The Hijackers

Here's a review of "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It," a new book by "Los Angeles Times" reporter Terry McDermott.

They were not brainwashed. Even the "muscle" boys knew they were on a death mission. Their end was a logical progression of their lives, and the world they inhabited. And there certainly are many more like them.

For all of them, radical Islam and jihad soon became obsessions, eclipsing everything else. Studies were abandoned, families ignored, the outer world denied as they plunged themselves into their fanatical version of faith. As a German investigator put it: "They are not talking about daily life stuff, such as buying cars -- they buy cars, but they don't talk about it, they talk about religion most of the time . . . these people are just living for their religion, meaning for them that they just live now for their life after death, the paradise. They want to live obeying their God, so they can enter paradise. Everything else doesn't matter." Talking one week of Kosovo, the next of Chechnya or Afghanistan, the "men were agreed: they wanted to fight -- they just didn't know which war."

It was, of course, Osama bin Laden who gave them their war.

The reviewer reaches for the perfect description of them, not to this book, but to Gerald Seymour's novel, "The Unknown Soldier:"

Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants . . . have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause." They are not necessarily loners but are attracted to "the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family," they have strong "personal self-esteem," they seek "adventure and purpose."

And he put 19 of them together and gave them a purpose and a mission, inside a clueless America.