- 7. Lasa Tinghni
At 11:35 that morning, the 24th (the day after my 42nd 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 retranslate, 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 trailweary 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 North American 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? and if so, what are they doing, and what do they intend to do?
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 particularly 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.)
