DARK-SKINNED WARRIORS

Dark-Skinned Warriors 2

     Ruben Gómez, a friend from the Bill Motto VFW Post, came over so we could use my computer to work on a resolution opposing the Reagan Administration's policies in Central America. I had written the original version and had taken it to a Post meeting, where the membership suggested some changes, and directed Ruben and me to make them. Later, another member of the post, Bill Watkins (who later converted to Hinduism, changed his name to Iraja, and moved with his wife to Hawaii), carried the resolution to Nicaragua and personally presented it to President Daniel Ortega. It raised a ruckus for a while; Dan Rather spent about two minutes on the story on the CBS Evening News.

     Ruben was looking over my shoulder at several photographs spread around my desk. "Are these from your recent trip to Nicaragua?" he asked.

     At first, I was startled by what I took as his ignorance. There was a photo of people crowding around a bus in Cambodia, one of South Vietnamese soldiers, one of Montagnard soldiers, one of a Laotian army soldier standing in front of a thatch-roofed building, and one of a Sandinista soldier who had told Alejandro Guillén and me how close we were to the Honduran border just before his two compatriots roared up on a tractor and told us to turn around before we got mortared from across the border.

     Something about Ruben's observation was more accurate than mine. I stared at the photos anew. Every one showed people with dark skin and dark hair. All the people were much shorter and slighter in build and skeletal structure than I. And most were armed with weapons made in, and supplied by, the United States, and were warriors, on one side or the other, in conflicts of which the U.S. Government was the major instigator.

  Dream: Guts

I'm driving on a freeway. There is an awful wreck: explosion of impact, screech of rubber, accordioning collapse of metal, shattering of glass. I stop, get out, run over. I'm inside the vehicle, a smoking hell. The driver is a black man. He is lying on his back, his belly ripped open, his intestines spread out over him and spilling into the wreckage. I see colors in his guts: yellow fatty tissue, transparent and translucent shiny membranes, blue veins, red arterial blood, brown shit. His eyes. He says nothing, but his eyes implore: Please help me. He begs me with his eyes to put his guts back in his body. I try, putting one hand on the guts still in his body, trying to keep them there, reaching with my other hand for the guts that have spilled the farthest from him, trying to bring them back to him. I try again and again. Every time I try, they spill out of my hands. He is begging me to help him, but I can't.

B. Indians and Cowboys

                                                   Mercenary 1

     "Mickey" said one of his parents was Basque; the other Puerto Rican. He said his life as a soldier had begun when, as a younger man - he was now nearing fifty - he'd been a member of a navy Underwater Demolition Team, the forerunner of today's famed SEALs, elite commando units highly trained in everything from hand-to-hand combat to jumping out of airplanes to a whole spectrum of work with explosives. Besides being a SCUBA diver, he'd later been trained in "hard hat" diving as well, working at greater depths in a pressurized suit.

     I think part of why Mickey decided to tell me as much as he did was that he had recently taken up with a local woman who had a son about ten years old, and he wanted to develop contacts who might help him get out of the mercenary business and into a legitimate trade in our area. He said it was too uncertain: you do a job, you get paid thirty grand, you blow it all, then you're a pauper until the next gig comes along. Besides, though he insisted he was still as fit as he ever was, that couldn't last forever. His conversation showed him to be both talented and experienced in technical things, and he hinted that, as a general contractor, I might steer him toward work in the building trades. He chortled when he mentioned this, however, saying that his experience of looking at building plans had had more to do with blowing them up than with building them.

     It was funny. The more Mickey told me about his life, the more I realized that he embodied some of the things I hated most. After he got out of the service, he'd worked as a mercenary in Rhodesia, in Brazil, in Central America. He'd even worked as a collector and enforcer for some Colombian cocaine dealers a few miles from where I lived in northern California. He scoffed at values, even the right-wing ones he'd defended in his argument with the peace activist who'd given me his phone number. She'd been picketing Bank of America because of what she and others thought of as investment policies which helped support right-wing regimes in Latin America. "Show me a patriot, I'll show you a dead man," Mickey said to me. (And the young woman had been right about his motive for giving her his phone number. He told me the first time we talked that he'd been both angry and aroused during their argument. The way he put it to me was that "if ever there was a time when my sex drive and my propensity for violence got connected...." and ended by shaking his head in such a way that made me shudder at the thought of what might have happened had she called him and offered to get together and continue their conversation. She’d given me his number instead.

     Yet, in a way, I liked him. I felt a certain kinship with his impatience, his seething physical energy, his hands-on approach to life, his knowing shrug about how dangerous it is, not just to lead the life he led, but to be alive at all.

     Besides being a diver, Mickey was a parachutist, a pilot of both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, and a small-arms expert. I've encountered all manner of wanna-be's who made similar claims; even those who've done enough homework to mouth authentic phrases are transparent when certain questions are asked. I became satisfied that Mickey was not a bullshitter, that he really was who he said he was. When my questions probed something he didn't want to tell me or didn't know, he didn't make something up. He just shook his head no.

     We were talking not long after the helicopter piloted by the American mercenaries Dana Parker and James Powell was shot down in northern Nicaragua during their raid from southern Honduras on a Sandinista base. I had read that the chopper was a Hughes 500. I asked him how readily available that helicopter was on the civilian market, especially one outfitted as that one had been with machine guns and rockets.         

     Mickey smiled animatedly. "Great little bird," he said. It could mount two General Electric Vulcan machine guns - "what you call a 'minigun'," he said, referring to the electrically operated, incredibly fast-firing Gatling-type machine guns that blanket an area with bullets and shred anything in it. He leaned forward, as if I wouldn't fully appreciate the wizardry of the chopper outfitted as a "gun platform" if he didn't physically hand me the information. He said that the bird shot down in Nicaragua was the military version, which would carry one Vulcan in a fixed mount on the port side so that it fired wherever the helicopter pointed, and the starboard gun was on a moveable mount and connected by a tracking system to the pilot's helmet, so it would automatically track with the movements of the pilot's head. All he had to do was look at something through the cross hairs on his visor and press the button, the guns would belch (in Vietnam we had likened the sound of a minigun firing to a long, continuous fart), and poof. And the rotors on that version were special, he said. "You know that sound the Huey makes, that real sharp wap-wap?" I sure did; every Vietnam vet will carry that sound to his grave. Mickey explained that the sharp part of that sound was the tip of one rotor blade - the one moving in the same direction as the aircraft's forward motion - breaking the sound barrier, due to the addition of the aircraft's forward speed and the rotor tip's rotational velocity.

     I said that might help explain why the sound of the Huey's rotor made us so nervous; that it was kin to the sound of a rifle bullet breaking the sound barrier as it goes by your ear.

     Mickey grinned now in full delight at having heard something from me that indicated that I might be equipped to understand him. "That's why they changed the rotors on the military version of the small Hughes helicopter," he said. He explained that a chopper's rotor is really a rotary wing, providing the same lift as a standard aircraft's main wing. The lift is a function of the surface area of the blades and their rotational speed. The Huey achieved sufficient lift by applying great power to two long rotor blades, moving them very fast. It was powerful, but noisy. Hughes had used four rotor blades, thereby shortening them. But, he said, they had gone further on one version, using five blades. Since the rotational velocity of the rotor tips was a function of the circumference of their arc in the air, the use of five shorter blades slowed the tips' velocity below the speed of sound, thereby making the bird much quieter than any other. Great for covert operations, he said.

     "Speaking of the sound barrier...." he continued, and settled back in his chair as if he were about to share something with me that was in a way embarrassing but which was so delicious he couldn't keep it to himself. He asked if I knew which handgun calibers were best suited for use with a silencer. I said no. He held up two fingers. "Two calibers," he said, "the two with the slowest muzzle velocities: .22 and .45." He said his favorite weapon for "that kind of work" was a small .22 automatic with a silencer, because it was quietest. You had to get up close, though, so you could be sure of a brain shot. He smiled that smile again, the excited smile, tinged only a little by guilt, of the neighborhood boy who sets the cat on fire when goaded on by his buddies.

     I asked Mickey if he could help clear up for me any of the mysteries about who had done what, and how, in some of the more notorious incidents in Central America in recent years. I brought up the debate about the helicopter crash which had killed Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, and asked him if he knew whether or not a bomb had caused the crash.

     "There was a bomb on that helicopter," he said emphatically. But when I asked for more, he averted his eyes in a way which I would see him do only once or twice more in all the conversations I had with him over two or three years' time. "That's a complicated subject," he said. That same phrase in Russian, “Eto slyozhnii vopros,” had been a stock answer by Soviet citizens during my summer in Leningrad when our questions got too close to politically sensitive territory.

     I asked him about the raid on Sandinista oil storage tanks at the Pacific port of Corinto in October of 1983, just before I’d arrived in Nicaragua. News reports had said that the fires were ignited by boats firing from the sea. But I'd been to the site and seen the blackened, crumpled storage tanks, and had wondered at the time about the thoroughness of the job. I asked Mickey if there had been more than firing from the sea, if some commando types, with special equipment and training which were ostensibly not available to the contras, hadn't swum ashore and placed a series of charges at the tanks, under cover of diversionary fire from the boats.

     "There was more than firing from the sea at Corinto," he said, but would give no more details. This part of our talk came during his recitation of his career as a diver/explosives expert. He had again become delighted in the storytelling value of some underwater breathing equipment, specially developed for secret operations, which allowed no bubbles to escape, meaning that a swimmer could approach a heavily guarded bridge, attach charges and timers, and swim away without ever showing a trace of his presence until the charges went off. When I asked if he'd ever gotten to use that equipment in an operation other than training - in Nicaragua, for instance - he smiled and said he had, but that I was getting too close to things he couldn't talk about. He did, however, float the name "Río Negro." I remembered having read news reports about a clandestine attack on a river by that name in Nicaragua.