This chapter if one of 14 from the section "Rus Rus," from my memoir Rattlesnake Dreams. The whole section tells of 8 days in southern Honduras and northern Nicaragua during January 1985. Five of us were representing North American Indian tribes. Our identities are told below. The trip was paid for by Maco Stewart, a Texas oilman who wanted to gather support among North American Indians for the Reagan Administration's war against the Sandinistas then in power in Nicaragua. Three North American mercenaries accompanied us. They were employed by Stewart.
The afternoon grew darker and rainier. We landed near dark close to the place where the first canoe's motor had broken its shear pin the morning before. We trudged through the rain until well after dark, slipping in the mud and cursing like any ragtag, worn-out army in history.
We came upon a Miskito refugee camp. It may have been Karas Ankan, but I'm not sure. Darkskinned people squatted in pole-and-thatch huts, their faces and skin illuminated only by cooking fires. They stared at us as we passed. Blue smoke hung in the air between the huts. Just as I was having a feeling that it was all too familiar, Shooter, who had been walking behind me, said in my ear, "Ain't this a flashback?" (He was one of the mercenaries hired by Stewart. I learned later that his real name was Joe Adams, and that he was from St. Louis. That is, unless "Joe Adams" was another pseudonym.) As we talked during that week, he also said he was an ex Marine (as am I), and had been in Viet Nam late in the war. It was a strange week for me, being a journalist reporting on a war that I personally opposed, yet having so much history that I shared, at least on the surface, with one of the mercenaries who worked for "the other side."
11. Perico's Garrote, and other stories
The next morning we washed clothes, and ourselves, in the creek near camp, and sat around recovering from the day before. Mike Hunt had brought a frisbee, and got a game going in the clear area between the tents. A man came, a muscular and very military- and authoritative-looking caucasian in neat camouflage fatigues, who stayed on the opposite side of the clearing from us and talked with Flaco and Shooter and Perico, always standing so that one of their bodies blocked our view of him. Their conversation seemed intensely focused.
I took out my camera and started taking photos of the intertribal frisbee game, then used that as a cover to aim the camera through their game and snap photos of the group of mercenaries. They were too far away. I changed to my longest lens, a 100mm, and shot again. I never got anything but the back of the head of the newcomer, and Perico never turned anything but his back in our direction. Maco Stewart noticed what I was doing, and paid closer attention when I changed to the longer lens. I pretended to be delighted with the action shots I was getting of the frisbee game. By the time Stewart started to hover near me, it was too late. I had what turned out to be, after it was enlarged, a recognizable photo of Flaco. But I did not get a decent shot of the military-looking visitor, which I desperately wanted.
In later years I’ve wondered if it was Oliver North – Flaco was mentioned in the notebooks that North was forced to surrender during the Iran-Contra investigations, and I have seen a reference to Rus Rus in something that North wrote – but I don’t know whether he was the stranger in camp that day. This man’s physical bearing, his uniform, and the way he wore it presented, to me, a clear impression of someone who was not a mercenary. I pegged him as active duty U.S. military, and a field grade officer at that. His bearing in the presence of the mercenaries was clearly that of someone who had authority over them. And their bearing toward him reflected, to my eye, obeisance to that authority.
We went out to another refugee camp, where the people had been established longer than those at Lasa Tinghni, but not so long as those at Awas Bila or Karas Ankan. The interviews were so obviously canned, with the subjects being visibly and audibly goaded by armed men standing behind them, that I didn't even take notes.
We were back in our tent at the TEA camp by noon, sacked out, still tired from the day before. Gary Fife was playing country music tapes on his interview recorder. Just after a song about "tryin' to love two women," he said, "I got another tape in there, by a friend of mine. It's called ‘Custer Died for Your Sins.'" Flaco, standing just outside the tent, laughed along with the rest of us.
Moses Fiske was working on the 16mm movie camera in the tent, and was having problems. All four Indians and I were there as well. Fiske told Stewart he wasn't sure he could get the camera to work. "Can't you nigger-rig it?" Stewart asked.
In the weeks after we returned to the States from Honduras, I asked Bill Pensoneau by telephone if he remembered Stewart’s question to Fiske about whether Fiske could “nigger-rig” his movie camera; and if so, what he thought of the remark. Bill said he did indeed remember it. He said “Yes, I hate it, but even Indians have to have someone to look down on,” or words to that effect.
We were lying around the tent. The four Indians were discussing the situation of their fellow Indians in Nicaragua. A year or so earlier, Bill Pensoneau had traveled there and visited some of the camps to which the Sandinistas had relocated Indians, possibly including some of the people who were now our hosts, to clear the border area for combat operations against the contras,
Their conversation got around to the history of the Sandinista movement, beginning when someone wondered where they'd gotten their name. Someone knew that there'd been this guy named Sandino, but didn't know who he was or what he'd done. They asked Stewart to clarify it, and Stewart gave an answer which I don't remember, but which was inaccurate. I had been keeping my mouth shut in the interest of self-preservation, but now I blurted out a short history of Sandino's guerrilla fight against Somoza’s Guardia Nacional, and the US Marines who trained and led them, during the 1920's. Since Maco and I and Shooter were all exMarines, my little history lesson definitely “stirred the stew” in our tent. (See also my chapter below, “Interview with Bill Gandall.”
(Gandall was one of those Marines stationed in Nicaragua during the 1920s.)
Stewart turned to look at me with alarm. "How did you know that?" he asked. I told him I'd worked in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist in 1983, had written some pieces about it, and had since then read quite a lot about the history of the country and US interventions there.
I'd said too much. Stewart wanted to know more about me, where else I'd been, what else I'd done, what I thought of the present situation and about US policy in general - the sort of questions he should have asked in the Houston airport. The four Indians were listening; we'd already had some conversations along these lines ourselves, out of Stewart's presence. I'm a lousy liar, and didn't want to appear to them to be hiding something they already knew I knew, or felt. So, I told Stewart that I knew about CIA interventions in Vietnam and Laos and with the Kurds in the area of the Persian Gulf, and allowed that US intelligence operatives had a history of recruiting poor, dark skinned people to fight our wars for us, which too often turned out to be losing wars, and then abandoning our former proxies to bloody retribution by our former enemies.
It didn't seem a wise thing to be saying in an armed camp of just such operatives a short walk from the Río Coco. But I was pissed off enough about the situation to risk having Stewart hear me say that in order that the Indians would hear it too. They'd heard the basic story about the Montagnards in Vietnam, but very little about the Kurds, or about the Hmong people in Laos who'd been slaughtered in large numbers as a result of their participation in US-initiated or -widened military conflicts.
From that time on, I was looked at differently by everyone in the camp, though I was never specifically threatened.
That is, unless Perico's visit was a threat. Within a day after my talk with Stewart, Perico came over to our tent while the four Indians and I were standing outside it talking. Perico entered our circle and stood next to me. His dark eyes glittered even more than usual. From his pocket he pulled a length of spring steel or piano wire, rolled loop upon loop into a coil about four inches in diameter, with a steel ring affixed to either end. He held it up for us to see.
"Do you know what thees eez?" He asked in heavily accented English.
"It's a garrote," I said.
"Isn't that for strangling people?" one of the others asked.
"You bettah believe it," Perico said, with a smile like dry ice, at once hot and cold. As he smiled, he turned and sent his unambiguous gaze into my eyes from a few inches away, still holding his garrote directly in front of our eyes.
That evening, in the little mess area by a creek a short walk from the tents, I sat at one of the rough wooden tables with Maco Stewart, Moses Fiske, Mike Hunt, and Miskito officer Mario Córdoba, who was wearing his new silver captain's bars on his hat. I'd become somewhat friendly with him; he seemed someone committed to struggling for his people, but not overly excited about the fighting itself. He seemed to see no romance in it, and was bemused, rather than impressed, by the propagandizing of both sides. He was particularly unimpressed with rank, his own or others'. He reminded me of Harris, the young black Marine who'd treated the Marine Corps mostly as a joke, to whom I'd tossed the rifle after we saw the three aluminum caskets on the loading dock at Oakland as we were shipping out for Vietnam.
We had, as usual, mess-gear metal plates of gallo pinto, standard peasant fare of rice and red beans. It was likely that we were eating the rice and beans that Stewart had brought in aboard the Setco Air C47, saying that the food was for the refugees. During the meal, Mike Hunt(20), the only one of us five tribal representatives who had accepted Flaco's offer of a weapon, told stories about the 1973 confrontation between Indians and federal agents at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. He had apparently been one of the armed Indians, though he was careful not to say anything that would be provable if it got back to the Feds. But without coming right out with it, he alluded to the fighting in such a way that it seemed to me that he might be hinting that he was in on it. Mike said he was a member of the Survival of the American Indian Association located in Olympia, Washington. I never got a feel for how large its membership was.
He also said he acted as a bodyguard on occasion for his friend Hank Adams, head of the Association. In the company of the four North American Indians that week, I got a glimpse of their informal but very active nationwide network, which they called the "moccasin telegraph," a word of mouth and telephone web, augmented by Indian media outlets, which informs Indians in the US about issues which concern them. BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) policies, treaty violations old and new, Federal legislation regarding Indians and their lands, any such stories which often barely surface in the mainstream media are given full treatment by the "moccasin telegraph."
The other strong feeling I got was one of danger, of yet another group of people who have so consistently been treated so badly for so long by the larger society that two very different, but perhaps equally dangerous, reactions are becoming more and more common. One is a deep despair resulting in severe alcoholism, drug abuse, and a disproportionate suicide rate. The other is an accumulated anger, especially among some of the younger men, that makes them itch to grab a rifle, put their backs to the wall, and go out like warriors.
Once during the week Gary Fife had told of his favorite trick while waiting for a table in restaurants. He and a couple of friends would put "War" as their name on the waiting list, and later there would come the announcement "War... party of three," and diners would look up in surprise when three Indians trooped past to their table. He clearly told it as a joke, but it just as clearly had an edge to it.
I noticed that Mario Córdoba, the Miskito officer, was eating more slowly than the rest, so I slowed down too. By the time he and I walked down to the creek to wash our plates, the others had left.
I wanted to talk to Mario. But I was worried about two things: that I would compromise my journalist's neutrality by what I had to say, and that I would get my ass in serious hot water, especially after what I'd said to Maco about US use of minority peoples as proxy soldiers. Perico's bit with the garrote didn't seem to have been done just for the sake of entertainment.
Finally I just said "Fuck it," and did it anyway. There was enough light left to see Córdoba's face. I moved close to him and spoke quickly, in Spanish, in a low voice. Be careful, Mario, I said. I told him, as succinctly as I could, about how the Montagnard highland people of Vietnam, and the Hmong of Laos, had had their populations decimated during and after their service with the US CIA and Special Forces, and about how the Kurds in the Middle East had been recruited, armed, and then abandoned to their enemies by a sudden policy change.
He listened, nodding in a way that intimated that either he knew more about those histories than I'd assumed, or that he wasn't at all surprised to hear it. Be careful, I admonished again, and ended by asking if he trusted "these people" as I nodded toward the mercenaries' tent.
He looked at me with a flat gaze that was neither friendly nor hostile: "No tengo confianza en nadie demás de los indios:" I don't trust anybody except Indians.
His look made it clear that that included me.
