MSNBC - Aiding the Enemy (original) (raw)

April 19 - The sun set behind the palm and oleander trees last week in Iraq, and Matthew Fain and Bret Turpin took off from work early to observe Passover. There’s nothing extraordinary about two friends sitting under an awning and eating a kosher meal. It’s where they did it that’s unusual.

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Their perch was surrounded by chem-bio labs and shattered hangars on a freshly bombed airbase in a country whose recent history of hatred for Israel obscures the fact that Iraq is home to the oldest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel. “What do you think about being over here?” asked Fain, 25. “I mean, being Jewish where they don’t like Jews.” Turpin, 34, picked through his kosher MRE. “You know, I hadn’t thought about it, but it is pretty ironic that we’re over here on Passover.” The men are with the 1-8 Infantry of the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, just arrived to help Iraq transition from war to renewal. They come carrying the Torah in their pants cargo pockets, “The Journeys of Abraham” in their rucksacks and slightly mixed feelings about their area of operations.

Holy Week can be a confusing time for troops in battle. Chaplain Leif Esperland held popular Good Friday services for the unit’s Christian soldiers and was expecting a big turnout on Easter Sunday. But the experience of celebrating Passover in Iraq was a particularly odd sensation for the unit’s four Jews. They’re not deeply involved in the politics of the region—the sworn-state-of-war between Israel and much of the Arab world, the violence between Israel and Palestinians. But the paradox of laying down their lives for people who claim hatred for Jews wasn’t lost on them. Nor was that act of simultaneously revving up a war machine and celebrating a holiday that marks the time that the Angel of Death passed over the Jewish households of Egypt. Now, their tanks roll past sites recorded in the Old Testament. Places like the banks of the Euphrates, where the Israelites were hauled by Nebuchadnezzar (the name of a Republican Guard division), enslaved and released at the end of Isaiah’s Babylonian captivity. “I don’t know if ‘Joe’ thinks about these things,” says Chaplain Esperland, referring to the GIs.

The Jewish Joes do. They have an acute awareness that their jobs can turn their religion into an immediate danger. The Army does issue Passover MREs (lamb, matzo and bitters) and distributes Haggadot, the book of Passover prayers, but it can’t rule out capture by the enemy. So Pfc. Turpin opted for “NO PREF” stamped on his dog tags rather than “JEWISH.” “If I got captured,” he said, “I’d be a POW turned into an MIA turned into who knows what—executed maybe.” At the helm of a Bradley armored fighting vehicle, Pfc. Sean Evans nurses some discomfort about laying down his life for the liberation of Iraq. “When I see a group of people bowing down to Allah, it’ll feel uncomfortable fighting in a foreign land for people that wouldn’t accept me,” says the 20-year-old Colorado Springs native, who enlisted to earn a $50,000 scholarship. “But it’s the right thing to do. You can’t let religion get in the way of work.”

Iraq’s hostility is barely notable to Pfc. Joe Kashnow, an Orthodox Jew from Baltimore who enlisted after tiring of managing a kosher fish importer. While he chooses not to wear his yarmulke in theatre-the better to avoid hostility, he says-he thinks Iraq is no different from most countries. “Jews have been run out of about everywhere they’ve been,” he says. “The Jewish nation is about freedom, and that’s why we’re here.”

The country isn’t entirely hostile toward Jews. Amid the madness of Iraq’s whiplash transition from Saddam to social equality, a group of Iraqi Muslims defended the Jewish Cultural Center against looters in Baghdad, where about 40 people comprise the country’s entire Jewish population. In fact, until the 1950s, Jews comprised 25 percent of Baghdad’s population and, few may realize, were not advocates of creating a Jewish state. The war has shattered other stereotypes. Turpin, a father of four from Phoenix, arrived in Iraq with a few prejudices of his own. “I came over here thinking, why would I want to help these people?” he says. “Then you see the kids on the side of the road starving and thanking us and blowing kisses and giving me Saddam money. I throw them an MRE and it makes me feel like I’m doing something good—not just for these people but also for the U.S.”

_© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.