Being a Muslim in the US Army
Being a Muslim in the US Army
By “Youssef Snuffy”
Part One
I was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps or ROTC when the attacks on September 11, 2001 occurred. Every American felt something on that day. Those of us in ROTC knew one thing … we would be going to war.
Everyone deals with war in a different way. But as a recent convert to Islam I had a lot more to worry about. How was the Army going to treat me? Would I be cast out, scapegoated, ran out or worse? Stories about Chaplin James Yee and the American Taliban (John Walker Lindh) didn’t help.
Luckily, I was chosen to receive more schooling and went to law school. However, this educational delay wouldn’t last forever and soon I would be back in the Army. A new army, a changed army, I would also be changed.
Before being a cadet in ROTC I was an enlisted soldier. My military occupation specialty or MOS was a combat engineer (code 12B). I volunteered to be a paratrooper and was stationed at Fort Bragg North Carolina. I was placed in a combat unit and trained. Trained all the time, trained for a mission that under Clinton never came. However, I always knew there was something more for me out there than being a grunt with C4.
Being a paratrooper in a combat unit means you give up, on occasion, substantial freedom. You are subject to room inspections in the morning and at night. You sometimes are locked down and on 2-hour recall for parts of the year just in case we had to go to war at the drop of the hat. Peculiarly, any time I was reading during a nightly room inspection my team leader would ask, “What are you reading … the Qur’an?”
Prior to joining the Army, I involved myself with some haphazard soul searching. Sometimes it involved learning about religions and trying to find the meaning of God. Other times in involved various recreational activities of which I am not proud. The Army, at first, delayed this soul searching as I got caught up in an isolated lake called “the barracks” and like a piranha went into a drinking frenzy.
After about a year of drinking almost everyday I decided this is not how to live life and stopped. At the time it was normal for me to vomit almost every weekend. Something that is so foreign to me now.
During a real soul searching session before joining the Army I caught a hint of a religion called Islam. I knew very little about it. No one teaches you about Islam in public school where I come from. You would have to specifically ask to learn about it in a college course, but I was a chemistry major. But I remembered one tenet was no drinking.
After I stopped drinking I picked up a copy of the Qur’an and began too read. One evening, just like every evening when I was reading, my team leader asked in a harsh yet civil tone, “What are you reading … the Qur’an?” To his amazement I was. Shortly there after I left the army and was in ROTC in sunny southern California.
(*** TO BE CONTINUED ***)
