E Pluribus Unum

E Pluribus Unum

One of the patients being seen in my Internal Medicine clinic was a young woman in her twenties. She was coming to see me for the first time for routine care. She was generally healthy and had no problems. Her name was however unusual. It appeared to be Middle Eastern in origin.

When I saw her, she looked no different from most other young woman in our area.  I was however curious about her unusual name. During the course of our exam, I asked her how she got her name. Oh it is Afghan, she said.

This was an unexpected answer for me. How did you get an Afghan name, I asked? She replied that her father was from Afghanistan. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he had fled with his family. He was sixteen years old at that time. The family first went to Germany and was able to eventually migrate to the United States and settle here.

Her father met her American mother and married her. He had four children with her, but unfortunately the marriage failed. My patient was brought up by her American mother, but kept her Afghan name.

On that day, I was also being shadowed by a medical student. After the patient left, he came up to me and said that his father had fled the Afghan war too. He was sixteen at that time as well. Oh, I asked, was your father from Afghanistan too? No he was Russian he replied.

Now I was confused. I said, "but the Russians are the ones that invaded Afghanistan"! He then explained to me that his paternal grandfather was forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army in the 1950’s during the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He did not want his children to have the same fate. When his son turned sixteen, the Afghan war had started and young Russians were being drafted into the army again. Many were being killed in action. The grandfather wanted to prevent his son from being forced to join the army.

He decided to get him out of the country, but getting out of the Soviet Union was not easy. His grandfather was able to devise a plan to get his young son out and away from the Soviet Union and thus avoid being drafted into the army. The young man eventually came to the United States. He went to college, got married to an American woman and had three children, the oldest of whom was my medical student. He was also in his twenties.

In that afternoon, I saw a meeting between the children of people from the opposite sides of the Afghan war. However both of these children were now American. The phrase that came to my mind was the original motto of the United States of America "E Pluribus Unum", which means "Out of Many, One". Originally meant to denote the first 13 states coming together to form a nation, it is now often considered a reflection of the melting pot nature of the United States of America.

As I saw for myself, this also includes people from opposing sides of the war in Afghanistan. Now barely, a generation later they were one. E Pluribus Unum indeed!