| | In September 2002, she moved to Queens to live with her brother and his wife. She returned to wearing a regular head scarf, or hijab, and started classes at a local community college. One night she came home late, she said, and her brother told her to leave. “She did not follow the rules of the house,” the brother, Sam Saeed, said in an interview.
Ms. Hamdan did not know where to turn. Her father had refused to speak to her since she left Jordan. Over the next 10 days, she rode the subway at night and slept on a park bench in Queens. Finally, she walked into a hair salon in Brooklyn and approached a Lebanese Muslim woman.
“She was hysterical crying,” said the woman, Helena Buiduon.
Ms. Hamdan stayed with Ms. Buiduon until she found her own apartment. She taught the Koran to children and worked in a doctor’s office while earning an associate’s degree in medical assistance.
Her life remained a struggle. She lived in a small, drafty apartment in the Bronx. Other Muslim immigrants found her puzzling.
Some people suggested that she was a “loose woman,” she recalled, a notion that amused her given how little she wanted another relationship.
“I can’t feel anything for anybody,” she said. “I lived like jail. Just imagine you have a bird and the door is open. You think he will go back to this jail again? Never. He’s just flying.”
In 2003, she spotted an ad for the Army in an Arabic-language magazine. She met with a recruiter but cut the conversation short after learning she would have to remove her head scarf before enlisting.
Secretly, though, she kept imagining a new, military life. In March, she made up her mind.
“I broke the law with God,” she said of her decision to remove her hijab. “I had to.”
She put her belongings in storage. She began lifting 20-pound weights. She slipped off her veil in public a few times. She felt naked.
Two days before she left, she stopped by her brother’s video shop in Queens to say goodbye.
Mr. Saeed was kneeling in prayer, as a Spanish rap video blasted from a television set. He stiffened at the sight of Ms. Hamdan, then kissed her on the cheek. They had not seen each other all year. Within minutes, an argument began.
“She’ll never make it,” Mr. Saeed said, looking away from his sister.
“Oh yeah?” she replied, her eyes widening.
“A Muslim woman is not allowed to travel alone,” he said.
“What about working?” she said, her voice quivering. “Look at your wife, she works!”
“She likes to spend time here,” he said.
Ms. Hamdan ran from the store crying.
“She won’t make it,” Mr. Saeed told a reporter after she left. “Woman always weak. She need a man to protect her.”
Later, when Ms. Hamdan heard what her brother had said, she was silent.
“Why didn’t he protect me?” she said.
What Happens Next
Life at Lackland — where soldiers cannot chew gum, wear makeup or leave the base — reminded Ms. Hamdan of her marriage.
“Sometimes, when I’m by myself, I wonder how I have stayed here for six months,” she said as she sat outside her barracks one recent evening. “But I did it.”
She was among 39 men and women in the Army linguist program, in a company of 119 soldiers. The rest were immigrants from around the globe, there to improve their English in the hopes of entering boot camp.
Everyone, it seemed, had a sad story.
The women talked quietly after the lights went out. A Sudanese woman had come to the United States after most of her family died in a bombing in Khartoum. A 23-year-old woman had lost her Iranian mother in an honor killing.
A teenage Iraqi girl cried herself to sleep every night. She, like many other soldiers, began referring to Ms. Hamdan as “Mom.”
“They come into my arms,” said Ms. Hamdan, who was older than most of the others.
She missed being a mother, yet she rarely talked about her own children. She was learning not to cry, and that was a subject that broke her down. Privately, she called them in Saudi Arabia twice a week with 20-minute phone cards, four minutes per child.
As the summer wore on, it became clear that Ms. Hamdan was floundering in her English studies. She failed the exam repeatedly.
Physically, though, she was growing stronger. Push-ups and sit-ups no longer scared her. She found she was a fast runner.
On Aug. 10, she won the one-mile race for female soldiers in seven minutes flat, in sweat pants. The next week, she became a squad leader and bay commander, directing a column of soldiers during marches and keeping order in the female barracks.
Days later, she decided to wear the shorts again.
“What, we have a new soldier here?” Sergeant Brannon called out as she walked deliberately down the stairs.
“I am going to show the men I’m like them,” she told him later. “I’m a man now.”
“No, you’re not a man” he said.
“Yes, I’m a man.”
“No,” he said. “You’re a strong-willed woman.”
That became his nickname for her: strong-willed woman.
As Ms. Hamdan’s status rose with the drill sergeants, so did her standing among the soldiers.
“Sometimes I’m tough on them,” she said one recent weekday as she patrolled her floor. The women smiled from their bunk beds. “I like everything clean.”
Another morning, she sat in the mess hall, eating her daily breakfast of Froot Loops followed by nacho-cheese Doritos. A drill sergeant called out that the group had three minutes to finish, just as a clean-shaven soldier walked past Ms. Hamdan with a tray full of food. She shot him a hard look.
“Three minutes,” she repeated. “You hear that?”
The greatest shift for Ms. Hamdan came in her relationship with the male soldiers. They stopped taunting her about wearing shorts. When she gave orders, they listened.
“It seems like a heavy burden has been lifted from her,” Sergeant Brannon said.
Yet even as she felt herself changing, she remained steady in her faith. She never stopped praying five times a day. She attended the base’s mosque each Friday and fasted through the holy month of Ramadan.
On a recent Friday, she sat with her eyes closed on the mosque’s embroidered carpet, wearing a white veil and skirt over her Army fatigues.
“Staying on the straight path is not an easy matter, except for those who Allah helps to do so,” the Egyptian imam said in Arabic over a loudspeaker.
In November, Ms. Hamdan’s English score was still too low, by 11 points, even though she was performing better on the weekly quizzes. She was given a one-month extension, and one more chance.
She took her last exam in December, and failed again. She ran from her classroom.
“Don’t come looking for me,” she recalled telling a startled drill sergeant.
By herself, Ms. Hamdan began walking across the base. Tears streamed down her face as she reached the two-story, concrete building that had long been her refuge.
She climbed the stairs of the mosque. Alone, she knelt on the carpet and prayed. Finally, she sat in silence. She felt at peace.
Ms. Hamdan will be discharged on Dec. 15. She is unsure of what the future holds. She may stay in Texas and look for a job. She may no longer wear a hijab in public. All she knows is that she is different now, and no less a Muslim for it.
“I can face men,” she said. “I can fight. I can talk. I don’t keep it inside.”
She thought for a moment.
“I changed myself,” she said. “I’m a new Fadwa. Strong female. I like this.”
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