Friday, July 30, 2004
"This moment changed me from the inside."
"I was on my way home to Baghdad after my brigadier boss had told me the war was over and to go home," Ahmed said, describing his last moments as a major in the old Iraqi Army air defense unit he had been with for nine years. "He said it was an order," he added."So I walked home from our station in Al Hillah, south of Baghdad, but I didn’t change my clothes," Ahmed said, "And I came to a Marine checkpoint on a bridge in Baghdad. And I still had my uniform on and the Marine sergeant stopped me ..."
"’Where are you going?’ he asked me," Ahmed said in his accented but surprisingly good English.
"And I tell him, ’I am a major in the Iraqi Army and I was ordered to go to my house’" Ahmed said, finishing the backdrop to a life-defining moment he had not seen coming; and on what was supposed to be just a long 50-plus mile walk home to his wife and five children.
The encounter would prove to be a pivotal one for the military veteran because for the next two anxious minutes, Ahmed went through what must be emotions impossible to describe to someone who has never known he was about to die. It was more the result of the 33-year-old’s lifetime of experience with the ways of Saddam Hussein.
Ahmed, though, was actually two minutes away from a rebirth of sorts. "He looked at me for a while and I thought he was going to kill me," Ahmed said. "But he didn’t kill me," he added. "Instead he came to the position of attention and saluted me as an officer," Ahmed said, "And said, ’Sir you can go.’"
"I took a few steps and began to cry," he said, "Because I think, ’Why do I fight these people for ten years?[’”]
"This moment changed me from the inside," Ahmed said. "What he did was kill me without pistol. He killed the old major in the Iraqi Army who fought America from 1993 to 2003.”
Ahmed's inspirational story doesn't end there. Read the whole thing.
