‘I want what you have -- freedom.’

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Zyna C. Captain
  • Air Force Doctrine Center
MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. (AFPN) --  On February 11, 1984, I married my husband in a cheap looking wedding chapel by a casino in Lake Tahoe. I was wearing 3-inch heels and carrying daisies. Little did I know that 20 years later, on the exact same day, I would be in Iraq, wearing desert combat boots and carrying a 9mm weapon.

I vividly remember standing in Baghdad as soldiers from Task Force 1st Armored Division's 4th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery Regiment, were providing aid to victims and securing a blast site. A sedan carrying explosives had just blown up in front of an Iraqi army recruiting station killing 47 Iraqi men.

This was one of many unforgettable events that occurred during my 4-month deployment to Baghdad. This tragedy made me realize how sacred democracy is to people who don’t have it and how messy, even our nation was, when giving birth to a new ideal.

In Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third inaugural address he said, “On each national day of inauguration since 1789, the people have renewed their sense of dedication to the United States. In Washington's day the task of the people was to create and weld together a nation. In Lincoln's day the task of the people was to preserve that nation from disruption from within. In this day the task of the people is to save that nation and its institutions from disruption from without.

“To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock -- to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of inaction.”

Only 11 months after I witnessed the tragic results of the explosion, Iraqis voted in their country's first free elections in 50 years. It’s because of America’s involvement and that our current president recalled our place in history to assist this fledging nation.

Our commander-in-chief, President Bush said, “In great numbers, and under great risk, Iraqis have shown their commitment to democracy. By participating in free elections, the Iraqi people have firmly rejected the anti-democratic ideology of the terrorists. They have refused to be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The Iraqi people themselves made this election a resounding success.”

While I agree that elections were a step toward a brighter future for Iraq, I had an unexpected teacher who humbled me. His reality was that democracy is a material possession and not an ideal.

This happened while I was overseeing about 100 local laborers who were placing sandbags around living quarters to increase the security for personnel assigned there. My unexpected teacher was a 14-year old Iraqi boy who was part of the work crew.

On one of their rare breaks, I asked him what democracy meant to him. To my surprise, he said, “It means the lights come on every time I flip the switch.” This was not what I expected to hear so I continued with, “It’s got to mean more that that to you.” Boldly he said, “It means never being hungry and it means I can go to school.”

While none of these answers were want I was after, I didn’t pursue it any further. I have a 14 year old, and I know that this idea would never cross his mind.

Out of his young mouth, his words required me to reflect on the facts that for decades, people of his nation were not free from tyranny, and the ideal of democracy was a foreign to him as speaking Mandarin Chinese was to me.

In spite of this, I go back to President Roosevelt’s speech which says, “Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit…The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live. There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future, and that freedom is an ebbing tide.”

I would argue that this was not true in America, nor will it be true in Iraq.

I base this belief on that rainy February day when I was part of the team that went to the army recruitment center, about a mile from the Coalition Provisional Authority's high security compound. As about 300 Iraqis gathered outside its locked gates waiting for it to open, the suicide bomber blew himself up by the center.

On this day, Iraqi men had been killed as they stood in line to join. On the backdrop of “beige,” -- sand-colored buildings, uniforms, sand everywhere -- the rain, which normally cleaned the sand from date palm trees, today ran red with the blood of people who wanted their country back.

After my initial queasiness of seeing things I wish I could forget, an Iraqi man slightly older than me approached. Not knowing whether I should trust him or not, I told him to stop.

When he did not stop, my 9mm was out of my holster before I even realized it. A military policeman approached him and cleared him as a “good-guy.”

With my adrenalin running high, I was trying to calm my nerves when he began speaking to me. His first question was as difficult for me to grasp as the surreal situation I found myself in. “When will the recruiting station open again?”

I just couldn’t believe my ears! “How can you ask me this after seeing so many of your countrymen die here today?” I asked him. He told me that two of his brothers had died there just in front of him in the line.

It was too much for me to come to terms with: the rain, the blood, the question. He stepped from my right side and came to face me, well inside my personal space. With eyes very difficult to read he told me, “I ask because I want to join.”

My mind screamed, "How could he still want to join after seeing his brothers die there?" but my quietly spoken question was a single word, “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I want what you have -- freedom.”

FDR’s speech sums up better than I ever could, what I felt when this man spoke those words. President Roosevelt said, “And a nation, like a person, has something deeper, something more permanent, something larger than the sum of all its parts. It is that something which matters most to its future, which calls forth the most sacred guarding of its present.

“It is a thing for which we find it difficult, even impossible, to hit upon a single, simple word. And yet we all understand what it is: the spirit, the faith of America. It is the product of centuries. It was born in the multitudes of those who came from many lands, some of high degree, but mostly plain people, who sought here, early and late, to find freedom more freely …

“That spirit, that faith, speaks to us in our daily lives in ways often unnoticed, because they seem so obvious… It speaks to us from the other nations of the hemisphere, and from those across the seas --the enslaved, as well as the free. Sometimes we fail to hear or heed these voices of freedom because to us the privilege of our freedom is such an old, old story.

“If we lose that sacred fire, if we let it be smothered with doubt and fear, then we shall reject the destiny, which Washington strove so valiantly and so triumphantly to establish. The preservation of the spirit and faith of the nation does, and will, furnish the highest justification for every sacrifice that we may make in the cause of national defense.

“In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America. We do not retreat. We are not content to stand still. As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God.”

We need to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. We need to remain devoted to their fledging attempts to embrace a new way of life in their country's first free elections in 50 years. As FDR said, “Sometimes we fail to hear or heed these voices of freedom because to us the privilege of our freedom is such an old, old story.”