Reported in Berlin, Germany, Jeffrey Jamaledine was hit with a bullet to his chin the blew out most of his jaw and almost killed him while he was deployed over in Iraq last year. The sacrafice is just something that comes with his job he says and that he would also go back into the line of duty the second he would be asked.
This is something that bothers his family, mainly his father. He serves in the U.S. Army as a German citizen, one of the 20,500 “green card warriors” in the army. Only last month he was aswarded U.S. citizenship, but he is keeping his German passport for now.
The thing that is bothering his father the most, Bashir Jamaleldine, is that he is fighting in such an unjust war because America went too far in the way of invading Iraq which is shared by a majority of Germans. He is hoping his son would snap out of his state of being and would go back to his “German roots”. “It would satisfy me more. Why he’s more American than a German, I don’t know,” he stated.
He also is upset that he went to Iraq. He says he only went over there to get this bullet. He also says that he wouldn’t have been wounded in such a manner, have had to spend a miserable time in the hospital, or be treated by a doctor when he could have been safe and happy at home with him and the rest of the family.
Shaking his head in an interveiw with the father, he added, “He is more American than German.” That, the 31-year-old U.S. army scout wearing a Stetson hat and Spurs proudly, made him laugh. He said that he has had many disagreements and countless fights on the deal and no matter what they say to each other, neither one changes their view.
The position that the father has is that he shouldn’t be fighting in Iraq, but trying to solve hunger in Africa. Africa is the place where he had immigrated to Germany from. No matter what the father says, the son will agree on one thing: his love for America is strong. When he was 18 and moved to America to go to college in Missouri he fell in love with the United States and the culture instantly. “You can go from rags to riches there. People still believe that. It is not something that has gotten lost,” he stated.
On September 11, 2001 this devoted man felt that it was his duty to go help his new country. “A small group of people (terrorists)-I felt-had a big influence on our way of life and that literally ticked me off,” he announced later on. He said his knowledge of knowing that he could join the U.S. army on his green card was an accident.
In 2007, he had to pay a huge price for his devotion to America. Pinned down in a firefight with the insurgents in Ramadi, he was shot in the face by the enemy.
They report that the left side of his jaw was shattered and now doctors in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany are trying to reconstruct his facial bones.
In America, he would be considered a hero and devoted, but back in his home country, it is the opposite. The German public incredibly oppose the Iraq War. They don’t mind the criticism. But it doesn’t matter to him, he will go fight again if he was given the chance.
He says he loves life and doesn’t want to die but would sacrifice himself if he got the chance to go back. He says he will do anything in his capacity as a human to stand up for what he believes in. His father, though, looks upon his son in disbelief to his son who is now an American citizen. He, Jeffrey, says he didn’t do it to rebel against his parents or go against being German, he says he did it to defend American Ideals.
“If we have people who want to change those ideals or take them away,” he stated,”then there are people like me or my platoon who stand up and fight for those ideals.”
In my opinion, I think he is doing the right thing by defending in what he believes in, but I think he might be taking it too far. I think he has served his time in defending his country and should try to settle the feud between his father and him. I also think that it is good to see that we have these kind of people willing to fight for America that aren’t even originally American.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/21/german.ussoldier/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/iraq-s27.shtml
I think it’s great that he loves a country he’s not even from enough to join their army. I think it’s good for at least some people to be non-conformist, so he shouldn’t necessarily have to be against the war just because the rest of his country is.