Muslims in the Armed Forces

EXCERPTS

Ismile's cousin Ace Montaser sensed a new distance among the men at his mosque on State Street. He described it as "the awkward eye."

Ismile's older brother Abe, a burly New York City police officer, learned to avoid political debates.

Their cousin Abdulbbuttet Montaser took a different approach. He answered questions about whether he served in Iraq with a feisty, "Yeah, we're going to Yemen next!" He has helped recruit for the Marines and boasts about his cousin's medal to the neighbors.

"I want every Muslim in the military to be recognized," said Mr. Montaser, a corporal. "If not, people will feel they're not doing their part."

Their service bears some resemblance to that of Japanese and German immigrants who fought for the United States in World War II. But for Muslims of Arab descent, the call to serve in Iraq is complicated not only by ethnic ties, but by religion.

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The same week that Abe Althaibani headed to Iraq with the 25th Marine Regiment, his wife joined thousands of antiwar protesters in Manhattan, shouting, "No blood for oil!"

"It was my people," said his wife, Esmihan Althaibani, a regal woman with luminous green eyes. "I went because it was Arabs."

...

One by one, they graduated from high school and joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Some of their parents found it odd, even disappointing. The sons of other Yemeni immigrants tended to follow their fathers into commerce, or better yet, studied law and medicine.

But for the young men of this family, the first to be born in America, military service became an honorable rite. It offered discipline and adventure. It also promised a new kind of respect from other Americans. Starting in 1992, eight of the family's young men enlisted, almost all of them before Sept. 11.

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Their fluency in Arabic made them invaluable. But it also laid bare the horrors of war. They heard what their comrades could not. A frantic sequence of foreign words was, they knew, a girl crying out that her father was dead.

"It's like you're part of two different worlds," Abe Althaibani said. "You're part of the military thing, yet you totally relate to this country you just invaded. You're not as foreign as everyone else."

He recalled the evening he tried to calm a bleeding woman as her children lay dying several feet away. He crouched next to her, near a bridge in Nasiriya, talking softly in Arabic.

Ismile Althaibani, Abe's younger brother, remembers insisting that a mentally disabled prisoner be allowed to ride in the pbuttenger seat of a truck, without a sandbag over his head, when a group of men were transported from Abu Ghraib to another prison.

Their cousins Abdulbbuttet Montaser and Khalil Almontaser were stationed in Babylon. There, Mr. Montaser befriended Iraqi workers. "I tried to look out for them a little more, help them a little more than the average soldier," he said.

But at times, such gestures brought unease. One day, as Mr. Montaser walked the young workers to lunch, a gunnery sergeant yelled, "Get away from them," he recalled.

He and his cousins learned to ignore the pejoratives of war, words like "hajji," "camel jockey" and "Johnny Jihad." They understood that their fellow marines had to dehumanize the enemy in order to carry on, Abe Althaibani said.

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The oldest of the group, Abe Althaibani, came home with much of his former character intact. He had the same easy laugh. He still cleaned his plate at dinner.

But there were hints of change. He was more on edge, his mother noticed. He had acquired the habits of his comrades: he smoked Marlboro Reds and took to dipping tobacco.

What struck his wife was something less common among marines: Mr. Althaibani spoke Arabic with a new Iraqi accent.

He told his relatives little about his role in the war. When prodded, he would sometimes say that he served in "civilian affairs."

In fact, Mr. Althaibani had worked on secret missions around Iraq with two counterintelligence teams.

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Other marines he knew had struggled to readjust to civilian life.

"It's hard," he said. "You're out there giving people orders, and you come here and the lady at the checkout is giving you atbreastude."

...

"I don't care what I left behind," he said. "There's nothing for me there. Everything's in America."