JINOTEGA, NICARAGUA 1983: SANDINISTA VETERAN AND USMC VETERAN TALK OVER COFFEE

     I walked into the Sandinista press office in the Hotel Intercontinental [Managua], again hoping to speed up processing of my request to travel in the area of the fighting [NORTHERN NICARAGUA, A HALF HOUR'S WALK FROM THE HONDURAN BORDER] between the contras and the Ejército Popular Sandinista, the Sandinista People's Army. I entered a room where business as usual had given way to faces that reminded me of Öle Ostergaard's when I'd shown him the  human vertebra, with an added charge. A group of Nicaraguan and other Latin American journalists were huddled around a low circular table, each with one ear leaned, in what had to be spine-wrenching positions, toward the small short-wave radio broadcasting news in Spanish from the center of the table. One journalist glanced up at me, at first in the offhand way that anyone glances up when another person enters the room. Then his face changed, a current passed among them, they all looked up at me, and on each face I saw the same pure, concentrated hatred that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of the old man I was guarding at bayonet-point, along with a group of screaming women and children, at the well in the burning Vietnamese village of Tho An in April, 1966. [I WOULD SEE THE SAME LOOK IN 1991, ON THE FACES OF HIGHLY EDUCATED PALESTINIANS IN A REFUGEE CAMP IN JORDAN, WHEN THEY LEARNED I WAS AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST.]

     The short-wave radio was broadcasting the first news of the United States invasion of Grenada.

     Jinotega, in a mountain valley between Managua and Nicaragua's northern border with Honduras, was a relief from the chaos and steamy heat of the capital. Contra raids had already penetrated that far south; I stayed there a couple of days talking to local people about the situation and petitioning the regional Sandinista comandante for permission to travel farther north, to the area near the Honduran border.

     Operating within my typically thin freelancer's budget, I found a stall where I could get a cheap plate of what I lived on most of my time in the country: rice, beans, and salty beef. At one of the plank tables, I got to talking with a young man about my age. He said he worked in construction, and when I said I did too, we swapped stories for a while. He bought me a cup of coffee. He said he'd served a hitch as a draftee in the Sandinista army. I told him I'd been in the Marines in Vietnam, quickly adding that I thought that war was a stupid mistake. His eyebrows raised; we swapped more stories. 

     When he told me his name was Juan Antonio Altamirano, I asked if he was related to Pedro Altamirano, the guerrilla leader who carried on the fight against the dictator Anastasio Somoza after Somoza had the nationalist hero Augusto César Sandino killed. Juan smiled, pleased that I recognized the name. “Era un tío mío: he was one of my uncles," he replied.

     I asked Juan what he thought of the contra situation. He took a deep breath, let it out in a deeper sigh. He patted the head of his young son and looked off at the surrounding mountains - mountains where Sandino had fought, where his uncle had fought, where Marines like Smedley Butler and Chesty Puller had fought as their names became legends that would be invoked to and by recruits like me, where Juan himself had fought. In those days, I usually had to take notes to remember the wording of something said to me in Spanish. But Juan's words slipped intact into my brain: “Si el ejército norteamericano viene aquí, habrá muchos ríos de sangre.”: "If the North American Army comes here, there will be many rivers of blood." 

     Juan didn't speak like an ideologue. He was a Nicaraguan, a nephew of a revered patriot. He loved his country. But he spoke now as a tired soldier, older than his years, the way my friends and I speak about Vietnam. He was already as weary of Sandinista bombast as others of his countrymen were becoming. But he was Nica, and told me he would fight again if it came to that; told me that there had been just too many yanquis coming here with rifles to have their way and to league up with dictators like the Somoza clan. He said that every Nicaraguan man, woman, and child would fight: with rifles if they had them; with sticks and rocks and Molotov cocktails otherwise. And not only Nicaraguans would fight. People would come from all over Latin America. This would be it, the great, long-awaited NO as people came from Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador... muchos ríos de sangre.

(Excerpt from the chapter "Sandinistas," of my memoir RATTLESNAKE DREAMS)

CHINESE SOLDIERS, A6 AND WOLVES

Chinese Soldiers

     Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision. 

     During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war. 

     I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.

     I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed. 

     But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.

     I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.

     I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream.

      Dream: A6 and Wolves

I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese. They are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.

     I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.

     I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon.