My surprising neighbor

By John McKenna

SOUTH PASADENA, California—For 18 years, Hani and Rose Qubain have lived quietly in South Pasadena.

Three years ago, my wife, Mickey, and I moved a few doors from them. For two years, we had a few conversations with them, mostly about the flowers in the yards and the good weather we enjoy in California. They appeared to us as a nice elderly couple who belong, we might say, to the quiet in the land.

From left: John McKenna, Rose and Hani Qubain
and Mickey McKenna.

One day, however, Mickey learned from Rose that Hani, retired from the aerospace industry and a quality control engineer on the Galileo Project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was scheduled to go to Iraq as a linguist for the Department of Defense. She could hardly believe her ears. It was a long way from anything that Hani appeared to us to be.

Now, after a year in Iraq, he has returned from his service among the Coalition Forces. Rose and her sons put up balloons and threw a party for him. We were invited to sit down with Hani and Rose and to listen to him tell of his experiences interrogating terrorists, informers and other detainees, and translating tons of paper and media materials discovered in the deserts of Iraq, at Baghdad, Arbil and Qatar.

Hani was born in Jordan. His parents were clothiers. His mother had been trained by Quakers in Rumallah, but was raised a Greek Orthodox. His father was Roman Catholic.

As a young man, Hani was sent to school in Jordan with King Hussein and other young men from prominent families, then sent to Roosevelt High School for English in Washington, D.C., after which he spent four years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a year in Berlin, and finally he moved to California, where he graduated from California State University at Los Angeles and became involved with our aerospace industry.

He speaks five languages, Arabic, Italian and English fluently, German and Spanish moderately. Because of this, when the call for linguists went out from the Pentagon for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Hani wanted to serve his country. He soon joined the Iraq Survey Group (ISG).

He was sent for a week to Texas, where he learned to fire his weapon, to Washington, D.C., for his clearances, and then to Kuwait. After spending 40 days in a desert camp waiting for the war to begin, he convoyed with the Iraq Survey Group to Baghdad, passing Abraham’s Palace at Talil. The group lived in a palace abandoned after Saddam’s defeat, without water or electricity. They questioned all kinds of people, informers and prisoners, in order to serve the cause of the operation.

From Baghdad, Hani spent three months at Arbil, the city of four gods, where he experienced the bombing of the offices of the ISG while looking for mass graves and where he continued his interrogations and translating.

Then he went to Qatar, where he directed a team working on media matters, and where he saw firsthand some of the degradation inherent in the former tyrant’s secret life-styles. At Qatar, his assignment ended.

Hani speaks with a soft voice in thoughtful tones. He speaks of Saddam’s rhetorical bluffs as a tyrant, his delusions of grandeur, and of the even greater relief that came when President George Bush finally toppled this tyrant’s reign of terror over the people of Iraq. The Arabs, he assures us, want peace and freedom from religious wars. He claims that the Coalition Forces have given hope for the realization of the kind of stability for which all the peoples of the region long.

He tells us, with his soft smile, that George Bush is the best thing to have happened to Iraq since the discovery of oil, and he wishes that the President would appoint educated and aware linguists to interact with high target Iraqi prisoners, including Saddam himself, to bring them to see the benefits of freedom, democracy and capitalism, with a full understanding of the pathos and passions of the Arab mind. Can we imagine an Iraq with a constitution that guarantees the people equality and human rights, he asks.

But even more eloquently, Hani speaks to us about his nights alone in the dusty deserts of the land. He felt, he said, that he could draw near to God there more than at any other time in his life. He became deeply impressed with the power of evil in the world, he said, in a way that made his spine tingle cold even in the midst of the hot days. But he also said that he felt, quite profoundly, the peace of the Lord settling down in the depths of his soul.

Mickey and I sat in the little living room with Hani, listening to him in silence, a silence that nearly took our breath away. How could we have ever guessed that our neighbor was this great and humble man of God?

Now when we wave to Rose and Hani in the mornings, we see far more than just a nice elderly couple living next door to us.

Now, we have learned that Hani has chosen to return for another assignment with the Department of Defense in Iraq.

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