Facing the Truth

October 9, 2004

Layla lay in her bed, crying again. She was desperate; her mind was split down the center into two completely different and conflicting mind-sets, and she was definitely losing it. One side of her had been created years earlier by her father and tormented her day and night. She had a purpose based in hate, excused by religion, and a requirement for her to be cold and uncaring.The other side of her longed to be gentle and tolerant; this side of her wanted to forget the failure of what had been her childhood and develop a new purpose in life. Her youth had been stolen from her, as had her future. Regardless of the pain she now felt pulsing within, she finally was able to attain a clarity of mind that had eluded her before. Jeremy was right; she did have an opportunity for a real future that she would decide, a future she wanted to reach out and take into both hands and protect.

She had been so confused for so long. She could always hear her father’s screaming voice in her ears, motivating her with fear of physical punishment.Then there was the supposed anger of Allah that paled in comparison to her father’s wrath should she eventually fail.There had never been any playgrounds for this young girl.There were no friends waiting outside to kick around a soccer ball or poke fun at the neighbor- hood boys.There was only the fear and incessant mantra of twisted pur- pose hammered into her, and now, the longing inside her to escape.

Layla rolled away from the window and lay on her side, facing the pale colored walls. As with the rest of the apartment, the walls were boring, showing only slight brown stains through age. But the window reminded her that there were living people outside, innocent people, children, families. It reminded her of the children who had died in the recent terror attack in Iraq. Visions of her own brother, lying dead in a pile of rubble filled her mind.How did I end up here?The pain of losing

her brother to a randomness had been difficult to bear, and had only intensified exponentially by the anger of her father.

Her mind slipped back to that day. A friend of her father’s, she had long since forgotten his name, rushed to the door of their small home on the east side of Ramadi.There had been an explosion near the university. Her father’s face had turned bright red, and the young child version of herself had watched as tears filled his eyes. No one knew at that point that her brother had been involved in the explosion, not for certain. But there is a bond between parent and child that reaches deep within the parent, and somehow, her father knew, and had said “He’s gone; I can feel my son’s life force is gone from this world.”

Their car had rushed across town toward the university.The images in her mind reminded Layla of when her brother played with her outside their home. He would laugh and toss her around in the air above his head, making her gleefully dizzy.Their mother and father would watch from a window in the house, smiling at the two playing in the dusty evening sun. Layla bit her lip as the pain of her loss returned. Ironically, her brother had preferred to stay near home to study even though he had been granted scholarships at universities in London and Germany. He had loved his family deeply and wanted to stay close in case of any emergen- cies that might befall them.

The small family’s car stopped near the university, but was unable to get nearer to the site. Military vehicles blocked the small alleyway, and armed Americans guarded the site. Her father stepped out of the car and walked toward the rubble, ignoring the shouts of the soldiers, who then let him be when they saw that he was intent on finding a lost victim.

Although she was only eight years old, the scene was etched in her mind like an old black and white photograph, turning yellow around the edges. Rocks, stones, and shattered pieces of handmade brick were scat- tered in a large circle around the area. Shards of glass poked up through the rubble taunting the men who climbed across the piles. A large hole occupied the space approximately where the door might have been in

the small shop. From what she could understand with her young mind, a very large explosion had ripped the shop from its core and left pieces of it strewn about the alley.

The neighboring buildings, although damaged badly, still stood.The owners paced around and inside their small shops, crying at the destruc- tion; their entire lives were destroyed by the events of the day.The

building across the street, a small market that once sold food to the locals, was now buried underneath pieces of the small coffee shop that used to reside across the way. Layla could remember not seeing any blood on the rocks, and there were no bodies lying nearby, but there was a smell in the air that she did not recognize.

Her father had joined the other three to four men who were already climbing the rocks of the haphazard piles of rubble, trying to find sur- vivors, or the remains of the dead.The piles were deep, and it would take time to reach the bottom. Over the next few hours, more men joined in the search, and soon a line stretched down the alley, with rocks being passed from man to man until a new pile was formed at one end of the small alley. Women wailed as they stood and watched.The men carried on their work, few saying much at all, but nearly all of them praying silently to Allah, their lips moving only slightly.

Layla closed her eyes.The tears were streaming down her face, soaking her hair and making it stick to her face.That single day of her youth would change the rest of her life. She sat up in her small bed and took the small glass of water off the nightstand. A small stream of water ran down her chin as she poured more into her small mouth than she could swallow at once. When the glass was emptied, she set it back on the small nightstand, her mind already wandering back in time once more.

The first body pulled from the wreckage that day was a small baby, the small blanket still wrapped around his tiny body. A sharp rock pro- truded from his small back, and his clothes were matted with blood, still wet. His head was bald as the black hair was just starting to grow in. He was so young, and the scene had made Layla cry instantly. A person can

see a pile of rubble and understand that something has happened, but once they see a victim, a body, their minds are forever changed. Her father had taken the child and handed it gently to one of the women crying at the side. She took the baby and wrapped it in black cloth.The women prayed over the child, crying to Allah to give the baby peace.

The second body was a woman, still holding a bag that had once held groceries from across the street with an additional smaller bag strung around her shoulders and around her neck.The men pulled the woman from the wreckage; her leg was completely gone.They kept their compo- sure and carried her as carefully as they could manage, across the rubble to a clear area off to one side. As they moved, a few small items fell from a hole that had been torn in her bag. A small baby toy rattled to the ground at Layla’s feet as the men passed.This is the baby’s mother, she remembered thinking to herself in shock.Who would do this? Who would kill an innocent mother and her child?

But the scene was about to get much worse. From inside the shell of the broken coffee shop, a man hollered to the others. Part of the roof had collapsed as the support wall had been blown away, leaving a pile of rubble near one side of the shop. Layla could barley make out the shape of a hand, sticking up limply from the rocks.The men gathered around the area, pulling rocks quickly and passing them down the line, from man to man, until the rocks had been removed. She could still hear the sound erupting from her father’s lungs, a sound made by animals in the desert, but never a man. She watched silently as each rock was removed, freeing the body from its prison.

A number of terrible things will happen to most people during their lives, but nothing compares to the death of a child.The pain and empti- ness felt by a parent sears their insides, shredding their hearts and leaving them feeling numb and empty. A child serves as the focal point of every hope the parents have and a bottomless flask into which the parents pour every ounce of their love. Losing a child can cause a man to lose his mind at the same time, and so it would be on this day.

Layla could vividly see her father clutching at the hand, screaming in agony as the other men carried his son from the wrecked building. Her brother’s face stared up at the sky, and his arms hung limp at his side. Blood stained his clothes, and his legs hung at odd angles as he was laid down on the street, away from the rocks.That was the day her life

changed completely. From that day forward, she was not a child. She was allowed nothing more than to revenge her brother’s death.

She wiped her eyes and pulled her wet hair from her face. Looking back on it now, she wondered why she had been allowed to stand and watch the entire scene. She had been no more than a child herself. But the scene was surreal, almost a dream. A young child playing spectator to a horrible event, never truly understanding the significance of what had happened that day or the impact it would have on thousands of lives in the future. But she was grown now.The pain had been real.The impact had been mortal.

The funeral had been held three days later.Time had been needed to repair the young man’s damaged body and prepare the arrangements. Her father had spent three days in silent misery. He avoided contact with her and her mother. No one approached him and he approached no one else. The anger was building inside his now empty heart, replacing the love that had been torn from him. But on the day of the funeral, her father had appeared calm, almost casual, just another spectator in this morbid life event. On that day, her father had walked to her and lit a fuse to a bomb inside her destined to explode years down the road. But fuses burn with flame, and it hurt her inside to carry such a horrible hatred inside of her for so long. It was against her nature and denied logic. She could not let this go any further. Human life was sacred. Greed and paranoia result in death and pain. She would play no further part in this.

Layla reached for her cell phone and dialed Jeremy’s number. She had tried to let him be these last couple of weeks as she knew he was

working nonstop on a project, but she needed to talk to a friend. Quite possible the only friend she ever really had.The voice on the other end

was both terrifying and comforting at the same time as she realized what she needed to do. As soon as she heard his voice she blurted out, “Jeremy, I really need to speak with you. People will die if we don’t. I can’t live with that.”

“What? Layla? What’s wrong? Are you okay?” came Jeremy’s reply. “You sound as if you’ve been crying.You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No, physically I’m fine. Mentally and emotionally I’m having a rough time right now.” Layla reached over and grabbed a tissue from one side of her bed and wiped her eyes. “I know you’re busy with whatever top secret work you can’t talk to me about, but I really just need to talk to you about something.”

“Look, Layla, it’s really not that big a deal. People graduate everyday from colleges around the world and make their way into the working world, to real jobs. No one has died from it yet, at least not immediately. From what I understand, you have to be in your forties before work will kill you on some random stressful Monday morning.” Jeremy laughed out loud, obviously enjoying the joke he had just made, but realized suddenly that the voice on the other end was silent.This was serious. Layla always wore her emotions quietly, letting him into her world a little at a time, but he could always elicit a laugh from her.This was serious “Okay, I’m sorry.Talk to me. What’s wrong with you?”

Layla took a deep breath and tried to relax.It’s no good, she thought to herself,I’m never going to be comfortable again until I get this off of my chest.

“Jeremy, I have a long story to tell you. It’s going to shock you.There are parts of it you probably will never believe, but if I don’t tell someone who can help me, people will definitely die.”

Jeremy’s skin was crawling.There was an eerie tone to Layla’s voice, one he had never heard before.The hairs on his arms were beginning to stand on end. “Okay. We can work through this. I’m your friend; that’s what I’m here for.Tell me what you need, and I’ll help you.”

“When I was young, my brother was killed when an American mortar round went astray and blew up outside the door to a coffee shop

he was sitting in. He was killed instantly.” Layla wiped her eyes again. It stung inside to actually talk of these events out loud to someone. “His name was Ahmed, and he was a student at a local university in Ramadi. No one is really sure why the Americans were firing off rounds or whether it was a freak accident. But suffice it to say, many people in our city were angry by the apparent attack.” Layla paused, trying to catch her breath.

“When my father heard about the attack, he rushed to where the coffee shop used to be, with me in tow. I was still a young girl back then, but I can remember the scene vividly.The young mother who had died from the blast. Her small child—a rock stuck in his frail body.” She started actively crying again, knowing she wasn’t making sense.

“Go on, Layla. It’s okay.”

“Looking back now, I remember feeling very sad for the young woman and her baby. But the worse was yet to come. Shortly after they had pulled the two bodies from the rubble, they found another body.” Layla was fighting inside to regain her composure. If she broke down now, she’d never make it to the important part. “My father was screaming in agony before I ever even saw the body.Together with several other men, my father brought the body of my brother past the edge of the debris and laid it on a blanket, laid out by some of the local women. He was completely distraught, my father.”

“There were people crying for days afterward. All I can really recall is the near constant wailing of members of my family as they mourned. My father said nothing to me, preferring instead to sink down into his own solitude. Several days later, we had the funeral.” She took a deep breath, feeling a sense of relief as the years of pent-up pressure and secrecy easily rose to the surface.

“When the funeral arrived, everyone was visibly grieving; everyone that is, except my father. For some reason, he seemed to have come to terms with what had happened. He came to me later that day and put his

hand on my shoulder. It felt so good to have his attention again. But he wanted something from me.”

“What did he say, Layla? What did he want?” Jeremy was tied to Layla’s words, hanging on each syllable as it flowed from her lips.

“He told me that eventually I was going to attend the university in my brother’s place, and I was going to avenge his death. It never occurred to me at that time what he really wanted me to do.”

Jeremy was silent with the possible implications her words might hold. She continued.

“For a decade my father tormented me with the idea that the West had killed my brother and would try to kill all my friends and family before they were through. He had been spending more and more time at a very small mosque in town, one known for harboring men who

despised the Americans. His thoughts grew more and more angry. My days were filled with extended lectures by my father about the evils of the West and how they must be destroyed in the name of Allah. It was