WASHINGTON, 16 May 2003 — Obadiah Y. Abdullah had converted to Islam. And 11 years into a military career, the US Army sergeant was drawn to the recruiting pitch of a defense contractor, the Vinnell Corp., offering him a lucrative job in Saudi Arabia, where he could fulfill the Muslim obligation to undertake a pilgrimage to Makkah.
So last July, Abdullah, a fire control specialist, left behind his wife and daughter in Colorado Springs and moved into a guarded compound in Riyadh to help train the National Guard. In January, he performed the Haj.
“He was amazed at ... the diversity of all the people there,” his wife, Sharon, recalled on Wednesday of his e-mailed accounts of the pilgrimage. “It was peaceful, and it was so many people from different backgrounds worshipping together. He was proud of it.”
Five months later, Abdullah this week was caught in a darker aspect of Middle Eastern life: The violent animosity of terrorists toward Westerners in the Kingdom. He was one of many Americans killed in coordinated car-bombings inside three gated compounds in Riyadh.
On Tuesday, Sharon Abdullah received a call from one of her husband’s friends, who had lived at the end of the Vinnell compound farthest from the bombing. He’d recognized her husband’s tattoos as he watched workers carrying out the bodies at daybreak.
Later that day, the company and the State Department telephoned her to confirm his death.
Families of some of the Americans killed spoke to reporters on Wednesday. Two of the victims were, like Abdullah, Army veterans who had been recruited by Vinnell to convey their military expertise to the National Guard.
Clifford Lawson, 46, had retired as a staff sergeant in 1997 and moved to Saudi Arabia to work for Vinnell in October of that year. He was a missile specialist during his 20 years in the US Army, and “the job he had was still military-related,” said his wife, Grace Lawson, of Atlanta.
Lawson “loved the military life” and had a knack for computers and electronics, his wife said. They married in 1988, divorced and remarried nine months later. He was due to come home in July when their son, Jason, is to celebrate his 13th birthday. It would have been her husband’s first trip home in 1 1/2 years, but they talked, often twice a week. A middle school reading teacher, she bought “many, many, many” long-distance calling cards at Wal-Mart. “I would sit in my classroom during my planning period and call my husband.”
Todd Bair, 37, had returned from a two-week furlough to visit his family less than two weeks before he was killed. His stepfather, Richard Thompson, in Lake Wales, Florida., where Bair grew up, said that he had retired from the US Army a year ago this month. He and his British-born wife, Samantha, had decided that she would resettle with their two sons, aged 11 and 8, near her family in England, while he took a job as a trainer for Vinnell for at least a year.
Bair, who specialized in logistics and transportation, and his wife had decided while the separation would be difficult for the family, the job offered a way for him to continue the military training he loved and receive “decent reimbursement and tax advantages for a young family just starting out in the civilian sector,” Thompson said.
He arrived last month in England with a present for each son: A small metal fish that he’d found at a jewelry store in Riyadh. He had been intrigued by Saudi culture, but he was mindful of the “volatility of the situation” there and was reluctant to explore too broadly. “Caution was the lead dog over curiosity,” his stepfather said.
