They Sent Me to Distant Lands to Fight Against Muslims ... Then I Became One

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted April 9, 2009.

Mike's attraction to Islam dates to 2001, when his Afghan interpreter gave him a Quran. Mike had a deep respect for the spirit of those he fought and wanted to better understand what it was about their belief system that roused such a fierce dedication to their cause.   

Last month, after a year of one-on-one study with Imam Sabur, Mike made his shihada at the Kemble Street Mosque in Utica, N.Y. He is now officially an adherent of Islam.   

As a practicing Muslim, his life has become a virtual prayer. Five times a day, he ritualistically washes his body and kneels to pray facing the Kaaba in Mecca. (The first time, he used a compass and marked the direction with tape on his floor.)   

"Islam," the imam explained to me, "is a way of life more than a religion. It teaches you how to do everything, and everything becomes an act of worship."

Mike agrees, allowing with some amusement that the structure is both reassuring and familiar for a soldier, "but the military isn't nearly as strict as Islam."  

Every day, he downloads the prayer schedule off the mosque Web site. Prayers are timed according to the hours of sunrise and sunset, and on some winter mornings, that means getting up at 4:30.

But Mike rarely sleeps more than a few hours anyway. He has found that the exhaustion produced by long hours of concentrated work seems to keep his night terrors under control, so he "practices avoidance," letting his schoolwork regularly keep him up well past midnight.

Mike has a 4.0 grade-point average at State University of New York, and plans to get a Ph.D. in trauma research and counseling when he graduates.

He is also a convicted felon who suffers from a terrible post-traumatic stress injury.  

If Uncle Sam were to use his finger like a Ouija board pointer searching out a U.S. Army poster boy, it just might stop on Mike.

He's tall, fair-haired, handsome, stands with a posture that suggests military training, but without rigidity, and he speaks with a polite confidence, intelligence and insight that made him a natural leader when he was in the service and makes him a campus and community leader now.   

Mike was with the first wave of Americans into Afghanistan in 2001, and then, 15 months later, with the first wave into Iraq. Like so many combat veterans, he quite enjoys talking about the funny-crazy memories he brought home.

Like when someone discovered that there was a Burger King in Peshawar, Pakistan, over the border with Afghanistan.   

If there wasn't a lot of traffic in the Khyber Pass, he and his unit could make the trip from Jalalabad in half an hour. Like schoolboys playing chicken, they'd go – 12 guys in three vehicles bristling with guns.

"We would just run in and grab our burgers, scarf them down, and get back out of Pakistan. If we would have run into somebody, we would have been massacred," he admits sheepishly. "But it was so good to have a Whopper."  

But he won't go near the bad stuff that happened. He has learned that indulging someone else's curiosity predictably brings on terrible dreams.

"My body," he says with painful understatement, "blows everything out of proportion."  

The imam has helped.

"There is just something about Imam Sabur," Mike says. "He has taught me to trust him."   

It probably helps that the imam is a veteran and recently retired after a 20-year career at New York State's Department of Corrections.

"He knows that nothing he might say is going to shock me," Sabur told me. "I just listen and remind him that he may have done wrong in the past, and he surely will make mistakes in the future, but God is perfect, the rest of us aren't."  

Mike enlisted in the Army in 1998. His first semester in college hadn't gone all that well, and he had a bunch of uncles who had told him the military would grow him up and give him a little discipline.

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Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.

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