Tales From My Past - The Iranian Kid

When I was in eighth grade a new kid showed up. Being in a military town we got new kids all the time, but this one was different. He was thick and dark and was already working on a pretty decent mustache, and he looked at us with wide, suspicious eyes, like he was waiting for the worst but hoping for the best. He liked to play basketball - 'hoop' as he called it - even though he was a worse player than I was, which was saying something. He looked vaguely Mexican, at least in coloration, but his features were wrong for it. When we asked him, he said he was Persian.
   He was from Iran. It was August 1979.
   His name was Sayeed, and he understood math better than the math teacher. He spoke English with barely an accent, which was way more Farsi than I knew, and he wrote Arabic as kind of a parlor trick, because it went backwards on the page. He didn't care for football and its pads and solid hits, but he really wanted to try out for the basketball team, and maybe baseball if he learned how to play. He slowly stopped being the new kid and stopped being the zoo exhibit because of his foreign-ness and started just being one of us.
   Fast forward to November. Revolution in Iran. Students storm the US Embassy and take over fifty people hostage. It's the only thing on the news, video of young men who look remarkably like Sayeed chanting 'death to America.'
   In an instant Sayeed went from just another kid to representative for his entire country and spokesperson for the revolution. He endured abuse like I could never imagine, but he also enjoyed more sympathy and defense than thought twelve-year-olds capable of. I could imagine him bracing for a day at school, for the names, for the demands for an explanation, for the humiliating yet necessary teacher interventions, for the agonizing yet well-meant friendly gestures. No matter how bad I had it, I knew I didn't have it anything like Sayeed did.
   He finished out the school year and then his family moved back to Iran. I remember talking to him about it, and he was politicized to an extent that was foreign to me. He loved his country, and he and his family wanted to help make it better. So they went. That would have been May 1980.
   The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980.
   I remember watching TV and seeing bodies, men killed in some nameless part of the desert between the two countries. They looked like Sayeed. Just as young, with the beginnings of proud Persian mustaches that were never going to get bushy. The news said both sides, Iran and Iraq, conscripted boys as young as twelve. If you were big enough to hold a rifle, you got one.
   And it hit me. The kid who just wanted to 'shoot hoop,' and who could out-Algebra the Algebra teacher, might be dead. He was my age, fourteen, and he could be a corpse at that very moment. Or he could be sitting behind a stack of sand bags waiting for the enemy to come over the wall. And here I was worried about having the proper brand of shoes and whether I should buy a mum for one of the girls I liked. We were the same, he and I, and yet his path took him into a true life-or-death situation, while mine let me worry about zits and trying to get to first base.
   That was the first time I realized that life isn't fair. The truth hit me in the gut when I saw the lifeless eyes of boys my age, killed in some conflict they certainly didn't understand. The injustice of it made me cry, and the shame I felt made me turn off the TV.
   I don't know what happened to Sayeed. I hope he's alive and well and teaching his kids how to shoot hoop. But he was exactly the wrong age, and in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time for his survival to be anything but a lingering question.
   Ma salama, Sayeed.