You know how sometimes a thing starts out looking like one
story—proud kid in uniform, mama crying happy tears at the airport—and ends up
being something else entirely? Something darker, maybe. Something that sits in
your chest like a stone you can’t quite swallow.
That’s what happened to Kezia Syifa.
She was from Tangerang, Banten—one of those sprawling
Indonesian cities where the heat sits on you like a wet blanket and motorcycle
exhaust mixes with street vendor smoke until you can’t tell where one ends and
the other begins. But Kezia had gotten out. She’d made it to America, gotten
herself a green card, and then—and this is where it gets interesting,
friends—she’d gone and joined the Maryland Army National Guard.
Specialist E-4. Logistics. MOS 92A, if you care about such
things. Her job was keeping the supply chains running smooth as silk, making
sure the bullets and beans got where they needed to go. Important work.
Necessary work.
But see, that’s where the trouble started.
Because back home—and isn’t home always where the trouble
starts?—the government folks and the parliament types, they’d gotten wind of
what Kezia had done. They’d seen the pictures. Her in that American uniform,
crisp and pressed, looking proud as punch while her mother’s tears fell like
rain.
Single loyalty, they said. The law said it. You
couldn’t serve two masters. Not in this world.
What had been a moment of pride turned into something else.
Something that crept into Kezia’s life like mold growing behind the walls—you
don’t see it at first, but it’s there, spreading, eating away at the
foundation. Her Indonesian citizenship, that thing she’d been born with, was
now a question mark. A maybe. A we’ll see about that.
She wasn’t the first, though. That’s the thing people
forget—there’s always been others.
Go back far enough, all the way to World War II, and you’d
find Indonesian sailors in New York harbor. They’d signed on to fight the Axis
powers, yeah, but when the war ended and the Dutch came sniffing around,
looking to take Indonesia back like some kind of prize they’d misplaced, those
sailors—those brave sons of bitches—they’d staged a strike that would’ve made
Jimmy Hoffa proud.
Dozens of them refused to crew the ships carrying weapons
for Dutch troops. You understand what that meant? It meant risking everything.
Deportation. Prison. Maybe worse.
The Dutch would’ve had them shot as rebels, probably. Stood
them up against a wall somewhere and made an example.
So some of them joined the U.S. military instead. Joined the
merchant marine. Found asylum in uniforms that weren’t their own. History calls
them “The Unknown Greats”—independence fighters whose battlefields weren’t
jungles but cold New York docks, their enemies not soldiers but bureaucrats
with stamps and papers.
Ghosts, really. That’s what they became. Ghosts
fighting for a home they couldn’t reach.
---
Then there was the French Foreign Legion—the Légion
étrangère. “The Legion is Our Fatherland,” they said. Legio Patria
Nostra. A fancy way of saying: we don’t give a damn where you came from, we
only care about where you’re going.
The selection process at Aubagne headquarters was brutal.
Not Stephen King novel brutal, but real-world brutal—the kind that breaks
bodies and minds with equal efficiency. Extreme physical tests. Psychological
warfare. Background checks that could smell your secrets from a mile away.
Very few Indonesians made it through. Maybe less than one
percent of the Southeast Asian recruits, most of whom were tough-as-nails
Nepalese. The ones who did make it disappeared into pseudonyms and legends,
their real names erased like chalk in the rain.
Why’d they do it? Some were running from something. Some
were chasing adventure so extreme it bordered on suicide. Some just wanted that
European residency after years of service so hard it would grind your bones to
powder.
They were all running, though. That much was true.
---
Kristania Virginia Besouw’s story was different. Lighter on
the surface, anyway.
She’d won Miss Indonesia in 2006—all sparkle and evening
gowns and that pageant smile that could light up a room. But when the crown
came off and the cameras went away, she did what a lot of folks do: she went
looking for something real.
She found it in Colby, Kansas. Population: not many. Cost of
living: low enough to survive on. She’d left her studies at Universitas Sam
Ratulangi behind and headed for the American heartland, that vast empty space
where dreams go to either bloom or die.
Being an immigrant student was harder than any pageant. The
tuition costs piled up like snow in a blizzard. Her visa status hung over her
head like the sword of Damocles—one wrong move and she’d be gone, deported,
sent back.
The MAVNI program became her lifeline. Military Accessions
Vital to the National Interest—a fancy name for a simple trade: your skills for
our citizenship. Your service for safety.
In a 2020 interview, she’d said it plain: she joined to
avoid deportation. The uniform was armor. Legal armor.
But don’t think for a second it was easy.
Military nursing at Fort Hood, Texas—the Army’s biggest,
busiest base—wasn’t pageant work. It was blood and trauma and the kind of
mental fortitude that would break most people into kindling. She rose to
Sergeant E-5, earned medals that meant something: Army Commendation Medal, Good
Conduct Medal, Army Achievement Medal.
Her father had been Indonesian Navy. Her grandfather,
police. Military blood ran in her veins, though she’d hidden it behind makeup
and swimsuits for years. People who knew her said she’d always been a tomboy
underneath—the evening gowns were just camouflage of a different kind.
When her contract ended in October 2018, she walked away
citing exhaustion. Physical. Mental. The kind that soaks into your marrow and
doesn’t leave.
Now she’s a nurse in Texas. The pageant crown and the Kevlar
helmet both gather dust somewhere, artifacts from different lives she used to
live.
---
Michelle Sukardi Kania’s story had teeth.
Born in Los Angeles but raised in Jakarta, she was a Third
Culture Kid—never quite belonging anywhere, always caught between worlds. She’d
attended Jakarta International School, learned Indonesian, absorbed the culture
like a sponge.
Then came May 1998.
The riots.
If you don’t know about them, count yourself lucky. Young
Michelle had to flee the only home she’d ever really known, flee the burning
city, flee back to Los Angeles—which should’ve been home but felt like Mars.
That kind of trauma? It changes you. Rewires your brain.
Teaches you that safety isn’t guaranteed, that citizenship is the only real
armor you’ve got.
Her father—an Indonesian man who’d once dreamed of being a
soldier but was blocked by age—trained her to shoot from childhood. Built
discipline into her bones. By the time she was old enough to enlist, she was
already half-soldier.
She made Captain. Deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—deserts
and bombs and the kind of asymmetric warfare that eats conventional military
doctrine for breakfast. Her Indonesian upbringing gave her cultural
sensitivity, helped her connect with locals in ways other officers couldn’t.
When she returned to Indonesia for the joint exercise Gema
Bhakti, she stood beside TNI officers in her American uniform. Bridging worlds
that shouldn’t have needed bridging.
For Michelle, that uniform represented freedom. The kind she’d
lost in 1998 and vowed never to lose again.
---
But not everyone chooses the uniform.
Sometimes, the uniform chooses you.
Two Indonesian students in Singapore learned that the hard
way in 2014. Singapore’s National Service rules are strict as a heart
attack—second-generation male Permanent Residents have to complete full
military training. No exceptions. No mercy.
Wear the Singapore Armed Forces uniform and swear loyalty,
or go to prison. Lose your residency. Lose everything.
When their unit deployed to Magelang for joint exercises,
the Indonesian military spotted them—Indonesian citizens in foreign uniforms,
Indonesian passports in foreign pockets. The TNI isolated them faster than you
could blink. Excluded them from training. Shipped them back.
The citizenship law was clear: join a foreign military
without presidential permission, lose your citizenship. Article 23(d), plain as
day.
But the government chose mercy. Article 24 provided an
out—the service wasn’t voluntary, it was a legal requirement tied to education
and residency. Refusing would’ve destroyed their futures.
They got deported with a warning. A slap on the wrist,
relatively speaking.
---
That kind of protection doesn’t exist for the Kezias, the
Kristanias, the Michelles of the world. They made their choices with eyes open,
and choices have consequences.
Break Article 23, and you risk statelessness—a ghost without
a country. Get foreign citizenship, and everything Indonesian vanishes: land
ownership, political rights, the green passport that once said you belong.
Going home becomes visiting. Being Indonesian becomes being
a foreigner in your own skin.
Still, for some in the diaspora, wearing a developed nation’s
uniform represents achievement. Proof they conquered something bigger than
themselves.
But late at night—and I know this, friends, I know
this—some of them lie awake wondering if they paid too much. If the uniform was
worth the ghost they became.
That’s the real horror, isn’t it? Not monsters or demons.
Just choices. And the long, dark roads they lead you down.
The End
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