Love
Across The Lines
By Julian Borger
The
Guardian
11 February, 2004
Saddam
Hussein is reputed to be a big Shakespeare fan. He particularly likes
The Taming of the Shrew and, more oddly, Romeo and Juliet. For some
reason, the ex-dictator believes the tale of the star-crossed lovers
teaches children obedience to nation and family. In that case, Saddam
must deplore Sean Blackwell and his wife Ehda'a's version of the love
story, about which he may even have read before his capture. For a while,
they were all over the press - the American sergeant and the Iraqi doctor
whose impulsive love affair and speedy marriage briefly united the US
army and the nationalist resistance in sheer irritation.
Following their
wedding, the US army confined Blackwell to base, stopped him seeing
his bride and kicked him out of the military and all the way back home
to Florida. Meanwhile in Baghdad, Ehda'a's life was threatened and she
still fears for her family, whose name we consequently may not use.
But this particular
story of love across the divide looks like it may have a happy outcome.
The pair - who have not seen each other since a 20-minute wedding ceremony
last August - are due to be reunited this weekend in the Jordanian capital,
Amman. After a long struggle with prejudice and military bureaucracy,
they will at last be together - bride, groom and the American television
documentary team that has been recording every step of their travails.
Yet without the
aggressive but sentimental glare of network television, the army might
not have let Blackwell go so easily. At one point he even came close
to being court-martialled - "for falling in love", as Vickie
McKee, Blackwell's mother back in the Florida panhandle, always puts
it. It was only after McKee and a local lawyer, Richard Alvoid, made
the story world news that the army backed down on the threat of a court
martial and dishonourable discharge. Blackwell was given a written reprimand
- which he now paraphrases as: "You did this. We told you not to.
Bad you" - and given an early ticket out of Iraq.
The story made headlines
not just because it was a tale of romantic love on the front line. It
also said a lot about Iraq's new occupiers and how they viewed the people
they had declared liberated. It was last May, about a month after the
fall of Baghdad, that Edhaa, 25, presented herself at the ministry of
health, offering her services as a trained doctor at a time when the
hospitals were on the point of collapse. She wanted to get out of Qut,
the Baghdad satellite town where she was working and where educated,
western-dressed women were under threat from resurgent Islamic militants.
The American administrators
at the ministry did not want to know. But the sergeant in charge of
security at the gate seemed pleasant and helpful. His name, as it turned
out, was Sean Blackwell. He was 27 years old and in Iraq pretty much
by accident. He had left the army in late 2002, and signed up with the
Florida National Guard (the equivalent of the Territorial Army) thinking
it would be a question of "barbecue and beers" a couple of
times a month, and free tuition. He had planned to get a degree in nutrition
rather than go to war. But a month after he signed up with the guard
he received his deployment orders and found himself manning the gates
of the Iraqi ministry of health four months later.
"He was the
first American I had the chance to meet," says Ehda'a in a telephone
interview from Baghdad. "He was very handsome with very nice eyes.
He was trying his best to help." Blackwell had an idea about how
she might find a job. There was some money set aside for clinics run
jointly by army medics and local doctors, and there was a shortage of
women doctors to examine women patients. In the end, the job did not
work out - the army surgeon apparently did not want to work with an
Iraqi - but at least it got the couple talking.
"It was kind
of funny, I kind of flustered her," says Blackwell, at home outside
Pensacola, Florida. "She was telling me [a story], like: 'They
want to kidnap me' [referring to the fundamentalists in Qud] and I just
kind of smiled and said, 'Well, I can't blame them.' She said: 'What?'
and I said, 'I'd kidnap you.' I was just flirting with her. She got
a little flustered and forgot how to speak English, and started talking
to my interpreter in Arabic and he was translating for her, and then
she started speaking English again. She was a little embarrassed. Open
flirtation like that... well, it's a big no-no actually over there.
But... it happened to work. That was basically it about how we met,
and she just continued to visit every two to three days for the next
four months."
Ehda'a would bring
him food and talk to his friends. The way she tells it, it was as coy
as a first encounter at the school gates. "After a few times we
met, the translator was saying, 'What did you do to him? He spent all
night asking about you and asking how to say [your] name.' "
For their first
date, Blackwell took Ehda'a somewhere he knew would take her breath
away - Saddam's palace. "It was a great day," says Ehda'a,
in effusive English. "It was just like palaces of ancient ages."
But she also felt sad. "Iraq is a very rich country and we in Iraq
should live like everybody else, but Saddam took all the money because
of his delusions of grandeur."
They talked about
their families and found out that they had both been abandoned by their
fathers as toddlers, and both were anxious to build stronger families.
Blackwell's first marriage had collapsed and he had two daughters by
two different women, but he insisted he was ready to start again.
Three months after
their palace date, Blackwell - fed up with dating across the razor-wire
- was already thinking about getting married. "It just felt like
the right thing to do," he says now. "It was something that
was more than us. I didn't want to give up something like that."
"He doesn't
make plans," McKee adds by way of explanation.
Ehda'a says simply:
"We just fell in love. We couldn't help it. We are willing to do
whatever we have to do."
That initially involved
Blackwell arranging to see Ehda'a's mother and brother, asking their
permission, and then converting to Islam in an Iraqi court. But the
army was a tougher nut to crack. Blackwell's commanding officer in the
First Armoured Division, Colonel Thad Hill, was not about to let him
marry.
"I'd been pushing
for a meeting with him to try and come up with some sort of compromise,
but he kept blowing me," says Blackwell. "I did get to speak
to the sergeant-major prior to the wedding. His reaction was somewhat
racist - 'Have you thought about your lives together, what they eat,
the clothes they wear, the way they worship' - talking about Muslims."
Blackwell told the sergeant-major he had already converted to Islam.
"Oh Jeez, he just about fell out of his chair. It wasn't very well
received and he basically told me that he battalion commander felt the
same way."
But Blackwell ignored
the views of his superior officers and went ahead with his plans. He
and Ehda'a arranged to marry in a small garden behind a restaurant in
the Baghdad district of Wasiriyah, during a break in one of the groom's
patrols. His fellow soldiers stood guard with their rifles and a heavy
machine gun.
It all happened
very fast. Ehda'a, in a floral dress, was so nervous that she offered
Blackwell her right hand by mistake. Blackwell, who wore combat fatigues,
claims to have taken it all in his stride. "You're already in Baghdad
so you're in sensory overload as it is, so I don't think nervousness
was ever a factor."
(Another soldier
in Blackwell's unit, a 37-year-old corporal, Brett Dagen, announced
he was going to marry too - a friend of Ehda'a's. The two couples exchanged
vows side by side, but days later that marriage dissolved.)
When Col Hill found
out about the marriage, he hit the roof, and threatened to court-martial
Blackwell for putting his fellow soldiers in danger by giving away the
time and place of the patrol. It is a charge the former sergeant fiercely
denies. He argues that his daily patrol, checking on supplies at petrol
stations, was already regular and predictable. He also says Ehda'a's
family and the judge did not know the venue for the wedding until the
last moment, when they were fetched by an interpreter. As for Ehda'a,
he says, she is trusted to mingle with and translate for senior members
of the occupation authority.
The army has refused
to comment on the case, but under press scrutiny it withdrew the most
serious charges against Blackwell, and issued a watered-down reprimand
instead. But while Blackwell was tussling with the army, Ehda'a had
to deal with an increasingly violent and hostile atmosphere in her neighbourhood.
Blackwell describes one incident in which she was approached as she
left his base by taxi. "Some guys pulled her over and got out,
and said if they ever saw her come out of our compound again dressed
the way she was they would kill her," he says. There were more
incidents like that, and he pleaded with her to lock herself in her
house, but she insisted on continuing to work as a translator. Many
of Ehda'a's friends have rejected her or tried to convince her to end
the marriage.
Blackwell's experience
has left him bitterly disullusioned with both the army and the politicians
who sent him to Baghdad. For him, the lies he says the army told about
his wedding mirror the ones the nation was told about the war. "When
I first joined the military I planned to stay in for life, and I always
knew the government would - I don't want to say lie - maybe exaggerate
some things or stretch the truth a little but I always thought it was
for the better good of the people," he says. "But in this
situation I don't think it was."
Now, at least, the
couple hope their trials are almost over. Blackwell has negotiated his
army discharge and Ehda'a has secured a visa as far as Jordan. The US
state department has told them they might get a US visa in as little
as a month.
As soon as they
get to America, he is going to take his bride on a tour of some states,
show her pictures of others, and let her choose where she would like
to live. He thinks the Florida panhandle might be a little too "redneck"
for her. He will study nutrition and she will get her US medical qualifications.
And they are going to have another wedding, barefoot on the beach on
Florida's Gulf coast.