Surrounded…

On the road in the Middle East, traveling with friends Jim and Paul, we stopped one afternoon in the town of Dera’a, Syria. We were all hungry and found a street vendor who made felafel sandwiches. The grizzled old fellow who sold us the food spoke perfect English. He told us of his youth in the 1920s when he was an administrator for British and French colonial offices. While we were talking I didn’t notice that Jim and Paul had backed away as a group of young Arab men appeared all around the felafel stand. 

Suddenly I was aware that I was surrounded by fifteen to twenty young men who appeared agitated. One of them stood at arm’s length directly in front of me and learning I was American proceeded in his accented English to harangue me about the ‘illegal’ Viet Nam War. This was the winter of 1967 when that war was in full fury. The young man went on to denounce the ‘Jewish occupation’ of Palestine. I tried to humor the guy but he wasn’t having any of it. As I’d been traveling in the Arab world for a few months I was gaining a sense of the culture – so very different from mine. And as the young firebrand amped up his rhetoric I could feel the occasion growing unstable. My knees began shaking and I wondered if anyone else was catching on to that. It seemed like things were going to turn violent. Fighting panic I kept trying to deflect, fearing my forced smile would crack into a grimace. 

Then I looked over across the street at our beat up old VW and saw that Jim had taken out his Super 8 movie camera and was filming the event. The Arabs saw this too and it may well have been the reason these guys didn’t put a beatdown on me, or worse.

Sensing a sea-change, I proceeded to speak in flowery terms about how I hoped they would return to their homeland and that I would never have to go to Viet Nam. This appeared to lower the tension and I proceeded to gently shoulder my way out of the crowd and over to the VW. A few of the young Arabs followed but said nothing more. Acting as if nothing was wrong, Jim, Paul and I got in the car and drove off without further incident. 

That evening we arrived at the Jordan-Iraq border station where we stayed the night. The accommodation was a caravansary, an enclosed courtyard where long-haul Arab truck drivers would rest from their journeys. These were older men, mostly Iraqis and Jordanians. In the dim light, as we spread our sleeping bags on the floor, I noticed kind glances from some of these fellows. The next morning a few of them shared their Turkish coffee with us before we all continued in our journeys. Long ago.