An American Family: Being Muslim in the U.S. Military

Khizr Khan

Khizr Khan was born in 1950, the eldest of ten children, to poultry farming parents in Gujranwala, a city in rural Pakistan. He moved to the United States with his wife Ghazala in 1980. The couple became American citizens in 1986, and raised their three sons in Silver Lake, Maryland. His middle son, Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in 2004 in a suicide attack near Baqubah, Iraq, and was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Khizr works as a legal consultant, and is involved with the University of Virginia’s ROTC program.

Jeffrey Fleishman

Jeffrey Fleishman is a culture and film writer for the Los Angeles Times. A long time foreign and war correspondent he has had postings in Rome, Berlin and Cairo. He covered the Iraq war, the Arab Spring uprisings and the fall of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series of stories, including a magazine piece about his accompanying 15 Buddhist monks and nuns as they eluded Chinese soldiers on a harrowing escape trek out of Tibet and over the Himalayas and into Nepal. He is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and the author of two novels, Shadow Man and Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad.

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Main Image: Arlington Cemetery  Credit:  Túrelio at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 2.5