- After graduating high school, I was looking for a way out
of my quiet hometown in Northern California.
A military recruiter on campus told me that if I enlisted
they'd pay my college tuition, I get to travel the world,
and if I was lucky, I might get to blow some shit up
in a foreign country.
(audience laughing)
He sweetened the pot by saying
that he'd give me a $10,000 bonus
by extending a 3-year enlistment
to a short 6-year enlistment.
(audience laughing)
And $10,000 was a lot of money for a 19-year-old
so I was sold.
Now about six months after I finished my military training,
I found myself in a place called Kirkuk, Iraq
which is one of the largest oil fields on the planet.
It's also a hotbed of terrorism
and one of the most violent places on the planet.
My job there was to patrol the city
around the bases perimeter most days.
But some days I'd be posted at a front gate
or a checkpoint somewhere where I'd spend a dozen hours
patting down potential suicide bombers
just praying that I'd get to live another day.
Working those suicide gates
was like playing this sick lottery,
this Iraqi roulette that you didn't want to win.
And over the course of that year,
I knew a few guys that weren't so lucky.
But for every suicide bomber, for every enemy insurgent,
there were a thousand friendly faces in Kirkuk.
And one of those faces belonged to a teenager named Brahim.
Now, Brahim was one of a group of kids
that would follow us around while we were on patrol.
They'd ask us for candy, soda, magazines,
and want to talk American pop culture
and I entertained them all the time.
I loved having them around.
But some of the guys in my squad, not so much.
Because after all, we were in this war zone
where enemy combatants didn't wear uniforms.
But, in my heart I knew these kids weren't terrorists.
They were just trying to make the best
out of a bad situation, kind of like I was.
Brahim reminded me of my younger brother Rory, back home.
At the time they were both the same age, 16 or 17.
And they were both very mature for their age.
Rory, when he was growing up,
he would follow my friends and I around.
So by the time he was in high school,
he had this very adult sense of humor.
And although he was four years younger than me,
he was one of my best friends.
We did everything together.
And Brahim had that maturity about him too,
but for a different reason.
Obviously he grew up in a war zone
so by the time he was a teenager,
he'd experienced things that many of us
will never experience.
And I missed my brother a lot that year in Iraq.
And I think that Brahim filled this void for me
because he became like a little brother to me.
But while my brother was back home,
applying to colleges, going to prom,
getting dumped by girls, doing things that teenagers do.
Brahim was working as a janitor on a military installation
in a war zone.
And like an idiot, I asked him,
"Why aren't you going to school?
Couldn't that be a way out of here?"
And he looked at me and said,
"I don't have a school to go to. Ours was bombed out.
And it's been too dangerous to go back."
He said that he was biding time
until he was old enough to become an interpreter
for the US Military
because that's where the real money was he said.
You could make $200 a week.
See, the US military had this agreement with Iraqi nationals
that if they worked a certain amount of years
as an interpreter, when their contract was up,
they'd be given this special immigrant visa
to resettle in the United States,
but it was an incredibly dangerous job.
And at the height of the war,
we were losing an average of one interpreter a day.
But Brahim said that he understood the risks
and that he was willing to do anything
to help feed his family and to help end the war in Iraq.
Now, as our deployment went on,
I learned a lot of things about this kid.
We became really close.
You know, I learned how he was a sole provider
for his family in his house
that didn't have electricity most days.
It didn't have adequate plumbing,
so something as simple as personal hygiene
was this huge struggle.
And this broke my heart.
I felt partially responsible because after all
I was a cog in this war machine
that destroyed this kid's home country.
I knew I couldn't do much, but I wanted to do something.
So when I had a second, I went down to the mini-mart on base
and I bought him $20, maybe $30 worth of soap, shampoo,
deodorant, toothpaste, water, just the bare necessities.
And the next time I saw him,
I presented him this box of toiletries
and he looked at me with tears in his eyes
like I had just handed him the keys to a brand new house.
And it was an incredibly humbling experience.
And in that moment, I realized that I wanted to see
how he was living.
I wanted to see this country from a different point of view.
So one day I snuck off base
and he gave me a tour of the city.
We hailed taxis, hitched rides, walked for miles.
And all along the way,
he pointed out these historical landmarks.
He told me about the Citadel that was built 2000 years
before Jesus was born.
He pointed out the tomb
of the Prophet Daniel from the Bible.
He explained that we were walking around
in the oldest region in the history of human civilization.
And I could tell how proud of his culture he was.
It was incredible stuff.
I told him that Campbell, California, the town I'm from
is famous for inventing the fruit cup.
(audience laughing)
He didn't know what a fruit cup was. That's okay.
Towards the end of that day,
we went by a bazaar, this outdoor marketplace.
And we stopped for fresh baked bread and kebabs.
And I don't know if I'm romanticizing this meal in my head,
but to this day, I still think that that may be one
of the best meals I ever had.
And I remember asking Brahim how the bread was so good
even though it was so simple.
And he looked at me and he rolled his eyes.
And he said, "Because we invented bread."
(audience laughing)
It was a fair point. (audience laughing)
Towards the end of my deployment,
Brahim finally got his chance to be an interpreter
for the US military.
For me, this was bittersweet though.
On one hand, you know he might be able to provide
for his family,
but on the other hand,
I knew that he had just volunteered his own life.
I knew that he had volunteered for his own death
and that I was leaving him to die.
But there wasn't anything I could do about it.
And I wished him well, and I got on a plane back to America.
Now, when I got home, things were different.
I was different.
There was this ultra vigilant muscle memory that I have.
I remember walking, you know,
in Downtown San Jose with my friends
and I would look at rooftops and windows
searching for snipers.
Or I'd be at a gathering somewhere,
I'd be at a restaurant and I would look at the torso
of every single person that walked in the building
just to make sure that they didn't have
like a suicide vest on 'em,
which is second nature at that point.
And living like that can be hard.
It can make a person angry.
And my behavior was straining all of my relationships.
And I decided that maybe I needed a change of scenery.
So I packed my bags and I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.
Now, Phoenix isn't a place where I had any connections.
I didn't have any relatives or any friends or family there.
I just did a little research
and it was much cheaper than the Bay Area
and it was sunny all year round.
So it sounded great.
I got to Phoenix. I started a job.
I enrolled in college just to add some semblance
of normalcy into my life.
But things didn't get better.
In fact they got worse and over the next four or five years,
you know, I struggled with my mental health.
I struggled with drugs and alcohol.
I couldn't keep a job because I was in and out
of the court system.
And I was even homeless for a period.
But in between weekends in jail
and weekends in homeless shelters, I went to class.
I was a good student.
I ended up getting my college degree
and that opened some doors for me.
I got a nice job and things were looking up.
And then one Saturday morning,
I woke up to a dozen missed phone calls and text messages
which I thought was kind of odd.
And I called my mother back first
because her name was the first and the last on the list.
And when she picked up, there was this fear in her voice
that I'd never heard before.
And when she was able to collect herself,
she explained to me that my younger brother, Rory,
had been killed the night before in an attempted carjacking.
At first I didn't believe it
because things like that don't happen where I'm from.
And ironically, I had just purchased plane tickets
to fly home to spend the holidays with my brother.
Only now, I flew home to bury him.
I remember spending that Thanksgiving in a morgue.
And then a few days later, I spent my birthday
staring at his freshly engraved tombstone.
That Friday, when Rory was killed,
he was walking out of grocery store with his best friend.
You know, they were celebrating his new life.
He just got a new car, a new apartment, a new job.
He is starting his adult life.
And as he was sitting in his brand new BMW,
two men wearing ski masks brandishing firearms
ran up on him and they told him to get out.
But for whatever reason,
they didn't even give him a chance to comply.
And one of the men shot Rory
three times in the chest and face
as his best friend watched in horror
from the passenger seat.
And I know these details because I watched it.
I watched the high definition security camera footage
during his killer's trial.
I watched my brother take his last breath
and it's something I could see every time I close my eyes.
You know, I've been through a lot in Iraq.
I'd survived suicide attacks and mortar attacks
and sniper attacks,
but Rory's death caught me more off guard
than any roadside bomb in Iraq ever could.
I was destroyed.
I decided that I should move home to be closer to my family.
But before I could do that,
I'd have to go back to Arizona to pack up my apartment.
When I landed in Arizona, I got off the plane.
I exited the terminal and I remember thinking,
it was odd that the sky was gray
and that it was pouring rain.
I went straight down to the taxi stand
and got on the first taxi I saw.
And we were driving down the 202
and I wasn't feeling very conversational
but the taxi driver didn't know that.
So he started up that standard small talk,
"What do you do? Where you're from? Why are you here?"
That sort of thing.
And obviously I didn't want to talk
about my brother's murder so I half lied and said,
"Oh, I just got out of the military
a few years ago and I got this new job in California."
And when I said military,
he asked if I'd been anywhere special.
And I said, "Sure, I've been all over the world.
I was in Iraq for a year."
And when I said Iraq, his tone changed a little bit.
And he said, "I'm from Iraq."
And he said, "Where in Iraq were you stationed?"
And I said, "In the Northeast in city called Kirkuk."
And he paused, and he said, "I'm from Kirkuk."
And just as soon as the conversation started,
it was over and I knew something was wrong.
And I was thinking, "What just happened?"
Did I harm one of his loved ones
intentionally or unintentionally.
Or maybe he was like, really anti-war.
And you know, if he was, could I blame him?
And we sat there in silence for miles
and I could feel him staring at me in his rear view mirror.
And I was trying to avoid eye contact
by looking at my own window.
And it was at that moment,
that I saw that he'd passed our exit.
And now I was terrified.
I told him that he missed the exit and he didn't respond
and just took the next exit.
And when he got off, we went down a few blocks
and he just pulled the car over to the side of the road.
And now the red flags were going off.
I didn't know what he was thinking,
but I could see him gripping his steering wheel,
working up the guts to do something.
What he wanted to do? I didn't know.
But I didn't want to be there to find out.
So I grabbed my backpack. I kicked open the door.
But before I could get all the way out of the taxi
he grabbed my leg and he turned around and said,
"Hey Dylan, do you remember me?
It's me, Brahim."
And I looked at him,
probably like you're looking at me right now.
And I just didn't understand what was going on.
But he sat a foot taller, you know, his voice was deeper.
His English is better. He didn't have that goofy bowl cut.
But 7,500 miles away from Iraq,
there was this kid who had saved my life a lifetime ago.
We got out of the car and we were hugging
and sobbing in the pouring rain like this scene
in The Notebook or something. (audience laughing)
And he explained to me that when I left Iraq,
he was an interpreter for four years
and he finished his contract and got his visa.
And they asked him where he wanted to resettle.
And he said, he didn't know but he wanted to go somewhere
where the weather was like Iraq.
So they sent him to Phoenix, Arizona.
(audience laughing)
I had learned a lot of things
about survival in the military.
And there's a segment of training, it's POW training,
and one of the things they tell you
is that sometimes the pain can be unbearable
and life can look pretty grim
but you've got to look for these glimmers of hope
to keep you going, to keep you going that next day.
I think that that day on the side of the road in Arizona
was my glimmer of hope.
I lost one brother and I got another one back.
Thank you.