November 25 th is Monte Melkonian's birthday. Artsakh war hero Monte Melkonian (Avo) was born on November 25, 1957 in Visalia , California. In 1978 he graduated from UC Berkeley and left the United States . From 1980 he participated in the liberation movement in the Diaspora, joining the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA). Later on he left ASALA because of disagreements over policies and modus operandi and with a group of friends founded the ASALA- Revolutionary Movement. For years he worked underground and was imprisoned. From 1991 to the end of his life he fought for the liberation of Artsakh. (See also: Ten years ago, Monte Melkonian was killed).

His brother, Markar Melkonian has written a book dedicated to Monte's life. Next December it will be available to readers. Below is an excerpt from the book.

November 25 th is Monte Melkonian's birthday. Artsakh war hero Monte Melkonian (Avo) was born on November 25, 1957 in Visalia , California. In 1978 he graduated from UC Berkeley and left the United States . From 1980 he participated in the liberation movement in the Diaspora, joining the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA). Later on he left ASALA because of disagreements over policies and modus operandi and with a group of friends founded the ASALA- Revolutionary Movement. For years he worked underground and was imprisoned. From 1991 to the end of his life he fought for the liberation of Artsakh. (See also: Ten years ago, Monte Melkonian was killed).

His brother, Markar Melkonian has written a book dedicated to Monte's life. Next December it will be available to readers. Below is an excerpt from the book.

From My Brother's Road: An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia , I.B. Tauris, London , 2005. Copyright 2003 by Markar Melkonian

Crouching behind sandbags in the rocket-scorched lobby of an apartment building, my brother Monte gave me a quick lesson in street fighting: At the first sound of gunshots, he advised, dash for cover: These are the seconds when most of the people who are going to get shot will get shot. Then “pep yourself up fast” he said, bouncing slightly on bent knees and fanning his fingers in front of his chest to emphasize the point. “You need to summon all your energy, and you need to do it fast.”

It was East Beirut, Spring 1979, and Monte and I were young and strong and scraping for the good fight. An inner voice had called us to help defend our fellow Armenians in their beleaguered neighborhoods in civil-war Lebanon. On the other side of the Sinn el-Fil Highway, snipers who belonged to a rightwing Lebanese party called the Phalange took up positions around pickup-mounted machine gunners. Rifles crackled back and forth across the post-apocalyptic cityscape. For the next two days, from May 9 to 11, our militia position saw the heaviest fighting in Lebanon that week, as both sides sewed the rubble with thousands of cartridges. Phalangist gunners wheeled in recoilless rifles and rocket propelled grenades, while our comrades taped dynamite to the inside of tires, lit long fuses, rolled the tires across the street, and watched the enemy scatter like chickens. Once, as Monte pulled his kalashnikov out of a hole in the rampart to reload, a sniper’s bullet whizzed through the hole. During another spate of fighting, he ducked into an abandoned building and sprinted down a hallway, one step ahead of a long burst from a heavy machine gun, which punched through the cinderblock wall like a sewing machine needle through flannel.

Ten years later, Monte wrote of his years in Beirut that “It is perhaps strange that I stayed alive.” Looking back, it strikes me as a miracle that my little brother ever reached the age of thirty-five.
We were born a year and a half apart in Visalia, California, the Walnut Capital of the World. Twenty-two miles north lay Kingsburg, the Watermelon Capital; and five miles beyond that lay Selma, the Raisin Capital. The town ended at our driveway. To the east, beyond our fence and the alfalfa field, lay peach and walnut orchards, and then the orange groves that banked against the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There were other Armenian families in Visalia, mostly spillover from the old “Armenian colony” in nearby Fresno. But they were scattered around town and the surrounding farmland, and it never occurred to us that they made up anything like an “ethnic community.”

Visalia might have laid claim to some measure of charm in the late fifties, when its population was less than 20,000 and a toddler could assume that the solar system orbited the one water tower he had ever seen. The movies just opening at the Sequoia motor theater had closed months earlier in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Mearle’s Drive-In, with its pink exterior and its giant neon soda, was the perfect emblem of small town California.

Zabelle Melkonian gave birth to her third child and second son at Visalia Municipal Hospital at 4:50 a.m. on November 25, 1957. Her husband, our father Charlie, considered naming the seven-pound fifteen-ounce boy Marvin, but opted instead for Monte. He wanted a short name, he said, one that would “sound good over loud speakers”--preferably loudspeakers in a baseball stadium or a sports coliseum. In keeping with family custom, Monte received no middle name.
Mom described the new arrival in the baby book: “Very affectionate and loving. Happy but can be very fearless and aggressive when reproached.” Although she registered his complexion as “fair,” he darkened to a shade of cocoa that once prompted an apartment manager who took him for a “colored boy” to evict him from an unofficially segregated swimming pool.

Dad had risen from farm worker to self-employed cabinetmaker before becoming a father. Mom, formerly an elementary school teacher, turned to full-time mothering. They were older than most of our playmates’ parents, and they also seemed to have more rules, which they enforced more strictly. We abided by rules for playtime, mealtime, and bedtime, and our parents denied us ponies, three-speed bicycles, go-carts, and the other expensive items for which we lobbied. The ice cream truck had no luck at the Melkonian house, either. At the time, we put it all down to puritanism rather than modest means. Still, it was not so bad settling for ships, airplanes, and rubber-band guns fashioned from scraps of wood we found under Dad’s jigsaw.

For years, Dad handed Mom twenty-five dollars a week for food and clothes. Yet somehow they managed to insulate us from the financial insecurity of those years. On special summer evenings they would take us—Monte, our sisters Maile and Marcia, and I--to a farm equipment lot after hours. There, beneath fluttering plastic pennants, we scaled bulldozer treads and bounced on the high seats of backhoes and cotton harvesters, pounding on steering wheels and rattling gear levers. If lucky, we ended up at a drive-in burger joint, where a waitress in a pleated skirt clipped a tray laden with frosty rootbeer floats to the window of the Chevy.

Mom reminded us time and again how fortunate we were to have been born in the United States. She set aside our grandmother’s heavy blankets from the Old Country, in favor of light American-style bedding, and she taught us to pull the sheets taut, like the skin of a drum, across the mattress Monte and I shared, and to secure it with crisp hospital corners. In this way we distinguished ourselves from our second-generation Okie playmates, whose beds even at high noon resembled nests of matted linen.

Despite her primness, our mother did not fuss over us. With her there was no pressing of second portions, no protracted, tearful good-byes, no public patting down of hair, no hysterical reactions to stray dogs. She wasn’t one of those Old Country mothers who spent their days doting over their sons. We learned early to fry our own potatoes and eggs. And after warning us about the undertow at Cayucos Beach, Mom left us pretty much on our own, to gaze at the empty horizon in the surging waves.

On Sundays, our protestations notwithstanding, Mom dressed us like pint-sized busboys, in button-down shirts, double-knee pants, wing-tip oxfords, and clip-on bow ties, and marched us to Sunday school at the nearby “American” Presbyterian Church. We were two kids with butch haircuts clutching blue tithing envelopes, each containing a dime. At Sunday school, we heard stories that bolstered our conviction that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. At the end of the morning, we left with indelible pictures of Christ’s temptation in the desert, of John and James leaving their nets to become fishers of men, and of Jesus driving the moneychangers from the temple with a whip. We had the usual doubts, of course--questions about angels, calamitous floods, heaven and hell. But more disquieting was our observation that the Sunday school teachers seemed themselves to be lukewarm to the Good News. They would read us the gospel stories the way the storytime ladies at the library read fairy tales. They seemed almost embarrassed about the Crucified One, as if His sacrifice was somehow un-American. One Sunday morning, Monte and I hid in the boys’ restroom until the starting bell rang, then we stole away to a liquor store and spent our tithing dimes on candy, which we devoured with guilty relish.
For a boy growing up in the Walnut Capital of the World, it was consoling to learn that the nearby Sierra foothills had once served as a place of refuge for train robbers, cattle rustlers, and latter-day Robin Hoods. We had seen faded photographs of the baby-faced outlaws clutching holster buckles and Winchesters, and we had heard some of their names, too: Black Bart, Jesse James, the Dalton boys, and others. We had heard that once, long ago, a posse had returned to Fresno with the head of the greatest desperado of them all--Joaquin Murieta. But we had hoped that the report was just so much bluster, or a lie concocted for reward money, and that Murieta and his gang had escaped safely to Mexico.

Looking back, what I recall were the cartwheels, leapfrog, hide-and-seek, dichondra-flower necklaces, impetigo, stilt walking, stubbed toes, and games of chase lit by the summer sun. Digging holes for hideouts was a process imbued with infinite significance, though our work collapsed with the first heavy rain. Straddling boughs, we gnawed nectarines amid luminescent leaves and dancing shadows. We slid down grassy slopes on flattened cardboard boxes, wrestled in flooded orchards, and chased quail, jackrabbits, and bluebelly lizards through trellises. On summer evenings, we would stretch on warm asphalt, stare at the stars, breathe the fragrance of orange blossoms and weed oil, and listen to the whistle of distant trains.

Monte was a curious kid, always ready to learn something new. In fourth grade, he and his buddy Joel underwent a day of testing and emerged “Mentally Gifted Minors.” As “MGMs,” they were entitled to cigar-box butterfly collections, evenings of star gazing, and weekend fossil hunts with their favorite teacher, Mr. Clifford. Monte enjoyed reciting amazing facts: Monarch butterflies flit across the Pacific Ocean; the Earth orbits the sun at an average speed of 68,310 miles per hour; they eat monkey brains in China, and so on. Many years later, he would write to his fiancee from prison: “One must constantly learn. It is probably the most exciting and satisfying thing in life—other than loving each other, of course.”

Somewhere along the line, my brother came to the conclusion that if humans have souls, then so must the rabbits, turtles, gophers, and pigeons that foraged and fluttered around the backyard. And the same must be true of the crawdads, snakes, and tadpoles we kept in buckets and old enamel roasting pots. Thus it was only fitting that wooden crosses should sprout under the orange tree where we wrapped our dead pets in rags and buried them. Later, Monte claimed that as a boy he had believed not that he would one day swim like a frog and fly like a hawk, but that he actually could grow up to be a frog or a hawk. Throughout his life, he retained this belief in the radical reinvention of the self.

And change he did, from an early age. One morning, despite Dad’s aversion to guns, he gave us each a clutch of coins, to spend a penny a bullet at the rifle range at camp Tulequoia in the Sierras. There, Monte discovered he was a pretty good shot with a bolt-action .22, and afterwards he begged in vain for a rifle of his own. In the third grade, Dad cajoled him into clarinet lessons with the school band, and about the same time, we joined the Cub Scouts, where we learned how to “walk like an Indian,” noiselessly rolling heel to toe. But Monte soon grew bored of the marshmallow men, balsa wood rockets, and whittling projects, and so he quit the Scouts, never having exceeded the rank of Wolf. He never forgot his troop yell, though, and years later, in the wee hours of guard duty in Beirut, he recited it for his fellow militiamen: “Two, four, six, nine/We are pack three-one-nine/Den Two—Better’n you!”

In the spring of 1966, Monte started Little League. His team, the Bears, wore red caps and white tee shirts with red lettering. The hem of his shirt, which he never tucked in, almost reached his knees. Although he was the second-shortest kid on the team, Monte commanded the pitcher’s mound with focus and maturity. The faster I threw, the wilder I got. Not so with Monte: As a rule, he threw hard, fast, and “right down the pipe.” Some players at that age copied the mannerisms of their favorite figures—Marichal’s high kick; Mays’ hat throwing; Clemente’s tortured English. Monte’s performance, though, was all his own: an austere sequence of businesslike motions, nothing feigned or balked. He had no slider, no change-up, no knuckle ball--just a curve for special occasions and a fast ball, and that was it. But the fast ball was searing. After a particularly sharp smack, the catcher would bolt to his feet, throw his glove in the dust, and shake his swollen hand. Although Monte was too young for the majors, my major-league coach, Mr. Simmons, would sneak him onto the field every now and then, to pitch an inning or two. After a game, we would tuck our mitts under our arms and trudge home across the playing field, sno cones in hand, crunching gopher mounds with our cleats.

Once, as Monte and I were playing catch in a field, an Anglo kid pedaled up on a fancy stingray bicycle and announced that Mexicans were not allowed on the field. That boy was looking for a fight: Everyone knew full well that the polite word for Mexicans was “Spanish.” Although he had clearly thrown down the gauntlet, I felt at cross-purposes: On the one hand, I was not about to try my luck with this guy: He had several years on us (Monte and I were then ten and eleven, respectively), and a big physical advantage. But I did not care to leave the field with my tail between my legs, either. Fortunately, Monte didn’t wait for his big brother to sort it out. He casually informed the bully that we were not Mexicans but—Hawaiians! I’m not sure how seriously he took his own claim: Maybe he was thinking of the stories Mom had told us about teaching third grade at a sugar cane plantation in Paauilo, on the Big Island, before she was married. Or maybe Monte was just bluffing himself and his brother out of a pinch. At any rate, the bully, suddenly confronted by a couple of swaggering malahini’s, retreated in confusion.

As far as our own ethnic background was concerned, we had this vague sort of understanding that we were Armenians. But what that meant wasn’t clear: Outside of the kitchen, our parents weren’t especially informed about the subject, and there were no grandparents around the house to fill us in. Our only living grandparent was Mom’s mother, Grandma Jemima, and since 1964 she had been living at an Old Folks’ Home east of Fresno in a eucalyptus grove behind a rickety cedar barn that looked like a shipwreck. Almost every weekend for three years, until Grandma’s death, Mom would usher us into her room and we would kiss a cheek that grew paler and gaunter with each passing week. Then we would run outside to catch bluebelly lizards.

The Home was full of brittle Old Country types—gnarled Armenians with a language and tears we didn’t understand. They played pinochle, and one of the best players was a man with pointy ears who had a head like a medicine ball, and a permanent scowl. Moneybags, they called him, and he was rumored to have buried riches someplace, maybe in the Old Country. Several of the chrones rocking on the porch had weird blue tattoos on their chins and the tops of their hands. Another old lady in black, Mrs. Cloud, also had a tattoo, but it was on her forearm. She claimed that it was her own handiwork, that she had punched it into her own skin using a nail and an ink of ashes mixed with spit. The tattoo read: 1915.

Eench unem? She asked in her mother tongue, “What else could I do?”

Mrs. Cloud did not otherwise seem insane. So it was hard for Monte or me to decide what to think of such stories.