hiram torres, yalie and taliban

This is nothing short of freaky.
In 1993, I enrolled as a freshman at Yale University. So did Hiram Torres. I was from a small town in south Louisiana; he was from Springsteen territory, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. I lived in Vanderbilt Hall, he in Welch Hall — if you leaned out of my third-floor window and had a good arm, you could probably hit Welch with a solid throw. He was the son of a seamstress, which meant we shared a working-class background that put us in the minority on campus.
I never knew the guy, but our seemingly aligned paths diverged pretty quickly thereafter. I started working for the college paper, failed miserably with the ladies, and generally had a standard-issue college experience. Hiram, in contrast, dropped out, converted to Islam, changed his name to Mohammed Salman, and apparently became a warrior for al-Qaeda.
I immediately dug up my old freshman facebook and turned to the T’s to see if I recognized his face. Unfortunately, he didn’t turn in a photo; where his face should be instead sits a photo of fellow Yalie Bill Clinton. (Boys who didn’t turn in their photos for the facebook got stuck with a photo of Bill; women got Hillary. A few of undetermined gender got Socks the cat.)
When you’re at a place like Yale, every once in a while you’d think about which of your classmates would get noticed by the outside world first. When we arrived in New Haven, there were two celebrities (of sorts) in the class, child actors Sara Gilbert (who played Roseanne’s younger daughter on TV) and Matt Shakman (who had been the boy on Just the Ten of Us, everybody’s favorite Growing Pains spinoff). Not much later, Mia Doi Todd started getting noticed as a singer-songwriter. Now, for reasons completely unexpected, you can add Hiram Torres to the list of famous members of the class of ’97.