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3. AL-QAEDA, THE TALIBAN, NUDJARIN, TERRORISM AND ME (Jan. 2003)

                                   "I don't want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral
                                or any occasion thereafter." - Mohammed Atta

                                   "Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their
                                beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, 'Come
                                hither, friend of God.' " - Mohammed Atta


          I refer to her as my "then-wife" though we're still legally married as I write. However, a divorce will take care of that. But as we sat in the United Airlines departure lounge that Tuesday morning at JFK, I still had hope for us. In retrospect, I was a fool. When a woman loves you she shows it, in "print" large enough for the densest male to read. When she doesn't, but she needs to keep you for other reasons, her art is clear unless you're blinded by love, or hope, or so desperate just to be married. I was all three. Once upon a time in this world of ours men like me didn't have to go through this. A girl was assigned - in some cultures several, say, four - and a man didn't have to struggle to keep her, any more than he had to struggle to keep his thumb on his hand.
          Nudjarin, my brainy, pretty, ultramoody, not-ready-for-marriage Thai bride of fifteen months was returning to Thailand. Again. Less than four months before her mother Manee had died, and Nudjarin was rocked by a grief deeper and harder and more agonized than I have ever seen in a human being ("She dies! She dies!"), crying so maniacally not just her tears but her snot and spittle covered her face. Now fate, cruel and sadistic, took her father Yorn too, and quickly, disbelievingly, we arranged for the same trip.
          Again I had held her as tightly as I could, I cried with her, though I had known her parents only a little. Nud's grief infected me and I couldn't hold back my tears, but I assume a half-conscious ulterior motive: to show her, whatever her dark thoughts about men (and she had many), that this man was worth staying married to, he felt, he bled, he was there in good and bad, could she not simply surrender to him then, her true husband?
          How could she be so cool to me as we waited for the boarding announcement? United Flight 897, 7:15 AM to LAX, where she'd switch to Thai Airways. I very much wanted a "goodbye-for-a-little, my darling," scene, but she was quiet, preoccupied, distant and sad. Also sickish, with some long trips to the airport bathroom. Also worried. Apropos of nothing, in my opinion, I must report she did turn to me and say "I feel something terrible is going to happen today." I, atheist and terminal skeptic, told her, she proud of her "foresight", seer of ghosts and spirits, that her sadness and dislike of flying were at work.
          We were there in that lounge, but history was too, perhaps, if it had arrived early enough. Robert Mueller, our FBI Director, told Congress that once the September 11 hijackers completed their flight training they made a series of cross-country flights, evaluating airport security and specific flights' weaknesses. They were looking for Boeing 767's and 757's, planes they'd trained for, set for long journeys, with few passengers and much fuel. (I myself noticed how few passengers boarded Nudjarin's plane.) Morning weekday flights proved best, and I imagine flights from Kennedy Airport had been scoped. A somewhat later flight, United 23, 8:30 AM for San Francisco, was late out of the gate, so before it could take off  Kennedy was shut. The New York Times (10/20/01) reported that "When the captain announced that the plane was returning to the gate, four male passengers described as Middle Eastern in appearance stood up and began urgently consulting with each other...The men refused orders from flight attendants to return to their seats....'As soon as the door opened, these four guys bolted,' said one of the officials." So who knows?
          We could have been seated back-to-back with them, for all I noticed. What I noticed was her goodbye kiss, her quick little perfunctory buss, a mere obligatory taste of the lips, which disgusted me, but, ever the good husband, I said nothing.
          I waited till the plane lifted off at 7:30, fifteen minutes late, and grabbed a taxi for home. The trip back was fast and uneventful, and the cab broke from the early morning commute to drop me off at Steinway Street in Long Island City. I walked to a supermarket so I could add some other vegetables to the salad Nudjarin had left me. The faces in the supermarket were ordinary. The old world had forty-five minutes to run.
          About the time I walked into the apartment, Mohammed Atta, at the controls of American Airlines 11 from Boston, turned south, and soon one of the flight attendants, in a cell call to an American Airlines supervisor on the ground, would cry out "I see water and buildings. Oh my God, oh my God!"
          Atta wasn't much with girls, nor did he want to be. He had contempt for them, and was cold to them. His distraught and clueless father, a lawyer back in Cairo, was still trying to set him up, though in the older culture, the Islamic culture, that means arranging a marriage, not suggesting a Saturday night date. "He was never touching woman, so how can he live?", his father's been quoted as saying. Nonetheless, in October 1999 "we found him a bride who was nice and delicate, the daughter of a former ambassador". Well, a proposed bride.
          In the kitchen, chopping vegetables, I never heard Flight 11 smash into the North Tower. I was some six miles away, with the Towers visible from my bedroom if I craned my head to the right. It was only ten or twelve minutes later, when I sat down to eat and turned on the Washington Post's website, that I learned.
          I never wanted to be an Atta. I hungered for marriage and fatherhood, but at 51 had found neither. A friend of mine recently told me I'm "inept" at relationships, but no one has ever questioned my integrity or intelligence, so there were two pluses, and in a Western world where men are damned as "commitophobes", even as women open themselves to commitophobes - that is a truth though not a p.c. truth - I thought I had a third plus. In fact, I think my friend is wrong. It's worse: I leave the Western woman flat. Hard experience's taught me. And why?
          This essay purports to connect my private life to the greatest public event of our time, and I questioned that. To the point of thinking I should stop writing. But over my shoulder stood a chorus, making a case, some of the voices sounding like Nud's. How she urged me on,
how she played with me, feeding me what I wanted to hear, things about culture and civilizations, things larger than just she and me: that Asian girls aren't like American girls, that they're loyaler, more feminine, their culture exalts marriage and family, they will never abandon you and run away, they place the communal over the individual, and how I wanted to hear this, how I wanted to believe it, how I deep down hated my world, what it's become, how I wanted to believe that the Old Way lives somewhere, that there is an Old Way, so I could be happy, and Westernization and modernity stop at its gate. At the same time she couldn't help telling me stories of family dysfunction in Thailand, of increasing divorce, of adultery, of the spread of drugs, of AIDS, of crime and violence, and children ignoring or abandoning their old parents (perhaps the ultimate taboo in Thai culture), of the utter disappearance of the river she loved to splash in as a little girl, and of woods she knew to illegal logging. Of the worship of Western things, to the extent that hip Thais in Bangkok force loathsome nonsensical alien bread and hamburgers down their throats, and Thai women (the most beautiful in the world - the myth is no myth) seek plastic surgery and exalt white skin and glorify "halfs" as models and movie stars. Nud said she hated her cheekbones (which women in Beverly Hills and Miami would no doubt pay thousands for), and in fact she'd had a little work done, on her nose, which, as far as I can see from her earlier photos, went perfectly with her face, so what was going on, what the hell was going on in this world, that we increasingly seemed to be moving towards two cultures only: America or poverty?
          The nineteen hijackers, on the surface, flirted with this Western Pervasion as well. They wore Western dress, were clean-cut, mostly beardless (and those with only lightly bearded). On the night of September 10 Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari - one of the young Arab "musclemen" brought in at the last moment to seize and control the plane - visited both a Pizza Hut and a Wal-Mart. Just hours before eternity, and eternal Islamic fame, and their eternal/infernal deed! (They had to catch a 6:00 AM Portland flight to connect to the Boston flight.) Down in Hollywood, Florida, shortly before moving north to embrace their fate, Atta and some of the boys enjoyed a night out at Shuckums, a bar. Marwan al-Shehhi, who'd pilot Flight 175 into the South Tower sixteen minutes after Atta, had five vodkas. Several of the hijackers, the FBI believes, kept girlfriends in Las Vegas. Ziad al-Jarrah, who piloted United Flight 93, taken down in Pennsylvania, is said by a cousin to have loved discos, drunk whiskey at a family wedding, and "used to go to church more than to the mosque." Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi (American Airlines 77 into the Pentagon), clean-cut like all the others, frequented California strip joints. And of course American Taliban John Walker Lindh grew up in ultra-American Marin County, the richest county in the United States, and wanted for nothing material.
          Americans, Westerners, do love to think of their life-way as inevitably, unalterably, irresistibly seductive to anyone who experiences it, the Casanova of civilizations.
          But then I read of Takfir wal Hijra, super-terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists so hardcore they actually attacked Osama bin Laden in the Sudan in 1995, and believers, according to a French official quoted in Time Magazine (11/12/01), in blending "into corrupt societies in order to plot attacks against them better. Members live together, will drink alcohol, eat during Ramadan, become smart dressers and ladies' men to show just how integrated they are....Some won't even worship with other Muslims..."
          As for us, after many weeks Nudjarin finally returned from her second sad trip to Thailand, and our marriage continued on its troubled way, but with just enough sweet moments of happiness and ease to show me what a blessing a good marriage can be. But in late July of 2002 she hit me with hard truths about her feelings: "I don't want to be married to anyone. I don't believe in marriage." Stupidly, though, I still wasn't ready to believe that.
          On August 5, 2002, returning home late from one of my two jobs - the Music Store one - I walked into an apartment emptied of my wife's things, the closets cleared out, the garbage container in the kitchen stuffed with makeup and medicines and women's magazines and hair ribbons, and this note was left on the kitchen table:
          "Dear Ira,
          "I don't know how to start. The first thing I'd like to say is I'm really sorry....
          "You are too good, but I am not good enough to be your wife. I'm sorry I've been hurting your feeling for many times....
          "You brought my life to America and you have done lots of good things to me. I owe you a lot....
          "About my family in Thailand. You don't have to worry about them. They won't blame you, they know you have been very good to me and you are a good man. They know about me well, but they can't do anything to convince me to stay married....
          "I've got a lawyer. She is going to do about our divorce....
          "I will never forget you for the rest of my life.

                                                                 "Sincerely,

                                                                      Nudjarin"

          I never heard from that lawyer. But I waited. And, honestly, I still hoped...
          Finally, in December 2002, she called. She had gone to Los Angeles to live and make her fortune, but "hated it" and was back. It turns out, on her second return to the U.S., she had met a Thai girl on the plane, and they became friends, and this Thai girl told Nud that if her marriage ever faltered she could come to Los Angeles and live with her.
          We spoke several times. One call Nudjarin began in tears: "I miss you!" I asked if she wanted to come home, and she said yes. I suggested the next day, but she backed off. She then suddenly ended her last call (to this point), after some aimless chatter about the state of her English, with "I have to tell you honestly. I love freedom." (Or perhaps it was "I love my freedom.")
          And then I knew it was over, and I got a lawyer, to proceed without worrying about her nonexistent one.
          "If you relax the woman's bridle a tiny bit, she will take you and bolt wildly." (Al-Ghazali, medieval Islamic scholar and philosopher)
          The nineteen hijackers never broke. How they never broke, never hesitated. None seemed to even break a sweat as they strode proudly, happily and implacably to their deaths, and 3,000 of ours. They had much to live for. By Western standards, material standards, they were by no means "losers". Both of Mohammed Atta's sisters have doctorates. He earned a masters, was fluent in English and German, and in another time would have gone on to a successful career as an architect or academic, maybe even marrying that "delicate" ambassador's daughter. His fellow death-pilots Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad al-Jarrah were also middle-class, educated, from good families, computer-comfortable. And Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's # 2, once had no beard and wore Western suits. One grandfather was President of Cairo University, his father was the Dean of its Pharmacy School. Al-Zawahiri became a successful doctor, fluent in English.
          No doubt Islamic terrorists say they're acting out of love, love for the truth of their God. I, secular, skeptical, think of their hate, but then my hate and theirs shockingly begin to merge. I cannot help it, this inner Taliban crying out for order against the revolution of our world, and I blame that world for my aloneness now, because it exalts "freedom" and took away my male power, and took away my happiness, and leaves me alone at 55. Curse me if you wish. I think there may be some other Westerners who are cursing these days, even as they are readied to fight. Perhaps here a man who once had a good factory job, but it's gone to Bangladesh, because such is globalization and its ways. Perhaps here a man of 45, who's lost wife, and, worse, his children, to divorce, though he was a good man (there are such) and it was his wife who was at fault. (Really, she divorced him because he wasn't exciting enough anymore. After 200,000 years women can finally do that.) And vaguely he understands in the future she may be able to clone asexually without him and his kind, yet still he must be willing to die for the revolution that makes such a scientific 9/11 possible. Perhaps here a man who's supposed to love the West and all its miracles, and they are miracles, but the forest he loved is lost, and soon the canyon, and the birds that used to sing him awake have fled, if indeed that's all that's happened to them.
          And I muse on the fate of my sister humans, who once would have been mine, and whom I've lost my power over. And I am aware, deeply, specifically, of the depredations upon them by Taliban and Wahhabis. Women! With their swaying hips and lipsticked lips, their love-button clitorises and utterly annihilating climaxes, and tireless journeys through orgasm after orgasm while the little male lies beside them, all soft and pooped-out after two or three (or one, or none). Women! With their quick laughing highs and hairtrigger lows, all moods and moodiness beyond a man's understanding or ability to satisfy. With their skirts and panties and ribbons in their hair and alienness and doodads on their ears and enormous brown nipples quick to show if some attractive possibility appears. Women! With the matchless human brain, most of its possibilities not even explored yet by the human race, and their counter-revolution and contempt and cry for freedom, whoever's happiness it leaves in the dust.
          There must be some immense...thing happening that could make intelligent and able males actually choose death to living in a world such as this, or letting it continue on its all-enveloping way.
          And I read what I've written with a sense of wonder. Can a moral Western intellectual really...?
          But in the end you don't have to worry about the likes of me. A deeply disappointed
but utterly harmless and impotent observer, albeit an acute one, I pick up no gun and fly no plane. (Unlike them, a hundred thousand, a hundred million? I can get a grip on my frustrations.)
          As the woman's letter praised me:
          "You are too good...."   

 

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