Commentary: Lesson in vigilance and security on way home from Europe

By Micah Meadowcroft

This year's Fourth of July weekend went more smoothly than last year's. Then I spent part of the weekend sleeping fitfully on a backpack, a gym bag, and two chairs stuffed together outside an airport coffee kiosk. All because there was a worry that I was a terrorist.

Flying to the United States from Dublin, you're supposed to arrive three hours before takeoff. The airport's Terminal 2 contains a U.S preclearance facility, meaning that after a second round of security - TSA-approved - and a chat with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, passengers flying to the states are considered domestic arrivals. Hence the need for extra time to get to your gate.

I was with my parents on the last leg of two months of touring, and I went to the airport on July 3 eager to get home. We had dinner and fireworks plans for the Fourth with friends I hadn't seen in half a year, and the novelty of living from a single bag had worn off.

Ignorant of preclearance, we gave ourselves two hours to get from taxi to boarding gate. Irish security was easy, and even the Transportation Security Administration wasn't so bad. I was asked to step aside for some hands-on attention, and my razor was taken away with a scolding, but none of that took terribly long. When we entered the byzantine queues for passport control and customs, the domestic status from preclearance seemed pure advantage.

I expected some sort of close examination. My passport's stamp collection had become relatively interesting that summer, starting with Turkey, slipping through some Balkans, moving from Eastern Europe to Spain, a momentary stop in Morocco, and then on to France and the United Kingdom. No surprise, then, that I was almost immediately pulled from the passport counter to a processing room with a halfhearted excuse that I probably had "the same name as a bad guy."

In the most boringly bureaucratic room imaginable, its taupe varieties animated only by the anxiety and timid anger of others similarly yanked, a compact Homeland Security agent - I regret forgetting her name - took over my interview with brisk professionalism. She wanted to know only one thing:

Why had I, a young American man traveling apparently alone (my tickets had been reserved separately from my parents') spent almost four weeks in Turkey?

The right answer, my answer, was that I had been on a school trip, with 20 classmates and not alone, in western Turkey, studying classical and Ottoman historic sites and, well, enjoying Turkey.

The wrong answer? The one listened for between lines, shifting eyes, and starts and stops.

The answer she unabashedly confessed to checking for was that I was an aimless, young American male who had found meaning in a so-called caliphate halfway around the world. In that version, instead of testing the limits of Turkey's shocking casualness about access to archaeological remains and clambering about on 5,000-year-old Hittite walls, I had made my way south and east, slipped across the border with the rising sun, and pledged myself to al-Baghdadi and his very different brand of shocking casualness about archaeology.

I hadn't done that. I had the pictures on my phone to prove it. There I am, on a priceless piece of ancient architecture, no gun in hand, not about to blow it up. But the perfectly civil conversation that established that fact lasted some 10 minutes too long, and I missed my flight. (I told my parents to go on without me, which they did, my mother reluctantly, my father less so.) So I spent 18 hours more in Dublin than expected but made it home just in time for the fireworks.

This concluding adventure of a summer of adventures has taken on new significance for me in light of the bombings at Istanbul Atatürk Airport and the Orlando massacre. Turkey's border has long played a key role in ISIS's ability to move people and recruits. The recent attack, part of a series coming after the Turkish government stepped up efforts against the Islamic State, is in some ways the exception that proves that rule. Homegrown terrorists like the Orlando and San Bernardino shooters - Americans disaffected by liberal society and seduced by an apocalyptic death cult - are a seemingly growing population, and many of ISIS's fighters are Westerners radicalized in the West before they make their way, often through Turkey, to Syria and Iraq.

The almost-missed-Independence-Day ordeal was an illustration of a system put in place to preserve that independence. My U.S. preclearance incident was a case of Americans responsible for our protection asking the right questions, seeing the warning flags, and doing their job politely and thoroughly. That the airline preferred to bump me rather than wait was not border control's fault.

This July Fourth, I looked back and was grateful for those Americans in Dublin, little stick flags on their desks for the holiday, still on duty.

Micah Meadowcroft, a recent graduate of Hillsdale College, is a summer copy editing intern at The Inquirer. mmeadowcroft@philly.com @Micaheadowcroft