The Profession (14 page)

These troops were illiterate and untrained, but they were not stupid. There was a subtlety to the way they operated that took us days to appreciate. They knew how to enter a street in a convoy of trucks and, without a word or a shot, instill utter terror into the populace. Their technique for neutralizing us Marines was to swarm our position, smiling. It worked at first, because part of our mission orders was to “establish rapport with indigenous elements.”

A typical street encounter would go like this: a cabinet minister
or general would come zipping up in a Mercedes or Land Rover, preceded by two “technicals”—Toyota pickups packing PKMs or Vietnam-era M60s—followed immediately by two truckloads of troops, who would dismount in a mob and surround us, beaming and jabbering about Cadillac Escalades, LeBron James, and American pussy. It worked. The Bombers were able to shunt us away from precincts of the city that President Mbana didn’t want us to patrol and from sights that he didn’t want us to see.

Where were our battalions from the MEUs? They were being held up offshore by the suddenly incendiary situation in Taiwan. Onshore we had no TVs and only military laptops; I missed half the crisis, catching scraps on my handheld. The one thing I remember was Chutes logging on to Fox/BBC and the rest of us gathered around, hearing how Beijing was pulling America’s paper, firing a Chinese New Year’s candle up Wall Street’s ass, while the life savings of all of us were being swept away like the trash trading slips that used to be left each night on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Three days went by, then six. When I’d report each hour to Salter’s command center with the flotilla, the final conversation was always with his aide, Pete Petrocelli, on the subject of the extraction of my team, Capt. Stettenpohl’s, and Robert Salter’s, should Task Force 68 suddenly be ordered to the South China Sea.

Zamibia is divided along an east-west axis by the Riviere Saint-Jerome, which splits in two at Princeville and runs to the Indian Ocean like an east-facing V. North is rice and maize country; south is diamonds and coca. In the V lies the built-up swamp where the French administrative capital had been sited in the colonial era and where President Mbana’s palace and barracks, the Villa Zamibia, stood. Zamibia had broken away from Somalia and Kenya in ’13 to become the East African Republic, was reabsorbed in ’14, then seceded again in ’16 under Mbana, to assume its current political form in January 2017.

In the intervening fifteen months, Mbana had driven the country into destitution while he and his posse preyed on the living corpse. The government taxed everything—bread, water, medical services. Bicycles were licensed, as were farm animals down to individual chickens. There was a tax to be married and a tax to be divorced, a tax to be born and a tax to die. Of course none of these tariffs were written down; the police decided them on the spot. A.D. had been there in ’19; she wrote a story about Mbana’s “poon safaris.” The president would cruise through neighborhoods and shantytowns in his white 1966 Fleetwood convertible with three technicals packed with Bombers and two empty army trucks behind. Any girl who struck Mbana’s fancy, his soldiers chucked in back and took away. If a husband or brother protested, he was tied to a tree, beaten with fan belts or barbed wire, his bones broken with clubs, and, if he was lucky, left for dead. A rebel force arose, which Mbana crushed, flaying captives alive, then dousing them with gasoline and setting them afire.

When Task Force 68 arrived, Mbana had just instituted what the opposition press (which was one hand-produced newspaper, published by an incredibly courageous black African editor named Alistair Finlay) described as a “Jesus tax.” This levy was to serve as “penance”—Mbana’s term—for the populace for allowing the uprising to happen in the first place. It was to be paid on Christmas Day. The tax was 33⅓ percent of the wealth and possessions of every man, woman, and child. Mbana’s troops set up collection centers in the six district capitals, which were just poor market towns along the river or near a road that was passable for part of the year. From these camps, the soldiers raided at will. They would enter a village and obliterate it. They murdered men by hammering nails into their skulls. They raped women and girls, then shot them and dragged their bodies behind their trucks. If a male of military age resisted, the Brown Bombers cut off one or both of his arms, sometimes
hacking them with machetes, other times chewing them off with power saws. Below the elbow was called “long-sleeving,” above it “short-sleeving.”

The third day we were in-country, my team and Jack Stettenpohl’s received a hot wire—an emergency transmission—from Robert Salter, whose team was operating in a ville called Finisterre on the north side of the city. We found them in a park above the river. The rainy season had just started; temperature was about 110 with 100 percent humidity. Mbana’s Bombers had stuffed three freight containers with “sinners”—his name for anyone who resisted or defied his orders—and padlocked them in. A throng of wailing, shrieking locals, nine-tenths women and children, surrounded these troops, pleading with them to release the captives. Rob Salter’s team had been summoned by frantic friends and relatives. He had rushed to the site, only to be forbidden by higher command to intervene. Now my team arrived. Stettenpohl’s had been ordered to stay where it was.

A hundred Brown Bombers ringed the containers. You couldn’t hear the screams coming from inside; all sound was drowned by the clamor of the mob and din of the downpour. But you could see the containers rocking.

Rob Salter was up front, trying to negotiate with the Bomber commander. I joined him. There were two Belgian women from the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and two men, one a black professor, from Oxfam and Human Rights Watch.

If it’s possible to have rain in hell, that’s what the scene looked like. The park grounds were mud; the women’s long colorful dresses and turban head wraps were soaked through. A Land Rover came up with
MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÉRES
on the side; a Belgian doctor got out and added his appeal for the prisoners’ release. While Rob was on the horn to his father on the flagship, begging for permission to
intervene, a phalanx of mothers could no longer contain their desperation; they rushed Mbana’s troops, attacking with umbrellas and stones and bare hands. The Bombers opened fire. No warning shots, no volleys over the women’s heads. The troops unloaded on full auto straight into the front rank of the wives and mothers. I’ve seen a lot of shit in my day, but I had never witnessed anything like that.

We had two African Americans—Pope and Harvey—on Robert Salter’s team and mine. Pope was a sergeant, Harvey a staff sergeant; they were both solid, disciplined Marines and consummate professionals. But when they saw soldiers gunning down unarmed women, they lost all self-command. Chutes and Q had to disarm Harvey. I couldn’t see Pope, so berserk was the pandemonium that had broken out across the entire park, but I heard later that he had had to be wrestled to the ground and zip-stripped. It was axiomatic that African American troops had the greatest difficulty dealing with black African savagery. They took it too personally.

Mbana’s troops had closed ranks now. They had configured themselves into a perimeter protecting the containers. Their eyes were big as headlamps. As for the women, about a dozen lay on the ground, swarmed by hundreds more, all wailing and screaming. For us, the immediate imperatives were to care for the wounded and to prevent the situation from getting even further out of hand. Every TacOps team has two hospital corpsmen. These were now rushing to aid the mamas. I had Chutes calling for CASEVAC. I could hear Rob Salter on the horn to his father. Rob was saying, “Yes sir … yes sir,” in a voice that was an octave higher than normal. Clearly Gen. Salter was telling him to keep his head and keep his Marines’ fingers off their triggers. Mbana’s troops would not leave and would not relent.

We should have killed them. We should have cut them down where they stood. I know AFRICOM’s fear was of an international incident. The generals in Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, were seeing
headlines—“Marines Massacre Africans.” But what was the alternative? How could we stand there, bringing in choppers to take out the gut-shot mothers, while every living soul inside the boxes asphyxiated and died?

Twenty minutes later, the containers stopped rocking.

The Bombers melted away. The crowd drove us off the field with stones and curses. They hated us worse than Mbana’s murderers because they knew we understood right from wrong, but we had stood by and done nothing.

Still the MEU battalions did not come ashore. The crisis in Taiwan had tied up everything. My team and Rob Salter’s worked around the clock evacuating the American, Canadian, and European civilians. This was a clusterfuck in its own right. Most of the whites in the capital were humanitarian aid workers or human rights activists, who were as dedicated as Mother Teresa and who felt that now, more than ever, they could not pull out. They refused to report to the embassy or the other stations that had been designated as evacuation points. We had to hunt them down. Again our TacOps teams were put in an impossible situation. We were physically carrying nurses out of hospitals, while their patients surrounded us, weeping and pleading.

The third day Rob’s team and mine were driving to a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Dingale, a village and refugee camp west of the Princeville “V.” We were on a dirt stretch among acacia trees, when a young boy came running up to us, begging us to follow him and help. He was so frantic he couldn’t speak; he opened his mouth but only a soundless croak came out. I took him up front with me on one Humvee with our two others following at three-hundred-yard intervals in case of treachery. Before we’d gone a mile, we smelled fire.

A tiny, tin-roofed house was blazing in the noon sun. The boy’s family was inside. Chutes, Junk, and Q kicked down one of the flimsy walls and pushed through, enough to find what turned out to be a grandmother (though she looked to be only about thirty-five) and two babies, the boy’s sisters. All had had their throats slit. On the side, in a still-burning lean-to, lay a young mama, still alive but charred horribly, whose throat had been hacked through in the same manner. A kitchen cleaver lay in the dirt. A crowd of hundreds ringed the scene, women and children, wailing like nothing I’ve ever heard. Ortiz, one of our corpsmen, made a show of trying to save the young woman but it was clear there was no hope.

From bystanders the story spilled out. Mbana’s soldiers had a camp a mile off in the bush. The young woman had been ordered to report every morning, which she did, whereupon she was raped by whoever wanted her. There were fifteen or twenty such women in the surrounding villages who had been compelled to perform the same service. The soldiers said they would butcher the families if any of them resisted. “How long has this been going on?” I asked one of the mamas. She flashed ten fingers four times. This particular girl, she said, had been driven mad. She had slaughtered her own family with the kitchen cleaver, then lit the house on fire and hacked through her own throat.

Our onshore parties, as I said, were under strict orders to intervene in no local affairs other than those covered by specific orders. We buried the girl and her family. The crisis in Taiwan was approaching its climax. A brigade from the People’s Republic Ninth Expeditionary Army (Nuclear Capable) had been deployed into the demilitarized corridor, only forty miles away. As we were gathering stones to mark the family’s graves, a transmission came in from the
Peleliu
. It instructed us to move our camp south of the river, to the administrative area of the port, and establish a compound from which we could be extracted in a hurry if necessary.

We did this.

That night soldiers from Mbana’s camp returned to the village. With machetes, they slaughtered every member of the young woman’s extended family, including the small boy who had run to us for aid.

You can imagine our Marines’ state of mind when they learned this.

We should have been there. We should never have left the village. Our two African Americans, Sgt. Pope and SSgt. Harvey, took it hard. I think they felt ashamed for their people. How could human beings commit such acts of barbarity? They came to me and Rob Salter together, both in tears. They wanted to hit the Bombers’ camp.

Pope and Harvey were not gangbanging street thugs. Pope had two years at UC Berkeley; he had been an All-Pac-12 lacrosse player. Harvey was thirty years old, the father of three boys. I got on the radio to Col. Mattoon offshore, urgently requesting to get both these guys relieved at once and given counseling. That was my official position. Between Col. Mattoon and me, I told him I sided with Pope and Harvey.

“Gent, I didn’t hear that.”

“Then let me repeat it, sir.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Col. Mattoon ordered me to get a hold of myself. If I couldn’t do it, he said, he’d find another officer who could.

The atrocities continued. I ordered my team not to engage in conversation with any innocents, don’t buy a Coke, don’t even say hello. I didn’t want interaction with us to be the pretext for any further reprisals. Mbana’s soldiers patrolled the villages with their Chinese cameras. The locals were petrified.

Meanwhile the country had plunged into an orgy of hyperinflation. Mbana’s government was printing notes in denominations of millions. A new issue came out twice a day. Ten million was worth one
American dollar. A beer was five million bucks. Bank lines wrapped around blocks. People would come twice a day to take out whatever they could (the government only allowed them to withdraw so much each time) just so they could buy dinner. And everywhere the soldiers cruised with their AKs, their machetes, and their cameras.

The third noon we went back to the village. The soldiers were still making the women come to their camp. We would see the girls trudging along the road as if they were marching to the executioner. Back in town, we ran into a gang of Mbana’s soldiers. They were in open-top, highback trucks, stoned on something. I was with Jack Stettenpohl; we were just coming out of the government printing office, where the operators had given up on churning out bank notes and gone to gas and ration coupons. Mbana’s soldiers spotted our teams, waiting beside their Humvees on the street; they swarmed around them, all smiles. The soldiers knew we had been present during and after three separate massacres. In their minds, that meant we were with them. When I arrived, half a dozen Bombers had crowded around Pope and a gunnery sergeant from Stettenpohl’s team named Larson, who was also black. They wanted to get their pictures taken with them. Suddenly Larson coldcocked one of them. The dude dropped like a stone. Stettenpohl and I plunged between the groups, ordering everyone to chill. The Africans were laughing; they thought it was a great joke. Even the guy Larson had slugged was smiling. Good friends, yes? Good.