It Happened on the Way to War (26 page)

“Well, let's talk about it.”

“Please, I don't want to talk about this now.”

“Good point.” I, too, was emotionally exhausted. “I don't either. Should I call tomorrow?”

“Yeah, okay.” We never booked specific times to talk. I called Salim when I could. He always picked up the phone, even if it woke him, and I tried my best to be just as responsive.

“Salim,” I stopped him before he hung up. I didn't want to leave us hanging on such a note. “You know I'm with you.”

“I know, bro.”

TEN OF THE fourteen CFK youth representatives went to Tabitha the following day and told her that they wanted Salim to be fired. She received their information with a poker face. That evening, Salim discovered a handwritten note under his door in Fort Jesus. The note, signed by the same youth representatives, informed Salim that he had two weeks to leave Kibera “or else.”

Tabitha and Salim retained an attorney the following day and drafted a terse reply: “Be advised that you are no longer part of the leadership of CFK. It would be illegal and improper to carry out any activity on behalf of CFK. You are also advised not to transact any business or activity using CFK's name. If the requested is violated, legal action will be taken.”

Tabitha discovered that Kassim and Kash had collaborated with the ten youth representatives. I began to worry about Salim's security. Kassim had helped lead the Nubian youth in the 1995 ethnic clashes, and Kash had spoken with Nate about a dark period in his life when he had been in dozens of street fights.

Early one morning I woke up from a nightmare that Salim had been shot in the head. I immediately reached for the phone. Salim picked up.

“I'm sorry, man,” I said. “I shouldn't have told Kassim the budget, or even discussed it with him before talking to you. I don't want you to get hurt.”

I squashed the phone's receiver to my ear. Even when he was upset, Salim spoke softly. “It's okay, Rye. You can talk to whoever, but thank you anyway. Thank you anyway for apologizing.”

“I'm worried about your safety. Kash, Kassim, these are tough guys.”

“No, no, don't worry about me. Let them try. Honestly, let them try anything. I don't fear these guys. You know, I have friends here, too. Some of my brothers and sisters from the children's home live in Kibera. They know these guys and they keep their eyes out. Even me, I am from Kibera. I know this place.”

“You mean because you live in Fort Jesus?”

“No, not that. Fort Jesus isn't really Kibera. When I was at the children's home, there was a family in Kibera who used to let me stay with them between school sessions. That's why also I know a lot of these people. I remember them and they remember me.”

“But Kassim and the youth reps think you're from outside. Even Taib, who sent those letters. You never told me this.”

“It's not like I was hiding it. The thing is, it was only for a couple of years. I was like six, you know. So for these people, I wasn't from Kibera because I wasn't living my whole life here. But what's ‘from Kibera' anyway?” Salim was extremely guarded with personal information, and it took many years for me to get a full sense of his life history. His discretion wasn't simply a safety mechanism. It was a matter of pride. Salim didn't want his past to typecast him as an orphan who grew up on the streets. He wasn't looking for pity. He would prove himself on his own merits.

“So, is that why you never said anything?” I asked.

“Is what why?”

“Well, because it doesn't really matter. The reps, they tried to make being ‘from Kibera' an issue because they had nothing else. The issue isn't being ‘from Kibera.' It's do you understand what it's like to live in poverty, and do you, CFK's leader, understand communities like Kibera.”

“Yeah, sort of. I don't have to justify myself to them. If they want to be part of leading CFK, then it's them to prove themselves to us, and to the community. That's why I don't say anything. Believe me, they know I spent time as a child in Kibera. Definitely, they know that. That's not the point.”

“I hear you. I'm just sorry I didn't do more to back you up. I didn't realize how my communication with individual reps was being misinterpreted and complicating things.”

“It's okay. It's just different now than when we started.”

Again, Salim was right. The truth was that I had trouble drawing the line between friends and professional colleagues. My role had changed, but I hadn't changed with it. I was no longer Omosh, the playful, unpredictable
mzungu
student who lived in a shack in Kibera and bonded with youth leaders and tough guys. Residents knew CFK, and my public identity had changed to a person with access to resources, power, and influence. I needed to step back and support Salim and Tabitha as we developed our management skills. I needed to be persistent but patient as we structured CFK together and helped build local leaders.

Military intelligence provided me with a framework. It all had to do with compartments. I needed to do a better job of separating my professional and personal lives. That was obvious. The larger insight, however, pertained to the balancing act between my two worlds. I had searched for overlaps between CFK and the Marine Corps and found a few. I would soon be done with my training and needed to figure out a way to manage my responsibilities in both spheres, a way that wasn't based on good luck or circumstance and could endure trials by fire. Compartmentalizing was the answer. It seemed so simple. Yet it had taken the youth representatives' revolt and a Top Secret clearance for me to realize it.

TOWARD THE END of the HUMINT course, the general in charge of Marine Corps intelligence arrived from the Pentagon for the graduation ceremony of a class of enlisted Marine intelligence analysts. Standing ramrod straight, with icy eyes and a chiseled jaw, the general skipped the graduation clichés and gave a classified war briefing. Days earlier he had been in Kuwait with the lead Marine division preparing to invade Iraq. He described our military might there as “awesome,” “incredible,” and “ready for trigger-time.”

I believed we were rushing into war, and I had opposed the doctrine of preemption until Colin Powell, the secretary of state and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convinced me otherwise. I trusted Secretary Powell when he delivered his United Nations speech and made the case for war based on the “facts and conclusions” from “solid intelligence” that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Secretary Powell's team, I assumed, had an intelligent, detailed plan for how to transition Iraqi governance once Saddam fell.

“We'll move so fast Saddam won't have time to react,” the Marine general concluded, karate-chopping the air. “This will reduce the risk of mass casualties from chemical weapons.”

We had been doused with tear gas and taught about chemical weapons at the Basic School. We had carried our gas masks in drop pouches on our thighs and drilled repeatedly with mock alerts.
“Gas, gas, gas,”
the alarm would sound. We'd drop our gear, don our masks, and get into fighting positions.

Despite this familiarity, for some strange reason I hadn't realized what the high probability of being gassed actually meant for our Marines on the ground in Kuwait, until that moment. As the general spoke, my mind returned to an image of a soldier dying from a chemical weapons attack in the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” (It Is Sweet and Right) by Wilfred Owen, an infantryman killed in action in World War I.

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues

I didn't remember the whole stanza, only those tongues plagued by “vile, incurable sores.” It was among the most indelible images of war's horror. What a degrading, miserable way to die. Vile, incurable sores. Those tongues haunted me. And yet they weren't enough to purge the pull I felt to go to battle. Days later, in our windowless classroom, we watched the Iraq invasion on television. Two other lieutenants were in my class. We spoke frequently with each other about our envy of the Marines on the front lines. It wasn't only bravado. We wanted to be there. Duty, honor, and courage played their parts. But for me, there was something else, something subconscious. It had to do with a dark corner of my psyche that mingled with a sense of service and led me to fantasize about what Owen called “the old lie” in his famous last lines:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie;
Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori
[It is sweet and right to die for your country].

By the time we graduated at the end of March 2003, our ground forces were assaulting Baghdad. A week later, they took the city. As the general had predicted, our military assaulted Iraq with such force and speed that Saddam hardly had time to react. Years later, we would discover that he also didn't possess the weapons of mass destruction that had been used to justify the war.

The base was a ghost town by the time we returned to Camp Lejeune with our new credentials. Our company was nearly deserted apart from a handful of Marines who were unable to deploy due to medical issues, training conflicts, or family matters. Although I was still hoping to go to Iraq, our mission with NATO to Bosnia needed replacements in less than three months, and I was the only officer who was deployable. Once the choice mission in the company, Bosnia had become the detritus of a forgotten war.

My initial disappointment faded after a few conversations with mentors. Colonel Greenwood, who was still a director at the National Security Council, put the mission into a larger context. While our involvement in Bosnia had tapered off substantially since the initial intervention in 1995, the mission was an opportunity for me to see a mature, multinational military operation and learn firsthand about the U.S. military's evolving experiment with nation building. NATO in Bosnia focused on peacekeeping, though with an important element that Colonel Greenwood referred to as “manhunting.” He suspected that my Marines and I would be heavily involved in that work. Among other indicted war criminals, we would hunt Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the two Bosnian Serbs who helped mastermind and execute the ethnic-cleansing campaigns and civil war that killed more than two hundred thousand people between 1992 and 1995. Professor Kohn predicted that the low visibility of the mission could improve our chances of doing high-impact work. Peter Whaley, who had served in the region, wrote a one-line e-mail: “Get the bastards.”

Three Marine sergeants were assigned to my team. We spent two months preparing to attach to NATO's first-ever multinational HUMINT battalion, a unit that consisted of dozens of military intelligence professionals from the United States and six other European countries. I focused on getting to know my team. Two of my sergeants were single. The other, Sergeant David Thompson, had a wife and two young children, one of whom was fighting a serious heart defect.

Sergeant Thompson exemplified the high caliber of some of our Marines. Orphaned on the streets of New York, Sergeant Thompson had boxed semiprofessionally, sold used cars, and driven cabs for New York's Gambino crime family until a recruiter enticed him to the Marine Corps with details about the GI Bill and other opportunities to advance his education. Within five years, he had deployed as a nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons specialist and earned a master's degree in information systems from Boston University. When he applied to join CI/HUMINT, one of the warrant officers who interviewed him remarked afterward that there was no better training for HUMINT than selling used cars.

THE NIGHT BEFORE we deployed to Bosnia for six months, Tracy joined me at the campground. Although she wasn't fond of the camper and frequently reminded me of its moldy carpets and lumpy bed, she loved being near the ocean. We took a long walk on the beach and said good-bye as the sun began to appear over the Atlantic. I was excited about the mission and didn't realize how difficult my departure was for her.

Later that morning, while driving back to graduate school in Greensboro, she called me in tears.

“It'll be all right,” I tried to console her. Bosnia was much safer than Iraq. We probably wouldn't even see gunfire. What I didn't realize was that every time she turned on the television or radio and heard about a Marine casualty, she would think of me.

“But what if it isn't? What if something happens?”

“It won't.”

“Promise?”

“Yes. And, Tracy…”

“What?”

“I love you.” I said it for the first time. Believing that it was better to show love than to say it, I rarely used the L-word.

“I love you, too.” I was taken aback by how good it felt to say and hear those words.

OUR NATO BATTALION commander, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, assigned me as his operations officer. The billet was intended for a major with over eight years of HUMINT experience. My aptitude played no part in his decision. The battalion's key leadership billets were assigned by country, and I was the only American officer in the battalion with the right training for the job. As Professor Kohn had predicted, I found myself as a young lieutenant in a position of significant responsibility. My duties included directing a platform of dozens of intelligence collectors from NATO bases spread across Bosnia and Croatia. I detached my three Marines with linguist support to the most strategically important bases.