From the magazine issue dated Mar 30, 2009
Army specialist Terry Holdbrooks had been a guard at Guantanamo for
about six months the night he had his life-altering conversation with
detainee 590, a Moroccan also known as"the General." This was early
2004, about halfway through Holdbrooks's stintat Guantanamo with the
463rd Military Police Company. Until then, he'd spent most of his day
shifts just doing his duty. He'd escort prisoners to interrogations or
walk up and down the cellblock making sure they weren't passing notes.
But the midnight shifts were slow."The only thing you really had to do
was mop the center floor," he says. So Holdbrooks began spending part
of the night sitting cross-legged on theground, talking to detainees
through the metal mesh of their cell doors.
He developed a strong relationship with the General, whose real name
is Ahmed Errachidi. Their late-night conversations led Holdbrooks to
be moreskeptical about the prison,he says, and made him think harder
about his own life. Soon, Holdbrookswas ordering books on Arabic and
Islam. During an evening talk with Errachidi in early 2004,
theconversation turned to theshahada, the one-line statement of faith
that marks the single requirement for converting to Islam ("There is
no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet"). Holdbrooks pushed a pen
and an index card through the mesh, and asked Errachidi to write out
the shahada in English and transliterated Arabic. He then uttered the
words aloud and, there on the floor of Guantanamo's Camp Delta, became
a Muslim.
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