Lasa Tinghni>>>BORDER CROSSING

                         6. Lasa Tinghni

     At 11:35 that morning, the 24^th (the day after my 42^nd birthday, which was also my second wedding anniversary), our little convoy of Toyota pickups rolled into the Miskito and Sumo refugee camp at Lasa Tinghni, a few kilometers upstream from the TEA camp, and still not far from the bank of the Río Coco.

     I saw no morsel of food in that camp, not so much as a single kernel of rice or corn. The thatched huts had floors raised three or four feet above the ground, which keeps them above the mud during the rainy season, and allows air to circulate all around the dwellings during the hot dry season. They reminded me of Montagnard houses in the highlands of Vietnam, where I had helped patch up Tin and his Sedang comrades after he shot them near the Special Forces camp at Mangbuk sixteen years earlier. The bare earth that stretched under these Miskito huts looked as if it had been swept with a vacuum cleaner. A large wooden mortar and pestle for pounding grain into flour lay on its side in the hot noonday dust.

     A new group of refugees had just crossed the river from Nicaragua. They told –

some through MISURA fighters who would translate Miskito or Sumo into Spanish for

me to re‑translate, some directly to me in Spanish ‑ of being driven from their homes

by Sandinista soldiers, or by fear of the war's increased incursions into their lives. These

stories were not canned: facial expressions and body language were obviously

unrehearsed. Desperation was palpable. Women, dressed in trail‑weary clothing that

was already becoming rags, crowded around us, pleading with their eyes, even more than with their voices, for help. A few had a little Nicaraguan money. They were in

Honduras without benefit of any immigration process; they had crossed the border –

the Río Coco – in dugout canoes. They had no way of dealing with any sort of

paperwork. We had been told to leave all our money in camp. I had disobeyed, so

started to change what Nicaraguan currency they had. Finally, the four Indians and I

just gave them the Honduran lempiras we carried in our pockets.

     I got busy taking photographs: a young boy and girl sitting in the dirt under a hut's raised floor, only occasionally trying to brush the flies from the open sores on their faces. The flies had more energy than the children. There was an old man, his pants and shirt filthy and in shreds, holding a listless infant; an emaciated dog, soft brown eyes bulging from taut skin, too weak to plead for food, waiting to die; a teenage boy in a Houston Astros T‑shirt; a striking‑looking young Miskito mother, one child on her hip and another clinging to her filthy skirt, wearing an old T‑shirt with the Playboy Bunny emblem on the front. (Apparently CMA had organized, or cooperated with, some church‑based relief organizations in the southern United States to collect clothing and transport it down to the people in these camps.)

     The four North American Indians in our group were visibly stricken. The hour or two we spent in Lasa Tinghni was the first of several times that week when I would see this change in them: a visible identification with other Indians and with their suffering, a too‑easily tapped reservoir of blood memory, of being hounded and starved and killed by agents of the white man's government. It affected Gary, Larry, Bill, and Mike physically: some circulatory change would visibly alter the skin color in their faces. I have a photo, which I think is one of the best I've ever taken, of Larry Pino holding a Miskito or Sumo infant at Lasa Tinghni, holding the child close to his chest and nestling its head next to his chin, bending his own head down, his own eyes staring deep within himself, remembering stories of his own people.

     "Just like what happened to us," one of them murmured.

     I noticed something else while we were in that camp ‑ this not about Indians, but about men who carry guns. As I moved slowly about with my camera, I was pained at what I was seeing through the lens but relieved that, for once, my subjects were too preoccupied with their own survival to be offended by being photographed. Like most Vietnam veterans, I have a perpetual itch between my shoulder blades. In any public place, I am always looking about, wanting to know who is present, what sort of force fields or psychic disturbances they emanate, what sort of trouble might come from what quarter. And especially, who is carrying what weapons, and what they're doing, or intend to do, with them.

     This habit caused me, even while moving in the emotional whirlwind of photographing the refugees, to lift my gaze above the immediate scene, to probe the edge of the forest at the camp's boundaries, to look at everything I saw through another lens in addition to the one that studied human suffering: this one calibrated to ask Where are the weapons? What's the current disposition of those who are carrying them? Is anyone there in the brush beyond this circle of suffering?

     At Lasa Tinghni, every time I changed my way of looking in this manner, no matter how subtle I tried to be about it, I would look out above everyone else and immediately meet the eyes of Flaco, Shooter, and Perico staring back at me. I realized that their focus was much greater on the military aspects of the scene than on the humanitarian aspects. I also realized that they considered cameras to be weapons, and mine particulary so. (We had been warned early and repeatedly not to photograph any of the three "security men;" I considered it another of my most important tasks, besides getting the tape of Larry Pino talking about US soldiers parachuting into Nicaragua back home intact, to somehow sneak photos of Stewart and the three mercenaries. I would succeed at three out of four.)

                         7. Red Chief, White Chief

     We were back at the TEA camp in early afternoon. My notebook has this 2:44 pm entry: "Gary Fife just came by from the creek: 'Somebody just hung out the Stars and Bars.'" I looked out from under the rolled‑up tent flap. A large Confederate flag was draped on the front of the mercenaries' tent. Gary "says he's descended from Stand Watie, a Cherokee who was the last Confederate general to surrender."

     Then Gary began to tell a story he'd heard from his people ‑ I believe it was from the Cherokee side ‑ about how the decision was made to go to war. He said he wasn't sure about the details, but that the tribe had two chiefs, a Red Chief and a White Chief. The Red Chief was the war chief, whose job was strictly military: once the tribe decided to go to war, he was supposed to make decisions that would bring success, and to lead the warriors in battle. But, precisely because of his fighting ability and experience, he was never allowed to make the decision about whether to go to war. That decision was made by the White Chief, in conjunction with the tribal council. The White Chief would often be a woman. It was her job to be the guardian of life, and to never let the warriors' enthusiasm for fighting get them into a situation which brought more death than life to the tribal community. I thought it was the most sensible political idea I’d ever heard.

                           8. In Camp

     I asked Maco how he'd gotten his name. He said that when his great‑grandmother was pregnant with his grandfather, two spinster aunts had come to his great‑grandfather and insisted that the baby be named after them, since neither would ever have any children. The patriarch had said that would be fine if the baby were a girl, but how could he name a boy after two women? They insisted, and the baby was a boy, so two letters each were taken from "Mary" and "Cora," and Maco Stewart I had a name. Our host was Maco Stewart III; his grandson is Roman numeral V.

     About 3:00 pm, Shooter invited us over to their tent. Flaco was handing out rank insignia, and indoctrinating the Indian officers about the responsibilities of their respective ranks. Alejo Teofilo translated into Miskito. The insignia were those used by US military officers: Comandante Raúl was given the silver leaf of a lieutenant colonel, and made "Second Comandante." Hilton Fagoth, brother of Steadman Fagoth, the elected MISURA leader who had been expelled from the country by the Honduran government a few weeks before, also got the silver leaf, and was put in charge of supply, which made him junior to Raúl. (I later asked Flaco why he hadn't made Fagoth senior, since he was Steadman's brother. Flaco replied that Hilton was a wimp. The next morning, Flaco wore on his camouflage cap the silver bird of full colonel. He was First Comandante, the military commander of the MISURA warriors. I don’t know how long that arrangement lasted.)

    Then it was trinket time. Teofilo, who I think was made a major, got some of the best stuff: a new fighting knife, a new mess kit with skillet, plate, pot, and green plastic cup. The others removed their hats, one at a time, and ducked their heads to enter the tent. It made it look like they were bowing. I knew it was just because the doorway was lower than their heads; still, it made me wince because of what was going on. The Indians emerged with their hats half full of cheap red and silver flashlights, batteries, brushes for cleaning weapons, pocket knives. Some Miskito boys hung around the wall of the tent looking at a weapons magazine. Flaco was entertaining the troops. "Dos años in Vietnam," he said, pointing to his chest, then made a motion like boys do at play to imitate the firing of a submachine gun on full automatic: "Kill many gooks." There was a little polite laughter. I wondered whether the Indians identified more with Flaco, or with the "gooks" he supposedly had killed. (I learned later, from Flaco himself, that he'd never been in Vietnam.)

     That evening one of the pickups returned from the little store at Rus Rus with scarred old 355 milliliter bottles of Coca‑Cola, some "Tropical" orange soda and some cellophane ‑ wrapped cookies from San Pedro Sula. That was our dinner.

     Another outboard motor had been found; we would cross the Río Coco into Nicaragua tomorrow. As dusk turned to dark and someone started the generator to light the bulbs in our tents, Shooter came over and demanded our identification. All of it: passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, everything with our names on it. He said something which I already knew about covert operations, which was that it is standard practice during “black ops,” including illegal border crossings like tomorrow’s, to "go in sterile," to preserve deniability in case anyone falls into the hands of the other side. Dead or alive. He assured us there was very little chance of that happening... but just in case.

     I asked Shooter what this kind of soldiering was like, as opposed to the more normal kind we had both known in the Marine Corps. He shrugged: "Somebody comes from Washington and says, 'Do it, and don't get caught.'"

                       9. Border Crossing

     The next day was overcast with dark clouds. It rained on and off all day, ranging from drizzle to moderate. It took about two hours of violent jouncing in the Toyotas to get upstream to the refugee village of Awas Bila, where our canoe was waiting. Unlike Lasa Tinghni, Awas Bila was populated by people who had been on the north side of the river long enough to become somewhat established. It was obvious from looking at them and their animals that at least some minimal nourishment was available to them, and that life there had settled into a routine. This time Honduran soldiers followed us about. They were very pushy about stopping us from taking photos of more than two or three refugees at a time. Just by reading their behavior, I could see that their orders were to prevent outsiders from gathering evidence of either significant refugee populations, or anything suggesting that military raids against Nicaragua were being staged from their side of the river. That was a change from when we’d first arrived.

     It was after 10:00am when we walked down to the riverbank and climbed aboard a long dugout canoe with a squared transom on which was mounted a small, but working, outboard motor. There were a little over twenty of us: Maco Stewart, Moses Fiske, Flaco, Shooter, Perico, Gary Fife, Larry Pino, Mike Hunt, and Bill Pensoneau; plus about a dozen MISURA warriors. Hilton Fagoth stood in the bow with a long pole and sounded for obstructions in the shallow channel. Neither Stewart nor Fiske, so far as I could see, was armed. Flaco carried a short‑barreled autoloading shotgun and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Perico had a similar pistol ‑ I believe he had borrowed Shooter's ‑ and an M16 automatic rifle. Shooter carried his Uzi submachine gun with extra magazines. Mike Hunt, the only tribal representative to accept the offer of a weapon (I had declined), had been given an M16 to carry; he had a magazine loaded into it. Each MISURA fighter was armed with either an M16 or an AK47.

     We spent most of the day on the river, letting the current carry us downstream, using the small motor for steerage as much as propulsion. To keep the canoe from tipping, we had to distribute ourselves evenly along the two sides, which meant that those seated on the starboard side had their backs toward the Nicaraguan bank, toward danger. Those on the port side had to keep their weapons pointed up, or leaned across the opposite gunwale between passengers. Perico was seethingly alive, just sitting there. His weapon was always ready, its action shielded from the rain but its muzzle pointed in the direction of his communist enemies. I had the strong feeling that, beyond wanting to fulfill his professional responsibility to provide military security for our excursion, he really hoped for a fight, for the chance to kill anyone ideologically connected with the hated people who had stolen his Cuba.

     I seated myself next to Perico, figuring that if anything happened which was very important to photograph, he'd be in the middle of it. I also kept an eye out for a chance to snap shots of him and the other "players" at work. Before the day was out, I managed to get recognizeable facial shots of Shooter and Stewart and Fiske (who didn't care whether he was photographed or not). And Flaco, though he always managed to have his back to my camera or to duck behind his hat brim just as I snapped, is recognizable to anyone who knows him.

     But never Perico. As alert as he was for Sandinistas on the Nicaraguan riverbank, he seemed to regard my camera as no less an enemy. I finally just asked him if I could lower my camera and aim it out along his M16, showing it and his arm against the background of the far shore. He let me. But no matter how intently he'd be looking at the bank, every time I began moving the camera in his direction, he would either have his face hidden before I could focus, or turn and fix me with a look of such unfiltered menace that I got the point and swung it back away.

     Sometime during the morning, we passed the mouth of a fairly large tributary flowing into the Coco from the Nicaraguan side. As we passed, Mario Córdoba told me it was the Río Sang Sang, and that it came down from the country where were located the three major gold mines of which Alejo Teofilo had spoken the day before.

     At 12:30 we beached the canoe at the mouth of a creek on the Honduran side, and took time for lunch. I washed my plate near two Miskitos; Mario Córdoba was singing in Spanish, "...he perdido un gran amor...." ("... I have lost a great love...."). The other, younger, Miskito sang a Moravian([1]) hymn in his own language.

     It wasn't much farther downstream after lunch that we pulled into shore on the Nicaraguan side. All the MISURA men (and boys: several were teenagers) aboard knew that we were approaching what was for them a regular crossing point. Rifles were checked yet again; people who had alternated sweeping looks at the Nicaraguan shore with conversation among themselves now turned their complete attention toward it.

     We nosed into a small brushy cove where a trail led up the steep bank. Everyone stood up as those in the bow of the canoe jumped ashore and spread out in the brush. It may have been, as we had been told, quite unlikely that we would encounter any Sandinista military presence. But the electric jolt that ran through everyone in the canoe told me that the people who lived here and had made this crossing before still considered it possible.

     I was near the stern of the canoe. I stood up just as the bow went aground, braced myself, and snapped a photo that caught most of the people in the canoe just as the first Indians jumped ashore. Shooter is clearly visible in the photo.

     We climbed the steep, muddy trail. Shooter, walking behind me, said, "Welcome to Nicaragua." Stewart and Fiske lagged behind, and were winded when they came up to where we were waiting at the top. We walked along an overgrown trail not far from the riverbank, and not over a quarter mile along it, until we came to an abandoned village of crude but comfortable‑looking wood frame houses. Several had anti‑contra slogans written on the walls. I've lost track of the town's name. I remember some of the houses having been painted in fuschia and turquoise green, colors which are seen a lot in Central America. Some of the houses had been burned to the ground. Raúl Tobías told us it was an Indian town, and that the Sandinistas had burned some of the houses and forced the people to leave, sometime in 1981 or 1982, about the time the new Reagan Administration began heating up the contra war. 

     When it had started to rain, the mercenaries had broken out several translucent, very civilian‑looking rain slickers and put them on. These made a visual mockery of their camouflage fatigues, and sounded like a battalion of old ladies on a rainy‑day shopping spree as they walked through the brush. Gary Fife carried a large, bright orange backpack. I gave up trying to guess if this were a real or pretend military mission.

     We returned to the canoe, convinced that the little town we'd seen had indeed been an Indian village, and that the Sandinista military had been primarily responsible for emptying it out and destroying some of the buildings. The larger responsibility, of course, lay with the war itself.

---

[1] Moravian Baptist missionaries had evangelized among the Miskito beginning in 1849, and it stuck. At the Moravian Church American headquarters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, archives still exist of this history.

In the CONTRA camp, + THE TAPE

                  4. Rus Rus    

     The aircraft was a silver, twin engine C‑47 "gooney bird," the workhorse twin-engine aircraft which had been hauling cargo and passengers since before WWII. The plane belonged to Setco Air, a company which was said by the Sandinistas to be a CIA proprietary in the tradition of Air America, the so‑called "civilian airline" which had been wholly owned by the CIA and had done so much of its hauling ‑ and some of its fighting ‑ in Southeast Asia. Christopher Robbins wrote in his 1979 book Air America that at one time that airline was the largest in the world.     

     I was never able to nail down the precise pedigree of Setco Air. Flaco would only say that the company was "very, very cooperative... they try in their own way to help with what we're trying to do."

     The plane was loaded with several large, heavy sacks. Stewart said they contained a thousand pounds of rice and beans which he was donating to the Indians at Rus Rus. Most of the Indians there were Miskito; some were Sumo. (The anti‑Sandinista military organization there, MISURA, took its name from the first two letters of the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama tribes. The Rama lived farther down the Nicaraguan coast.)

     Flaco and I talked as we flew. He had called Shooter and Perico over to see if they remembered what UNIR meant. (It was being floated as a new name for the contra umbrella organization.) They didn't, but both stopped to chat. My notebook has this quote from Shooter: "You can call it UNIR, FDN, whatever the fuck you want. But if I don't get to kill communists, I'm out." This was the kind of blunt honesty that journalists later came to value him for. He was unapologetic about what he did for a living, thoroughly enjoyed it, and didn't much give a shit who knew about it, except for the kind of information that might shut down the operation.         

     Perico didn't have much to say. I asked him how he chose his nombre de guerra, which I knew as a common name for small parrots in Central America. He said it was the name of the village he'd come from in Cuba. I didn't learn until later that "perico" was a Latin American slang term for cocaine.

     Flaco said that UNIR included the major contra organization, the FDN, as well as MISURA and ARDE, or Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática, the organization headed by the charismatic former Sandinista guerrilla hero, Edén Pastora. (“Arde” is also the third person singular of the Spanish verb “to burn,” while “unir” is the infinitive “to unite.”) Pastora had electrified the world in 1978 when he led an astonishing raid on the National Palace, right in downtown Managua, capturing so many influential hostages that he was able to demand a sizeable ransom, an exchange of the hostages for Sandinista prisoners held in Somoza's jails, and get away clean. But following their revolution's triumph in July of 1979, Pastora had become disenchanted with the comandantes'  increasingly leftist policies and ties with the Soviet bloc. His critics would claim that his objections grew more out of having his nose bent by not being given a position in the new government appropriate to his heroic status as "Comandante Zero," Commander Zero.

     In any case, Pastora had broken off with the Sandinistas in Managua, calling himself and his band the only true followers of Sandino, formed ARDE, and began conducting guerrilla raids out of Costa Rican sanctuaries, and southern Nicaraguan hideouts, against Sandinista government forces. He managed to cause serious discomfort to the Sandinista leaders, though his small units were not as serious a military threat as the FDN operating out of Honduras. Managua was forced to allocate scarce resources along its southern border to deal with Pastora, a tiny version of the problem faced by Hitler in WWII when he tried to add the Soviet Union to his list of conquests, resulting in his having to fight a war on two fronts.

     For the CIA, Pastora was a pain in the ass. They liked the idea of harassing the Sandinistas from two directions; what they didn't like was not being able to control Pastora. For Pastora's part, he needed recognition, arms, and money from the interna-tional community; but not, he claimed, at the price of the independence of his movement. He insisted that alignment with the two elephants playing Cold War politics with their country was what was hurting Nicaraguans most.

     As Flaco spoke with me on that C‑47 from Tegucigalpa to Rus Rus, he was particularly animated about the issue of Pastora. His manner seemed to indicate that a decision was then being made about how to deal with Pastora, and that some sort of showdown was imminent. Months later, I would have cause to regret not having taken more notes during that part of our conversation aboard the plane. In my notebook, I have two direct quotes from Flaco regarding Pastora. One is "They've made a dozen attempts, and he just don't cooperate." "They" was understood, in the context of our conversation, to mean some unspecified people calling the shots in Washington regarding Central America.               

     The other direct quote regarding Pastora from Flaco's comments on the plane is that the unspecified situation then playing itself out between Pastora and whoever "they" were in Washington constituted "Pastora's last chance." Terrell repeated those words, or others to that effect, several times during the week. Adams would make similar comments. All this took place, of course, only a few months after the attempt to assassinate Pastora with a bomb at a press conference on May 30 of the previous year at La Penca, in southern Nicaragua. Besides injuring Pastora and some of his guerillas, that bomb had killed three journalists and wounded more than a dozen others.

     The C‑47 banked steeply; I looked down the wing at a small cluster of wood‑framed, metal‑roofed buildings beside a red dirt road, and had a startling flashback of flying into the Special Forces camp at Mangbuk, in the Vietnamese highlands, over sixteen years before. Someone said it was the village at Rus Rus. At 11:03, less than five minutes later, we touched down on a straight stretch of the red dirt road a few miles away. "Suave," someone said: soft landing.

     We climbed out and piled our gear off to the side of the road. We were immediately approached by a patrol of 3 or 4 Honduran soldiers, but they seemed neither surprised nor alarmed by our presence. I made a questioning motion with my camera, and one soldier stood obligingly at attention alongside the C‑47 while I took his picture. He seemed unconcerned that he was giving me photographic evidence of his government's knowledge of activities taking place on its soil which it claimed were not.

     The area was a grassy savannah, flat to gently rolling, sprinkled with sparse young pine trees. We sat on our duffel for nearly three hours waiting for a vehicle ‑ our circling over Rus Rus had been the signal for them to start toward us. We brushed aside cartridge casings (M16, AK47, and .308, which is the civilian equivalent of the 7.62mm NATO round used in the M14 rifle and M60 machine gun), stetched out, napped, talked, took pictures of one another. Maco Stewart was perched on his duffel bag reading Robert Heinlein.

     Larry Pino was saying he remembered stories of his people, generations earlier, taking journeys as long as ten years to this part of the country in search of parrot feathers. I heard Shooter talking with a couple of the Indians, saying "I love it down here. There's no law..." except the gun, or except strength: something like that. Flaco told us we were only a few kilometers from the Nicaraguan border.

     We were driven to a camp where we were directed to a large olive drab tent and told to claim a cot. I looked the place over and immediately grabbed a cot nearest one of the two tent openings.

     "You got a thing about doorways too, huh?" It was Shooter, dropping his gear onto the other cot near the opening. We began to chat, discovering that we were both ex‑Marines and Vietnam vets. He said he'd been there for a short time in the early 1970's. As we talked, he picked up an expensive‑looking black and chrome briefcase, set it on top of his gear, and snapped it open. Inside, in its custom‑fitted velvet nest, was an Israeli‑made 9mm Uzi submachine gun, along with a folding stock and two long magazines. He took it out, snapped the heavy wire stock into place, slid a magazine into the receiver, slapped it home, and pulled back the bolt, chambering a round. He did all this with the easy dexterity of an experienced secretary dialing a touch‑tone phone. He also took from his duffel bag a pistol belt with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in a black nylon holster with a Velcro flap. He loaded the pistol and strapped it on. Good system, he explained: two weapons firing the same cartridge. Easy resupply.

     Before we'd settled in, it was decided that we shouldn't stay there after all. Back in the pickup, back on the red dirt road. We came to another, larger camp comprised only of tents, save one tiny pole structure with a barred door which had obviously been a jail cell. This was one of several such camps slightly removed from the Rus Rus river, but generally referred to by its name. The Indians thereabouts pronounced the name "Roos' Roos'," with a softly rolled initial r and a sibilant, near ‑ "sh" sound at the end. I took it to be an onomatopoetic mimicry of the sound of the river flowing.

     The camp was unoccupied when we arrived. On the way in we passed a small sign that read HOGAR DEL TEA (HOME OF TEA). I remembered reading an article in Soldier of Fortune magazine about Tropas Especiales Atlánticas, which the article had said was MISURA'S version of Special Forces.

     Fiske, Stewart, the four Indians and I were given a military surplus pyramidal tent with canvas army cots. The three mercenaries moved into a nearby tent with steel‑springed bunks. They all changed into camouflage fatigues, and all were now armed. Shooter had his Uzi and pistol, Flaco had a similar pistol, and Perico carried an M16 rifle.

     Stewart immediately grabbed an entrenching tool, went outside the tent, and began energetically digging at the hard, rocky ground. He said that he had been in the Marine Corps – late in the Korean War, I believe – and was digging himself a fighting hole, just in case. Several Miskito Indians gathered around and looked on with bemused expressions. We came outside the tent to watch. Shooter walked up and stood with folded arms. He turned and said to me in a stage whisper, "This is better'n TV. They never saw a millionaire dig a hole before." He chortled. "Come to think of it, neither have I."

     We were treated to a canned speech by "Comandante Raúl," a twenty‑nine‑year‑old MISURA officer named Raúl Tobías. I copied the speech, then translated it for the others. It began "We are here in the Republic of Honduras, 37,000 refugees. There are young volunteers with the idea of returning to their country, Nicaragua. Then the young men put forth their sacrifice and their last drop of blood to regain their lands. It is a difficult war against communism, but we are making that war...." and so on. It was obvious that he hadn't written the words, and that his delivery was rehearsed. Over the next several days, we would hear a number of such speeches, some totally canned, with crude prompts from behind by armed MISURA officers. Though much was canned, it was also obvious that these people had some genuine complaints about the Sandinistas, who had indeed killed some Indians and driven many from their homes and burned whole settlements and killed or run off their livestock. Sandinista claims that they had been forced to clear the area because of CIA‑sponsored FDN and MISURA raids across the border had some base in fact, but didn't cut much ice with the Miskito and Sumo people who had been driven from their homes.

     At dusk someone cranked up a small red Kawasaki generator, illuminating a single bulb in each tent. We ate whatever we could scrounge from our own packs. One of the Indians had brought pemmican, a traditional food for traveling. In one corner of the tent, I noticed several silhouette targets and about half a dozen LAWs, the Light Antitank Weapon that had replaced the earlier "bazooka," or 3.5" rocket launcher, used during WWII and Korea, and with which I had trained before Vietnam. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was watching a large grey spider, over two inches in diameter, crawling upside down along the underside of the tent roof. With that, the smell of the canvas, the putt of the generator, the feel of the canvas cot... it was Vietnam revisited. I felt strangely at home.

     Life in the camps reeked of the presence of the old "special operations" network of CIA officers and agents, military intelligence types, Special Forces people, "civilian" adventurers of various stripes, even the odd civilian fresh off a plane from Washington with a briefcase and secretive manner. Somewhere in the camp at Rus Rus I had noticed a slogan which was clearly an attempt to translate into Spanish one that was drummed into our heads when I went through Marine Corps boot camp, and which has been used to motivate generations of US recruits: "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer." But in Spanish it had come out "Si es imposible lo haremos," or "If it is impossible we will do it," which to my ear sounded so odd that I imagined it evoking quizzical expressions among the Indians it was supposed to motivate.

                           5. The Tape

     We spent a good part of that week riding in the back of Toyota pickups with teenage Miskito and Sumo warriors armed with AK47 and M16 automatic rifles. They climbed in and out of the trucks with no regard as to where their rifle muzzles were pointing. By the end of the week I'd looked down so many rifle barrels that I began to have the physical impression my torso was perforated, that breezes were passing between my ribs, that I was breathing in and out directly through my chest. Meeting young Miskito and Sumo Indians who'd been wounded in combat, and showed us their scars, intensified that feeling.

     One of the Miskito we rode with in the back of a pickup was Alejo Teofilo Barbera. He was older than most of his fellow warriors; I'd say in his mid‑30's. He was from Puerto Cabezas, the Nicaraguan Caribbean port I'd flown out to in late 1983 to interview people after a contra raid, possibly conducted by some MISURA warriors in a speedboat supplied by the CIA, had damaged a freighter docked there and injured a few people.

     Teofilo said that he'd been fighting against forces of the government in Managua since 1973, which meant that he had fought first against the Guardia Nacional, then since 1979 against the Sandinistas. He echoed a common Indian complaint: that "los españoles," the Spaniards, as they called the European‑derived culture and political structure in the nation's capital, mostly ignored the indigenous people who lived in their country; and when they did pay some attention, that attention was typically racist and exploitative. He gave examples: there were three major gold mines, he said, in what was traditionally Miskito territory: Bonanza, Rosita, and La Luz. "The Sandinistas promised that 80% of what richness come from Indian lands would be for Indians; 20% for the government. But it is not like that." Teofilo was speaking in broken but clear English, unlike most of his comrades, who spoke mainly their own languages and Spanish.

     I took notes as we bounced along in the truck. My notebook still has mud splotches in it, and the writing makes it clear when we were moving and when we weren't. Most of this information came from Teofilo as he was conversing with Larry Pino. I was seated on my pack at arm's length from the two of them.

     After the talk of the gold mines and the broken promises and the Indian elections, their conversation took a shift, and they began to compare older Indian stories. They weren't exactly current news, but they were interesting, and things I hadn't heard before. And it was becoming harder to take notes, with the jouncing of the vehicle. I turned on my tape recorder and set it between Larry and Teofilo. Both noticed it, and didn't seem to mind. They continued with their stories.

     Suddenly Larry remembered something he'd wanted to ask Teofilo about. Following is an unedited transcript of the next portion of my tape:

DM: Larry was asking Teofilo if their people came down from the north as well. He [Teofilo] said yes. That's when I turned the machine on.

(Saying the above, I stepped on the first part of Larry's next sentence, when he'd said something about white men, or about Columbus):

LP: ...discovered the Indians. Bullshit.

TEOFILO laughs.

DM: Teofilo, what was the name of the reverend who knows all your history in Tegoosh [Tegucigalpa]?

TEOFILO: Molling Stellet (phonetic).

DM: Molling Stellet?

TEOFILO: Mm‑hmmm.

DM: How do... how does a person find him?

[A few words where LP, TEOFILO, DM all speak at once.]

LP: Miskito office.

TEOFILO: MISURA office.

LP: Oh, MISURA office.

TEOFILO: ...there's ... other reverend, Silvio Díaz. Him too.

LP: Did you hear a story about two months ago, about American paratroopers coming here, landing seven miles into Nicaragua? Have you heard that story?

TEOFILO [guardedly eyes red light on my tape recorder]: Yeah.

LP: 'Cause one of my cousins was in there.

TEOFILO: Oh yeah?

LP: He parachuted into Nicaragua. He didn't tell me anything 'cause it was top secret, he said. The government won't let him talk about it.

TEOFILO: Top secret?

LP: Yeah.

TEOFILO: Top secret. Only for them. [laughs]

LP: He says, 'Just know I was there. And don't ask me no more questions, 'cause I'm gonna have to tell you to shut up.'

TEOFILO: Mmmm. [laughs]

GARY FIFE: You can tell him you were there too, and you can ask anything you want....

[DM laughs.]

[Here GF and LP both speak at once: GF says "...providing we have a propeller tomorrow.' as LP says something about "...rangers....' The propeller remark refers to the broken shear pin which had stopped us from crossing the Coco earlier the morning of this conversation.]

     At that point the conversation shifted to something else. Larry Pino hadn't seemed to realize the newsworthiness, or political significance, of what he'd said, or the fact that he'd spoken directly into a tape recorder with its red on light clearly visible. Or his nonchalance might be explained by the fact that he was a Native American, that he had a certain built‑in disdain for the political shenanigans of the white men's nation, the United States; it was clear that mainstream journalists were included in that disdain.

     Alejo Teofilo Barbera was different. I could tell by his body language that he immediately knew the ramifications of what was being said, and particularly that a U.S. journalist was listening in. And, most particularly, that the red light on my tape recorder was glowing. His first reaction when Larry mentioned the paratroopers was to look down at the red light. Teofilo had already demonstrated his political savvy in his long discourse about Miskito troubles and alliances. He would obviously know about the Boland Amendment, and, whatever he might privately think of the ongoing tug of war between Congress and the Reagan Administration over Central America policy, he would realize that if what Larry said were true (and he seemed to be admitting that it was), and if it were proven and published in the mainstream US media, the whole Central America equation might be changed, likely in the direction of even less aid getting to his people to fight the Sandinistas.     

     I couldn't believe my luck. I fervently hoped that the recorder was working properly (it was), and that the growling of the truck's engine hadn't drowned out the critical parts of the conversation (it had not). I resolved that, no matter what else happened, my most important task now was to get that tape back home in good condition. 

     Over the following six years, I would spend hundreds of hours of unpaid time, at least four thousand dollars of my own money in travel expenses and long‑distance phone bills, and travel something like eighteen thousand miles (about a third  of that in my pickup), chasing that story. I started out using my status as correspondent for Pacific News Service([1]); then, from the summer of 1987 through the Spring of 1991, I worked on a Special Correspondent's credential with Doyle McManus of the Washington, DC bureau of the Los Angeles Times. 

---

[1] PNS was an independent international news service based in San Francisco. Sandy Close was Executive Editor, a tough-minded ex-Southeast Asia hand, and my boss. After I made several trips to Central America with her credential, she was awarded a Macarthur “Genius” grant for her work at PNS.

Rus Rus

                    1. Maco Stewart's Letter

     In early January 1985, Chris DiMaio called. Chris and I knew each other through our veterans' rap group and as members of Bill Motto VFW Post 5888 in Santa Cruz. But it was the Cheyenne part of him that occasioned the call that sent me on one of the most bizarre expeditions of my life. An Indian friend of his had received a letter from a Texas lawyer offering an expenses‑paid trip to Central America to see firsthand how their Miskito Indian brothers were being killed and run off their land by the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Chris's friend was Michael Joseph. Michael's tribe, to whom the letter had been addressed, were the Tachi people of Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno, California.

     The Tachi leaders didn't know what to make of the letter; Michael had called Chris because he was a Vietnam vet. Chris didn't know what to make of it either, so he called me, since I'd done some reporting from and about Central America. I thought they had been contacted by someone who was working with the CIA‑financed (and -led) contra operations being run out of Honduras across the border into Nicaragua. It sounded like a rare window to see inside the world of covert operations. I warned that it might be risky, involving anything from inconvenience and wasted time to physical danger. I recommended that anyone they send be both an experienced journalist and a combat veteran.

     The tribal council kicked it around, and decided not to send any of their own people. They sent me instead.

     A few days later, in the Houston airport, I was standing in a circle of people I'd never met before. Sue Young, Stewart's secretary, was handing out tickets for a Tan Sahsa (the Honduran airline) flight to Tegucigalpa, leaving in just over an hour. She was a middle‑aged, well‑organized but somewhat harried‑looking woman. Maco (pronounced MAY‑ko) Stewart was an unremarkable ‑ looking man in his late fifties with a sizeable gut and thinning hair; he was dressed in khaki pants and short‑sleeved shirt. His friend Moses Fiske, who later told me he was sixty, had an even bigger gut, a pasty complexion, and a kindly demeanor like somebody's grandpa who'd just retired from something no more vigorous than the insurance business. Sure enough, he'd had major heart surgery some months before. He was to be our movie cameraman. Besides me, there were four real Indians: Gary Fife was a mixed‑blood Cherokee and Creek, a full‑time radio journalist with Migizi Communications, an Indian media cooperative in Minneapolis. Mike Hunt had come representing Hank Adams, of the Survival of the American Indians Association of Olympia, Washington. Larry Pino represented New Mexico's Zia Pueblo, and Bill Pensoneau was from the Ponca tribe in Oklahoma. (I seem also to remember a Potawatomi connection with Bill’s name.)

     I showed everyone my letter of accreditation from the Tachi people; the Indians read it much more carefully than did Maco Stewart, since Stewart had already accepted me on the trip through Michael Joseph. I told everyone that besides gathering information for the Tachi, I was a freelance journalist, and might want to do a piece about the trip. Stewart said that was okay, or at least he didn't object.

     It was midafternoon by the time we landed at Tegucigalpa's Toncontín Airport, after stops in Beliz and San Pedro Sula. As we lined up to go through immigration, Stewart instructed all of us to say that we represented "Delphi Company," and to answer no further questions about what we were doing in Honduras. We should just say that we were with him, or that we didn't know.

     That worked to get us past the kiosk and into the departure lounge. But whatever Maco had said to the officials wasn't enough to get us out the door and onto the street. The authorities apparently wanted to know what a group of two older men, four Indians, and one guy who might have been an unemployed university professor, with a pile of gear that looked like they were going to war, were doing in their country. Stewart just kept shrugging at their questions. Armed Honduran soldiers at each exit, plus two or three who mingled with us, just kept not letting us go.

     Meanwhile, Stewart and I chatted. He asked where I'd grown up; I told him Oregon and Washington. He asked if I'd heard about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the guru/cult leader who had settled with his followers in Eastern Oregon. I replied that I only knew what I'd read in the papers, since I hadn't lived in Oregon for some years. He asked what I thought of Rajneesh. I snorted derisively before I caught myself. Stewart said he had a "great deal of respect" for the man.

     Stewart told us, and presumably told the immigration officials, that we were waiting for someone who would explain everything. His name was "Colonel Flaco."

     Finally Flaco appeared, a slim man dressed in designer jeans and windbreaker. In his late forties with grey hair and moustache, he spoke with a strong Southern accent.

                      

    2. Flaco and Luque

     The senior Honduran officer spoke no English, and it quickly developed that no one in our party besides me spoke Spanish. So I became the interpreter for the interchange that followed between "Colonel Flaco" and the Honduran officer.

     The officer asked what we intended to do in Honduras. Flaco said to tell him we were going hunting. ‑ But where were our rifles? Flaco said they were coming on another plane. The officer clearly didn't believe him. ‑ What about all that camouflage gear we were carrying? It looked military. Flaco said to tell him not to worry about that; that camouflage clothing just happened to be in style at the time in the United States. The officer stood there, arms crossed, stolid, disbelieving. His attitude was accepted as a command by the sentries at the exits. They stiffened; paid less attention to anyone else in the room and focused on the loose circle of Indians and Texans, with the Honduran officer and Flaco and me at its center. Other travelers hurried past, or stood aside and gawked. Immigration officers in the kiosks we'd passed through earlier cast sidelong glances.

     Flaco leaned and spoke directly into my ear in a low voice. "Tell him ‑ quietly ‑ that we're going to the FDN camps." FDN was the acronym for Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense, the contra umbrella organization. I repeated his words ‑ and his secretive attitude ‑ to the Honduran officer in Spanish. This managed to further heighten the tension in the room, but not to convince the implacable officer to let us go. ‑ Who were we with? What were we going to do there? What authority had given us permission to go there?

     Flaco leaned to my ear again: "Ask him to call Captain Lookey of the Honduran secret police." He pronounced it "LOO‑key."

     The officer's expression changed for the first time, to one of startled surprise. He said to me, somewhat harshly, "Ask him how he knows the captain."

     Flaco gave a shrug intended to convey a patiently resigned "Okay, I see I finally have to come clean with you," and pulled from his hip pocket a small nylon wallet, flipped open a velcroed flap, and showed the officer ‑ being the translator, I was standing close enough to see it ‑ a large gold badge, consisting of an eagle atop a shield, with a blue arc on the shield and gold letters on the arc. I wanted with my whole being to read the inscription on that blue arc, but couldn't. It didn't seem wise to lean down between them far enough to read the small gold letters.

     The officer disappeared. We waited. A small, slim Honduran appeared, wearing a hip-length leather jacket and aviator's sunglasses that made him look like every intelligence or secret police agent in every movie from "Casablanca" to "Doctor Zhivago". A current zapped around the room: The Man had arrived. The Honduran army officer dropped respectfully back; I became a corner of a new triangle with Flaco and Captain Luque, translating for them. (In a phone conversation later that year with Brian Barger, an Associated Press reporter who, with his colleague Robert Parry, broke some of the early stories on the contra support network that took over for the CIA when the Boland Amendment made it illegal for any US Government entities to aid the anti-Sandinista contras, I learned that the man in the leather jacket was Captain, later Major, Leonel Luque (pronounced LOO‑kay). He was the liaison between the Honduran army and the contras, with specific responsibility for controlling flights to contra bases along the Honduras ‑ Nicaragua border from Tegucigalpa's Toncontín Airport. Luque was also identified in Christopher Dickey's book, With the Contras.)

     It turned out that the two had met before, and that Luque pretty much knew that Flaco was involved in supporting the contras, which was okay with some people in Washington but not with others. But the "others" were of little concern to him, since he himself was part of the program. So he and Flaco had a conversation, through me, that wasn't a conversation at all. Luque more or less asked some questions, but not really; Flaco more or less, but not really, answered.

     Captain Luque turned his head ever so slightly in the direction of the sentry at the exit through which we wanted to leave, gave an even slighter nod (without so much as looking at the sentry), and we were free.

                   3. Babes in James Bondland

     Outside, a yellow whale of a Detroit‑made station wagon taxi waited. Flaco swooped around us like a nervous mother duck, giving orders to us and to another man who was obviously with him, standing a few feet away, feet planted wide apart, hand darting in and out of the half-zippered front of his light blue windbreaker. Load up. Get in. Doesn't matter where or how, just get in. Hurry. There'd been too much attention, nobody was supposed to know we're here, this is a clandestine operation. Flaco said "clandestine" so it rhymed with "Palestine."

     The man in the blue windbreaker waited until the rest of us were crammed into the taxi, then jumped in the back seat beside me, slammed the door, and we sped off. He squirmed about in the seat, looking out both sides, looking back, looking forward, as if he expected us to be attacked from any direction. He also seemed to be enjoying himself; he virtually gave off sparks. After we got some distance from the airport, he relaxed enough to say "Hey, guys, welcome to Honduras," and introduce himself. He said he was known thereabouts as "Teetador," which I realized was his attempt to roll the “r” in the Spanish word tirador, or "shooter." The word also means "trigger" in Spanish. He said we could just call him Shooter.

     We got to the hotel, the Honduras Maya, which we were told was the best one in Tegucigalpa. It seemed to be. Bellhops crossed the gleaming tile floor of the entry salon, and the plush carpets of adjacent lounges, in crisp uniforms with contrasting collar trim and piping. (Those same lounges, in those days, were famous as places where spooks from every country involved in the Cold or hot wars in Central America, plus legions of "independent operators" and Soldier of Fortune types, sat around and grinned at one another over their drinks.)

     Flaco took charge of signing us in, intent on getting us, and the pile of camouflage gear, out of the lobby as quickly as possible. I looked around to see Shooter standing in a startlingly unambiguous pose, feet planted wide apart, right arm crossing his body and the hand out of sight inside his blue windbreaker. He'd picked a spot from which he could cover the door, the group of us clustered around the registration desk, and the entire room as well.

     Each of us got a private room with thick, richly colored carpeting and draperies, two double beds, private bath, television, and telephone. Maco had said it was all on him, including room service and long‑distance telephone charges. Anything we wanted. (After I returned from the trip, I checked with a travel agent and learned that the rooms were listed for US$75‑80 a night.)

     It was late evening when we gathered in the hotel's large, leather‑appointed dining room, lighted by expensive‑looking chandeliers. We settled on a large table against the back wall, with a stuffed leather seat along the wall side and ornate chairs of dark wood with velvet‑covered cushions around the other three sides. While the others were milling around and politely deciding where to sit, I instinctively grabbed a seat with my back to the wall, near one end of the table so as not to be trapped behind it. But Shooter came in, sat down beside me, and bumped me over. He wanted the same seat. He was carrying a small leather purse, which he dropped onto the table between us with a thump that said it contained something heavy, made of metal. He turned the top toward him and unzipped it.

    "Pozo," he said, using the Spanish word for what he described as the standard pouch for carrying a pistol in this part of the world. He said that it was so hot here that it often wasn't practical to wear clothing heavy enough to conceal a belt or shoulder holster. I looked down the table; Flaco sat with his back to the wall at the other end of the table, and also had a pozo on the table in front of him with the zipper open.

     Stewart invited us to order anything we wanted to eat. The four Indians and I felt, and I'm sure acted, like babes suddenly dropped, mouths agape, into some James Bond wonderland. After dinner some of us began politely prodding, wondering, Well, what's all this about. Flaco said we couldn't talk about it here. There'd be a meeting after dinner in his suite.

     When we got there, Flaco had a briefing ready. He was to be known only as "Colonel Flaco;" he re‑introduced "Teetador/ Shooter," mispronouncing the Spanish in the same way that Shooter had. (Over a year later, when I called Shooter at home in St. Louis, the message on his answering machine was in both English and Spanish, with Spanish first. By then, his Spanish pronunciation, and even his grammar, were pretty good.)

     Flaco also introduced a man we hadn't seen before, whose nombre de guerra was "Perico." Perico, Shooter, and Flaco were our three "security men," the latter explained. Perico was what he called a "free Cuban," who welcomed the chance to fight communism any way he could, and hoped to help free Cuba itself one day. Flaco said that the three of them were members of Civilian Military Assistance, or CMA. I recognized the name immediately as being that of an Alabama‑based organization of Vietnam veterans, gun enthusiasts, and other anti‑communist true believers which had been all over the news a few months earlier after two of its members, Dana Parker and James Powell, had been shot down in a Hughes 500 helicopter while conducting an air strike against a Sandinista position at Santa Clara, in northern Nicaragua. Parker, Powell, and a Nicaraguan identified in the September 3, 1984 issue of the Sandinista daily Barricada as Mario Pocillo, were all killed. (At one point, when I asked Flaco what he knew about the Parker/Powell mission, he said, "We were viewing satellite photos of that crash before Managua even knew their people had shot it down.")

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.

MISSING MAN

Missing Man

     The first time I met Bill Motto was on the street outside the Veterans' hall in Santa Cruz. He was holding forth on some book or newspaper article or recent event that, to him, was yet another confirmation of the depths to which U.S. imperialism had sunk in the 20th century. His talk was brilliant, informed, and delivered so fast that even those of us who read a lot and pretty much shared his judgments about U.S. foreign policy had a hard time keeping up with him. Jesus Christ, I thought as I listened to him, this guy's wound too tight for his own good.    

     We got to be friends. But like most of the other vets, I could only handle being with Bill in limited doses. He didn't live anywhere; he "crashed around": he'd stay at a friend's house, keeping as low a profile as possible and helping with chores where he could, but finally just being too jarring a presence in a person's, or a family's, life. He'd either be asked to move on, or would get the hints and do it on his own. Sometimes he'd disappear for a few days or weeks, hang out in San Francisco or his old haunts up the coast around Guerneville, then show up again. I let him crash at my place for a few weeks, but it was a tiny three‑room house and when Bill was camped out in the living room, it wasn't even mine anymore.

     "Bill," I said to him one day, "this...."

     "It's time, huh?"      

     "Yeah."

     He nodded, smiled a resigned smile, thanked me, and took off.

     One night a few weeks later I came home from a late night in town, and there was Bill, in his sleeping bag, on my living room floor. He was awake when I turned the light on. He shrugged. "I tried," he said. "There wasn't any other place. I'll be gone tomorrow."

     Bill and I were in a Vietnam vets' rap group. There were seven of us, plus a counselor named Greg Anderson who coordinated the group. Greg had been a Marine sergeant in Nam.

     We sat in a little room in the Vets' Hall, once a week, and poured our guts out: combat, nightmares, alcohol, drugs, sex, relationships. A man hearing his lover scream as he took hours to die. Bill, who was a medic with a deeply ingrained ethic about saving lives, telling about walking across the top of a bunker and being shot in the back from within it, to find out after the bunker was blown up that he'd been shot by a North Vietnamese Army nurse who looked a lot like his first lover, a Filipina girl in East Los Angeles. The nurse died when the bunker was blown. Another vet told of killing his first man before he even went to Nam, in a fight with another soldier in a holding cell after a wild weekend pass from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I told about Tho An, and about the Marine radio operator who blamed me for his friend's death.

     We talked about the years since the war, about the forms our rage took, against ourselves and those we loved, or those we wanted to love but couldn't, or those we didn't even know; about too much alcohol, too many drugs, never wanting to be without a weapon; about not being able to sleep, or sleeping with one eye open and a pistol under the pillow, about checking every room you entered for dangerous people and exits, about always preferring a seat in a restaurant with your back in a corner and a door nearby. We learned that we'd lost more vets since the war than the 58,000-plus who were listed as killed there: self‑inflicted gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, single car crashes... the Medal of Honor winner who committed suicide by holding up liquor stores with an unloaded gun until one of the owners finally killed him.

     By the end of each rap session, the eight of us would be wound as tight as if we were about to go on patrol in enemy territory. As we got to know each other better and better, sharing our weaknesses and rage, one thing that kept coming up was how many guys we'd all seen go down because of alcohol, and how most of us faced that danger too. So in letting one another see parts of ourselves we'd mostly kept from others, we became closer, really tight after awhile.

     So we went drinking together.    

     Most often, we'd walk out the front door of the Vets' Hall after a rap session, cross the street and turn a corner and walk up a flight of stairs to the Teacup, a dark, cozy little bar attached to the Chinese restaurant owned by Don Yee. Sometimes we were pretty wild in the Teacup, sometimes we'd just get drunk and morose. But we talked a lot, letting our defenses down, with the help of alcohol, even more than we did during the rap sessions.

     During those drinking sessions, Bill and I would often gravitate toward each other. We were the readers of the group, the ones who would devour history books about Vietnam and other wars in U.S. history, and come up with more and more reasons for our anger, convincing ourselves that it wasn't we who were fucked up, it was the world we lived in; and that any sane person who'd seen what we'd seen would be as crazy as we were.

     I thought I'd read a lot. But Bill Motto flabbergasted me with his knowledge. He hadn't even been a Marine ‑ he'd been with the army's 173^rd Airborne Brigade for one of his tours in Vietnam and in an armored unit for the other ‑ but he was the one who first told me the other side of Smedley Butler's story: that, after retiring as a Lieutenant General with 34 years of the most illustrious service in Marine Corps history, Butler had written a book titled War Is a Racket. He had gone on a lecture circuit, using his status as a war hero to denounce U.S. imperialism, saying that during his years of service he had spent most of his time being a strong‑arm for Brown Brothers Bank and other U.S. corporations.

     Bill told me something else about the History and Traditions of the Marine Corps that I hadn't learned in boot camp. The Battle of Chapultepec, commemorated by the crimson stripe down the trouser leg of officers' and NCOs' dress blues – I could have worn such a stripe, had I wanted to spend the money for the uniform - was fought against boys, cadets of a Mexican military academy, and was thought by some in the U.S. forces to be so unjust that a number of men from an Irish unit in the U.S. Army, the Saint Patrick's Brigade, switched sides and fought for the Mexicans. A number of them were captured and hanged. A friend of Bill's and mine, Chris Matthews, wrote a play about the incident called "A Flag to Fly"; it's been produced in Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

     It was from Bill that I first heard about Bohemian Grove. We were in the Teacup one night, we both already had several beers aboard, and were swapping historical anecdotes. Bill told me about Shell Oil trucks being able to drive freely about Vietnam without being ambushed because they paid off the VC, and about other U.S. and international corporations that supported the war because they had interests there. He recalled Eisenhower's speech justifying aid to the French in their efforts to retain Indochina as a colony. Eisenhower noted the value of Vietnam's tungsten, rubber, and other resources that would be lost to the West if Vietnam fell to the communists. I'd come back with my story about Cho Lon and the "five o'clock follies." Bill would come back: "Oh! Oh! Have you read this book? The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia? By this guy...." He snapped his fingers to engage his memory. "McCoy! That's it!" He leaned in close with his wild‑eyed intensity. I took a deep breath. Bill was wired now; it could only end when the bar closed at two a.m.

     "Alfred..W..McCoy...you gotta read this book. You won't believe this book. Well. Of course you'll believe it. It was, get this, the guy's fucking Ph.D. thesis. The guy went to Nam, went to Laos, went to France. He interviewed all these people. The thing is rigorously documented...." He launched into a synopsis of McCoy's book, beginning with the U.S. Army's deal with Lucky Luciano, the Mafia boss, during World War II. According to McCoy, the Army sprung Luciano from prison and gave him his freedom in exchange for Luciano's use of his connections to provide intelligence and other assistance to pave the way for the allied invasion of Sicily. After the war, Luciano went back to heroin dealing, organizing a route that began in the poppy fields of Indochina and ended on the streets of New York, with Marseille as its hub.

     Still according to McCoy, Luciano's network hooked up with French military intelligence in a Mephistophelean bargain: the French officers turned a blind eye to the drug trade in exchange for help against the communists. That help began with using mob thugs to break up dockworkers' strikes in Marseille, then spread to Vietnam and Laos when the drug traffickers showed themselves able to provide intelligence about Ho Chi Minh's independence movement. Then after the French were defeated at Dienbienphu in 1954 and the United States took over the anti‑communist crusade there, U.S. intelligence operatives inherited, from their French counterparts, an in‑place network of intelligence sources. Later, during the 10-year American chapter of the Vietnam story, pilots for Air America, the CIA's covert air operations company, tacitly admitted hauling opium for the Hmong tribesmen in Laos who made up their mercenary army there.([1]) In a similar mood another night, Bill began with, “You know who Archimedes Patti is, right?” I was silent for too long a second. “Fuck! How come nobody knows about Archimedes Patti? ... Oh! Shit! This guy..." He leaned closer. His intensity was always high, yet could always be doubled: “...this guy... was a fucking Captain in the OSS – you know, the Army guys in World War II who were clandestine operators, the precursor to the CIA? His job was liaison with General Giap and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese in World War II... he wrote this book, man...Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America’s Albatross. You gotta read this book. Oh shit man, you gotta gotta gotta read this book. There’s a photo([2]) in there, in a jungle clearing in 1945, with Ho’s officers declaring national independence, and their declaration of independence is based on ours ‘cause Thomas Jefferson was a fucking hero of Ho’s, and all these guys are saluting an American flag! Giap, OSS guys, the whole fuckin’ nine yards...”

     Patti had worked with Vietnamese to rescue downed Allied pilots and to conduct anti‑Japanese operations, and had an acute sense of the politics of that time and place. He writes that Ho Chi Minh knew his independence movement couldn't survive without his siding with one or the other of the two behemoths already jockeying for position in the post-war world, and tried to ally himself with Uncle Sam.        

     I came back and told Bill about hitchhiking through Laos, bumping into Air America pilots, and having some of that material censored in an article I wrote for the college alumni magazine([3]). I was told it might offend some of our alumni. 

     Giap, of course, was the general who later commanded the forces which defeated both the French and us Americans in Vietnam.

     Bill went on to say ‑ this is borne out in Patti's book ‑ that the declaration of independence read by Ho on September 2, 1945, was modeled on our own, and that Ho appealed to Harry Truman to accept his government as legitimate. But countries which had been major allies during the war ‑ especially Britain, France, and the Netherlands ‑ wanted their Asian colonies back after the war. Truman sided with the colonialists – they had been our allies in WWII - and the war Bill and I and nearly three million other Americans fought in grew out of that choice.

     I couldn't match Bill's intensity, or his speed at spitting out facts, names, dates. But in my thirst to know more, and in my anger upon learning it, I was right with him.

     By then, we were reeling on our barstools. We talked about the men who had led us into that mess, and how much we hated them: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, the Bundys, the Lodges (we spoke of the latter name in the plural because of roles played by Henry Cabot Lodge's relatives in such adventures as Eisenhower's CIA‑led coup in 1954 against the elected president of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company).

     Our drunkenness and our anger reached a point where they began to converge, and we began to wish that there were some justice in the world, that the rich old men like those who sent poor young men like us off to fight their wars, lying to us to get us to do it, could be made to suffer some of the same things that they had caused us to suffere, that our comrades whose names were on the Wall in Washington had suffered.

     Bill began telling me about Bohemian Grove, the retreat not too far up the California coast where rich and powerful men, the country's power elite, gathered once a year for their secret self-congratulatory shenanigans.

     "They're all there," Bill said, "every fuckin' one of 'em." He started counting fingers: Reagan, Bush, Meese, Kissinger, McNamara, Schultz, Weinberger, plus the corporate heads whose names we didn't know but who had such influence on our lives. Heads of oil companies, tire companies, auto companies, insurance companies, banks, investment firms....

     "Wouldn't it be great to hit that place? To kill all those bastards in one nice, clean operation?" Bill was leaning in close again, his eyes glittering with the deliciousness of his thought.

     I allowed as how the security must be pretty tight.

     "Hunh! No shit...." He went on to say they had guards all over the place, with submachine guns and walkie‑talkies and leashed guard dogs.

     Still, it could be done, he said. There's no place that can't be busted, if you have the right people and equipment and you plan it right.

     We talked about how it could be done. You'd have to have intelligence. You'd have to bribe one of the prostitutes or strippers they hired to come in and amuse them. It wouldn't be easy; they paid them a lot and made them sign a secrecy oath and threatened dire consequences if any of them ever talked to outsiders about what went on at Bohemian Grove. But it could be done, with patience and money. Let's say we had the money. Here's the other thing. People like that always screw over people. That's what you'd hafta do, find somebody they really fucked over, take your time, get 'em to talk: what's the layout of the place? What's the electronic security setup? What gates, what wire, what sensors? How many security patrols, how many men each, what weapons, when does the guard change? And what are the billeting arrangements. Where, exactly, does Nixon sleep? Kissinger? Too bad LBJ's already dead.

     We discussed weapons, silencers, equipment, camouflage. Bill, as I remember, was partial to a certain model of Harrington and Koch submachine gun: superb workmanship, reliability. I remember thinking about the problem of being given away by noise, and saying, "What about just a few intense people with knives?" I told Bill about the Randall fighting knife I'd carried in Nam, that I'd since given away.

     Sure enough, we closed down the Teacup. I got home, beery‑eyed but in one piece. I stumbled into my bedroom and there, on the desk I'm now using to write this piece, was a bouquet of flowers from my new lover, Annie, who would become my wife of fourteen years. She'd left a note signed "Yer sweetie, A." with a heart beside her initial.

     At times, over the years, I thought that Annie might have saved some lives that night, though probably only mine. Bill and I would never really have done it. We wouldn't have been able to pull it off, and wouldn't have tried even if we'd thought we could. Not once we were sober. But there was another outlet for my rage that she might well have saved me from. I became increasingly angry about U.S. interventions in Central America, especially in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. And I became frustrated that so little of the truth about those situations was known – or acknowledged - by the American people, and further frustrated that probably no amount of truth‑telling would make any difference. Reagan and his cowboys just did what they wanted anyway, Congress and public opinion be damned. I even considered going to Central America to fight: this time on the right side. I was just that frustrated, that angry. It had a logic to it: if it truly was as wrong as I knew it to be, and was so deadly to so many innocent people, and if I knew about it and nothing else was working, wasn't I duty bound to put my life where my ideas were?

     Some tourist saw his body on the rocks at the base of West Cliff; the autopsy said heart attack. We learned from his mother, when she came up from Los Angeles for the funeral, that he'd had a history of medical exams showing some mild dysfunction of the heart. But it hadn't been enough to keep him from the army, or from coming home from Nam with two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts (or the other way 'round; I'm not sure which).

     Anyway, Bill was dead. His body was cremated, and a bunch of us – including his mother, a sweet lady in her late fifties who immediately adopted us - took his ashes out past where he'd died to Natural Bridges, to scatter them in the surf. A wooden fence had been erected several feet back from the cliff’s edge, and a sign on the fence said that crossing the fence was prohibited. The State Park Ranger who was there explained that some people had fallen down the cliff onto the rocks there, and been badly injured or, in one case, died. We told the Ranger our story and begged him to let us go out to the cliff’s edge. Amazingly, he gave his permission. We climbed the fence, tenderly boosting Mrs. Motto over into several pairs of waiting hands. We walked out and sat on the rocks at the top of the cliff and looked down past our dangling feet to where the surf came in and pounded the rocks and eddied around them.

     Shit. Were we blue. Bill had been a pain in the ass at times, always wanting to crash at our houses, always in your face or in your ear with his intensity. But we all knew that some precious, deeply buried part of each of us had been taken by Bill and lived right out in the open, right on the edge of life, to the nth degree. We loved him, and all we had now were a few photos, and the painting Kenny Walker had done of Bill, in long hair, beard, shades and beret, showing off the Combat Medic's badge and jump wings he’d pinned to his leather vest.

     And we had these few handfuls of ashes, with their obscene/holy pieces of charred but recognizable bone. It was a clear, bright afternoon, with little wind. As we tossed the ashes out from the cliff, we could see them float down to the rocks and spume below, taking a long time because of the updraft, swirling about and finally descending like little clouds of auto‑rotating butterflies.

     Then, for a couple of long minutes, we just sat, silent except for the occasional shit! ‑ which was all any of us could come up with to express how we felt.

     Something moving to the right of us caught my attention. I turned to look. It was a flight of pelicans, moving toward us, surfing easily along the updraft that climbed the cliff in front of us. "Here comes the honor guard!" I shouted into the wind.

     The pelicans, flying in as perfect a V as those clumsy/graceful birds can pull off, passed directly in front of us, right at the height of our heads, so close we could see the individual feathers on their wings, even their eyes. I could even hear, as one or two birds made just enough wing movement to maintain both steady altitude in the updraft and their position in the formation, a slight sibilance as feathers slipped across one another.

     As the leader came abreast, I yelped: "Missing Man! Look! They're flying the Missing Man formation!" And so they were, a good V formation with one bird's place vacant on the seaward leg of the V, signifying, when it's flown by military aircraft, the absence of a comrade who's crashed or been brought down by enemy fire.

     We cheered as they passed.    

---

[1] See Christopher Robbins, Air America: The Story of the CIA’s Secret Airlines, 1978........

[2] The photo in Patti’s book to which Bill refers carries this caption: “26 August 1945, Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh sends an official delegation headed by Vo Nguyen Giap to welcome the American OSS to Hanoi. While the band plays the American National Anthem, Giap and his delegation join the author and the OSS team in saluting the American flag.”

[3] Colorado College Magazine, Spring 1969: front cover and pp.1, 5, 6-12.