“It’s kind of like the Civil War, where brothers fought each other across the Mason-Dixon line. I don’t want to stain my faith, I don’t want to stain my fellow Muslims, and I also don’t want to stain my country’s flag.”
--Abdi Akgun, who joined the Marines in 2001, from LIndenhurst, New Jersey, and was haunted by the fear that he might kill innocent Iraqi citizens.
My family, all originally from western Kentucky, had members who fought on both sides of the Civil War. My grandmother, a landowner, tobacco farmer and schoolteacher who died nearly 45 years ago, told me that the family was permanently scarred by their differences and loyalties for an entire generation. Most of the men, she said, wouldn't talk about the war and what it did to them. The Muslim perspective differs little from that Christian perspective.
