(Image source: original photo - Myself BIAP 2003)
When I got there and threw my laundry bags on top of a washer I noticed the only other patrons were, from what I could tell, a Hispanic woman and her young daughter. The mother looked as if she were in her late 40’s and the daughter looked maybe 17. They were speaking another language pretty fluently and from what I could overhear, over the clunking washers and dryers, it sounded like Spanish.
Out of boredom, I decided I was going to introduce myself. I had forgotten most of what I had learned in my many years of Spanish classes so I texted my roommate, who was at work, to make sure I had the right verbiage for “Hi, my name is Paul” in Spanish. I was only a little off so I was going to break up the monotony of laundry day by making new friends. I approached and said, in a pretty bad American accent, “Me llamo es Paul”.
Dead silence and a look of confusion staring back at me from both the women. I thought maybe I dicked up the pronunciation. I then asked if they spoke Spanish and the mother said “No, Arabic”. The language barrier was pretty bad but I was now captivated by this conversation.
After I got over the initial embarrassment of completely getting the wrong language, I asked where they were from. The mother spoke for the two and told me they were from Iraq. I explained, as best I could, that I had deployed to Iraq in 2003 when the U.S. first invaded and the places I had been while I was there. It turns out the young lady was her daughter and was born the year of the American invasion and that they had only been in this country for a month and a half. They had fled the violence of ISIS and other brutal factions.
The mother explained that they had been relocated to Scranton and, it sounded like her and her 4 children lived in a small one bedroom apartment. She went on to tell me that her husband and father of her children were still in Iraq and that he would not be joining them. As she told me this, tears began to form in her eyes. I didn’t have the heart to ask why but I knew the answer.
The young daughter began pulling clothes out of a dryer and was now shoving them into a garbage bag, the mother turned away from me to help. She then put the stuffed black trash bag on a little red wagon like a child would ride in and began to put more laundry in a dryer. I took my laundry out of the washer, put it in a cart that almost tipped over because of a broken wheel, and loaded up my own dryer. I could hear the mother and daughter speaking Arabic to one another. I felt a pit of guilt form in my stomach as I listened to the two talk. I finished loading up the dented and dirty dryer with my clothes, hoping they wouldn’t catch fire, and walked back over to the mother and daughter.
With a lump in my throat, “I’m sorry”.
The mother looked at me with confusion. I wanted to explain that I was so sorry for the part I played in destroying her country and oppressing her people. I wanted to apologize that they had to leave their home and live in poverty here because of constant warfare. Warfare brought to them to make the rich richer and to exploit their homeland to preserve our decadent, wasteful, morally bankrupt, and mostly willfully ignorant way of life. I wanted to ask forgiveness for helping do evil things to her people at the behest of a criminal financial empire.
All I could manage to say with the language barrier was, “I am sorry America was bad and invaded your country. I am sorry for the bad things that I helped do to your people.”
She looked at me with sympathy and said, “No, Saddam bad. Iraqi bad.”
“I know Saddam was bad.” I replied, “There are Saddams all over the world. We invaded because of your oil.”
I didn’t know how to tell her, or if she would even understand, that Saddam had to go because he started selling oil in the Euro and our bloated consumer based economy couldn’t survive the hit to the petrodollar.
All I could get out was another, “I’m sorry.”
Tears started to form in her eyes as she smiled at me, “It ok.”
We both just kind of stood there and looked at one another for what felt like an eternity with her daughter sitting on the bench next to us. The pair’s last dryer stopped tumbling and knocking and the mother smiled at me and turned to return to her laundry. The mother-daughter team finished putting their laundry in trash bags and loaded them onto the little wagon and I returned to my wash. I sat on a counter in front of my drying clothes and checked the time on my phone.
Before I knew the daughter had wondered close and jumped in front of my holding out a container of mints. She motioned for me to put out my hand and I did as instructed. She dumped a pile of mints into my palm giggling the whole time.
It amazed me, a girl who was born into a world of death and destruction could be so carefree and happy with no indicators of emotional trauma. Indicators that a normal American would show after their favorite TV show gets canceled let alone growing up in a war zone. I thanked her and she smiled and skipped back to her mother as she was pulling the wagon out the door. They both waved goodbye to me and were gone into the darkness of the night.
I do not know if I will ever see the two again but I hope that they find the peace they deserve. The whole interaction has left its mark on me. I have been living with so much guilt from my deployments, survivor’s guilt and just guilt because I knew “Freedom” had nothing to do with why I was there. It felt like a small part of the void that filled my heart had been healed and I had finally found a bit of closure.
