THE TIGHTENING DARK

A Muslim American Marine veteran recounts his impressive life story and his six-month captivity in Yemen.

A former military officer, interpreter, and security specialist in the Marine Corps, Farran was born in Lebanon, the son of a spectacularly workaholic father who traveled the Arab world as a laborer, opened a restaurant, and accumulated enough money to immigrate with his large family to the U.S., where he continued to labor and open other restaurants. The author was 10 when they arrived in the U.S. Writing with Buchholz, the former chief of attaché operations at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, Farran delivers an amusing account of his culture shock, but mostly he thrived. He became fascinated with the Marines and joined out of high school in 1978, along with a friend from his adopted home of Dearborn, Michigan. He served as a translator/interrogator in the First Gulf War in 1991 and joined the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he was soon promoted to military attaché working out of embassies in Arab-speaking nations—after 9/11, exclusively in Yemen. Leaving active duty in 2004, Farran became a security manager for private companies, returned to Yemen in 2009, and started his own security company. Farran provides an expert portrait of this little-known nation, a fractious collection of rival tribes governed by a long-standing autocrat supported by the U.S. who also trained his army and police force until he was nearly assassinated in 2011 and fled the country. In 2014, Farran left as instability worsened, and the U.S. Embassy closed soon after. Yemen descended into chaos, where it remains as the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster.” For reasons that aren’t completely clear, Farran returned in 2015. He was arrested, brutally beaten, imprisoned for six months, and then released, more through the efforts of friends than the U.S. government. He is now safely retired in Lebanon while Yemen remains a dangerous failed state.

A fine memoir and a disturbing hostage drama with a happy ending.