BY PETER GEIGER
Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001: the telephone rang at 10 o’clock at night in our apartment in Zuunmod, the capital city of Central Province, Mongolia. My wife and I were startled awake.
On the phone was Enkhjargal (Mongolians use only one name), the provincial police chief, a personal friend. He had been my student in college.
“Pete,” he said urgently, “turn on the TV. Something terrible has happened in America,” Mongolian Eastern Time is 13 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time; 10 p.m. in Central Mongolia is 9 a.m. on the East Coast of America.
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| Pete Geiger and Enkhjarga at | Central Province Police headquarters |
Programming on the national television network had been interrupted by coverage of the attack on the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a hillside field near Shanksville in rural Western Pennsylvania. When that coverage ended, we went to the computer for MSNBC. com, which had turned its site over to live reporting from NBC-TV. We sat all night, listening to Tom Brokaw and watching videotape of airliners striking the three buildings.
In the morning, we walked to our college, where the director (Mongolian equivalent of a college president) asked all the students to assemble in the foyer and to sing “God Bless America.” Through the years, each Freshman class asked to learn that hymn. Now they echoed the sentiment to their American teachers. We sang with them; lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes.
In days to come, we received telephone calls from friends in Mongolia and from the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar, the national capital. The American ambassador cautioned all us Yanks in the country to be cautious, to travel in groups and to avoid crowds until it could be determined how wide-spread the attack on Americans might be.
Mongolians are mostly Buddhist, but there is a large complement of ethnic Kazakhs living the far west of the country, most of whom are Moslem. Al Qaida had sent recruiters to these people, but the Moslem Mongolians had rejected them out of hand.
Mongolia frankly asserts America to be its best friend in the world. For 80 years until 1989, the nation had been a suzerainty of the former Soviet Union. When that empire collapsed, some 200,000 Russian troops left Mongolia. In December, 1989, student protesters demanded democracy and the former Communist parliament complied.
In 1994, the year my wife and I went into Mongolia, the parliament decreed that Russian would no longer be the official second language of Mongolia, but English. The nation needed college teachers to re-train its Russian language teachers; to help them become English teachers. Qualified teachers who could teach an American-flavored English were preferred.
Meanwhile, the Mongolian Army rushed to bolster the Western alliance nations in their fight against al Qaida in Iraq. Notably, Mongolian soldiers were assigned to guard their American counterparts in their bivouacs. Two Mongolian sergeants spared the lives of their American charges when a bomb-laden truck rushed toward the barricade of an American bivouac. When the truck driver and a passenger failed to obey the Mongolian order to halt, the sergeants leveled their rifles. Each Mongolian took out one of the truck occupants with a single shot.
U.S. President George W. Bush went to Ulaanbaatar to present the two sergeants with medals from a grateful American government. A graduate of our college, Amarsaikhan, who had risen in the ranks of Mongolian guards at the U.S. Embassy, was placed in charge of security for President Bush’s motorcade from the airport to the national parliament building and back again to Air Force One.
It was Amarsikhan who organized all the Mongolian employees of the U.S. Embassy to contribute a day’s pay for the relief of families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attack. It was a remarkable gesture for these Third World residents whose pay goes mostly for food; few extras.
“We owe so much to America,” Amarsikhan told me. “All Mongolians do. It was the least we could do.”
Every American has an indelible memory of that tragic day 10 years ago. Mine just happen to be coupled to the love for America held by Mongolians, people about as distant from our shores as it’s possible to be but whose hearts are almost as close as our own.
Pete is a former BJ reporter. Pete & Sandy returned to America for Sandy's health and live in retirement at Penney Farms, a Christian retirement community 38 miles west of St. Augustine in Florida. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in May.
Their mailing address is
Sandy and Pete Geiger
P.O. Box 2000
Penney Farms, FL 32079
Their email address is
psgeiger@bellsouth.net
Their phone number is (904) 284-2220
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