screening program to pre-screen inherent diseases. Because this research would be entirely new and on the cutting edge of technology, I wanted to be a part of it.

  At Tech I had a double major of physics and biochemical engineering and as part of Hillcrest, we had the added benefits of our own dormitory, our own honors advisers and a group of diverse intellectuals from every culture around the world. It was not unusual for us to spend entire nights talking about Taoism or Buddhism or Islam or Star Trek or whatever. There was also a large society of Jewish kids who joined in the fray, which completed my perspective. Very quickly I found a covey of friends and became very close to my two resident advisors Bob Bolden and Susan Griffin. Bob was 6 feet 3 inches tall with curly brown, shoulder length hair. He had a scruffy goatee and always wore Hard Rock Café T-shirts from the most obscure places in the world. His dad owned a helicopter business and picked up a T-shirt everywhere he traveled. The standing joke in Hillcrest was, “Hey Bob, I love that T-shirt from that place I know you’ve never been.” Susan was a tiny 5 foot 4 inch vegetarian, with blonde straggly hair that was overrun with split-ends. She was very homely with a large, crooked nose and a sharp chin with a few whiskers which would allow her to double for the witch from the Wizard of Oz.

  Bob and Susan were seasoned veterans of Hillcrest. They laughed at my freshman idealism and my thoughts of political Utopia. Bob was as liberal as Susan was conservative. One of our favorite topics was the Palestinian situation in Israel.

  “I think we should give them the State of New Jersey,” said Susan sitting in the lounge with her baggy red gym shorts exposing legs that hadn’t been shaved in at least a month and her breasts hanging loosely under her orange and maroon Virginia Tech t-shirt.”

  “What is a Palestinian?” asked Mallory Hamilton a dark haired sophomore from across the room. “I think it is a made-up term.”

  “They are the rightful owners of the land that is now called Israel,” I answered.

  “But where did they come from? There was never a real civilization called Palestinians. And no one wanted that desert over there, until the Israelis started growing figs the size of footballs.”

  “I think we should give them New Jersey,” repeated Susan sarcastically.

  “That’s not going to solve it,” answered Bob. “You’re showing your ignorance of history and their culture. Israel is not going to give up their patch of desert!”

  “They already own New Jersey and most of the Northeast corridor!” came a comment from Jeremy Camp, a pimply Jewish red headed kid from the Northeast.

  Everyone laughed.

  Soon everyone was chiming in with remarks as extreme as “Nuke the Palestinians,” and as seemingly logical as “It’s Israel’s land….read the Bible.”

  As in many of these conversations the crowd quickly thinned, because the conversation required work, and soon Bob, Susan and I were sitting alone.

  “Have you been there?” I asked. “I mean to the Middle East.”

  Neither of them had.

  “Then how do you know what’s really going on over there?”

  “Duh, it’s in every paper and on every news program,” answered Susan.

  “Talk about propaganda, you might as well read The Globe or one of those cheesy grocery store tabloids.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  He sat silent.

  “Have you ever read an Arabic newspaper?

  “Um no…..I don’t understand Arabic.”

  “Let me tell you what I think. We are completely different from the Arabs in our perspectives and we will always be different. Until we understand what their motivations are and how they see the world, we are wasting o
ur time speculating. In any conversation you will just try to make them like us.”

  “How do you know so much about Arabs?” asked Bob.

  “I’ve been there, my mother was born an Arab. They’re just different….can we leave it at that?”

  Susan shrugged her shoulders as if she didn’t care. Bob switched the TV over to Star Trek.

  I loved that the kids at Hillcrest respected my liberal views and never questioned my allegiance to my Middle Eastern roots, just as I never questioned any of their allegiances. As the year progressed and people began to share more openly, we were exposed to other cultures, which, like the Arabs, were terribly misunderstood. Many of the kids were more liberal in their political views than I.

  My freshman classes were typical “weed out” type classes, designed to fail all the kids who were not really interested in college and make way for the new wave coming in the next semester. There were several hundred students in these classes which were taught by associate professors or teaching assistants, except for one anomaly, my physics professor, a 70 year old Nobel Prize winner, who requested the freshman physics class, because he thought the first year was the best time to influence a young mind. His name was Dr. Stanley Moore and he took an immediate liking to me, when I approached him after the first week and told him, “I’ve already had all this stuff, would it be okay if I just come back for the final.”

  He laughed and crinkled his bushy gray eyebrows, “If you know this, then what are you doing here? You should have been exempt with your Advanced Placement Test score.”

  “I only got a 4 on the exam and the university requires a 5 to be exempt.”

  “So you don’t know everything?”

  “I aced everything that I had in high school. The test covered a few things we didn’t cover.”

  “What did you miss?” he asked.

  “Conductivity,” I answered. “We didn’t cover it in high school, so I had no idea.”

  “So you don’t know everything,” he repeated.

  I was speechless from the experience that exuded from his words and presence.

  “I’m guessing that I can teach you a thing or two. But I’ll make you a deal. Come to class for a month and if you still think you know everything, leave. And then come back the last 2 weeks, because that’s when I’m covering conductivity and you can take the final and we’ll be done….deal?”

  “Deal,” I answered shaking his withered old hand.

  That semester, I never missed one of his classes. And after a month, I felt like a fool to have had the audacity to approach someone with his knowledge. I was amazed at the simplicity with which he explained the basics of physics. After a month he approached me.

  “Well?” he asked.

  I looked at him shamefully.

  “Well, have you decided?” he repeated.

  “I’m staying,” I answered.

  He smiled. He knew that I was in the Hillcrest community and asked, “Aren’t you supposed to find a mentor your first semester?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He nodded, waiting for me to ask him.

  I was slow, but finally caught on. “Dr. Moore, would you be my mentor?” I asked.

  He smiled and put his arm around me, “So you don’t know everything?”

  “No, I don’t know everything,” I answered.

  From that day forward he became one of my closest friends and filled the void that had been left vacant by my uncle being so far away. There didn’t seem to be anything he didn’t know, even though he would be the first to admit that he had barely scratched the surface. I met with Dr. Moore once a week and explained to him my hopes and dreams, my political affiliation and my Middle Eastern roots. He wasn’t much on politics, but politely listened as I explained my frustrations.

  “What do you want in life?” he asked. “What are you doing here at this university?”

  I told him more than anything else I wanted to be part of the team that was working on the genetic screening project.

  He scratched his chin as if I had said something that had hit a sensitive nerve. “Be careful what you wish for. When I was about your age, I too wanted to be part of a revolutionary new project, on the cutting edge of technology that was code named S-1. I was going to the University of Chicago when I heard that they were trying to do something that had never been done before. Three of the most eminent scientists in the world: James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, Karl T. Compton, the president of MIT and Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington were given a grant to collect a group of scientists and create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. I wanted to be a part of that team more than anything else, because I knew that it had never been done before. Like you, I was very bright and they were looking for the smartest students to work with these men. They were like gods to me and I had heard that even Albert Einstein was consulting on the project. How excited would you be if all the greatest names in genetics had come together at one place, for one project?”

  “Pretty excited,” I answered.

  “And you’d do about anything, sacrifice whatever you needed to be involved?”

  “Yes, I would do anything, but I wouldn’t look at it as a sacrifice. It’s what I love to do.”

  “What if you had to sacrifice your ethics, everything you knew to be right and wrong?”

  I stopped to think, but before I could answer he continued, “I knew if I made it to the project, I would get to work closely with my idols and perhaps one day, be like them. Now, all these years later I’m still suffering for what we did. Do you know what we did?”

  “Yes, you created the atomic bomb.”

  “That’s my legacy, I helped create the Atomic Bomb. I used the very science I love, the knowledge I worship to create the most evil device ever invented by mankind.”

  “The United States was at war,” I answered. “If we hadn’t done it, the Germans would have. And they would have had no problem using it anywhere.”

  “Actually, we were more afraid of the Russians. By the time we tested the first bomb, the Germans had already surrendered. The rationalization to use it on Japan was very troubling. It was all based on forecast American fatalities. The God Darn Japanese just wouldn’t surrender. We fire bombed them, invaded their outer islands but each soldier would fight to his death.”

  He paused, “In the course of the project I made a good friend, named O.C. Brewster. He was one of the most instrumental people in the success of isotope separation. After the Germans surrendered, he became distraught that the project continued. He told me secretly at the beginning of the project he hoped that it would be proved impossible, but now he was tormented with the belief that civilization would be annihilated.” Dr. Moore opened up his wallet and pulled out a wrinkled and yellowed piece of paper and carefully unfolded it.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a copy of a letter he wrote to the President of the United States.” It took Dr. Moore all of his strength to tell me about it. “He warned the President and told him what would happen. The letter presented the most perfect scientific, philosophical, and moral arguments as to why we should terminate the project and never pursue nuclear weapons.”

  “Did the President ever see the letter?”

  “We don’t know. He gave the letter to Jimmy Byrnes, the Secretary of State, who told him that he would give it to President Truman. Whether he did or not, no one will ever know. Anyway, O.C. was right. I should have known as soon as I found out that it was a military project that they were going to use whatever we invented to end the war, no matter the cost. But why we enabled man through physics to destroy himself, I’ll never comprehend. And why such brilliant people didn’t see all the ramifications and simply refuse to do it, I’ll never know. Most of us were just naive kids, trying to solve an equation and the results were that we created the atomic bomb.”

  I looked over and a tear ran down his cheek. “Be careful what you wish for,” he whispered
.

  That was the last he ever talked about that project.

  Chapter 8

  In my second year, with the help of a reluctant Dr. Moore, my dream came true. I was chosen to be part of the team that would try to understand and perhaps alter the very make-up of a human being to deter genetic based disease. This gave me the opportunity to work with a think tank of professors, students and an all star medical team from virtually every city in the United States. I still found the time weekly to meet with Dr. Moore, who seemed very interested in how the project was affecting me.