by Derek Farwell
Columnist

During my time in the Army I made a lot of great life-long friends. Friends that I know through shared experiences would give their lives for me, and they knew that I’d do the same for them. Since I served on active duty they lived all around the country as opposed to National Guard units who are all generally located within the same area of the state. I like this because there aren’t many places in the country where I don’t have a friend. However, one of my best friends from my time in the army was not an American, he was an Iraqi. He was our interpreter, and we called him Frank.

Frank was born in Baghdad and grew up in Iraq. He has possibly the most interesting life story I’ve ever heard. College educated with a degree in the financial area, he speaks Arabic, French, Italian, and English. Because he couldn’t find any work due to the conditions in Iraq and because his main goal in life was to leave Iraq and become an American citizen he made the risky decision to become an interpreter for the Army. That was a very risky choice because one of the things the al-Quaida fighters would do is get the identity of the interpreters and then kill their families. This happened to Frank. While he was working with us, his brother was shot and killed. Prior to this, Frank had been pretty much abandoned by his family not because he was a Sunni Muslim, but because he fell in love and wanted to marry a Shi’ite Muslim woman and his family really wanted nothing to do with him anymore. He ended up not marrying her, so in retrospect maybe that wasn’t his wisest decision.

I first met Frank when we arrived in Baghdad and he was assigned to work with my platoon. We always had to be skeptical of our interpreters because many of them can be bought by the bad guys to provide information about our activities to the terrorists. It didn’t take long for us to realize that Frank was truly a good man. He was someone who had a lot to gain or lose by the outcome of us being in Iraq and he was risking more than any of us by being a civilian contractor with the Army. As time went on and we got to know Frank more, we trusted him enough to let him carry a weapon when we were out on missions. We couldn’t issue him a military weapon, so whenever we confiscated a weapon he would get it. So Frank usually carried a rusty old 9mm pistol that needed to be unloaded and reloaded after every time it was fired, and more for our entertainment, every time we found an RPG launcher we’d give it to him to carry around as his weapon. So, Frank would walk down the street with a big rocket launcher strapped across his back.

As a civilian contractor Frank was not entitled to the same benefits as us soldiers were. During his time as an interpreter he could have potentially been awarded two Purple Hearts for injuries he sustained during combat if he was eligible to receive military awards. He was blown up twice in IED attacks and by our side all the time. He went through the worst of the bad times and the best of the good times with us and did his job through it all. Throughout all of this, Frank became one of my best friends and one of those friends that I mentioned before who would give his life for me if necessary.

In the end Frank got his American citizenship and moved to the US about 3 years ago. He still carries the physical scars from his time as an interpreter and has had multiple surgeries on his ears to fix them as both his eardrums were blown out. Because he was a civilian contractor, he isn’t entitled to care at the VA Hospital and because of this I’ve written numerous letters to Congressmen in Texas to share my thoughts about that policy without much success, or so much as a response for that matter. I still keep in contact with Frank and every time I talk to him he happily says, “Derek, my brother, how are you?” and it makes me happy every time. He sacrificed more than most in the military, and in the end he saw his dream of becoming an American citizen come true. I couldn’t possibly be more happy for Frank, my Iraqi brother.