Cultural Learnings of Bahrain for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of United States
Homeland Security doesn’t have to start at Home.
In early 2013, I volunteered for a one year deployment to United States Coast Guard Patrol Forces Southwest Asia, based in Manama, Bahrain. After a couple of training detours at Fort Huachuca, Arizona and the Academi (former Blackwater) facility in northeastern North Carolina, I boarded a 14 hour, mid-June flight from Dulles International Airport to the tiny Arabian Gulf island just off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
I’m not going to get into detail about what my actual job “over there” entailed. Suffice it to say, I got to interact with the coast guards and navies of most of our Arabian Gulf allies. I was able to meet and have tea (and fresh dates!) with the leadership of a major Saudi Arabian naval base. I had brunch, traded sea stories (and a vodka shot or three) with a Kazakh Navy Captain in town for a professional exchange, who recalled his early days in the Soviet Navy.
I’ll be honest. Before living in Manama for a year, I held some of the typical American biases towards Muslims, or at least towards the Middle East. While I’d heard from others who had lived and worked in Manama that it was as safe as your average US city, and with most of the typical amenities and lifestyle perks, I still wondered. Bahrain experienced its own uprising during the Arab Spring, and a low-level Shia insurgency, replete with (usually, but not always) harmless Improvised Explosive Devices, tire fires, and the occasional skirmish between government security forces and protesters. But the unsafe stuff usually always happened in the same neighborhoods (that were off limits to us) and contrary to what you might think, Americans, even obviously American military members were never targets.
Yet I approached each interaction, while professional or recreational, with the knowledge that I was an American military member working and living in a region where my country’s presence, while tolerated, was not necessarily welcome. Which as I saw it, made each conversation, brunch, or business transaction important. Not only because it was sometimes my job, but because I knew that even after over a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, a very small percentage of Americans regularly lived and/or worked in the Middle East. Very few Americans lived in a Middle Eastern city, shopped at the local grocery store, haggled at the local souq (imagine a flea market on steroids with better stuff), and regularly ate at local restaurants. I didn’t live on a base or fortified compound. I lived in a hi-rise in town. One block from the Grand Mosque, in fact.
This was my chance, however fleeting and for only a few moments at a time, to present to another culture that I was a pretty regular guy all things considered. I respected their culture and I was willing to learn and at least try to put my biases aside. I’m not saying I made any lifelong friendships, or single handedly turned a vulnerable person away from jihad, but I at least gave them a living breathing counter example to a negative image of Americans someone else in their lives might by trying to sell them. Even stateside, you never really know who you’re dealing with and what their past experiences with people like you have been, and it usually pays to never assume anything.
I tried to do little things that cost me nothing but that might be remembered by your average Bahraini or Saudi. Little stuff like kicking a soccer ball around with some of the kids from the neighborhood when I had a moment. Or trying (and mostly failing) to learn a few words in Arabic to order my food, or at least say “please” and “thanks.” Or even joking with the Afghani rug dealer at the souq who was about my age about married life and all the ways in which guys just can’t win.
During my daily jogs, I’d sometimes see this guy (in the photo) walking his horse. It’s not in every city you see a regular citizen taking his horse for a dip to cool off from the 120 degree heat. But I saw it all the time. I saw him often enough I looked forward to it and we’d throw each other a wave.
Granted, Bahrain may not be the “best” example here. Nearly 40 percent of the resident population is non-Bahraini and the British have been around for almost 200 years. Western military forces have been based on the island for decades, and Bahrain has not experienced the same U.S. military/host country tensions that have recently plagued the U.S. Navy and Japan.
The point is: Homeland Security (or Defense) doesn’t necessarily always have to occur at “home.” When you’re overseas, and especially if you’re living there for any amount of time, changing minds and attitudes via mundane everyday interactions, small-talk, or just regularly waving at a guy riding his horse all count for something…and usually cost you nothing. Countering someone else’s narrative about you or your country could be as simple as showing someone else that you’re not a cartoon villain and never were.
