HASAN AKBAR’S PECULIAR MILITARY CAREER

Once a month Quran Bilal drives north out of Baton Rouge, La., in her black Nissan, a car so old she cannot remember its year, only that she paid $700 for it used and that the odometer has now turned 148,000 clicks. A side window is broken and the air-conditioning blows hot.

Bilal endures it because this is the only way she can visit her son, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, her eldest, who is confined to a military brig at Ft. Knox, Ky. Akbar grew up in Los Angeles, an honor student at Locke High School and a devout Muslim who faithfully prayed at a South-Central mosque. He was the first in his family to go to college, to UC Davis, and later enlisted in the Army to save money and pay off college loans, to advance his engineering skills and to perhaps one day open a small business with a brother.

Today, at age 32, Akbar stands accused of drawing first blood in the Iraq War on March 23 by lobbing hand grenades into the tents of sleeping officers and firing at them with his M-4 rifle. He is accused of two counts of premeditated murder and three charges of attempted murder. If convicted in a court-martial he could be sentenced to death.

As disturbing as the attack was, Akbar’s defense is equally troubling. His mother and his military lawyers say he snapped in the face of relentless ridicule, of him and of Muslims in general. He had complained before his arrest that soldiers and officers harassed him and scared him and trampled on his religion. Moments after his arrest, according to fellow soldiers, he blurted out that he feared “American soldiers were going to kill and rape Muslims” once Iraq was taken.

If we expect that the U.S. military is a microcosm of society, then such harassment isn’t terribly surprising, especially after Sept. 11. But if we expect the military, with its rigorous oversight and strong need for cohesive fighting units, to have less tolerance for religious harassment and other divisive forces, then Akbar’s case may provide a painful lesson of the kind the nation has wrestled with since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and elsewhere where the killers felt they had been hazed or shunned by their peers.

In Akbar’s case, it should be noted, harassment might have been just part of the problem. Soldiers testified at his preliminary military court proceedings this summer that he was known for strange behavior, a flaw he does not deny. At his Ft. Campbell, Ky., Army base and in the Kuwaiti desert awaiting combat in Iraq, he often seemed aloof and confused. Soldiers recalled him pacing aimlessly, talking to himself, laughing and smiling at nothing. Army superiors said he was passed over for promotions, given second and third chances to shape up and then reassigned to more mundane duties.

As the Iraq War approached, officers debated whether Akbar, because of his Islamic faith, should be deployed. At one point, an officer said, they even shouted insults at him to test his loyalty to Uncle Sam over Allah. In the end he remained with his unit and shipped out for war.

It was a long way from where he had come as a quiet youth, an introverted but accomplished student and disciple of the Prophet Muhammad. Akbar’s name at birth was Mark Fidel Kools. Bilal, then 20, worked as a barber and a beautician, and later an independent truck driver. His father, John Kools, had followed a twin brother from Detroit to Los Angeles, and eventually owned and managed apartments in South-Central. But by the time his son was 3, Kools was in jail on gang-related charges. He turned to Islam while behind bars and emerged with a new name, John Akbar. His whole family converted.

“It is a motivating religion,” John Akbar said recently from his home in Seattle. “Black people at the time were very aggressive and mostly against ourselves, so we embraced Islam because it lifts the morale of the black people. It taught us that nobody can say we are less than a man.”

Bilal changed the name of the couple’s firstborn to Hasan Akbar. Hasan means handsome, a name she took from the imam at a local mosque. Akbar means greatest.

“He practiced his religion all the time,” she recalls. “He didn’t hang around nobody or nothing like that. No bad company. He was in school all the time.” After school, he routinely went to a mosque.

Bilal had five children with John Akbar, and then she was single again when John left for Dallas and a job as a tree surgeon. She also raised two of her sister’s children. Bilal, now a grandmother, married several more times, and for a while took her children to Baton Rouge. But she returned to Los Angeles, not wanting them to adopt the slangy Southern accent she had acquired.

Hasan was precocious, she says. At 9 months, he was sitting up and eating with a fork. He never crawled. One day she held him up in the hallway and said, “Walk!” and “that boy started walking, like he’d been walking all the time.” By 3 he could count from 1 to 50. By 4 he could count and write from 1 to 100. He knew math before first grade. He was reading at 6.

She was often away from home, and when between husbands, she left Hasan in charge of the younger children. At 9 he was a full-time babysitter in the summer, and when she came home from work, “he’d have them all lined up and sitting on the couch,” she says. “They were safe. That’s the only thing I was caring about.”

Hasan was also 9 when he last saw his father. “He was a very good son, a humble son, a loving, peacemaking son,” his father says. “And he just loved his mother.”

Young Hasan turned his attention to schoolwork and was often up late with his books. “He always did have his days and nights mixed up,” his mother says. He seldom ventured far from the neighborhood’s gang-toughened culture around Central Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Once a close relative was lost in a gang-related killing.

“Hasan was very smart but he didn’t know too much about street knowledge,” Bilal says. “He didn’t know how to handle guys with street knowledge. If you don’t know street knowledge, you’re going to have problems, and he didn’t know it. He didn’t know how to get people off him.”

He was easily bullied, she says. When neighborhood friends took his bicycle, he never tried to get it back. Once he came home with a broken arm after a bigger kid smashed into him in a game of sandlot football. For nearly six months he was in physical therapy, and once healed, he did not again challenge his friends in sports.

“He never had a man at home to guide him,” his mother says. “He had to become his own man. If he had had a father around, he would have been able to handle what happened to him in the Army. But he just wanted to be with his mom.” And to be in school, and Islamic.

The family lived in a two-story beige house across from the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center on Central. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Newton Division looms around the corner, and the homes there today are noticeable for bars on the windows and padlocks on the doors. The mosque is a string of trailers with a dirt lot and a sign warning against trespassers.

Fard Abdullah, who handles security there, recalls Hasan as a smart, well-behaved kid with few friends. “He was always off to himself, like me,” Abdullah says. “That’s the way some people are. Some people can’t mix; some don’t like to be social. Some like to be a loner.”

The mosque’s imam, Abdul Karim Hasan, recalls a slightly built youngster who was “quiet and reserved,” and a natural target of peer pressure.

“You never knew what he was thinking,” the imam says. “You knew he was intelligent, but he was never expressive. A lot of times people like that you can push farther than someone who talks all the time. And if you do, they explode. They erupt. Provocation is a terrible thing.”

Abdullah says he was not surprised to hear that Akbar allegedly struck out against his Army superiors. “We gave him the training and the knowledge here, and it shouldn’t have been difficult for him to resist the sins of the world,” Abdullah says. “So whatever later happened to him, it had to be something that triggered him off. It would have to be something directed against him or his religion to make him respond so aggressively.”

In the mornings, the teenage Hasan took a bus to Locke High, the “Home of the Saints,” and often asked his science teachers for a ride home. Science was his love, and he was a remarkable student, a fast learner, serious with his books. Hasan was a teacher’s prize. He showed little interest in school sports or ROTC or girls, making the school’s academic decathlon team. When he was singled out for scholastic achievement at graduation, his mother beamed down from the stands.

Dan Duncan, his physics instructor, drove him to the mosque after school. They would talk about the latest school projects, and Duncan was pleased that while other kids were satisfied with a D because it was a passing grade, Hasan “seemed to really want an education.”

“He had this inner peace,” Duncan says. “It made him more calm and introspective, I guess. He seemed to be very self-aware. He didn’t go along in a crowd. But I also didn’t see he had any enemies.”

This was the late 1980s. John Mandell, the school counselor, says that on the occasions he drove Hasan home, “We’d talk about school and about religion and the differences between some of his relatives who were Baptists and how there was tension around holiday times. He wanted to be an engineer and have his own private firm and help some other minority kids make it. So had you asked me back then would he join the military, I would have said no. It wasn’t in his character.”

Like many, Duncan was stunned to learn of Akbar’s arrest in Kuwait. “Why couldn’t one of my students grow up to be a Nobel scientist?” he laments. “Instead I get this?”

In 1988, Hasan headed to UC Davis. There the pattern was much the same--more books, less social life. He was rarely spotted around campus, where he was enrolled as Hasan Karim Akbar. He worked for a while as a night watchman, and his landlady, Ramona Morrow, remembers that he giggled about how it was “really neat” to carry a gun.

Along the way he married, surprising those who knew him by turning up at school one day with a wife, Zineb Lemseffer. To some teachers he said that he had met her in Somalia, to others it was Ethiopia. Mont Hubbard, an engineering professor, says Akbar told him that Lemseffer’s father didn’t bless the marriage. The union did not last. The couple soon divorced, declaring no children and no assets.

Akbar took nine years to go through college, graduating in 1997 with a double major, in aeronautical science engineering and mechanical engineering.

After graduating, he moved to Moreno Valley in Riverside County to live with his mother in her new home there. But she says he was restless, could not find work and worried about his student loans coming due. The following spring, at 27 and just a year out of college, he enlisted. With his dual college degrees, he could have gone straight into the officer corps. Instead he chose a six-year general enlistee program that would pay his college loans.

He entered the Army under his birth name, Mark Fidel Kools, something his mother said the recruiter advised him to do. Almost immediately he harbored second thoughts, telling her a friend had found a job in computers and maybe he should have been more patient in his own job search. But by then he was in boot camp fatigues at Ft. Jackson, S.C.

A younger brother, Ismail Akbar, who served briefly in the Air Force, says no one back then joined the military expecting to fight. “It’s for personal gain,” he says. “Job experience or college money.”

Hasan was soon writing home, beginning his letters with “As-Salaam-Waliakum Mom [Peace be unto you].” He wrote on United States Army stationery, in block capital letters, sometimes misspelling his words.

“Just imagine,” he told her in his first letter. “I am on the other side on (sic) the country & the continent. I have never been on the East Coast before.”

Writing while serving guard duty, he described how “a couple of days ago my drill sergeant was preparing to kick me out of the Army. I suppose he was getting tired of me falling asleep in class. But he has decided to give me a second chance. Therefore, I am going to try to do better. We will see what happens.”

He wrote that most recruits joined “because their lives where (sic) so messed up they really did not have any where else to turn.”

He added, “I suppose I join (sic) for the same reason since I did not find an engineering job right away. My life was very difficult. It really sucks to have that big degree and not be able to find a job. Maybe if I had been more patient I would have found one. But I did not want to spend too much time living off of you.”

Army life “is tough doing all these things,” he wrote. “I just have to readjust my living habits.” He also noted that he was “having some difficulty in basic training, but it will be OK.”

In one letter he asked Bilal to send “my holy Quran (sic) and my Hadith books.” He knew he would have to push himself and “stay in good physical shape.” But he saw many benefits, including a continuing Army education in engineering.

“I will have a master’s degree in engineering. I will have at least $40,000 . . . I will be able to speak Arabic fluently. I will have lived in an Arab or Muslim country long enough to know if I will be accepted there.”

In May 1998, he wrote that after his enlistment ended in 2004, “I hope to be completely out of debt and have at least $60,000 in the bank. I do not know if I will be able to save that much money, but I will try. Hopefully, I will be married with children by that time too. I want to take full advantage of everything the army has to offer.”

Despite his difficulties adjusting, his early years went well enough for him to win the Good Conduct Medal and the Army Service Ribbon. He was made sergeant in Febuary 2001, moved to Ft. Campbell and was assigned to the 326th Engineer Battalion of the storied 101st Airborne Division.

But despite these advances, his performance began to falter and his superiors began noticing odd behavior. His conduct mystified them, leaving them at a loss to explain his sudden changes. It ultimately led to his being frozen out of future promotions.

Several superiors testified at Akbar’s preliminary military court proceedings that he was late for assignments. On a training exercise to Louisiana, where he was in charge of making sure other soldiers brought their gear, officers said he forgot his duffel bag. He misplaced his dogtags. On the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the base was on high alert, he showed up at the gate without his ID badge, the supervisors said.

Army officers said they found him asleep in training classes. They watched him sneak into Army vehicles and try to sleep away the afternoon. He could not keep up with physical exercise, they said, a failing for any sergeant expected to lead troops. He walked aimlessly, sometimes talking or laughing to himself.

He was busted down from platoon leader. He was counseled about insubordination. He was faulted for being a poor mentor to young soldiers. Officially he was classified a “rehabilitative transfer.”

Officers said he also told them he had changed his name back to Hasan Akbar, and that he wanted to be addressed that way. All of it raised Army eyebrows.

“Nobody took him seriously,” Sgt. Wesley Lafortune Jr. recalled in court testimony. “Everybody said he was messing up.” Lafortune says he spotted Akbar near the rifle range during a live-fire exercise. “I looked over and he was snoring. He could fall asleep standing up.”

Another time, Lafortune says, Akbar “woke up in his sleeping bag and started doing some kind of karate movements with his hands.” They nicknamed him “Crouching Tiger.”

In an Army that prides itself on cohesion, many like Capt. David Storch worried about how Akbar would perform in battle. “I wondered about it every time I was out in the field with him. And how vulnerable I might be, and what was going through his mind.”

Akbar’s behavior was so troublesome that when the division began packing up for Kuwait and Iraq, many in his unit believed he should not go because of his erratic behavior and the inherent conflict with his Muslim faith. Staff Sgt. Billy George Rogers told the court that Akbar called him one night at home, very upset. “He wanted to know if it was true the U.S. was going to rape and plunder Muslim women,” Rogers said.

First Lt. John W. Evangalista testified that such talk did float around the base, and later in Kuwait. But he insisted it was mere bravado, and that Akbar should have dismissed it. “It was just soldier talk,” Evangalista said.

To test Akbar’s loyalty, Sgt. First Class Timothy Means called him into his office and, according to court testimony by Storch, asked Akbar point blank: “What would you do if you came over a ridge and saw a raghead? Would you kill him?”

Akbar replied obliquely that “it would depend on what kind of jihad I was on,” Storch said.

In Kuwait, according to testimony from many soldiers in Akbar’s division, anti-Muslim slurs were common in the mess hall and scribbled on the latrines at their forward position, called Camp Pennsylvania. The command tent’s computers had an e-mail cartoon with President Bush supposedly saying, “Tell those . . . with the dirty laundry on their heads that it’s wash day.”

Although soldiers and officers insist the invective was not directed at Akbar, it filled the air all the same. Slurs such as “raghead” and “towelhead” and others unprintable in a newspaper often bounced around the camp.

Sgt. First Class Daniel Kumm testified that the talk was intended to “depersonalize the enemy,” that it was just “a soldier talking about war.” But Sgt. David Walker, assigned to Akbar’s squad, said it was much more casual than that. “We weren’t sure what to call them,” he says. “So we gave them nicknames. Ragheads. Habibs. Skinnies . . . .”

Maybe it was not meant for Akbar’s ears, but some soldiers said there was deep concern in the days before they were to head to Iraq that, as Lafortune said, Akbar “might drop his weapon and walk over to the other side.”

Sgt. Patricia Lewis, the unit’s Equal Opportunity officer in Kentucky and Kuwait, said that “every now and then” she would hear complaints that soldiers joked about Muslims praying five times a day. Other times, she said, she would hear the epithets herself and ask those making them to stop. Her training told her that a Muslim, should he hear such language, would be “extremely offended.”

Government evidence in the case against Akbar shows that at 1:30 on the morning of March 23, he was guarding an Army Humvee used to store grenades. After he was relieved from duty, the evidence shows, a cache of grenades was missing. His fingerprints were found on a light generator in the camp, which was turned off just minutes before the camp erupted in explosions and gunfire. Some officers were writing e-mails or watching a golf show on TV. Most were asleep. Suddenly there came a man’s voice, allegedly Akbar’s, shouting, “We’re under attack, sir!” Grenades came rolling across the tent floors.

“It was kind of an ugly scene there,” said Capt. Terence Bacon, one of the wounded. “A lot of noise. A lot of screaming. A lot of blood.”

The government contends that the bullets fired at the fleeing officers came from Akbar’s M-4. He was arrested in a nearby bunker carrying the rifle. He reportedly told his guards he was worried about American soldiers raping and killing Muslim women and children. But he refused to talk to Army criminal investigators. He was brought home to Kentucky to prepare for a court-martial.

“I just pray all the time,” says his father, John Akbar. “Please God, keep your hand on my son.”

His stepfather, William Bilal, concedes that in these times of war and terrorism, “we all have a breaking point.”

His mother Quran Bilal, his greatest champion, says, “I think he was set up. Set up to be killed.” She says he once told her on the phone, “I don’t know what went down.” Then, she says, “he started talking about the guys who got killed and I could tell tears were coming out of his eyes.”

Once a month his mother makes the 10-hour drive from Baton Rouge to visit her son in Kentucky. They are allowed to hug when she arrives. They talk about family and they pray and discuss raising money for his defense. She says he told her his military lawyers wanted him to plead guilty and hope for life in prison, but he refused. They hug again when she leaves.

In a letter he wrote that his days were “prayer, fast and prayer.” He recalled how when he was young she had sacrificed and bought football helmets and football pads for the kids in the old neighborhood, and BB guns too.

“All the children on that street loved you,” he wrote. “When I tell people about that they are very impressed and say to me, ‘That is why you love and respect your mother so much.’ ”

He is lonely without her. “The guards are looking at me like I am crazy because I am pacing and talking to myself,” he wrote her. “But you know I have always done that.”

He added, “Lately I have just been thinking about being free.”