Born to blindfolds and yellow ribbons

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Iranian takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran and the 444 days American hostages were held by Islamic revolutionaries with the support of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini. In my first joke on memory, I told a group of adults in our home that in America the Ayatollah’s name meant "I a toilet". It was a bad joke; I was six years old. I had been born into Watergate and the last years of Vietnam. Times weren’t very funny.

For the vast majority of American children, though, the horror of our country’s actions abroad amounted to sanitary news items, frightful images at worst. We had made Iranians angry and it struck me then that a whole country couldn’t be that mad over nothing. After propping up Iran’s Shah in his elite opulence, American meddling had become intolerable for a proud people.

Then came layers of war in Beirut and the naive U.S. intervention and tacit support for Israel’s excessive aggression there. My aunt Janet Lee Stevens made her home in Beirut as a journalist-activist working with newspapers from Japan to France. In 1983 she was killed with 62 others in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy. The act constituted the first of many terrorist acts against the U.S. of its kind, introduced Iranian-backed Hizbollah to the West and killed off the CIA’s entire Middle East contingent in the embassy that day. After Hizbollah bombed the Marine barracks six months later, the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon. A precedent was set; Islamist resistance could succeed.

Born into risk

With the direct and illicit hand our government played in the region’s deadliest conflicts, Americans at home have never faced fear or consequences on any tangible level Ğ 9/11 aside. But people in the region Ğ like my husband in Turkey Ğ quicken at the pulse recalling how close those events came to their own homes and lives. This remains the case for young people here today.

Like all Turkish citizens, my husband Inan remembers being told that every Turkish man was a soldier. To him this meant if war reached Turkey, all men would go to war, including his father Ğ and eventually himself. As Beirut imploded and the Iran-Iraq war raged next door, Inan remembers at the age of seven listening to 10-year-olds play out World War III scenarios resulting from some American move or another. With compulsory military service in place, then as now, those boys had a direct stake in such a result.

Our son is both Turkish and American. Turks have already begun telling him at 20 months that he too will be a soldier. Whether he will or not, Max Ali will grow up with the notion that he might have to fight or be killed in conflicts not of his making. We will do what we can as parents to protect him from this fear and/or reality, but in the end the geography of his birth and the polarizing recklessness of the U.S. in the region have already put him and his generation of small Turkish citizens at grave risk. Nations, like religions, mask acts based on immorality and greed in the name of populations that become indifferent or hateful toward the "other". The children of Gaza have no mask, no country, no protection. Yet foreign-made weapons are their currency. These children are the truest face of war. They entered a world full of nations that treat them as subhuman. Dehumaization is war’s currency.