BY JOHN PATRICK DEES
An American Muslim Finds his Place in the Marine Corps… and Afghanistan
At 0500 hours sharp the drill instructors barged into the Quonset hut. The entire structure shuddered from the impact of the door on the galvanized steel wall as it slammed open. The darkness of twilight provided no light, but Ahmad Abdullah and his fellow recruits were soon blinded by the blazing brightness of the fluorescent lights above as the instructors flicked them on. Then the yelling began.
Wake up!” shouted one drill instructor. Abdullah pried his eyes open.
“Oh there’s the terrorist,” the other instructor said, mocking Abdullah. Abdullah swore it had only been an hour since the fluorescent lights had been turned off the night before. His exhaustion was crippling.
Ahmad Abdullah, then 21, was a U.S. Marine Corps recruit attending basic training in Camp Pendleton, California in 2012. He had just left his desk job as an engineer in sunny Los Angeles hoping to escape a life in a cubicle. He was wondering what exactly he got himself into.
Seven years and three deployments later Abdullah, now a proud veteran of the Marine Corps, sits across from me in the tidy living room of his New York City apartment. Marine Corps recruiting posters hang on the wall. “Land with the Marines: Join Now and Test Your Courage,” one says, as cartoony marines storm through a violent surf, rifles raised towards an unseen foe. Abdullah wearing his Marine Corps running shorts and sporting a big black beard offers me water.
“My nickname was terrorist from the first day until the day I stopped caring,” Abdallah says. “It only took 3 weeks before I stopped caring. I was too exhausted to care.”
Abdullah, born in California to Egyptian immigrant parents is a practicing Muslim. He was one of just over 5,000 Muslims serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in 2015 according to the Pentagon – only about .045% of the entire force. Despite the low numbers, Abdullah believes he was not treated differently because of his background. Rather, he tells me he benefited from the unique position his religion afforded him during his deployments.
His boot camp nickname – as well as the physical exhaustion – was a method to break him down, only for the instructors to build him and his fellow recruits back up together as equals. “If there is one thing the Marine Corps does right, it shows you that nothing matters except who you are as a person. Are you a good marine, are you good at your job, are you a good leader,” Abdullah says
Receiving top scores in basic training, Abdullah was selected and trained as part of an elite group known as assault infantrymen. These infantry marines are trained to breach doors under enemy fire, manipulate explosives and rockets, and maneuver through urban environments – skills particularly relevant to combat in Afghanistan. Due to his expertise, Abdullah was assigned to an advisor mission in 2013 to Helmand Province, Afghanistan to train Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers.
Upon arrival, Abdullah was given a group of Afghans to train. Excited to make a difference, he was initially enthusiastic about his mission. “You’d wake up in the morning and each day was different. It was a holistic approach. I was gonna train them in marksmanship, I was going to train them in just basic stuff, like weapons safety,” Abdullah says.
As the days wore on however, negativity set in. The realities of training Afghan soldiers emphasized the difficulty of building an army from scratch. “You have to fight the pessimism sometimes, there was an overwhelming sense of, man I’m just wasting my time here, these guys aren’t picking this stuff up,”Abdallah says.
The Marines often relied on a select few trainees to act as leaders among the ANA soldiers. “You’d have those who were there because he wanted to defend himself and his family and really be an upstanding human being and a leader in his village,” Abdallah says. “Those guys we loved because they put in a lot of effort and they would become your sort of a liaison between you and the rest of those guys there because they spoke the language.”
Abdullah had an additional way to connect with his trainees, however.
“It was an advantage,” Abdullah says regarding his common religion. “I was born and raised almost in between two worlds, I spent most of my time in school and my friends were Americans like me, but I also had this other world that I lived in which was the community – the Arab community, the Muslim community I lived in, so there were these dual values and a lot of them did overlap.”
Abdullah relied heavily on the Mulsim community while growing up. His father passed away while he was young, and the community rallied around him and his mother. “The Muslim community took the place of my father,” Abdullah says.
While Abdullah was deployed, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan came and went. During this month, Muslims observe a religious obligation to fast from sunrise to sunset, making extensive training difficult. This time was especially trying for both Afghan trainees and their Marine Corps overseers. While many of Abdullah’s colleagues did not appreciate the cultural weight of the month long obligation, Abdullah did.
“I totally understood. There was almost no learning curve,” he says. “I’d see them pray, and I wanted to go pray with them, but I knew that I needed to keep a level of professionalism.”
Despite his connection to the ANA soldiers, Abdullah and his colleagues were always wary of green-on-blue attacks. These attacks, in which a service member is killed by an allied soldier, increased dramatically between 2011 and 2013, accounting for 15% of coalition fatalities in 2012.
“Frankly the threat of a green-on-blue attack was always there, which is why we had guys who were armed at all times. That’s not to say you don’t make friends with these guys, you do, you make friends with a lot of them,” Abdallah says. “But it never leaves the back of your mind that these dudes are just here more often than not just so they can make money and survive.”
Near the end of his time in Afghanistan, Abdullah felt like he had improved substantially in his training techniques. “Right around the point when I was leaving I finally started to get a good rhythm going,” he says. “I now know how to teach these guys a new concept like rapid fire shooting or reloading properly and positioning when they are kneeling.”
“It kind of defeats the purpose of the advisor missions, because mine was so short,” Abdullah says.
Despite early hurdles, Abdullah was happy with his personal impact. “I helped them in the capacity that I was the alternative to some thug showing up with a posse telling them what to do. I didn’t tell them how to live their lives, I didn’t tell them what their wives could wear, I didn’t tell them what they could eat, I didn’t tell them when they could eat, all I did was training them on how to defend themselves,” Abdullah says. “These guys came to me not being able to hit the broad side of a barn, and then they left being damn good shots.
Clouds block the sunlight streaming in through his apartment window. Abdullah shares his disdain for New York weather, and is nostalgic of his days in California. He’s excited to finish his bachelor’s degree at Columbia and move back West. He is also nostalgic of his time in the Marine Corps.
He has a well-paying job lined up in Los Angeles at a large defense contractor, but he tells me he is talking to a recruiter about going back in. He’s worried about the cubicle.
He continues to think about his family, however. He is ready to have children and settle down with his wife. For more stability, he is contemplating joining the special forces with the reserves, who train once a month on the weekends.
Every time he walks into his living room, that recruiting poster beckons to him. “Join Now and Test your Courage,” it implores incessantly. Although Abdullah was born a Muslim, he was born again in bootcamp as a Marine. In Afghanistan he used both identities to help fulfill his mission, and he is hoping that the next chapter of his life, although not nearly as dangerous, will also be fulfilling.
“I don’t need their money,” he says. “I just want to be a ninja on the weekends.”