20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY october 24-30, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com Leaving Iran would not be that simple, however. At 18, he learned he would have to serve in the Iranian military before receiving permission to leave the country. He enlisted and went on to become a member of the Iranian Special Forces, serving threeand-a half-years. Afterward he worked in a record factory, saving up enough money to move to the States. He left Iran in 1974. Lahidji’s uncle and brother were already living in the U.S., working as owners of gas stations, one in Santa Clara and the other in San Jose. Lahidji worked for $2.50 an hour, riding a bike between stations. At night, he took classes at San Jose City College and West Valley College. Eventually he got a green card and his uncle helped him get his own gas station in Palo Alto. (Oil companies were giving stations away to anyone who could pony up $2,500 for the first tanker delivery.) Business wasn’t for Lahidji. He sold the station in 1977 and walked straight into an Army-Navy-Marines recruitment office with the goal of becoming a Green Beret or Army Ranger. There were no positions open at the time, a recruiter told him, so he joined as a medic. Before long he was in Airborne School. During the last week of training he sprained his ankle on a jump from a tower, didn’t tell anyone, and went right into jumping out of planes. On the last day, after the last jump called the “Hollywood” jump, he was limping badly and could barely stand at attention. “The captain in charge of Airborne School stopped in front of me and slammed a pair of brass wings into my chest. The pin stung like hell,” Lahidji recounts in the book. “I shouted, ‘Airborne!’ I was an Army Ranger.” ■ ■ ■ Medic training was difficult for Lahidji, who struggled with learning medical terms while still improving his English. He also had not let go of his dream of becoming a Green Beret. Eventually he was able to transfer to infantry and in 1979 he graduated from Special Forces training—one of only 35 men who graduated out of an initial 275. “The pride I felt in reaching my goal of becoming a Green Beret—the first Iranian and Muslim Green Beret in history—was enormous,” Lahidji writes in the book. Three months later, he was training for what would be his first mission, gathering intelligence for rescuing more than 50 hostages inside the U.S. Embassy in Iran, during what came to be known as the Iran Hostage Crisis (see excerpt, p. 22). After enduring hateful slurs and physical beatings from fellow soldiers who equated Lahidji with the Iranian extremists who had kidnapped the hostages, he was determined to show them that he was an American who loved his country and loved his comrades, even those who berated him. He wanted to prove that he was one of them. With help from a friend, he wrote a letter to then-President Jimmy Carter asking to be sent to Iran to assist in freeing the hostages. “Please give me permission to choose an A-Team and deploy to Iran to free the American hostages,” he wrote to the president. “I know the area well, and used to play soccer at the stadium across the street from the U.S. Embassy. With your approval and support, I am sure I can come up with a plan that will succeed. Please don’t say no.” Months later, Lahidji was on a flight to Tehran, under the guise of visiting family—he packed decoy gifts of polo shirts, blue jeans and boxes of See’s candy. He carefully gathered intel but unfortunately, Operation Eagle Claw, as it was called, encountered multiple challenges and was aborted by Carter, upon advice of field commanders. Lahidji was left to find a way out of Iran safely, with only his wits to help him. It was a perilous journey, but he made it out and back to Fort Bragg, to the astonishment of the other members of his unit. They thought he had died. “Changiz, you’ve proved you are one of us,” he remembers one of the soldiers saying. The comment was bittersweet. ■ ■ ■ In a full-circle moment in 2004, Lahidji was working as a contractor in Darfur, Sudan, when he was asked to drive a delegation of dignitaries on an U.N. mission. The dignitaries were Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel. In the book he recalls the conversation he had with the former president: “‘You probably don’t remember, but during the early days of the Iran Hostage Crisis, I wrote you a letter offering to volunteer to go into Tehran.’ “[Carter] frowned. ‘I’m sorry that didn’t go well, Changiz.’ “‘No need to apologize, Mr. President. Not to me. The important thing is that the hostages returned home alive.’ “‘Eventually, yes,’” was Carter’s reply. A photo of Lahidji posing with Carter in Darfur hangs inside his Pacific Grove home, alongside dozens of other pieces of memorabilia from his long military career. ■ ■ ■ As Lahidji was off to Tehran on his first secret mission as a Green Beret in 1980, McCullough was a 10-yearold kid growing up in Claremont, 32 miles east of Los Angeles. Like Lahidji, McCullough’s parents taught him to love all people. They initially lived in Carson in a mostly-Black neighborhood. He remembers there was a Black family down the street with the same last name. “The Black McCulloughs Lahidji signs copies of his 2018 book, Full Battle Rattle, in both English and Farsi inside McCullough’s Pacific Grove home. Lahidji and McCullough are selling copies of the book with some of the proceeds going to the Wounded Warrior Project.
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