Departure

Departure

Iran had been under martial law since early August, and now, in early November, 1978, things were falling apart.

“No one is answering the phone at Pan Am, or Iran Air either.” Manouchehr’s mother had been trying for hours to get information about flights leaving Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. Every few minutes we heard small arms fire, and there were occasional volleys from machine guns. Dusk was settling into night.

In his mother’s house in Tehran, my friend Manouchehr, his uncle and I sat cross-legged on cushions around a brass brazier, its cherry-red charcoal keeping a pot of tea hot. The floor was covered with tribal carpets, and there were pillows and bolsters all around. The walls were a soft yellow, hung with Persian miniatures, and an old studio photograph of Manouchehr’s grandparents. The smell of opium hovered, sweet and comforting. Manouchehr’s mother occasionally threw a few chunks of frankincense resin onto the hot charcoal, and a burst of smoke would swirl up, perfuming the room with its spicy scent. She and his sister stood behind, bringing us fruit, stuffed grape leaves, morsels of grilled lamb, almond brittle with saffron, and tea, always fresh tea. 

I had a ticket for Pan Am’s flight to Paris, scheduled to depart at 8:30 the next morning.

 “Amu joon,” Manouchehr addressed his uncle, who had offered to drive me to the airport. “When do you think you should leave?”

“Truly, I don’t know. I can’t imagine flights would leave early, before they’re scheduled. The streets are uncertain.”

“I’ve heard the airport is a madhouse,” said Manouchehr. “Flights might just take off when they’re full.”

“God knows what will happen.”

“Agha, I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” I said. The drive from Isfahan the day before had been nerve-wracking. Here and there cars were turned on their sides, thick black smoke billowing around dirty orange flames. The smell of burning rubber, plastic, and oil stung my nostrils, even though we kept the windows closed. It was never clear whether the next intersection would be passable, if nervous young soldiers would pay attention to where their rifles were aimed. Their fingers twitched on the trigger, and I doubted they knew if the safety was on or off. 

“It is nothing. My car is an old Mercedes, but it runs well. No one will pay any attention to us.”

At midnight I said good-bye to Manouchehr, his mother, and his sister. I had known them for nearly a decade. He and I hugged for a long time, saying nothing. The press of our bodies carried many memories, and we were locking them in, come what may. We knew that the Shah would soon be gone. We had high hopes for what that would mean for the country. I remembered that five years before, Manouchehr had told me people were smuggling in casette tapes of Khomeini’s speeches attacking the Shah. Being caught with one of these tapes would lead to interrogation and probably torture by SAVAK, the secret police. That wasn’t true now. Everyone in the Shah’s government was scrambling to save his own hide. Khomeini’s return was certain. From Paris, Khomeini said he would stay clear of politics, but it wasn’t clear what that meant.

I had first come to Iran in 1964, to visit my parents in Shiraz and spend part of the summer with one of the Qashqai tribes in their summer quarters, high in the Zagros Mountains. On that first trip from New York, the Shah and his family had taken over the first-class section of the plane I was on. A few years later, he had his own Boeing 747. Now his time was up.

In the spring of 1976, a small company in Eugene, Oregon offered me a job as co-general manager of a construction project in Shahinshahr, a small town just north of Isfahan in the center of Iran. The project involved building 500 houses, mostly duplexes, for the Central Mortgage Bank of Iran. Component Builders Inc. (CBI) didn’t hire me because of my management track record – I had none. They hired me because I had lived in Iran for several years, and spoke Farsi, Iran’s national language, reasonably well.

The transformation since 1974, the last time I’d been in Iran, was astonishing. Grumman Aircraft and Bell Helicopter International had huge contracts with the Iranian government, and had brought thousands of technicians and their families to live and work there. They formed a ‘second city,’ a transparent overlay of bus routes, restaurants, stores, and schools built on top of the magnificnt old city. All of it just for American ex-pats, many of whom had come directly from Thailand or Taiwan.

Fourth of July was a great holiday for this American assemblage. Food tents offered hot dogs and burgers, with all the fixin’s, Tex-Mex and Vietnamese food, and a big tent where Budweiser flowed freely. For several weeks I had been practicing a jump from a Bell 214 helicopter with a handful of skydivers from Grumman and Bell. The plan was to exit and hook up at 15,000 feet, break off and open our parachutes at 2,400 feet, and fly into the park, the lead jumper trailing an American flag. Iranian pilots flew the helicopters, their American instructors next to them, smiling at the explosive bang! of compressor stalls, which most of these green pilots couldn’t avoid.

That Fourth was the last easy-going holiday for Americans in Iran. The tension in the air was an electric charge, steadily building. On August 2^nd, the American Consul in Isfahan, David McGaffey, sent a ‘Security Advisory’ to all Americans in the area. Someone had thrown a bomb into the Consulate grounds the night before. The advisory included a description of Ramazan, the month of fasting, which would begin in three days. 

McGaffey’s one-page advisory confirmed the opinions of most everyone on the street, Iranian and American alike. “Conservative religious protests over the past six months, recently exacerbated by the deaths of two prominent religious leaders, have made the possibility of violent protest very likely. Moreover, there is strong evidence of violent, even deadly, reaction by the police to demonstrations. Tempers are high, escalation of violence is likely...”

A week later, the Consulate called our company and told us to send our security officer to a meeting the next morning in Isfahan. CBI had a loose organizational structure, and no one had ever thought about a ‘security officer.’ I was commissioned security officer on the spot.

The night before, there’d been a major demonstration at the south end of Isfahan, about two miles west of the university. It took place in the quarter where my assistants, Behruz and Rahman, lived. This quarter was old and serene, seemingly untouched by the frenzy of building activity and new businesses that were popping up elsewhere. The main street was lined with little stores, greengrocers, bakeries, repair shops of all sorts. No storefront was more than 20 feet across. Small streets and alleys branched off behind either side of the main street, and in the continuous walls of these winding passages were the doorways to people’s homes. I asked Rahman and Behruz what had happened.

“It was terrible. Shopkeepers and their friends were protesting the new rules that fixed prices for everything. People were chanting, marching in the street. Soldiers came to make everyone go home. People were on the roofs of their houses, shouting. When the army came, some people were yelling ‘marg bar shah!’ [death to the Shah]. One boy, who’d been a classmate of ours, was standing at the edge of his roof, shouting, and they shot him. He is dead! It was very bad.”

Rahman was a devout, free-market Moslem. He believed that Islam is the Way, but that other ‘religions of the book’ should be tolerated, allowed to live in their way. He, his parents, and his siblings lived in an old traditional house. The family was not well-off, but they lived a comfortable life. They ate good food, sent their children to school, and were able to entertain modestly, all with a spirit of generosity and acceptance, thankful for their blessings. 

Behruz’ father was a retired army officer, who received a small pension from the government. Behruz took good care of his parents, particularly his mother, a generous, welcoming woman, with a wide-open, rich voice. Behruz had no political passions. He believed in little except loyalty to friends, cleverness, and covering his flanks. I knew he and Rahman had given an accurate description of the demonstration, and I was curious about what I would hear at the Consulate meeting.

I entered through the Consulate carport, and saw that the bomb damage was minor. Things were clearly unravelling if someone could throw a bomb into the courtyard of the heavily-guarded Consulate. People were jammed into the meeting room, more than the Consulate had prepared for. McGaffey introduced a man in his late 20s from the G-2 [intelligence] section to brief us. 

“The demonstrators were Islamic-Marxists. They are students and disaffected youth, the radical fringes. They are dangerously troublesome, but represent a small minority of the indigenous population. They will be dealt with by appropriate police and military authorities. You should avoid crowds, and make every attempt to make your homes and workplaces secure.”

The words rolled off his tongue with practiced ease. His tone and affect were flat. His message that there was nothing to get excited about. But those sitting in the assembled folding chairs knew things were out of hand. When Mr. G-2 finished, hands shot up across the room.

“What are the contingency plans?” At this, McGaffey stepped in.

“No plans for evacuation are under consideration.” 

“What if the situation deteriorates?”

“The situation is under control. There is no real problem, and therefore there are no plans for evacuation.”

People were getting angry. Some of them had been through the evacuation of Saigon in ’73, and wanted no repeat of that debacle. Finally I chimed in.

“Your G-2 says the demonstrators were students. But the demonstration happened two miles away from the university. Students wouldn’t walk two miles to start a demonstration.”

“We know what’s going on.”

“Do you get your information directly from SAVAK? Those demonstrators were bazaar merchants and shopkeepers. Their beef was with price controls. How’s your Farsi?”

But few in the room cared who the dissidents were. They were furious that their government was stonewalling them, refusing to talk about how to exit the tinder box we were living in. People kept shouting the question, “What are your evacuation plans?” “How are you going to get us out of here?” But they got no answer. The meeting was adjourned, and – in spite of their anger – everyone went back to work. They were military contractors, loyal, and law-abiding.

On the ride back to Shahinshahr that day, I thought back to a spring evening, just a few months before. Two friends and I decided to spend the night in the desert hills east of the town. We needed a break from our frontier construction camp, the cement floors and echoing hallways, the constant dust churned up by vehicles of every description, the disharmony of place. We commandeered a Gian, a small pickup truck made by Citröen, for our outing. Knowing the chilliness of desert nights at 5,000 feet, and the skimpiness of our bedrolls, we took along a pile of scrap wood from the construction site.

Without a plan, we drove east-northeast, leaving the dirt road when we were out of sight of the town. The terrain was undulating, gradually sloping until it reached the vertical escarpments of the mountains. It was easy to drive on it, and we meandered slowly about until we found ourselves at a pleasant vista, where we stopped. We sat on the hillside for hours, feeling the silence. The tensions of our working lives melted away. The ground was rocky, all jagged rocks the size of baseballs down to pebbles, but it was easy to clear a spot for a blanket to lie smoothly. The rocks absorbed sunheat all day, and by afternoon they were pleasantly warm. No wind blew.

A particular thorny plant was growing all around us. Its stem and limbs were thin and hard, sharp spears to defend itself from the heat of sun and the bite of grazing animals. A single straight stem branched out at the top, flat, a foot and a half above ground. For a few days in early spring, this lacy top is a pale lime green, and from where we sat, our heads at the level of the bush, it looked like a band of pale green fog hovering just above the desert floor, for as far as we could see. The cloak of sunlight pulled westward, and the peace of the desert infused us. I felt deeply content, body and soul.

Shortly before sunset we realized that we had no matches. Luckily, we had a camera, and with the lens we got a fire started, which we fed slowly. As dusk settled, we noticed another campfire, about a mile and a half distant. We were curious, and decided to pay a visit to whomever was there. We drove slowly, so we wouldn’t raise dust, or cause alarm. An old man and a young boy of seven or eight were squatting by the fire, which was fueled with old thorn plants and dry sheep dung. They stood up as we approached.

“Salaam aleikum,” they said, the old man placing his right hand over his heart, and bowing slightly. “Salaam aleikum,” we replied. We talked a while, and learned they were grandfather and grandson, tending a flock of sheep. They invited us to sit by their fire. Without a word to each other, Rick and I unloaded the wood from the back of the Gian. They protested, but we insisted they accept it, telling them we had plenty more. They thanked us profusely, and the grandson added a small stick to brighten up his fire. Grandfather offered us a bowl of dugh, fresh buttermilk from the sheep. It was laced with dried mountain mint, and a trace of desert dust. No matter that it was served in a battered aluminium bowl, it was ambrosia. 

Behind the fire sloped the gentle entrance to a cave, where a hundred or more sheep milled contentedly about. We explored three chambers of the cave. The floor was spongy, a deep layer of dust and sheep dung, so high that I could not stand upright. The sheep were in good condition, fat, their wool nearly ready for spring shearing. We rejoined the old man and the boy by the fire, and were offered more dugh. The old man smiled at our evident relish.

“The dugh at this time of year is a great gift from God. The sheep are eating one hundred different spring plants, each with its own particular power. It strengthens and protects the body.”

At his simple and genuine invitation, free from any pretense of ta’rouf, we laid our bedding next to theirs, and slept in the open embrace of the desert sky.

The pop! pop! pop! of nearby rifle fire brought me out of my reverie. Manouchehr’s uncle pulled the car around, and we set off. He knew which streets were blocked for certain, and we crawled along, easing into each intersection, looking and listening. When we heard bullets ricocheting off of building walls, he adjusted our route. What ordinarily was a 30-minute drive, took us four hours. He dropped me off with a quick hug goodbye, and sped off back to Tehran.

Bedlam reigned inside the airport. It was jammed with families, mostly Iranian, many American and British. Fist fights broke out, over what I couldn’t tell. I worked my way to the Pan Am counter, got a boarding pass, and went through security. The security people were overwhelmed. No one was supposed to leave the country without an exit visa. I had mine, but they grabbed my passport and stamped it without a look. When the Pan Am attendants opened the gate for boarding, people streamed toward the plane. I found my seat and settled in. The seats quickly filled, and more people came. The Pan Am crew closed the doors, and got on the intercom.

“Because of the situation, we are boarding more passengers than we have available seats. Those passengers in the aisle, please sit down. We will depart as soon as we have clearance from the tower.”

One more hurdle, I thought. The air traffic controllers are a calm bunch, and I had confidence in them. A few minutes later we taxied to the runway, the engines wound up, the pilot released the brakes, and we picked up speed. As the plane neared rotation speed, the pilot locked up the brakes, throwing people forward in their seats. Those sitting in the aisle flung their arms out, grabbing anything they could to stay put. The plane shuddered and shimmied on the runway, and screeched to a halt. The pilot turned the plane around, and addressed the passengers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry about that abrupt stop. An Iranian Air Force C-130 was taxiing into our path, so we had to abort our take-off. We’ll try again.”

Save for the whine of the engines, it was silent inside the plane. Not even a sound from the babies. The second try was successful, and everyone burst into applause when we were airborne. Cheers erupted again when the pilot announced we had left Iranian air space. It was still morning, but when the stewardess asked if I’d like something to drink, I ordered a scotch on the rocks. It had been a long night.