When I was a young man beginning my journey into manhood, I was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Base near Chicago, Illinois.
Iranian sailors trained with us there. All of us had goofy-looking hats.
We were all basically the same: young men who had volunteered to do what our political leaders asked us to do, even if it got us killed.
But back then, the Shah was in charge in Iran.
Iranians weren’t too happy with him. They considered him to be a corrupt authoritarian and a puppet of the West.
The Iranians decided to have a revolution in 1979, and the Shah left for America.
The Iranians didn’t like that, so a group of students decided to show their displeasure by taking about 50 hostages at the American embassy. They held for them for 444 days.
“Death to America,” the students shouted in the streets of Tehran while they set fire to American flags.
Just dang. The Iranian sailors had seemed so cordial at the Great Lakes.
Americans didn’t like watching Iranian students burn American flags, and soon a new ally emerged in Iraq: the dashing rogue known as Saddam Hussein. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, you see.
Journalist Ted Koppel got a new job as a result of all this chaos as the host of a new show called Nightline. He kept that job for 25 years. Liberals thought Koppel was biased. Republicans thought he had a large head.
A rescue operation was mounted to get the hostages out, but it failed, and several American servicemen were killed.
It was a particularly bad time for Persian cats.
I have a Persian rug in my living room now, though.
Minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president in 1981, the hostages were released.
Were they scared of Reagan? Some said so.
Muslims had not been talked about much until then. But villains from the Middle East started to pop up in Hollywood movies. Libyans tried to kill Dr. Emmett Brown in “Back to the Future,” but he was wearing a bulletproof vest and did not die.
In college, I took a world history class taught by a man who specialized in Islamic studies.
I learned what a whirling Dervish was and also learned the Five Pillars of Islam: 1. There is no God but Allah; 2. To pray five times daily facing Mecca; 3. Giving alms to charity; 4. Fasting during daylight hours during the month of Ramadan; 5. Making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your lifetime.
These things didn’t seem entirely incompatible with Christianity back then, except for the bit about Allah.
A few years later, Saddam Hussein became our enemy when he invaded Kuwait.
“This will not stand,” President George H.W. Bush said on Aug. 5, 1990.
Pretty soon, the Desert Shield portion of the Persian Gulf War started with American planes pummeling the Iraqi military and targets in Baghdad.
General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf led the battle and became famous. So did Peter Arnett for his CNN reports from Baghdad as the planes came in.
I watched almost all of it.
A live war on television.
Imagine that.
The Iraqi military was rather pitiful if I’m honest, and fighting soon stopped. For a while.
On Sept. 11, 2001, several Muslim men who probably thought they were doing something heroic boarded planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Another plane was taken over by passengers and crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
If you are under 30, you probably can’t fathom the gut punch that was to Americans. Almost 3,000 people died.
George W. Bush didn’t like what the Muslims did, and he decided to stir up trouble in the region again a couple of years later.
More American soldiers died, and the dashing rogue was found hiding in a hole like a muskrat. Saddam’s life ended with “a short drop and a sudden stop.”
Osama bin Laden was the chief villain on Sept. 11, but he managed to avoid capture until 2011 when Navy Seals found him, killed him, and buried his body at sea.
This week, Iran’s Supreme Leader – who once said female prisoners of war should be raped before being killed to keep them out of heaven – was killed himself.
The beat goes on.
Selah.