Chapter One

I was not born an American. I chose to be an American, and I chose to leave behind the land of my youth and the land of my family when I came to America. Citizenship was not my birthright, and I had to work and study in order to earn it. For me it was a privilege and an accomplishment to become an American citizen. I became a patriot out of my learning and my experience, and my conviction that the principles and ideals which define America are the pinnacle of all mankind's social progress. For me to call myself an American patriot is a great honor, and I feel humble to be able to offer my loyalty, my support, my admiration, and my life to this fine land, to this wonderful people. It is my greatest pride and honor to be able to say, "These are my countrymen, and this is my homeland."

I was born and raised a Muslim. Until I was a young adult, my experience with other religion consisted of watching from a distance the village celebrations and conflicts of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, both of whom at times looked down on us Muslims, and from a greater distance the Jewish, who were even more a minority than we. It was only later, after much reading and meeting other people that I learned enough about those religious forms and about the God they describe to embrace my family's form of Islam by choice. The God I have discovered all those religions to be seeking, and the desire for peace, community, and respect for all His children they each call for are the most true and most important things in the world. If people actually lived as though they believed in those things, we could have Heaven on earth.

Having such common ideals and such common faith, one might think they should quickly come to an agreement, and would welcome each other in brotherhood and celebration. Having such love for my country, and for my God, one might think I should feel close in the embrace of my community and welcomed by the smiling faces of my people, my American countrymen, my brothers and sisters. How sad it is that instead the world is in chaos fighting over those religious distinctions, and in America I find myself increasingly isolated, as Muslims are being identified and demonized as an unwelcome minority, a threat to real Americans. How could such fine ideals, such devout faith, and such patriotic devotion produce such terrible results?

It is easy to point to the implacable momentum of history, from the Diaspora to the fall of Rome, the beginning of Islam, the Ottoman Empire, the rise and division of Catholicism, to the newborn nation of Israel. It is easy to point to those precepts in the doctrines of each of their religions which led to the nit-picking exclusivity over which the several sects continue to fight. It is easy enough to see what has been going on these five millennia, and how the history has been driven by the precepts of these interwoven religions, as they quarrel about probate rights to the promises they believe God made to their and our common ancestor Abraham. Even so saying, I don't presume to explain it, much less to be able to offer some clever insight that might help the world to correct it, whatever that might mean. I hope at best to show how one person can try to do some good in response to the madness and turbulence, the violence that no one in the world's leadership seems to have the conviction or the will to assert the power to avert, a one way trip to hell.

We are perhaps born equal in the eyes of God, but we each have unique heritage, as though each of us is born with a hand of cards. That is part of our fate, and whatever we do with it that does not change. It was my fate for better or for worse that I was born to a Muslim family in a little village high in the mountains of a country that was then called Yugoslavia. I was born in Montenegro, one of the eight once independent states which made up the tapestry of Yugoslavia. As a Minority, I am ethnically a Bosnian from the province of Sandjak, and Montenegro. To the north and west of us, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Muslims are the majority, but it was my fate that in Montenegro we were a minority. It was many years before I began to understand the stories told about my father's generation, and his father's, and how we had been persecuted and murdered by our neighbors the Orthodox Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats, Albanians, and Italians.

Today, as it has been for hundreds of years, life in that Balkan region is troubled and violent. Some of my family still live in that same village, and others have become American citizens as I have. We are separated, but not apart. Though I am an American, are they not still my family when the troops come marching up the streets? Worse, when my American government and the rest of the so called democratic world stands aside and watches the troops come marching to round up my ancestral people, are they not then still my family? When a few non-faithful Muslims whose beliefs lead them to depart from the peace of Islam conduct acts which make Americans misunderstand, fear, and hate all they identify with Islam, must I then not try to help my family for fear of appearing to support those who oppose America? Is it possible in the complicated world of today to be a Muslim patriot in the United States of America? I intend to prove that it certainly is. There are millions of people of my faith who are devoted to and love and are staunch supporters of the state of the union and stars and stripes. There are certainly some who do not share our American way of life.

I wish I could just put the real names of everybody involved in this book. I would like to be able to drag the villains out into the light, and let everybody know just what they did, and for whom. Much as possible, I'll do that. One character I would like to identify unfortunately has the same name as a certain beloved celebrity, who doesn't deserve the misunderstanding that would naturally take place, so I'll just keep him on a first-name basis. I would also like to be able to bring out the heroes, and to let some good people take well-deserved applause for doing jobs that must forever be kept secret. Sadly, as crypto people, they get crypto names, and no curtain calls. What I have not done is to create composite or fictional characters to fill out the drama in an otherwise historical scene. My opinions and my conclusions are based upon my on experience, and my own limited knowledge of history that I am very comfortable with, and they are entirely my own, but the people in this book are all real. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent.

My mother's father Ebrahim Vukelj was a young Ottoman officer when the empire fell in 1912. When he was captured while saving the life of Vojvoda Borichic, one of the officers of the victorious King Nicola of Montenegro, my Grandpa became a friend and favorite of the King, who was an Orthodox Catholic. Sometimes jokingly referred to as "Nicola's little Turk," my grandfather was able to remain one of the local aristocracy, and he had a fine farm from which he fed the armies of a succession of leaders and invaders who came through the passes surrounding the little valley where our village of Gusinje sits surrounded by the most beautiful mountains and rivers. At times because of the political feuds and wars the banks and the river have been covered with innocent blood, but even then the river looks so calm and peaceful if one can see the nature and beauty. In the calm flowing of the river one can for sure hear the voices and cries of the innocent souls the river has carried through the centuries at times all the way to the Black Sea. I wonder if the beautiful lush valley and the Trojan mountains will ever see the peace, which seems like even God himself has forgotten. For whatever reason, men have chosen to solve their differences with the sword and barrel of the gun. I have finally realized if we give ourselves a chance and an honest thought to communicate with honesty we wouldn't have a need to kill each other. Children would no longer be butchered, raped and thrown on wooden sticks, instead they would be playing and enjoying their parents at their farms to provide a home, which every child and human deserves with dignity.

Many years later my Grandpa would pay back the favors he had enjoyed by hiding the King in his own home while he was being pursued by the conquering Mussolini who just a few years earlier had invaded Ethiopia with his mighty fascist army which had no regards for the human life. Even then, the King of Ethiopia asked the United Nations for help to save his people from the butchery of the fascist army. They didn't lift a finger. It looks to me as if some members of the UN did not understand the consequences that would follow, just as it happened. Mussolini's ambition was to bring back Roman glory. Ten years later the only glory he received was by being left hanging upside down by his own people for betraying the loyalty of the people who entrusted the power to him which he got by overthrowing the King and Queen.

My grandfather was not pleased when his daughter chose to marry my father Halim Koljenovic. It was not that he did not like and respect the serious young man, but he knew that like one of his own sons, Halim was a Communist. He had managed to endure the fall of the Ottoman well enough, and more than one war since, but the idea of the idealistic authoritarian labor-union collectivism of Communism actually becoming the law of the land was not something he welcomed.

Ebrahim knew Halim had carried the burden of being the man of his family a long time, as his father Bajram Koljenovic while still young had died of malaria, a disease for which there was no cure then, in battle in the lush swamps of Bojana river in Albania. It was a serious blow to the family, as Bajram had been a strong leader and local hero first cousin of the great Ottoman officer and hero, Jafer Pasha Koljenovic, Governor of today's country on the shores of the Indian Ocean called Yemen. Jafer Pasha was decorated and ordained with a provincial coat of arms in his honor, as Governor of Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. Turkey has also named their military academy in his honor. My grandfather Bajram was already the "Godfather" of our kolektiv Zadruga, our organized extended family. This ancient family based social structure has long been the fundamental way of keeping order and justice in our culture. Always more powerful in the people's lives than the government, it is the real thing behind the stereotype which makes up the popular image of the mafia. It is about family duty, and about blood. Bajram, my Grandpa, was the man, the patriarch, his young age notwithstanding, and when his judgements were crossed, blood flowed. You can walk today right to the corner in Gusinje where he personally shot a man dead on Friday morning and then pulled a handkerchief out of his sash, wiped his revolver and then threw the white handkerchief on the man he had just killed, while everyone in town watched, all dressed up to shop and socialize. He was the man, and then he was gone, and it was all left to my father, Halim and his brother Halit.

Halim was one of the best educated young men in town, one who excelled in several local offices, and eventually became the Chief of Police. Like Ebrahim his father in law, he was good enough at his job that he kept it under a succession of changes of government. Though he was very influential in bringing to power his comrade Josip Broz Tito, he later fell out of favor with the party, taken as a threat intellectually who was capable of growing in the ranks of the Communist party. No wonder some members that he himself had installed in positions have burned the rug under his feet and accused him of favoring Stalinism over Titoism. That cost him five years on the rock island prison called Goli Otok, the Naked Island, at the north Adriatic Ocean where blistering cold winds are known to exceed sixty miles per hour. One may expect weather like that in winter at times for three of four months at a time. The summers are hot and almost unbearable, and you could fry an egg on any exposed metal surface at any given time of day. One cannot imagine being imprisoned in such a place with no place to hide from the sun nor the blistering cold in winter. If I were looking for a place to show you hell on earth there would be no need to travel any farther than Naked Island. There is where my father had paid a price and his faith had been decided. Among my earliest memories is watching him being dragged from his bed by armed men, officers of the same party he had devoted his life to creating, soldiers of the same local bureaucracy and militia that he himself had organized and run.

While he was away in prison, and when he came home to take a menial job, I grew up watching the insensitive and implacable machinery of the Communist state being manipulated by the greedy and the vindictive so as to gradually strip away all that we had, reducing us from a strong self-supporting family to a subsistence client of the state. All that was good and right and healthy about the life we had lived was destroyed. When my mother died while being shuffled through the endless and expensive process of seeking and suffering the communist state's "free" medical treatment -- which apparently did not apply for my mother because of the political persecution of my father -- I resolved that I would free myself of that life one day. I promised myself I would find a place where the job of the government was to help people create good lives for themselves, and then to let them live those lives, a place where it didn't matter if you were a Muslim or a Jew, or a monkey worshipper, you weren't going to get rounded up and shot for it.

It didn't take me long to find such a place. As a young soldier in the Army of Yugoslavia, I was trained as a commando, and then after being wounded, I served in a staff office of Topcider in Belgrade working among Tito's favorite generals, including Ljubichic General Isidor Papa, where I got a quick education in the realities of world politics. After my tour of duty in the military I went to live in Italy and took a job and discovered the vast world of trade and power which lies along or beyond such boundaries as governments and laws, respecting none. Though I saw quite a bit of the world, and I had friends and family in many places, it was clear to me that only one place offered me the potential, the opportunity, and the freedom to fulfill my dreams, and that place was the United States of America. I was right.

I boarded a Pan Am jet at Lido di Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome at Fiumicino Airport, set in beautiful lush meadows near the banks of the Tiber River. My first grand American experience was eight hours later after landing in New York City at Kennedy airport, a quick tour by my friend in a brand new 1971 Le Mans Pontiac to see Grand Concourse Avenue and of course Yankee Stadium and New York national monuments as well as forty second street and Broadway. With the thrill that I had already, what I saw there was a little man with deformed feet, heels in the front and toes in the back. I drifted for the moment in my soul and my heart to my father's home in Montenegro. My elderly Grandmother used to tell me stories of such a little man with deformed feet, who was made to dance in circles by demons. Even with all the people around me and all the pleasure I was having at that moment I found myself alone and my heart was beating in my chest. I wanted to be back in that wonderful old kitchen room, next to that wooden stove and my sweet Grandmother drinking Turkish coffee with her. I realized that was not possible. I have chosen a new life on my own. There in New York I saw just such a little man, a simple man with a little problem of deformity, and he looked so happy and cheerful I wanted to know his name. I introduced myself and I couldn't help looking at his feet. Without hesitation, in a very polite language he asked me not to worry or be sorry, he is just fine the way he is and told me that his ancestors are from Italy, although he does not speak the language. "Please permit me to call you my giant little friend," I said, "big in heart and small in body. You have just brightened my day, beyond my expectations."

He told me his name was Julio and he lived in Forest Hills, just across the park onear Yellowstone and Queens Boulevard, and he invited me to come and say hello at the Italian Restaurant, Tutto Bene. He told me not to worry, as to know New York is to know America. I didn't fully understand at that moment what he was trying to tell me, but I eventually understood he meant I should immerse myself in the life of New York, to learn to think quick, to think American, and to set my sights high. So I set myself to fulfill the promise of the phrase I heard them say, "Go West, young man." I soon found the open space and opportunity of the new frontier, and I knew I had been right for dreaming about America.

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