I was camping on a beach on a small island off of Okinawa with a teenage friend and his parents when we heard the news of the assassination on a portable radio that the father carried with him. He was a Jewish archaeologist and historian who had spent years in Iran under the Shah, working to preserve Iranian cultural heritage. The news stunned him. He never wore his politics on his sleeve, but I could tell he kept a deep respect for the man. He once saw me reading Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and I believe that’s why he took me along on the family’s camping trip. At our school in 1973 my friend and I had received an intensive Western media-mediated history of the Middle East. But on this day my friend’s father took us into a deep dive of the region. I still remember that day beside the ocean.