Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (20 page)

(As for my pacifism, it is nothing if not ambivalent. When I ask myself what person in American history I would most like to have been, I am powerless to protest when my subconscious nominates Joshua L. Chamberlain. Colonel Chamberlain, while in command of the 20th Maine Volunteers during the Civil War, ordered a downhill and then uphill bayonet charge which turned the tide of battle in favor of the Union forces at Gettysburg.)

“ ‘Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in Mozambique?’ I asked.

“I was strapped into the seat of a jet bound from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Maputo, the capital of the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, where I had never been before. All I knew about it so far was that it was as beautiful and habitable as California, had several good ports on one of the longest shorelines of any African nation, was underpopulated, got enough rain most years and sounded like a Garden of Eden—but was a manmade hell instead.”

Thus began a piece I wrote for
Parade
at the start of 1990, when the so-called Communist Bloc of nations could no longer hold up their end of the Harry High School myth that there was a desperate struggle between good and evil societies going on. (When I was a student at Shortridge High School, whose colors were blue and white, we hated Arsenal Tech, whose colors were green and white. One time I got roughed up by a bunch of Tech subhumans while I was walking home alone from a Shortridge-Tech football game wearing a Shortridge band uniform. As I would tell Benny Goodman many years later, “I used to play a little licorice-stick myself.”)

“The stranger I asked about the good guys and the bad guys was a white American male named John Yale, who was an old hand in Mozambique,” my
Parade
piece went on. “He was a worker for World Vision, an American evangelical Christian charity, which was getting food and clothing and other bare essentials to some of the country’s more than 1 million helpless refugees. The population of the whole country was only 15 million—fewer people than are crowded into Mexico City nowadays. The refugees had been driven off their little farms and had had their homes and schools and hospitals burned down by other Mozambicans who called themselves in Portuguese the National Resistance of Mozambique, or RENAMO for short.”

(Our Neo-Conservatives, or Neo-Cons for short, think RENAMO is the cat’s pajamas. I heard from several of them after the piece was published, and their letters reminded me of the way Dean Martin introduced Frank Sinatra once. He said Sinatra was going to tell about all of the
good
things the Mafia was doing.)

“John Yale replied that his job was not to choose sides in a civil war but to help people in deep trouble—no matter who or what they were said to be. But I sensed from some of the other carefully neutral things he said about RENAMO, which had been raping and murdering and pillaging and all that since 1976, when it was trained and equipped by white South Africans and Rhodesians, that it shouldn’t be thought of as people. RENAMO had become an incurable disease instead, out of control, since the armed forces were so poor and spread so thin, a ghastly feature of daily life no more to be discussed in terms of good and evil than cholera, say, or bubonic plague.

“There is, in fact, an old, old word in every language for roving gangs of heartless hit-and-run robbers, gangs which have become a crippling or fatal disease, unreasoning, existing for their own sake and nothing more. In English the word is
bandits.
In Portuguese it is
bandidos,
which, I would soon learn, in Maputo and elsewhere was a synonym for RENAMO.

“ ‘Crippling or fatal disease’ did I say? Our own State Department estimates that RENAMO, virtually unopposed, has killed more than 100,000 Mozambicans since 1987 alone—including at least 8,000 children under the age of five, most of whom were driven into the bush, where they starved to death. Our own government may have supported RENAMO secretly in the past, because Mozambique was avowedly Marxist, and South Africa used to do so openly and unashamedly. But no more. The
bandidos
are so few, and so hated, for good reason, that they can never expect to take over the country. Everybody else—including the United States and the Soviet Union and the International Red Cross and CARE and John Yale of World Vision—is doing everything possible to ease the agony of the non-Marxist, noncapitalist, nearly naked, and utterly pitiful refugees. For that matter, by the time I got there, the few Mozambicans sophisticated enough to have some idea of how Marxism was supposed to work were as sick of Socialist idealism in practice as anybody in Moscow or Warsaw or East Berlin.

“I was soon off the jet and into an eight-seat twin-engine Cessna flown by a lantern-jawed kid named Jim Friesen, who had previously been a bush pilot in northwest Canada. Jim couldn’t fly low to give us a closer look at the sights because the
bandidos
could be anywhere in the open country. They shot at boats and planes and trucks and cars, at anything that looked as if it might have something to do with making the lives of the common people less hellish. Our chartered Cessna wasn’t a luxury. It was a necessity, since all the roads below us had been turned into death traps by
bandido
ambushes and mines.”

(Before I left, somebody asked me if I wasn’t afraid of getting killed, and I said, “I’m just going to Mozambique, not the South Bronx.”)

“Imagine California with all its roads cut, with most of its country people driven into towns and cities, with its farms abandoned, and with its huddled, defenseless population having to be fed and clothed by air. Welcome to Mozambique.

“From October 9 to October 13, while Wall Street was having a little crash, Jim Friesen flew me and several others with media contacts in the USA—including reporters from
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
and
Newsweek
and CNN—from one isolated and besieged refugee center to another. What we saw wasn’t all that different from what every adult American has seen more than enough of in photographs, whether they were taken in liberated Nazi death camps or Biafra or the Sudan or you name it. I myself have seen people that hungry in real life—at the end of World War II in Germany, where I was a PW, and again on the Biafran side of the Nigerian civil war.”

(In my novel
Bluebeard
I describe a valley full of refugees at the end of WW II. It wasn’t imaginary. It was real. O’Hare and I were there.)

“In Mozambique we saw lots of familiar stuff, stupefied starving children with eyes as big as dinner plates, adults with chests that looked like bird cages. There was one new sight for me anyway: purposely mutilated people with their noses or ears or whatever cut off by hand-held sharp instruments.”

(I didn’t just hear about them. I saw them and talked to them through an interpreter. They weren’t brought to us. They were just faces, what was left of them, in a great big crowd of people who could easily be dead soon for want of calories.)

“We were making this gruesome trip at the invitation of CARE, a bigger and older relief organization than John Yale’s. CARE hoped that we would let ordinary Americans know about the peculiarly manmade agony of faraway Mozambique, and what so many relief agencies to which they might have contributed were doing there.”

(CARE came into being after World War II, of course, bringing food to people starving in the ruins of Europe. It had since ministered to Third World people in dire need, but an executive in its New York City headquarters told me that, what with the collapse of the Russian Empire, CARE might have to return to certain parts of Europe again, mainly with storage batteries and tractor tires and so on. The chief piece of farm machinery in Mozambique was one of the world’s worst polluters, since the farmers there cleared fields by burning them. RENAMO should be thanked, maybe, for making so many of them stop doing that.)

“With us was CARE’s boss in Mozambique, David P. Neff, forty-three years old, whose hometown, which he hadn’t seen in quite some time, was New Athens, Illinois. He had been in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, instead, and had then been hired by CARE, mastering shipping and accounting and hard-edge management techniques for getting relief supplies to where they were most needed—on time, unspoiled, and unstolen—to the people the donors had addressed them to, in Liberia and then in the Gaza Strip and then in the Philippines and then in Somalia and then in Sierra Leone. And now Mozambique. His enemy wasn’t RENAMO. It was inefficiency.”

(Will Dave and his family next take up residence and learn the language and the customs in Warsaw or Leningrad?)

“I won’t repeat the tales of hunger Dave had to tell. As I say, color the people in old photographs of Auschwitz all shades of brown and black and you will be looking at what he sees every day. I will pass on instead what he said to me as we were flying over a refugee center near the mouth of the crocodile-infested Zambezi River, at a town called Marromeu. We flew over the town before landing, making sure that the people were out in the open, trying to scratch a living with their hoes from their little gardens, and not hiding in the bush from yet another hit-and-run attack by what some Americans still call ‘Freedom Fighters.’ Dave said that keeping RENAMO in mines and bullets and rocket launchers was so cheap that they didn’t need South Africa or the CIA or whatever to support them. He estimated the price at about $4 million a year, the cost of a movie without big stars or of a fairly elaborate Broadway musical. This was a sum from a few rich individuals outside Mozambique, or even one billionaire.

“Dave added that if the
bandidos
actually captured the capital city of Maputo, which they could probably do, since they were operating on its outskirts, they would look around helplessly and ask in effect, ‘Okay, what are we supposed to do now?’ All they knew about transportation was how to shoot at anything that dared to move. All they knew about hospitals and schools was how to burn them down or blow them up.

“The hungry and terrified and dispossessed farmers in and around Marromeu were out in the open. They had surely never heard of Karl Marx, and probably had never even heard of Johannesburg or New York or Moscow. So Jim brought our plane down expertly on the short, rough landing strip. To one side was the corpse of a DC-3 which had cracked up a couple of days before. Fifteen minutes earlier we had been looking down at about a hundred wild elephants.

“Dave and Jim knew the plane well. Its nickname was ‘Little Annie.’ She had been delivering supplies to refugees day after day for years. But now her landing gear had given out, and her belly was all ripped to hell. She had to have been older than Dave Neff. The last DC-3 was built in 1946, when CARE was sending food parcels to the ruins of Europe and the black people of Mozambique had thirty more years of virtual slavery to endure under the rule of the Portuguese.

“Among the first Mozambicans we saw after landing were two gaunt men wearing shirts Little Annie must have brought them. One shirt was decorated with the flags of United States yacht clubs. The other was emblazoned with an S in a triangle, which identified the wearer as the man who was mild-mannered Clark Kent in private life—but who now stood before us as Superman.”

(That ends my piece for
Parade.
I wrote another for the Op-Ed page of
The New York Times,
but I can’t find it now, and the hell with it anyway. In it, I remember, I pointed out that the black people of Mozambique threw out their Portuguese masters, who hadn’t even allowed them to drive motor vehicles, when we were about to be thrown out of Vietnam. That was how young they were as a nation. And one of the first things they wanted to do was learn how to read and write and do a little math. RENAMO is still doing its best to keep them from doing that—with state-of-the-art weapons and communications equipment which are still coming from God knows where. When the Portuguese were departing so long ago now, they poured cement down the sewer lines of toilets in office buildings and hotels and hospitals and so on which weren’t going to belong to them anymore.)

In my book
Palm Sunday
I reprinted an essay I wrote when I came home from the Biafran side of the Nigerian civil war. The Biafrans (rebel Ibos) were so successfully blockaded that their children all had red hair and their rectums were everted, dangling outside like radiator hoses and so on, thanks to protein deficiency. When I got back to my own country (where my family was off skiing in Vermont), I got a room at the old Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, and I found myself crying so hard I was barking like a dog. I didn’t come close to doing that after World War II. Nor did I shed one tear after getting back from Mozambique. The last time I cried (and I did it quietly, and didn’t bark like a dog) was when my first wife Jane (who was skiing when I was in Biafra) died. (Our son the doctor, Mark, said after her death that he himself would not have submitted to the ghastly treatments which allowed Jane to stay alive with cancer for so long.)

I ran into an old friend from Shortridge High School, a great inventor and mechanical engineer named Herb Harrington, while I was writing my dry-eyed piece about Mozambique. I confessed that something had happened to me since Biafra, that Mozambique had impressed me intellectually but not emotionally. I told Herb that I had seen little girls about the age of my own precious Lily drifting off to death, having been in the bush too long before reaching a refugee center, but that I felt hardly anything afterward. He said that the same thing had happened to him when he was in the Army during World War II, with a small crew installing radio stations along the coast of China. Wagonloads of Chinese who had starved to death were a common sight, and he soon (in less than a week) no longer noticed them.

(The photograph at the head of this chapter shows me in action in Mozambique, demonstrating muscular Christianity in an outfit that might have been designed by Ralph Lauren. The aborigines didn’t know whether to shit or go blind until I showed up. And then I fixed everything.)