Inside the Jihad (3 of 5 free samples)

---

COPYRIGHT
Inside the Jihad by Omar Nasiri. Copyright 2006 by Omar Nasiri.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

---

Previous | Next

BRUSSELLS (CONT'D)

BUCK DANNY

My life ended when I was eight years old. I was in the bedroom, sitting at the desk building a model airplane. My oldest brother, Hakim, was wrestling on the bunk bed with Rochdi, one of my younger brothers. I was annoyed because I couldn't concentrate, so I took a break and went to the bathroom to get a Q-tip. When I returned to the room they were still wrestling, and I sat on the floor and started to clean my ears. Seconds later, my brothers tumbled off the bed and fell on top of me.

I felt the stick ram into my eardrum, and a searing pain shot through my body. I nearly passed out, but I could still hear myself screaming. When my brothers pulled themselves off of me, I saw that I was covered with blood. There was blood all around me.

It could have been just a tiny accident, boys roughhousing as they do. But it was much more than that. It changed my life forever, and deprived me of the one thing that mattered most to me. I have never really recovered.

#
But let me start at the very beginning. I was born into a large family--six boys, three girls. I am the second-oldest son.

I was full of energy as a child, too much energy sometimes. I talked back to my parents, and like all boys, I would fight with my brothers. Mostly, I fought with Hakim, who was older and bigger. He tried to put me in my place, but I always fought back.

I was mischievous and got into everything. I'd steal butter from the refrigerator--I loved the taste of butter--and climb up into a tree and eat it. One day, I ate so much that I ended up in the hospital, and my mother made me promise that I would never do it again. But of course I did do it again, and when my mother found out she was so angry that she punished me by burning my hand with a scalding spoon. Even that didn't stop me for long.

#
When I was three, my father moved to Belgium. He got a job in Brussels and left all of us behind in Morocco with our mother. Two years later, we followed him. Shortly after we arrived, our mother took us all to the doctor for a checkup. Medical care in Morocco was very expensive, so we saw a doctor only when there was an emergency. But in Belgium medical care was free, and so we all went at once. That's when my parents learned that I had tuberculosis.

Because of the tuberculosis, I couldn't live in the city with my family. Instead, I was installed in a sanitarium in the country, about seventy kilometers outside of Brussels. Overnight, I, a North African raised in the tradition of the Ku'ran, found myself in a Catholic school staffed by nuns. At any given time there were about two hundred other children there, all of them white Europeans. I was the only Arab.

It was obvious to me and to everyone else that I was different. No one was cruel to me in any way; the other children played with me and I with them. They'd taunt me a little bit sometimes, as children do, but I would just taunt them back. It wasn't a big deal.

But on Sundays it was different. We would all go to church together, and the services seemed incredibly strange to me. The prayers, the communion, the incense; it was so unlike the mosques I attended over the summer or when I went home on holiday. And there was music, a man who played guitar. In Islam, there is no music in the house of God; I had grown up considering it a great sacrilege. Mostly it just seemed funny to me, and at times I laughed openly. I think this made some of the other children nervous.
I didn't see my family very much during these years. Over the summers we all went home to Morocco, and once in a while I'd go back to Brussels to see them for a long weekend or a holiday. Sometimes--rarely, maybe two or three times a year--my parents would visit me and stay for a couple of hours. But my real life was at the sanitarium.

It was during this time that I fell in love with airplanes. My father had a friend who worked in the airline industry, and sometimes he'd teach me about airplanes and give me model planes to build. When I visited my family in Brussels I would go again and again to the Museum of the Army in Cinquantenaire Park. There was a huge hall filled with airplanes from World War II, and I would spend hours devouring every detail. I was incredibly curious; when we flew between Morocco and Belgium I would always run up to the cockpit and ask the pilots to show me the equipment.

Mostly, though, I learned about airplanes from Buck Danny. Buck Danny was the hero of a Belgian comic strip, and I read every book in the Buck Danny series from cover to cover. Big, athletic, handsome, and blond, Buck was a brave pilot who fought for America and flew on all sorts of dangerous missions with his friends Jerry Tumbler and Sonny Tuckson. The comics were very realistic; I learned the names of all the planes and lots of information about how to fly them. I read and reread all of the books, and at night I'd dream of becoming a fighter pilot like Buck Danny. I wanted it more than anything.

And then my eardrum was destroyed. The doctors in Belgium tried to fix it--I had three different surgeries--but there was nothing they could do. I'm still almost totally deaf in my left ear. I knew that I could never be in the army, that I would never fly a plane. I had nothing to live for. I had lost everything that mattered.

#
Every boy has a dream--to be a fireman or an astronaut or a president, to be something fantastic. Of course, most boys will never fulfill their childhood dream, but that's not the point. As a boy grows up and becomes a man, he gradually lets the dream go, although it may still linger in the form of nostalgia. But if his dream is destroyed at a very young age, the boy will either be destroyed totally along with it, or he will become strong. He will become strong because he no longer has anything to lose. He will give up on the future.

A boy without a dream is dangerous.

Previous | Next