One of Them Ran From Iran : 10 From 4 Continents Crowd Birmingham Melting Mat

When it comes to drama, Hollywood has nothing on Birmingham High’s wrestling team. Neither does the United Nations nor Ellis Island. Howard Fast might have had this team in mind when he wrote his book The Immigrants.

Boys from afar, most of them.

They came from the reaches of four continents to land on Birmingham’s Melting Mat. Three of them--an Iranian, a Cambodian and a Vietnamese--escaped from their homelands in perilous scenarios right out of the movies The Killing Fields and Midnight Express.

“We have come to live,” said Houman Vaghefi (HOO-mahn Vug-HEF-ee), who as a 15-year-old schoolboy sneaked out of Iran in August 1985. “We are happy to be alive.”

That month was a particularly hot and dusty one in Iran. Temperatures hovered around the 100-degree mark and it was getting even hotter for Vaghefi, who was being shipped off, against his will, to fight in the Iraq-Iran War.

Vaghefi and other students had been drafted into the army two months earlier when Iranian forces became depleted. After being separated from his father--who lived in the town of Yazd--for six weeks and graduating from a military training camp, Vaghefi was being bused westward to the Iraq border. Neither he nor his father were followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the prospect of killing Iraqis or being killed by them didn’t captivate him. He wanted out.

Together, Vaghefi and his father planned a possible escape.

Just before arriving in the city of Shiraz en route to the war zone, the two buses that were transporting about 60 young soldiers stopped so the troops could eat lunch. During a two-hour break, Vaghefi, who had been looking for a chance to slip away, decided it was the right time to bolt.

“I was breathing deep, real deep,” Vaghefi says now, in broken English. “When I left, no one saw me. I think they chased after me, but I didn’t look. I just ran.”

He disappeared into a side street and ran to a bus station that Vaghefi estimates was about two miles away. From there, he took a bus to a friend’s house in the northwest province of Kurdistan.

Vaghefi called his father at home and the two plotted a final escape route. He borrowed the equivalent of $40 from the friend and caught a bus north toward Turkey.

But if he was going to make it out, he would have to do it alone.

His father, Homayoun Vaghefi, a 47-year-old air traffic controller who was fortunate enough in those troubled times to have an Iranian passport, planned to fly to Istanbul and meet his son at a hotel there. As it turned out, were it not for a blunder by Iranian officials, the elder Vaghefi might never have received permission to leave the country.

Homayoun Vaghefi was allowed to travel to Turkey only because officials doubted he would leave family members permanently behind. But he had no immediate family. His wife had died from a heart attack years earlier. And Houman was an only child.

One day later, the younger Vaghefi was three miles from the Turkish border and looking for a place to cross where he would not be spotted by the Iranian border patrol. The terrain consisted of dry, rocky hills with few trees, so staying out of sight was his main concern. At dusk, he jogged toward the border, Vaghefi said, “Because I knew I couldn’t run the whole way. But the closer I got, I ran. I ran from Iran.

“I had heard about another boy who tried to escape. He was shot through the head by a soldier. I was thinking about that as I was running.”

He toted a map, a jug of water, a cantaloupe, and a “Rambo knife--in case a dog or a wolf or a robber attacked me.” After he thought he had crossed the border, Vaghefi tried to sleep. But he was too afraid.

“Every second of the time,” he said, “I thought someone would see me and shoot me.”

From the closest border town, he took a bus to Ankara, the capital of Turkey. He then went to Istanbul where he checked into a hotel and waited for his father.

He arrived the next day and the two lived there for several months until they could get a visa to the United States. “When we landed at LAX,” Vaghefi said, “then I knew I was free. This was over. It was the happiest time of my life.”

They settled in Reseda in December, 1985.

Vaghefi talks about his escape as if he can’t believe he actually made it. Even though he escaped the country’s borders, he is still running from a memory that he wants to forget. “I try not to look back too much,” he said. “Don’t want to look back.” But looking ahead brings Vaghefi new problems, including language barriers and obstacles built by American stereotypes.

“Some people don’t trust,” he said. “One student thought I was terrorist because I am Iranian. But I hate the Ayatollah.”

He’s not real keen on learning English, either, and knows just enough to get by.

Said one instructor: “Houman is an average student. He tries real hard.” He has been accepted by students at Birmingham and he feels accepted, largely because of his wrestling teammates. Many of them face similar barriers. Some also have extraordinary stories to tell.

There’s the case of wrestling teammate Bill Sie, from Battambang, Cambodia. Sie and some of his family escaped the country’s communist regime in the winter of 1979.

“When we crossed over from Cambodia to Thailand,” Sie said, “we were held up by bandits. We had to kneel down on the ground and they searched us. They shot people. I was really scared.”

During one such holdup, one of the refugees tried to run from the border thieves and was shot right in front of Sie, who was 10 at the time. “I turned my face,” he said. “But I saw them shoot him in the stomach. My body was shivering, I was so scared.”

His family eventually came to this country and moved to Van Nuys.

Even though the turmoil of Cambodia has stayed with Sie--”When I think about it,” he said, “the memories all come back to me and it’s not a good memory”--he still has managed to put the memories aside. He speaks fluent English and is an above-average student. Despite being shy, he is popular among the other wrestlers. Asked about his biggest adjustments to living in the United States, Sie answered, “Changing to a fork and spoon was real hard to get used to. And children here are unpolite to older people.”

Still another wrestler, Vu Tang, 17, who is half Chinese and half Vietnamese, escaped from Vietnam through Thailand with his family and came to the United States in 1981 because, he said, “We wanted to get away from there.”

Tang went from Bangkok to Hong Kong to Seattle to Van Nuys.

Perhaps it is fate that brought the three far-flung escapees to the same school, but it is first-year Coach Peter Dhanes who helped stir up the boys’ interest in wrestling. Dhanes is a fanatic in a sport that struggles to compete for athletes with more popular sports such as football.

Besides teaching a wrestling class that is designed to help athletes decide wrestling isn’t so bad, he scours the campus, looking for boys to recruit. “And you have to really go out and shake the bushes to find them,” he said.

Dhanes shook out, basically, a group of foreigners. In addition to the 147-pound Vaghefi, Tang and Sie, the team consists of: Satoshi Yoshida, born in Japan; Soo Lim and Young Cho of South Korea; Malik Ismail, a Muslim who was born in the United States but whose parents are Syrian; Eric Ben-Samochan, a Moroccan Jew; Henry Macias of Mexico and Milorad Korac, who was born in Yugoslavia.

Two other wrestlers, one from Sri Lanka and another from Israel, have left the team since the season started.

All of which brings up, then, two ponderous questions: “Does Dhanes think he is a social studies teacher or a wrestling coach?” and “How do the American and Moroccan Jews get along with the kid from Iran and the Syrian, not to mention the other weird mix of nationalities?”

“It’s the United Nations team,” the coach said. “I wish the world could see how these kids--one trained with an M-16 as a teen-ager, the other trained with an AK-47 and both trained to hate each other--get along so well.

“They even tease each other about it. One kid will give Houman a hard time about the Ayatollah. They joke all the time. But the Jewish kids don’t get upset about the Iranian or the Syrian. They put their arms around each other after matches. If they were in their home countries, they’d be at each other’s throats.”

Said Korac, a 167-pound sophomore: “We all sort of blend together. We compare what we eat at home, because we all eat different foods and we all speak different languages.

“We laugh about some things. We say, ‘Hah, look at your nose,’ or ‘Look at those ears.’ Mostly, though, we laugh at the world.”

The American-born wrestlers, who make up half the team, seem to enjoy their team’s multinational makeup. Many, such as Brian Sroufek, like and take advantage of their teammates’ cooking skills. Tang and Yoshida drew raves from team members after inviting them over for various Oriental meals--including seaweed and combination dishes consisting of “everything but the kitchen sink,” Sroufek said. “It was cool.” Said Soo Lim: “Seaweed is the best thing to eat when your mouth is really bored. It’s got almost every flavor in it.”

Just like the team.

Marc Levey of Encino said that all this international hobnobbing has caused few problems with the white-bread Americans on the team. In fact, they hardly notice. “Even after we had worked out together for a couple of months, I didn’t realize how diverse we were until we started going to tournaments and saw how a lot of the other teams looked so, uh, white.”

Dhanes said the large number of foreigners on his team is not a coincidence. “A lot of them seem to take the discipline and the pain a little better than the average kid from Encino. They have a tougher background. They grow up tougher and can put up with the work. If wrestling had higher visibility maybe more American kids would wrestle.”

Said Yoshida, only half-joking: “The Americans don’t get into wrestling. They have better things to do.”

And easier things. Nonetheless, no one can tell Houman Vaghefi--or any of the other 10--that there is anything better anywhere than flopping around on a mat in a sweaty Birmingham gym. They came a long way for the chance. “I like wrestling,” Vaghefi said. “I love it.”

It beats being bused to the border.