Fred Cohn
BLUE
My name is Mohamed Daoud bin Ladin. I have fought the Russians. I have sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden who, if he is a relative, is a very distant one. I have killed in war and been wounded in return. I have murdered over 200 people and maimed thousands more in the name of Allah. I am 23 years old and live underground in a room made entirely of poured concrete. I see no one but the silent guards. The lights are always on. I leave my cell once a day when they take me to a cage for one hour. There I am allowed to walk around and kick a ball against a wall. Afterward, I am allowed to shower. but they watch. I prefer not to shower as I do not want the guards to see me naked. I have not seen another Muslim for three years. I have never seen a naked woman.
I have not seen the sky in these three years. I remember it was blue.
I should have become a martyr and gone to paradise. Instead I reside in a hell made by humans. When I die, I do not know whether I will go to Paradise or burn in hell forever.
There are days when I know that the killings were justified. The target was military, a place where the Americans ran their operations in Africa. The embassy personnel consulted with godless regimes throughout the continent. They enforced sanctions in Iran. 500,000 Iranian children died of starvation. The Americans deserved to die in the name of Allah.
But I lived. I did not die in the explosion as was planned. At the final moment, I ran from the truck full of explosives. The bomb leveled the embassy and injured 5000 people in the neighborhood. 1000 were blinded. Others lost limbs. Many of the dead were unrecognizable and identified only through a distinctive piece of clothing. But I was safe. I cannot be sure that Allah approves. Still there are days when I feel that my actions were justified. There are days when I do not. There are more days when I do not know.
I go on hunger strikes to protest my living conditions, at least that is what I tell my jailers when they stick a tube down my throat to force feed me. Sometimes it is true. Other times it is not a hunger strike, it is a fast of contrition to assuage my guilt over the murder and maiming of non- combatants, of innocents.
I wake, I walk around my little cell. I stare out the small opening in my door in hopes of seeing some movement, a guard or some other prison functionary. I would even like to watch a rat. There are no rats in this place.
When I leave my cell for exercise, I am shackled hand and foot. On three occasions in the three years I have been here I have received visits, twice from my lawyer and once from a government agent seeking information. At these times, I was kept in chains behind a thick glass. There was no contact. It was only after these visits that I allowed myself to cry. The days are long, the boredom weighs heavily on me. The prison psychiatrist sends me pills without talking to me. Sometimes I take them. There are days I speak to the people who I killed. The days are awful. The nights are worse.
At night, I dream. I see the faces of the dead as I imagine them. They shout at me and berate me. I see the wounded with blood streaming from their eyes. They are silent. They stare at me, sightless. And still I have not seen the sky.
I miss my parents who cannot visit. I miss my friends and compatriots in the training camps of Afghanistan.
But I miss the sky most of all. I survive the isolation. I endure the restrictions. I pray seven times a day although they will not let me see the prison Imam, but I need, just once, to see the sky again.
There are nights when I am not visited by the dead and maimed. On those nights, I dream of blue.
Fred Cohn, a retired criminal defense lawyer and active cynic, resides in the mountains of Western North Carolina with a small, stubborn dog that refuses to be housebroken but laughs at his jokes. Mr. Cohn, who
has been accused by the few friends he has, of taking up the writing of fiction upon his retirement, demurs, insisting that he wrote fiction for his entire career,. His stories were called summations.