siuDE.com

Hakim looked at me like a deer caught in the headlights of a Mack truck barreling down I-57.

Half of my glass of wine was now on the conference room floor. He was waiting for me to play the part of the angry American, but before I could assure him I wasn't upset, he had muttered several apologies and had disappeared into the crowd of international students to grab me another drink.

That was the beginning of what became an unlikely friendship between myself and a thirty-something graduate student from Iraq. I made a lot of friends from around the world while studying abroad, but it was my time spent over pints with Hakim that were the most eye-opening. We have spoken on every subject from our mutual obsession with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to President Bush, and I am ashamed that I have waited two years to tell his story.

But I can think of no better time to tell what I flew halfway across the world to discover: War may be hell, but it is much more to those who are unable to fight it. It is a gut-wrenching feeling of helplessness words can never describe; a level of Dante's inferno previously undiscovered and inaccessible to anyone who has not been plunged head first into the fire.

Our meeting was a strange twist of fate, for sure - but nothing can convince me it was not preordained. I stand a solid foot above Hakim, but he carries himself as if he were a head taller than anyone he encounters. However, he is also perpetually soft-spoken and, despite the language barrier, is one hell of a storyteller.

Canterbury, England, became our stomping ground, and we attracted our fair share of strange looks. Neither of us cared. We looked and acted like a modern Laurel and Hardy walking down the winding streets of southeast Britain, cracking jokes and trying in vain to teach me Arabic.

By the time I left we knew most everything about each other, but when I tried to speak to Hakim about life in Kurdistan, a northern province of Iraq, he became uncharacteristically quiet. I gingerly approached the subject a few times, but the only information he shared was how most Kurds do not consider themselves Iraqis - and for good reason.

During the 1980s Saddam Hussein was at war with Iran, and citizens of Kurdistan suffered greatly during this period. Gas rockets were launched into the Northern Province in what is, to this day, the largest ever chemical weapon attack against a civilian population. In the words of an anonymous survivor, "I got some gas in my eyes and had trouble breathing. You always wanted to vomit and when you did, the vomit was green."

The chemical agents this individual and thousands of others breathed in were a lethal cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX. During the worst period of Saddam's onslaught - known as the Halabja poison gas attack - Kurds were bombarded for four days straight while people, in the words of the previously mentioned survivor, "just dropped dead" or took several excruciating minutes to die of burning and blistering.

Hakim would have been in his teens during this period, huddling with his family in their house hoping the distant sounds of explosions remained distant. Unfortunately, little more than a decade later, he and his family pray for the same salvation.

I have not heard from my friend for several months, but I will never forget what I learned from him: No matter what end of the bombings you're on, we're all still irrevocably human after the smoke clears. So every day I pray for a call from a friend in the military I consider family, and an e-mail that always concludes: "Your brother, Hakim."

Wolfe is a senior studying English education.

Article Tools