10. Skulls of Tulin Bila
Clouds darkened and the rain increased as the afternoon wore on. Less than an hour downstream from the first village, we pulled in again on the Nicaraguan side. We climbed the bank, on an overgrown trail as before, to the abandoned Sumo village of Tulin Bila. Raúl Tobías said its Spanish name was San José. As we entered the village, Shooter stamped his foot, revealing an overgrown concrete sidewalk none of the rest of us had noticed. He said, "This is what always gets me ‑ here's a village in the middle of nowhere, big enough for them to have sidewalks, and the Sandinistas just burn it down." I was standing beside him; his manner of calling our attention to the sidewalk and his general familiarity with the surroundings made it obvious that he'd crossed the border before.
Tulin Bila was also completely abandoned, with its dooryards overgrown and a number of its houses burned. We were led down a trail near the village, to a spot away from any buildings, not even distinguished by being in a clearing. We stopped. Someone moved to the side of the trail and called our attention to a place on the ground at the edge of some dense brush, where lay three intact human skulls, side by side, in a shallow depression in the topsoil that appeared to have been scooped by someone's hand. Comandante Raúl told us that they were the skulls of Indians who had either been killed outright by Sandinista soldiers, or of old people, ancianos, who had been goaded into a forced evacuation march which they didn't have the strength to survive.
There were no other bones visible in the vicinity. The neat side‑by‑side placement of the three skulls, and the absence of the usual scattering of skeletal bones left by animals and birds and insects that have cleaned a corpse of flesh, made it clear that the arrangement of the skulls was a recent one made deliberately to show to us.
In a way, that didn't matter. We had seen and heard enough evidence of Sandinista misconduct toward Indians, ranging from mismanagement and broken promises to murder, that whether or not the particular skulls we were shown were those of murdered Indians, they could have been.
Raúl Tobías had made his speech short. As I translated it for the four North American Indians, Raúl grew silent and stepped back from the skulls, to let his visitors experience the situation as we chose. His manner seemed sincere, his grief for the trials suffered by his people genuine. The rest of the party, including the two Texans and the three mercenaries, did the same, becoming silent and pressing their circle back into the brush at the far side of the trail. Some spread out to provide security.
I felt terrible. What I had just witnessed seemed such an improbable admixture of an attempt at cheap political theater with evidence of real human suffering that I didn't have a clue as to how I should do my job as a journalist and try to sort it out.
But as I turned to look at Gary, Bill, Mike, and Larry, gathered solemnly around the skulls, I saw in a rush how stupid it was of me, and how misplaced, to be concerned about my own feelings at all, in the face of what was happening with them. I particularly remember the look of Gary Fife's face, how its light coppery skin, the color of some clayey soils, took on a distinctly gray overlay, as if the blood had left his face and retreated to deep inside him, or even as if his face had been rubbed with ashes.
The four of them settled into a profound silence, standing in a close circle and looking down at the skulls. It seemed to me that these four men, who had met one another for the first time in the Houston airport three days earlier, felt something between them that made them feel as if they had grown up together, even lived past lives together. Their silence closed out the rest of us.
They decided, almost wordlessly, to smoke tobacco over the skulls. Someone solemnly rolled a cigarette with pouch tobacco and paper.
It was more than a cigarette. They handled and passed and smoked the cigarette like any people in the world will handle something they consider sacred.
I desperately wanted to photograph them. What I was seeing, I thought, would tell more about what was happening on this trip than any other image, or any words, if I could get the right photograph. It had the human urgency of Larry holding the refugee infant at Lasa Tinghni the day before. I gently pushed myself back into the brush to get enough distance, since I didn't have a wide‑angle lens on the camera. I caught the eye of one of them ‑ I believe it was Gary ‑ and raised my camera and made a questioning look with my face. He barely moved his head, but it was a clear "no". The others agreed, again without speaking. There have been times in my work as a journalist when I was not willing to take no for an answer, or even to ask the question. This wasn't one of those times. I lowered the camera without shooting.
They finished their smoke and knelt around the skulls and tore open the cigarette and sprinkled the remaining tobacco around the skulls, still treating the tobacco as a sacred offering. They stood up and looked at one another without speaking, then stepped back. Their ceremony was over.
I took a step forward, getting their attention without speaking, raised the camera and the question again. They nodded yes. I took several photographs of the skulls.
We returned to the canoe and headed downstream again. The afternoon grew darker and rainier. We landed near dark close to the place where the first canoe's motor had broken its shear pin the morning before. We trudged through the rain until well after dark, slipping in the mud and cursing like any ragtag, worn‑out army in history.
We came upon a Miskito refugee camp. It may have been Karas Ankan, but I'm not sure. Dark‑skinned people squatted in pole‑and‑thatch huts, their faces and skin illuminated only by cooking fires as they stared at us as we passed. Blue smoke hung in the air between the huts. Just as I was having a feeling that it was all too familiar, Shooter, who had been walking behind me, said in my ear, "Ain't this a flashback?"
11. Perico's Garrote, and other stories
The next morning we washed clothes, and ourselves, in the creek near camp, and sat around recovering from the day before. Mike Hunt had brought a frisbee, and got a game going in the clear area between the tents. Someone came, someone muscular and very military‑looking and authoritative in camouflage fatigues, who stayed on the opposite side of the clearing from us and talked with Flaco and Shooter and Perico, always standing so that one of their bodies blocked our view of him. Their conversation seemed intensely focused.
I took out my camera and started taking photos of the intertribal frisbee game, then used that as a cover to aim the camera through their game and snap photos of the group of mercenaries. They were too far away. I changed to my longest lens, a 100mm, and shot again. I never got anything but the back of the head of the newcomer, and Perico never turned anything but his back in our direction. Maco Stewart noticed what I was doing, and paid closer attention when I changed to the longer lens. I pretended to be delighted with the action shots I was getting of the frisbee game. By the time Stewart started to hover near me, it was too late. I had what turned out to be, after it was enlarged, a recognizable photo of Flaco. But I did not get a decent shot of the military-looking visitor, which I desperately wanted. In later years I’ve wondered if it was Oliver North – Flaco was mentioned in the notebooks that North was forced to relinquish during the Iran-Contra investigations, and I have seen a reference to Rus Rus in something that North wrote – but I have no way of knowing whether he was the stranger in camp that day. This man’s physical bearing, his uniform, and the way he wore it presented, to me, a clear impression of someone who was not a mercenary. I pegged him as active duty U.S. military.
We went out to another refugee camp, where the people had been established longer than those at Lasa Tinghni, but not so long as those at Awas Bila or Karas Ankan. The interviews were so obviously canned, with the subjects being visibly and audibly goaded by armed men standing behind them, that I didn't even take notes.
We were back in our tent at the TEA camp by noon, sacked out, still tired from the day before. Gary Fife was playing country music tapes on his interview recorder. Just after a song about "tryin' to love two women," he said, "I got another tape in there, by a friend of mine. It's called 'Custer Died for Your Sins.'" Flaco, standing just outside the tent, laughed along with the rest of us.
Moses Fiske was working on the 16mm movie camera in the tent, and was having problems. All four Indians and I were there as well. Fiske told Stewart he wasn't sure he could get the camera to work. "Can't you nigger‑rig it?" Stewart asked.
We were lying around the tent. The four Indians were discussing the situation of their fellow Indians in Nicaragua. A year or so earlier, Bill Pensoneau had traveled there and visited some of the camps to which the Sandinistas had relocated Indians to clear the border area for combat operations against the contras, possibly including some of the people who were now our hosts.
Their conversation got around to the history of the Sandinista movement, beginning when someone wondered where they'd gotten their name. Someone knew that there'd been this guy named Sandino, but didn't know who he was or what he'd done. They asked Stewart to clarify it, and Stewart gave an answer which I don't remember, but which was inaccurate. I had been keeping my mouth shut in the interest of self-preservation, but now I blurted out a short history of Sandino's guerrilla fight against Somoza’s Guardia Nacional, and the US Marines who trained and led them, during the 1920's.
Stewart turned to look at me with alarm. "How did you know that?" he asked. I told him I'd worked in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist in 1983, had written some pieces about it, and had since then read quite a lot about the history of the country and US interventions there.
I'd said too much. Stewart wanted to know more about me, where else I'd been, what else I'd done, what I thought of the present situation and about US policy in general - the sort of questions he should have asked in the Houston airport. The four Indians were listening; we'd already had some conversations along these lines ourselves, out of Stewart's presence. I'm a lousy liar, and didn't want to appear to them to be hiding something they already knew I knew, or felt. So, I told Stewart that I knew about CIA interventions in Vietnam and Laos and with the Kurds in the area of the Persian Gulf, and allowed that US intelligence operatives had a history of recruiting poor, darkskinned people to fight our wars for us, which too often turned out to be losing wars, and then abandoning our former proxies to bloody retribution by our former enemies.
It didn't seem a wise thing to be saying in an armed camp of just such operatives a short walk from the Río Coco, but I was pissed enough about the situation to risk having Stewart hear me say that in order that the Indians would hear it too. They'd heard the basic story about the Montagnards in Vietnam, but very little about the Kurds, or about the Hmong people in Laos who'd been slaughtered in large numbers as a result of their participation in US‑initiated or ‑widened military conflicts.
From that time on, I was looked at differently by everyone in the camp, though I was never specifically threatened. That is, unless Perico's visit was a threat. Within a day after my talk with Stewart, Perico came over to our tent while the four Indians and I were standing outside it talking. Perico entered our circle and stood next to me. His dark eyes glittered even more than usual. From his pocket he pulled a length of spring steel or piano wire, rolled loop upon loop into a coil about four inches in diameter, with a steel ring affixed to either end. He held it up for us to see.
"Do you know what thees eez?" He asked in heavily accented English.
"It's a garrote," I said.
"Isn't that for strangling people?" one of the others asked.
"You bettah believe it," Perico said, with a smile like dry ice, at once hot and cold. He looked at me as he smiled.
That evening, in the little mess area by a creek a short walk from the tents, I sat at one of the rough wooden tables with Maco Stewart, Moses Fiske, Mike Hunt, and Miskito officer Mario Córdoba, who was wearing his new silver captain's bars on his hat. I'd become somewhat friendly with him; he seemed someone committed to struggling for his people, but not overly excited about the fighting itself. He seemed to see no romance in it, and seemed bemused, rather than impressed, by the propagandizing of both sides. He seemed particularly unimpressed with rank, his own or others'. He reminded me of Harris, the young black Marine who'd treated the Marine Corps mostly as a joke, to whom I'd tossed the rifle after we saw the three caskets on the loading dock at Oakland as we were shipping out for Vietnam.
We had, as usual, mess‑gear metal plates of gallo pinto, standard peasant fare of rice and red beans. It was likely that we were eating the rice and beans that Stewart had brought in aboard the Setco Air C‑47, saying that the food was for the refugees.
During the meal, Mike Hunt([1]), the only one of us five tribal representatives who had accepted Flaco's offer of a weapon, told stories about the 1973 confrontation between Indians and federal agents at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. He had apparently been one of the armed Indians, though he was careful not to say anything that would be provable if it got back to the Feds. But without coming right out with it, he alluded to the fighting in such a way that it seemed to me that he might be hinting that he was in on it. Mike said he was a member of the Survival of the American Indian Association located in Olympia, Washington. I never got a feel for how large its membership was.
He also said he acted as a bodyguard on occasion for his friend Hank Adams, head of the Association. In the company of the four North American Indians that week, I got a glimpse of their informal but very active nationwide network, which they called the "moccasin telegraph," a word‑of‑mouth and telephone web, augmented by Indian media outlets, which informs Indians in the US about things which concern them. BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) policies, treaty violations old and new, Federal legislation regarding Indians and their lands, any such stories which often barely surface in the mainstream media are given full treatment by the "moccasin telegraph."
The other strong feeling I got was one of danger, of yet another group of people who have so consistently been treated so badly for so long by the larger society that two very different, but perhaps equally dangerous, reactions are becoming more and more common. One is a deep despair resulting in severe alcoholism, drug abuse, and a disproportionate suicide rate. The other is an accumulated anger, especially among some of the younger men, that makes them itch to grab a rifle, put their backs to the wall, and go out like warriors.
Once during the week Gary Fife had told of his favorite trick while waiting for a table in restaurants. He and a couple of friends would put "War" as their name on the waiting list, and later there would come the announcement "War... party of three," and diners would look up in surprise when three Indians trooped past to their table. He clearly told it as a joke, but it just as clearly had an edge to it.
I noticed that Mario Córdoba, the Miskito officer, was eating more slowly than the rest, so I slowed down too. By the time he and I walked down to the creek to wash our plates, the others had left.
I wanted to talk to Mario. But I was worried about two things: that I would compromise my journalist's neutrality by what I had to say, and that I would get my ass in serious hot water, especially after what I'd said to Maco about US use of minority peoples as proxy soldiers. Perico's bit with the garrote didn't seem to have been done just for the sake of entertainment.
Finally I just said "Fuck it," and did it anyway. There was enough light left to see Córdoba's face. I moved close to him and spoke quickly, in Spanish, in a low voice. Be careful, Mario, I said. I told him, as succinctly as I could, about how the Montagnard highland people of Vietnam, and the Hmong of Laos, had had their populations decimated during and after their service with the US CIA and Special Forces, and about how the Kurds in the Middle East had been recruited, armed, and then abandoned to their enemies by a sudden policy change.
He listened, nodding in a way that intimated that either he knew more about those histories than I'd assumed, or that he wasn't at all surprised to hear it. Be careful, I admonished again, and ended by asking if he trusted "these people" as I nodded toward the mercenaries' tent.
He looked at me with a flat gaze that was neither friendly nor hostile: "No tengo confianza en nadie demás de los indios." I don't trust anybody except Indians.
His look made it clear that that included me.
[1] I have since heard, among other Indians, joking reference to “Mike Hunt” as “my cunt,” for example calling a bar that was a local hangout, and asking if Mike Hunt was there, to a round of laughs. I’ve wondered if the whole thing were a particularly Indian smokescreen, a “moccasin telegraph” kind of communication among Indians, that was a coded way for the Indians in a group to talk past any others present. But I don’t know. I do know that there is a specifically Indian humor.
No comments:
Post a Comment