THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH-APRIL 2026 45 General Mazloum Abdi (center left), commanding general of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and William Roebuck (center right), deputy special envoy for the Coalition to Defeat ISIS, attend a liberation day ceremony marking the final surrender of ISIS forces in Syria at Omar oil field compound, Dayr al-Zawr, Syria, March 2019. described the horrors of prison, including Tadmour, the infamous desert prison from which he was finally released in 1996. He noted he had been a medical student in Aleppo, with aspirations to become a doctor, when he was first arrested and sent away to the Syrian gulag, shattering his professional prospects. What struck me, overwhelmed me even, when I left that first meeting, was a sense that I had been in the presence of a powerful moral witness, a dissident of high order, who had completely preserved his humanity, intellect, and modesty in a sustained confrontation with brutality and oppression. As the embassy driver ferried me home in the cold night, I sat quietly in the back of the car, shaken and humbled. The meeting with Yassin brought out a sense of shared experience that emerged from the conversation and the charged effort afterward to write about it persuasively. The participation takes place on the level of empathy: active listening, a willingness to see the world from the perspective of others. The professional craft of good writing captures and shares that encounter so that it resonates for others. I had already begun to identify empathy as a crucial quality in my very first assignment as a political officer, working out of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem in the late 1990s. It was a schizophrenic reporting mandate: Jewish settlements and Palestinian political developments in the West Bank, territory Israel had occupied since prevailing in the ’67 war. I visited settlers in Hebron one day and Palestinian activists, Fatah party politicians, and Palestinian Author- ity security figures in the tense southern West Bank city the next. Feeling empathy with Palestinians was not that hard; the challenge was not to get overwhelmed to the point you couldn’t report objectively. With the settlers, empathy was more challenging, but I strove to see their perspective and avoided the urge to argue. Washington wanted to hear their views and perceptions, not mine. A Professional Commitment Finally, the work of secret sharing requires a commitment forged in professionalism, a shared sense of mission, and pride of service because there can be costs involved, and they can be exacting. I learned this during a routine trip into Gaza in October 2003 as Gaza political officer. After crossing from Israel into the territory in a small convoy of heavily armored Suburbans, there was an explosion just behind the lead vehicle in which I was traveling. We lost radio contact. We made a U-turn and looked across the median: Four tons of SUV steel had been flipped upside down and left in a crater in the road. Three members of my security detail were dead, and a fourth was seriously injured in the attack. It was a painful, permanently searing reminder of the risks— and human costs—at stake in continuing to be active out in the field as diplomats in the Middle East. Now, in having worked my way back to the beginnings of my Foreign Service career, I realize that I learned my first lessons about secret sharing as a youth growing up in the South I loved and hated in the 1960s and 1970s: Keep your eyes open STAFF SGT. RAY BOYINGTON / U.S. ARMY
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