The Iranian


 

 

MIDDLE EAST

Straight talk
A very short story

April 3, 2003
The Iranian

The morning sun had just cleared the jagged black peaks of the Musandam peninsula when Abdullah took in a deep breath and pointed to a convoy of oil tankers below, still shrouded in the morning fog, with their runner lights still on. "Carlton," he said, "chances are that the oil in your furnace back home this winter will be in one of the dozens of these ships that pass through here each day." His right index finger attached to the end of a stretched-out arm, moved slowly like a giant dial, from left to right, sweeping across the Strait of Hormuz below. This is a body of water that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. It has served as the jugular vein of the industrial world, feeding it with the substance of modern life, oil. Some sixty percent of the world's seaborne petroleum goes through here.

Americans are not very keen on world geography, maybe because we are pretty much a world onto ourselves -- until something traumatic happens to our interests or people overseas. Then we go and look up the place, read about it, and become instant experts on the place and its people, sometimes more of an expert than the natives themselves. Mrs. Jackson, my fifth grade teacher at Abraham-Theodorus Public School, in Simsbury, Kansas, was a good example of this education-by-crisis method.

The way that Mrs. Jackson told it, she had been a survivor of the '73 Oil Crisis, when a bunch of Arab oil exporting countries decided to punish America's friendly policy toward Israel by not sending us oil. So Mrs. Jackson, then Penny Standish, a twenty-something student at Kansas State, had to put on an extra sweater, turn down the thermostat, drive less and slower, and cut down on the number of light bulbs that lit up her two bedroom townhouse like a shrine to the local power company. The crisis was also a time for opportunities: Her Uncle Bill was able to insulate his whole house and get a tax break from the government; then he turned to selling insulation and wrapping people's water-heaters. Under another Federal program, her other uncles, Bob, left Newton and went drilling for oil and gas in Oklahoma. In the Winter of 1972-73 then was when Mrs. Jackson had learned about the Strait of Hormuz.

According to Mrs. Jackson, as she taught us, Strait of Hormuz was more important than the other straits: So when we got to "strait talk," as she called it, in our geography-and-exploration unit, we skipped the straits of Magellan and Malaca. This created a sort of a stir in the community. The parents at the Tuesday evening's curriculum night wanted to know if Mrs. Jackson was out of her cotton-picking mind to stress the importance of a strait that nobody had heard about. Given the vitriol, one would think Mrs. Jackson had bucked up against Creationism or something. By the time the school committee could do anything about it, the class had moved to another unit, electricity.

Mrs. Jackson's strait talk also made it into our familyís dinner hours. My great uncle, Mike, was infuriated over Hormnuz-gate. He had fought in World War 2, Pacific Theater, as he used to announce at every Thanksgiving dinner. By his own count, which varied from year to year, he had passed through the Strait of Malaca some fifteen times, ferrying life-saving and essential cargo past Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Very few around the turkey table would openly disagree with Uncle Mike, on this or any other issue; I always agreed with him: it was the most efficient way to be excused from the table after three hours of butt-numbing ordeal.

Getting caught in the web of Uncle Mikeís captivating talk at Thanksgiving meant missing out on a lot of the other stuff. For one thing, there was the ball game. When Cousin Jeff would shut off the sound during commercials, we could hear the juicy details of Cousin Susan's melodramatic life, which the ladies dissected nearby with their soft whispers. Then there was Cousin Ferdinand, who never learned to develop an exit strategy when cornered by Uncle Mike. Every Thanksgiving, Ferdinand would fall into Uncle Mike's conversation trap and he did again at the height of Hormuz-gate. He decided to challenge Uncle Mike by declaring that, in his opinion, the Strait of Magellan was the most important strait in the history of mankind. Well, that sent Uncle Mike through the roof, and somehow Ferdinand miraculously managed an escape from the table with just a turkey's neck stuck in his ear.

Truth be told, as reported by my Aunt Sally, Uncle Mike's bias toward Malaca was psychotic. The strait, as she explained one night, connected Uncle Mike, in his idle years, to a time that he was young and purposeful, to a saga that caused him to suffer a great pain from a couple of superficial wounds. All this had developed in him an over-inflated moral authority which he lorded over the rest of the family, especially over my poor dad, who had the courage of his conviction to sit out the Vietnam War.

The only one in my family who could speak with any authority about the Strait of Hormuz was John Hermish, the one-time estranged husband of Cousin Susan. Some said that his constant volunteering for tours of duty to the Persian Gulf did-in their marriage. John believed that he was called upon by God to protect the blood-line of the greatest Christian nation on earth. No sacrifice was too great to that end: He quit his job at the local meat packing establishment, left Susan and their two-month-old daughter, and began his odyssey as a deck-hand on board the Panama, an oil-tanker, owned by the Kuwaitis but registered in Liberia; it used to transport oil from the Persian Gulf country of Kuwait to South Africa.

John's joining the crew of the Panama in the early 1980s coincided with the time that Iraq, an Arab country, and Iran, not an Arab country but with a small Arab population, were fighting each other. Kuwait, another Arab country, was on the side of Iraq. The Iranians, thinking that the money from the Kuwaiti oil was helping the Iraqis, decided to attack the Panama. John lost his right middle finger, reportedly as the price for waving obscenities, as was his manner. Nobody knew for sure. Five months later, when President Reagan ordered American naval protection for the Kuwaiti tankers, John somehow ended up as an ensign on one of the destroyers that were sent to patrol the waters near the Strait of Hormuz. That tour of duty was followed by another one in Bahrain, an archipelago in the southwestern corner of the Persian Gulf, home to America's Seventh Fleet. At the time of Desert Storm, in 1991, John ended up as gunner on a destroyer that rained missiles on Iraq during Desert Storm, the war in which America and her allies pushed out the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

Funny, John and Uncle Mike never argued about the straits. Had they, it would have been like fireworks. Maybe what had kept the peace between them was deterrence, the knowledge that either could inflict an equal and unacceptable degree of indignity on the other. Had they argued, my money would have been on Uncle Mike.

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