the spirit of aggieland

In 1993 my cousin Ali and his wife Nada were able to get out of Iraq and come to the United States. Their first stop was our house in a Dallas suburb, just twenty minutes from D/FW Airport. We had only been sitting in the living room a few minutes when a plane loudly took off overhead. Having grown up with this sound I didn’t even notice. But Nada’s face became pale and she almost fell from the sofa to the floor. I asked her what was wrong. “That plane,” she quietly said. “For so long now whenever we hear a plane we know it is an F-16 coming to drop bombs and we must go for cover."

Last week my parents and grandmother (she’s almost 96!) came up to Wilmore to spend Thanksgiving with us. We ate lots of food all week, spent some time with my cousins Ali and Nada and their children in Ohio, were given a grand tour of a Sheiks horse farm, and celebrated the most important of Thanksgiving traditions... watching football.

This year was the 102nd game between the University of Texas and Texas A&M. As far as rivalries go, this is one of the oldest and best. Everyone in the Lone Star State picks a side, and I have always sided with the Aggies.

Both my father and I are Aggies. After earning degrees at Baghdad University and the University of London, my father applied to PhD programs at both Texas and Texas A&M. The Aggies sent him an acceptance letter first, and so it was off to College Station. I was born during my dad’s last year there, and he always blamed my Aggie devotion on the fact that “the first milk I ever drank was from Aggieland.”

Aggieland was the only place I ever wanted to go to school. It was a dream, a fantasy… and it came true: Omar Al-Rikabi, Fightin’ Texas Aggie Class of ’96.

The third largest university in the country (43,000 students) Texas A&M is a school unmatched in tradition and spirit, and football is the church where it all comes together. Every game begins with the student body singing: Some may boast of spirit bold/ Of a school they think so grand/ But there’s a spirit can n’er be told/ It’s the Spirit of Aggieland! Most of the traditions are rooted in a time when the school was all male, all white, and all military. This history and tradition is one of the greatest strengths, and at the same time the greatest weakness of Aggieland.

In the early ‘70s, foreigners like my father didn’t fit in, and weren’t treated very well. During his time there the school had only allowed non-military and women as students for less than a decade.

Texas A&M has always seemed to take a little longer than most to catch up to the times, and I often think they are guilty of taking two steps forward, and even two steps back. One time I was cutting through campus near the Memorial Student Center and ran into a "straight pride" parade. To this day there is still a major racism problem there.

Around the time the war started my friend Abbey was a student there, and she was helping a friend with his campaign for student body president. One day he set up a huge “card for the troops” for people to sign, and Abbey volunteered for a three hour management shift. The card was set up next to the Quad, the area on campus that houses the military students, the Corps of Cadets.

She left her post after 45 minutes because she grew tired of the comments people were saying and writing: Leave nothing but oil wells. Kill ‘em all. Blow away Baghdad. Kill all those f***ing Arabs.

That next football season, I came back to campus for a game. After the national anthem there is always some sort of military “fly over.” This time a formation of Air Force F-16s roared over the stadium. Later, during a time-out, the announcer called our attention to the field where the pilots were introduced. At one point the actual number of tons of bombs this very group had dropped over Baghdad was announced, and the place went crazy. Now Aggieland has a reputation for having one of the loudest stadium crowds in the country, but never in my all my years of football games had I ever heard this stadium cheer that loudly. There was a sort of excitement… almost a euphoria about it.

I thought about my cousins still in Iraq... the ones who lived close enough to Saddam's palaces to see and feel the bombs that first night of "shock and awe." I wondered if my family ran for cover from the bombs these men standing in front of me had dropped. How could I cheer along with this?

I remain bothered by that moment. It was bad enough that they were cheering for an unjust war. War is hell, and even if the reasons for it are completely justified there is supposed to be a certain amount of sobriety to the conflict. No matter the means or the ends, humans (many of them innocent) are being killed and maimed in war. I once remember hearing a WWII submariner tell about how his crew would never cheer when the sunk an enemy sub because they knew what horror those men were going through, and what pain their families would bear.

But here I was, witnessing over 80,000 civilian and military Aggies become giddy over the methods of war, almost as if it were a national pastime. My Aggie zeal burned out then. I tried to hold on to it… but last Thursday I found myself telling my good friend and Longhorn fan, Afshin, that I didn’t really care who won.

I still love Aggieland. In a sense it is home and family. But I am beyond disappointed. I took off my class ring a long time ago. It just has too many pro-war symbols, and stands for an institution I can’t agree with anymore. The longer this war has gone on, and the more death and destruction that has occured because of a failed war plan that was greated with such excitement and euphoria, the less pride I have in my alma mater.

Now the President of Texas A&M, Robert Gates, has been tapped to be the new Secretary of Defense. His mandate is to bring a fresh view on the war and to try and fix what Rumsfeld broke. I hope and pray that he does not embody the spirit of Aggieland… for if he does than there is no hope for repentance and a new direction in Iraq.

“Any soldier worth his salt should be anti-war.”
General Norman Schwarzkopf
Commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq 1990-91