Authors: Steven Pressfield
By next morning, villagers started showing up carrying “stars.” This was the temporary unofficial new currency. It was nothing but scraps of colored paper with Salter’s personal three-star stencil stamped on them. Each “star” was worth a buck. Any kid with a copy machine could counterfeit them, but nobody did. The stunt worked. We Marines used the stars too. In fact, the only problem with this tender was that the locals held it in such awe and viewed it as imbued with such good juju that they squirreled the bills away for luck and didn’t even spend them.
I had never taken over a country before. Who had? The people adored you. If you were a Marine, you were everyone’s number one
son. We became the Peace Corps. We patrolled the streets, we repaired sewers and power lines, we delivered babies.
The onshore force was cut off from TV. None of us had time. We gleaned only snatches about the crisis over Taiwan or even of the mounting threat to our own position from nuclear-capable Chinese forces massing along the demilitarized corridor. The only thing we knew for sure, because we could see it happening from the hills above the harbor, was that we had lost our own carrier group, Adm. Spence’s. Under orders from President Cole, the battle group was steaming right now for the Strait of Malacca, where U.S. and Chinese subs were facing off and the world was holding its collective breath over this potential nuclear showdown.
In-country, reprisals continued. Elements of Mbana’s soldiers had rallied into raiding parties and taken to the bush. They still resisted. They still terrorized. The natives went after them.
Any individual who had collaborated with the army—informants, girlfriends, merchants who had supplied the Bombers or relatives who had harbored them—was fair game. We talked to people. They told us how things worked.
The word for shame in local dialect is
imare
. There are twenty-two words for shame in Swahili and Gozen. There’s a word for the shame associated with failure to extend hospitality when it is called for, and another term for the shame of neglecting a parent or grandparent.
Imare
is the shame of failing to stand up to an oppressor. This is the worst shame of all. It can be made whole only by blood and only within a ritual called
inagama hura. Inagama
means “sever”;
hura
is “soul.” The malefactor must be dispatched in such a way that not only his body dies, but his spirit, too. The skull must be severed from the body and all four limbs detached and scattered. Inagama cannot be enacted individually; it must be performed in a ritual group, called a
gangara
, which has been purified beforehand.
There is another type of shame, which I could never pronounce and could never find anyone to write down for me. It’s something like
urchita nambe
, with the “ch” sounding guttural and the “b” in nambe spoken singsongy at the top of the throat.
Urchita nambe
is the shame of women. Not the shame of men who have failed to protect their women, but the shame of women whose souls have been violated. This is the shame that made our young girl take her own life and the lives of her family that first day. This woman’s act, we learned, was no aberration. It was mandated by tribal law. By such a slaughter, she had saved her own soul and the spirits of her family from the pollution inflicted on her by the soldiers. In East Africa, we were told, rape was an expression of manhood. When a man took a woman by force, he acquired her power. He stole a piece of her soul, which made him stronger and more virile, while degrading and shaming her. Again, the stain of this infamy could be washed clean only by blood.
When we Marines landed, our presence took the lid off this shame and the emotion that accompanied it. This was not rage. You could see it. It was deeper; it was at the level of the soul.
What it meant in effect was that the entire population of wronged villages, male and female, packed up and set off into the bush, armed with clubs, spears, and machetes, tracking down those who had shamed them. After Salter’s initial takeover of the capital, as I said, raids continued by the Brown Bombers in the outlying regions and in the townships and shantytowns. Salter immediately dispatched platoon- and company-sized response teams to hunt them down. Vehicle chases would take place across hundreds of miles, in Humvees and requisitioned “technicals” and jingle trucks, with Cobra gunships overhead and Crow and Raven thermal-sensor drones quartering above the bush, zeroing even on bodies that hid themselves in rivers or slathered themselves head to toe with mud. Salter had pledged to protect any Mbana soldier who surrendered.
The detainees must face justice, but they would have a fair chance to defend themselves.
The problem had become the
gangaras
, the ritual vigilantes. The Marines were in a race with them to get to the bad guys first.
By now, reporters had started showing up. Not the mainstream media; they had their hands full with Taiwan and a collateral crisis in Egypt. We got the freelancers, the wild Aussies and Germans and South Africans with their handhelds and their nCryptor uplinks. They were like paparazzi. They had unbelievable guts; they would do anything for a shot or a piece of sensational video.
A.D. came in with them. She was the only legitimate journalist, other than Ariel Caplan, who brought a camera crew from Agence France-Press TV, and John Milnes, the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent from Fox/BBC, who traveled alone except for his valet, Whittaker, who cooked his meals and boiled his shirts and whom he paid out of his own pocket. By now the machete reprisals had become a serious PR problem for Salter. The gonzos wanted footage. None except A.D., Caplan, and Milnes was covering Salter’s restoration of the courts of justice or his reactivation of the water treatment plant. The freelancers wanted video of black Africans hacking the heads off other black Africans or, even better, black African women and children doing the hacking, which was in fact how the honor imperative worked. It became the Marines’ full-time job to keep these journo vultures in their hotels or inside the wire on our bases.
You had to feel for the locals. I’ve served in a gaggle of these ass-fucked countries and it’s the same in every one. First, there’s no indigenous economy. There’s no entrepreneurial class, no middle class, no capital, no respect for property rights. There are no businesses other than roll-up storefronts selling rice and cement—or the odd mom-and-pop Chiclets and T-shirt stand. The only enterprising capitalists are criminals. Government exists in external form
only, a travesty of legitimate governance, with tribal thugs and gangsters occupying the ministries and looting for themselves and their families whatever revenue or matériel is extracted from the earth or flows in from outside the borders.
What enterprise exists is either subsistence farming or narcotics. Cash comes in from outside, not as capital investment—because no First World bank or corporation is reckless enough to take such a risk—but in the form of humanitarian aid, military support, or poison-pill loans from the IMF and the World Bank to fund well-intentioned but artificial projects such as infrastructure construction and rehabilitation—roads and wells, power stations and water purification plants that look great on paper but on the ground are nothing but sinkholes of corruption, with the outside cash flowing into the pockets of whatever tribal or criminal despot lords it over the region. The infrastructure project itself is abandoned halfway through, when the foreign workers bolt because they can’t stand conditions any longer, with only the shell left standing after every item of value has been looted by the locals.
These countries are often called “failed states,” but the truth is they’re not states at all. There’s no source of revenue sufficient for the central government to pay for police or security forces (if these could even be created, which they can’t) to protect the simple, hardworking villagers in the provinces. So the warlords do it, as they have for the last ten thousand years, by extorting money from the locals and shaking down any outside entity via tolls or road or river taxes (and nowadays pipelines), either in the form of institutionalized patronage from whatever Western or Asian buccaneering entity is ripping off the natural resources, or informally by checkpoints and roadblocks at the muzzle end of AK-47s. The regional lords extract protection money from the narco traffickers (most in fact are indistinguishable from narco traffickers) and use this revenue to recruit and fund their militias. The real currency of the nation
is hopelessness. If a young man of courage and vision arises, he has two choices: join the gangs or bolt the country. The rare honest man, the stand-up politician, the crusading editor gets his few column inches in the Western press and then is shot, hanged, poisoned, or “detained for his own protection” and never heard from again.
That’s what you see in these countries. And you see something else: the long-suffering, brave, generous, God-fearing, patient, kind, and, against all odds, cheerful wives, husbands, and children of the villages and cities. That’s what we Marines saw and that’s what Salter saw.
There are three primary tribes in Zamibia—the Zamibs, the Nahallawit, and the Koros. Mbana was a Zamib. These were the majority, constituting about 60 percent of the populace; the other two tribes composed 30 percent, with the final ten made up of smaller tributary tribes. When Mbana was in power, his tribesmen persecuted the others. All the judges and ministers were either Zamibs or tokens. When the Marines took over, the minority tribes didn’t trust the courts because the justices were still essentially Mbana’s cronies. Salter had to have his platoon and company commanders dispense justice themselves, in person, at least temporarily. The problem was the East African mind is so tribal and so finely attuned to distinctions in rank that any man of substance, which was everybody above the age of thirty, refused to have his case adjudicated by these young lieutenants and captains who were perceived by these tribesmen as the “sons” of Salter. The petitioners wanted the real deal. They demanded the man himself.
Salter began hearing grievances. He conducted these proceedings outdoors, first on the palace grounds, then in a quadrant of the soccer stadium—partly because these were the only sites big enough to contain the multitude of plaintiffs, and partly for the transparency of the venue, to let the people see that business was being conducted in the open and nobody was selling them out behind closed doors.
In East Africa, no public act can be taken in the capital without report of it flying on wings to every village and crossroads of the interior. A wise judgment is commended. Two in a row are acclaimed. Three and they’re writing songs about you. Salter dispensed justice like a Marine. What counted to him was the group; every judgment he handed down had as its aim the strengthening of the bonds within the community—and the swift kicking in the ass of anyone who tried to fuck with those bonds. He might let a bad actor slide once, but he’d hang the sonofabitch by his nuts the second time. He couldn’t be bought, he couldn’t be bribed, he couldn’t be manipulated. The people loved him. He became, in the popular imagination, a cross between Solomon and Atticus Finch. The badge of office worn by a native justice is a scarlet sash called an
inguro
. Salter resisted wearing one at first. He appeared only in uniform. But after a week, he relented.
A Westerner seeking to restore stability to a tribal society inevitably finds himself in an ethical bind. Does he go along with the native customs, which are usually barbarous but effective, or does he attempt to impose “civilized” standards, which the natives consider at best quaint and at worst inscrutable, and which in the end only make matters worse?
In the bush, the machete massacres continued. Official MEU policy, as articulated by Salter in his Orders of the Day, was to prevent these outrages by all means necessary. A typical day had half our battalions in the air, in platoon-sized security-and-stability elements, following up reports of potentially inflammatory gatherings or of out-and-out violence. I was present for several incidents where Marine forces actually intervened. This was wildly unpopular. The women would wail and lacerate their scalps till blood was sheeting down their faces. They wanted justice. They cried Salter’s name, or the name he had come to be called,
Ero Horo
—“The Man with the Clock”—because of the big Bulova he kept on his desk during the
petition hearings. Ero Horo would never order his Marines to prevent justice! Ero Horo understood! He was one of us!
The problem of course was the evidence of the massacres. It was too grisly, too visual—and there were too many cell-phone cameras. Finally, what everyone feared would happen, did happen.
Second Platoon of Kilo Company 3/7 was on a heliborne sweep at the south end of the delta when they came upon a
gangara
in progress. The date was 11 September 2022, the twenty-first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers. Col. Mattoon was in charge of the Joint Operations Center when the call came in. I don’t know what factors influenced his decision. Maybe the violence on-site had gone too far already; maybe to intervene at that stage would only have risked more lives. Maybe second platoon’s commander indicated that he lacked the force to influence the outcome. Maybe Mattoon was simply acknowledging political reality: that what gave Salter his influence over the population (the solitary element, in fact, that kept the country from descending into chaos) was that he was perceived as being the lone Westerner who understood the locals’ concept of honor and possessed the courage to stand up for their vision of justice. Whatever the reasons, Mattoon ordered 2nd Platoon to RTB—Return to Base—which they did.
In other words, he let the massacre continue.
Someone had a satphone camera.
Three hours later, the video was all over the Web.
The first reporters on the scene were a couple of freelance South Africans. I knew them; they were decent guys. They were actually going to pass up the payday because they knew what a shitstorm it would unleash. But then a take-no-prisoners Dutch journalist named Ditman Kroon appeared, and a couple of Americans who the South Africans knew would never sit on so hot a story. So they went for it.