RED CHIEF, WHITE CHIEF

Red Chief, White Chief

     We were back at the TEA camp [TEA= Tropas Especiales Atlánticas} 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.

Dream: Deadribs

I had this dream upon returning to California from the trip in January 1985 spent in southern Honduras and northern Nicaragua, the latter illegally. We had crossed the Río Coco in a dugout canoe. Most of our party were armed Miskito and Sumo Indians, fighting against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Many of these "contra" fighters were teenagers. I was an unarmed journalist. The kids were careless about handling their weapons, so I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week, up close.

Dream: Deadribs        

I am dead. I'm a skeleton. Wind blows between my ribs. I can't move; can't leave the place that is death. People who aren't dead can visit me here. My wife comes, and friends. They ask what it's like. I answer that I'm sad I can't go back with them to the place of the living, but that loneliness isn't the worst part. The worst part is not being able to move. That, and being a skeleton, with the air passing freely between my ribs, not blocked by any organs or skin, the uncaring wind blowing through me and not finding any life there, no warm barrier between my bones and the wind.

RUS RUS (PART 2)

     THIS POST BEGINS WHERE THE LAST ONE LEFT OFF, WITH A LITTLE OVERLAP FOR CONTINUITY. MACO STEWART WAS THE TEXAS OIL MAN WHO PAID FOR THE TRIP. HIS ASSOCIATE, MOSES FISKE, WAS ALONG AS A MOVIE CAMERAMAN. THE THREE "SECURITY" MEN, KNOWN AS "COLONEL FLACO," SHOOTER, AND "PERICO," WERE EITHER PAID BY STEWART, OR UNDER ORDERS FROM SOMEONE IN THE REAGAN GOVERNMENT, OR BOTH. BY THE END OF OUR EIGHT DAYS WITH THEM, I SUSPECTED BOTH. IN THESE STORIES, I SIMPLY CALL THEM "MERCENARIES."
   
     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.

     [The four North American Indians were Gary Fife, a Cherokee/Creek journalist; Mike Hunt, representing the Survival of American Indians Association; Larry Pino, of Zia Pueblo; and Bill Pensoneau, a Ponca. Though not an Indian, I was accredited to represent the Tachi people from near Fresno, California. I learned years after this trip that my great grandmother was a half Cherokee woman named Gatsie Helen Widders. The Tachi people accredited me on the recommendation of my friend Chris DiMaio, a Vietnam vet who is part Cheyenne.]
       
     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. They 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 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 were also based 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 putter 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.

OUT OF THE WOODS, + DREAM

12. Meeting

     The next day, January 27th, we had a meeting in a conference area that had been set up at the edge of the camp, which consisted of a camouflaged cargo parachute spread like a tent above a flat clear area with a number of wooden benches. It reminded me of a woodsy area in a Baptist youth summer camp in southern Oregon where, as a kid, I remember us being gathered to sing the old hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and “That Old Rugged Cross.” Stewart, Fiske, Flaco, the four North American Indians and I were there.

     The purpose of the meeting was to discuss, and presumably for our hosts to control, ground rules for what we would say and write about our trip upon returning to the States. I thought it curious that this meeting should be held at the end, rather than the beginning, of the week. Agreements about what is "off the record" are customarily made before the valued information is passed. It's standard practice, known as well by those who are experienced at being information sources as by journalists, that if a reporter gets information without having made prior agreements about whether or how it may be used, it's fair game, period. So this meeting was essentially a post facto attempt on the part of Stewart and Flaco to influence what we said about the trip, and to get us to believe that they had the authority to do so.

     I listened, nodded, even asked questions and took notes about what they wanted, hoping they'd take that for agreement. I just wanted to get out of there in one piece with my film, tapes, and notebook intact. I had visions of blowing at least part of the lid off the "private" contra resupply effort which a number of journalists pretty well knew had stepped in to take over, during Boland Amendment prohibitions, from the CIA‑led supply and direction of the contras.

     The first thing, of course, was that we weren't to say that we'd been in Honduras. The Honduran government was receiving increasing international pressure to investigate and stop such activities, and it was important to preserve their "deniability," however thin it might be, by using such phrases as "somewhere along the Nicaraguan border," or better yet, "somewhere in northern Nicaragua." The whole world knew otherwise, of course, but it was part of the game. Many journalists from major print and television outfits had been doing it routinely; it was the price of access to training camps, patrols, interviews, the whole nine yards. The difference was that usually that agreement was made as a condition of getting to where the action was; we'd already accompanied two illegal armed border crossings into Nicaragua and were on our way out.

     Flaco said that under no circumstances were any photographs of him or the other two "security men" to be published, on the off chance that, in spite of their precautions, some of our pictures had inadvertently included them. He said that this was especially important in his case; that there was quite a high reward on his head (he was never specific about who was offering the bounty, or its amount). Stewart said he didn't want his picture published either. The affable Moses Fiske shrugged and said it didn't matter to him one way or the other.

     Flaco said emphatically that "we do not violate the anti‑neutrality laws of the United States." (I would question him about this later, noting that it was against such laws for US citizens to conduct military operations against foreign governments. His response was that he and his colleagues didn't recognize the government of Nicaragua as legitimate.)

     And: "The private sector picked up the gauntlet... if Congress hasn't got the good goddamn sense [to help the anti‑Sandinistas], then we're going to exercise our rights to help these people."    

     And: "We operate on the Costa Rican border, too." (Since Costa Rica's neutrality laws prohibited the use of its territory for military operations against any neighbors, this would appear to violate the laws of three nations.)

     Flaco said pointedly, and more than once, that the Boland Amendment, which prohibited any US government agency from providing any material or military support to anti‑Sandinista groups (except for intelligence information), was about to expire on February 28.

     Maco Stewart took a turn. He came "from the Democratic side," he said (meaning the Democratic Party), adding that he had "always been a civil rights activist." He said that "the people who need to know about these [Nicaraguan Indians] are the [North] American Indians.... I'm raising funds for the entire movement here, but I'm insisting that at least 25% go to the Miskitos, and I'm insisting that the two groups (FDN and MISURA) exchange liaison officers. There's never been effective liaison between them."

     Flaco took the stand (in this case, the stump) again: "I make the prediction that you won't see Daniel Ortega celebrating Christmas in Managua this year."

     Stewart disagreed, saying he thought it would take three or four years to get the Sandinistas out of power. He added that he would never advocate an American invasion.

     The latter remark seemed intended to put some distance between himself and Flaco, who took this occasion to again bring up something he'd said aboard the Setco flight from Tegucigalpa: "The latest intelligence estimate says that it would take two and a half U.S. divisions 21 days and 4,000 casualties...." to take Nicaragua.

     Sometime during all this dance in which Flaco alternately asserted and denied that his activities were connected with official US Government entities, he said something which he intended, I thought, as an evasion, but which resonated with me more than almost anything else he said that week: "We are all here for our own reasons." Whether or not he so intended, I took that to mean that Flaco, along with the other "special operations" cowboys who were flocking to Central America as they had flocked to Vietnam and Laos and every other war I'd been to or read about, had come here because of the same reason I had gone to Vietnam: because he wanted to, because it suited his idea of who he wanted to be.

     The meeting adjourned and Flaco and I continued alone. I don't remember now whether he called me over, or I gravitated toward him with my unanswered questions, the indelicate ones I didn't really want to thrash out in front of the others.

     I felt very strongly that I was in the middle of something which was significant, if not in its effectiveness, at least in what was being attempted. It was worth considerable risk, now that the trip was almost over, to milk it for every drop of information I could get. I felt I had a pretty good insurance policy: my wife knew I was in Honduras with Maco Stewart, what flight I'd come in on, and when to expect me to leave the country. So did the Tachi people who'd accredited me, and so did Chris DiMaio and several other friends in VFW Post 5888 (named after Bill Motto, the "Missing Man"), whom I'd told everything I knew about the trip and whom I'd asked to start raising hell with the media and Congress and to send people after me if I didn't show up on time. I also planned to trot out this insurance policy if they tried to confiscate my film or tapes.

     I was ready with all that when Flaco and I started our private talk under the parachute tent. He got right to the point which I'd seen had been on his mind all week: what, he asked, was my assessment of what I'd seen? What was I going to write?

     Flaco was a complicated man. When word games were being played, or when it suited him, he was all gamesman. I was afraid that if I beat around the bush, or even gave a slightly evasive answer which would have been appropriate for a journalist in my situation ‑ such as "I'm a reporter; I don't have an opinion. My job is to find out what your opinion is and report that, along with what I've seen and heard" ‑ that games was all I'd get.

     I decided to be direct, hoping he would meet me at least part way. I looked into his eyes and said, "I think you're CIA."

     His reply, as he returned my direct gaze, was: "I have the final say on everything that goes on down here (I understood that he meant with MISURA, not with the FDN), and I wouldn't give the CIA the time of day." Well, that was a classic dodge if I'd ever heard one. I wasn't asking him if the CIA depended on "Colonel Flaco" to find out what time it was; I was asking if he was helping the agency organize an illegal international military effort. Then, as the two of us engaged in a little skirmish with our eyes, came what I thought was the more significant part of his communication, and what I thought he intended to be so. His face changed subtly. His shoulders didn't move, but there was a slight shrug. The muscles of his face seemed intent on maintaining a poker face, yet equally intent on letting some other message through. As I watched, there played about his mouth, for a brief moment, the hint of a smile.

     He turned his head away. "There are several other agencies involved down here...." He let his voice trail away. He seemed to be itching to say more, but didn't. My mind ticked off possibilities: DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency)? NSC (National Security Council)? State Department? USAID (Agency for International Development)? And what about NSA (National Security Agency)? I'd wondered about them for some time, because Congressional oversight was the biggest thorn in the side of Reagan's covert cowboys, and NSA was unique among intelligence agencies in being so secret that it was subject to no oversight, period, except for that of the people who directed its operations, which of course included the White House. There must at least be NSA radar and other equipment, along with its operators, providing surveillance and other intelligence for the use of contra "clients". What was to keep them from scooting selected other people and operations under their super‑secret umbrella? It seemed a logical choice to me. I recalled Shooter's earlier remark that "the CIA gets credit for a lot of shit it doesn't do down here."

     And I recalled Flaco's comment on the plane coming out from "Tegoos", as he and his cohorts called the Honduran capital, that I could have been "detained by the FBI." People returning from Nicaragua to the US had already complained publicly about being detained and questioned upon their return by FBI agents. The FBI certainly had a sordid history of conducting paranoid investigations of its own citizens, especially during the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the McCarthy hearings, and the COINTELPRO (CounterIntelligence Program) files kept on American writers and dissidents. Did they have an activist role in the contra situation?

     I pressed him to tell me more. But: "things will become known as the Administration wants them known."

     There it was again. Almost in the same breath, Flaco was denying any official connection which would constitute illegal activity under either US neutrality laws or the Boland Amendment, and claiming to personally speak for the Reagan Administration.

     Well then, I asked, how did he know this? Had he spoken with the President personally?

     Flaco replied that he had spoken with Reagan three times, but was evasive about what the occasions had been. Another time when I pressed him to elaborate, he said that one such occasion had been before Reagan won his first Presidential election, on a campaign swing through the South. He kept mum about the other two. He seemed to want credit for being close to power, without getting his boss (if Reagan indeed was his boss) or himself in trouble. He did say that Reagan had told him that the Nicaraguan government "'...will not be allowed to survive in its present form.'"    

     While we were on the subject of Ronald Reagan, I asked Flaco how he thought Reagan's election had affected events in Central America. "Huh!" he exclaimed. "You wouldn't believe the parties they had down here." He went on to describe a wave of jubilation that he said had swept through the landowners and career military officers, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. And, of course, among the Nicaraguan elite who had recently been kicked out of Managua by the Sandinistas. I've often wondered to what extent the body count among suspected Central American leftists was increased by the shift from Carter's policy of making aid conditional on countries' human rights records, to Reagan's dropping of that policy in favor of increased military aid to rightist officers in El Salvador and Guatemala. To some, it seemed not coincidental that the rape and murder of the four US churchwomen in El Salvador came in December, 1980, the month after Reagan's first election; and that massacres of Guatemalan Indians at the hands of the military took place in 1981 and 1982, while it was Reagan policy to aid the Guatemalan army (in particular General-cum-President and evangelical minister José Efraín Ríos Montt) in its campaign against "subversivos". Those years are still remembered by Guatemalans as the period of la violencia.

     Flaco repeated other claims he'd made during the week. One was that he and his colleagues had powerful supporters, including "the owner of Coors brewery."([1]) Another was that Edén Pastora, the former Sandinista commander operating out of Costa Rica, was getting his "last chance" to get aboard Washington's program.

     I kept trying to exploit Flaco's desire for favorable press coverage, which was the game being played here. I was trying to say to him that if he wanted to be written about as a serious player, he'd have to give me evidence of serious connections.

     I asked him who had made the decisions about the ranks of the MISURA officers whose insignia he'd passed out earlier.

     "I did," he said. He tapped his chest with a motion of his right arm and hand that replicated with startling accuracy the motion I'd seen Special Forces Captain John Moroney make at the camp at Mangbuk sixteen years earlier. Moroney had been explaining that, though the official line was that he and his men were merely advisors to the Vietnamese, "That's bullshit. (tap) We command."

     Our little tête‑a‑tête was winding down. I'd saved something special for last. I'd been thinking that the worlds of Flaco and "Mickey," my mercenary acquaintance back home in California, overlapped so thoroughly that they must know each other. If they did know each other, it was likely that they'd be highly nervous about somebody like me knowing details of their acquaintance.

     So I ambushed Flaco. The two of us were standing alone, off to the side of the parachute tent. Our conversation had dwindled to small talk, and we'd both started to relax: I, because it began to seem that I really might get out of there in one piece with my film, tapes, and notes intact; and Flaco (I imagined), because his stressful dance of trying to get me to believe him without lying, and of lying without seeming to, was coming to an end. We were both looking around us and down at the ground, in the way that men often will while talking around a subject.

     Maintaining an offhand tone of voice, I asked, "Do you know a guy named....?" and used Mickey's real name. I timed my question so that I was turning my face toward his just as the name left my lips, so that a second or two of eye contact wouldn't give him time to contain his reaction.

     It worked. For all his control, Flaco wasn't able to smother the startled look that darted around his eyes before he pulled the emotional mask back over his face. He knew I'd caught him, so he didn't lie. "Name sounds familiar," he said, giving me a look that clearly said I'd hear nothing more on the subject.

                      13. Out of the Woods

     Mario Córdoba and one or two other MISURA officers flew with us back to Tegucigalpa. We returned to the luxurious Honduras Maya, and there ensued in front of the registration desk a scene which at the time seemed both funny and pathetic, and which I'd have cause to remember in later years. Those Indians, who were more native to Honduras than anyone else in the room, stuck out like a man in a white dinner jacket at a Masai tribal dance. This, in a hotel named for, if not their ancestors, then for people who were at least racial relatives of their ancestors.

     Flaco checked them in first, under the stares of the hotel employees, then gave me, as the only person in our group who shared a common language with them (Perico had stayed at Rus Rus), the key to their room (they, of course, being only Indians, didn't get single rooms like the rest of us who had come to help them) and curtly told me to "get these people upstairs and out of sight."         

     That afternoon, Stewart went on an errand. He said he'd bought several 70 horsepower Evinrude outboard motors, "at four grand a pop," plus some SCUBA gear, for use by MISURA forces to cross the Coco and conduct military operations up various tributaries in their homeland ‑ now Sandinista‑controlled territory ‑ in northern Nicaragua. He said that he'd had to ship them via the same channels as FDN materials because there was a supposedly centralized supply system for all the anti‑Sandinista groups. He said he'd given specific instructions that the outboard engines were for MISURA only, but nonetheless they appeared to have gotten sidetracked in an FDN warehouse on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. Stewart took along Shooter to emphasize his point.

     That night, Stewart and Shooter showed up late for dinner. They said they'd found the engines, though it wasn't clear whether they'd actually gotten possession of them and turned them over to MISURA people.

     In the hotel dining room, the relief at being back in the city was palpable among us. We ordered beer and mixed drinks generously. And it was story time. The one I especially recall came out of Larry Pino's question to Shooter. The two were sitting across from each other at the end of our table, so I listened intently.

     Larry asked Shooter what was the "hairiest situation" he'd ever been in. I could see Shooter's dark eyes glitter. "Reloading face to face," he said. "Guess who won? The one with the expertise, the one who's sittin' here eatin' steak." He grinned with a satisfaction that no steak could have inspired. Someone asked him how far apart they'd been. "Ten yards," he said.

     I piped up and asked, to be sure to get the record straight: "Shooter, was that in Vietnam, or here?"

     "Here," he said. He of course meant Nicaragua, where the fighting was.

     Another remark I heard from Shooter that evening was about Miami: "I love it when it gets cool down there ‑ when you wear a coat, you can carry a bigger gun."

    

     As we stood in the departure lounge at Tegucigalpa's Toncontín airport, Larry Pino took off his beaded belt buckle and presented it to Shooter. Larry's admiration for the stocky gunman had become more and more visible as the week wore on. I think he genuinely believed that Shooter was there to help the Indians, though I wondered if his admiration didn't come more from what Larry felt ‑ about a man who went his own way and apparently took no shit from anyone ‑ than from what he thought. Shooter was visibly touched by the gift.

     The airport scene got Shooter and Flaco talking about other times they'd passed through on their way to work. Flaco said he'd used so many aliases that at times he "had trouble remembering who I was supposed to be." Both he and Shooter said they sometimes traveled in US military uniforms, "with false ID and everything." Another mercenary-looking type said hello to Flaco in a manner suggesting that they were accustomed to meeting every few years in airports in countries where there was war. Flaco, ever the cool operator, became nearly as nervous as he had been as we left the same airport eight days earlier. He obviously didn't want us to hear the man call him by name, and we didn't.

                         14. Aftermath    

     In early February, I got a call from Jonathan Weiner, legislative aide to newly‑elected Senator John Kerry, the Vietnam vet from Massachusetts who would be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 2004. Without my knowledge, Jim Purcell, one of the vets in our VFW Post 5888, had taken it upon himself to call the senator’s office and tell Weiner about my trip, after I'd given a report in a Post meeting. Weiner wanted information about the trip, and was especially interested that we'd gone into Nicaragua. We talked a long time. It would be an easy matter to track down Maco Stewart, who was well‑known and had used his real name. But what of the mercenaries? I'd been very clear that Flaco, Shooter, and Perico had not only led an armed incursion into Nicaragua and had obviously done so before, but were themselves armed at the time. I named the weapons and their calibers, and made it clear that I was reporting from observation, not hearsay.

     Weiner wanted any information that would help him identify the mercenaries. Congressional opponents of Reagan's intervention in Nicaragua had been looking for hard evidence of paramilitary activities by US citizens at least since Parker and Powell had been shot down in Nicaragua the previous September.

     "Look," I finally said, "I have photographs of these people." There was a long pause, and Weiner said, with all the gravity he could put into his voice, "Dean, I need those pictures." I was working on a newspaper article about the trip, and hoped to publish photos with it. But I was also building a house, and the mechanics of writing the article and getting it published would take a while. I sent Weiner several recognizable photos of Flaco and Shooter. Perico had escaped my lens.

     I believe Flaco was first publicly identified, that Spring, in an Associated Press article by Robert Parry and Brian Barger. He is Jack Terrell, a covert operator from Alabama whose background came only partially into focus over the coming months and years. Shooter is Joe Adams from St. Louis, Missouri, who made his living hunting down people who'd been charged with crimes and jumped bail, and by hiring himself and his weapons out to various other clients. He also had been a bodyguard for Adolfo Calero, one of the main FDN leaders. Joe told me at one point that he'd also dated Calero's daughter.

     Probably bowing to public pressure, including pressure from legislators who opposed Reagan's intervention in Nicaragua and attempted to bump up the line the heat they were feeling from peace groups back home, the US State Department finally whispered in the ear of someone in Tegucigalpa. One morning, a few weeks after we left, Flaco and the boys in the camp at Rus Rus woke up looking down the barrels of Honduran Army M16s. They were put on planes back to the States.

     Terrell laid low in Alabama for several months. The peace movement picked up steam, and press accounts more frequently exposed contra atrocities, misuse of aid funds and supplies, and the misadventures of private citizens like Stewart and Terrell who took money and weapons to Central America and presumed to conduct US foreign policy on their own hook.

     Jonathan Weiner, the aide to Senator Kerry, told me later that someone from their office, acting on a tip regarding Terrell's whereabouts, confronted Terrell in an airport in one of the southern states and showed him my photographs of him in the camp at Rus Rus. Was he the guy who'd been conducting his own war down there?

     Terrell switched sides. He started talking to reporters from major newspapers, and in front of TV cameras. He began talking about contras running drugs, about the US expatriate rancher John Hull using his land in northern Costa Rica as a resupply and staging area for contra raids into southern Nicaragua, about corruption and incompetence among contra commanders. He increased the heat on Oliver North, who was beginning to be named in press accounts as the White House's man who took up the slack in terms of getting assistance, legal and illegal, to the contras.

     Robert White had been Jimmy Carter's ambassador to El Salvador when the four US churchwomen were raped and murdered there in December, 1980, the month following Reagan's first election as President. White had started a liberal think‑tank‑ cum‑pressure‑group in Washington called the American Institute for Development Policy. Terrell was given a job at AIDP that gave him enough to live on, and a platform for his damaging pronouncements against the Reagan Administration's methods of intervention in Nicaragua. He had a certain credibility because he continued to maintain that he was a conservative who had no use for the Sandinistas. But he also damaged that credibility by seeming attempts to manipulate the use of the information he gave out, by making claims that couldn't be checked out, and by continuing to be secretive about his own past, especially connections with US intelligence agencies. At an interview in the AIDP office in Washington in September of 1986, Terrell told me that he'd worked with "these people" for six years.

     For once, something checked out. "Flako" showed up in Ollie North's notebooks, in entries that said he had worked with CIA for six years, and that North was worried that he could spill a lot of beans.     

     I never saw Joe Adams ‑ "Shooter" ‑ again after January, 1985. But Terrell put me in touch with him in St. Louis, and I had several long phone conversations with him, some of which he allowed me to tape.

     I asked Adams about the shoulder patch I'd seen him wearing, with the horse and wing and the words "PEGASO  CMA ‑ FDN". He told me that right after the supposed expiration of the Boland Amendment at the end of February, 1985 ‑ a month after we'd been in the camp ‑ he had led a Terrell‑planned military expedition into northern Nicaragua. Terrell had stayed in Honduras, ostensibly because he "had more important things to do." I suspected it was also because Terrell, whose abilities seemed to be more towards dreaming up military plans than carrying them out, simply didn't have the legs for a many‑day hump with heavy equipment through difficult terrain, and knew it.

     Their primary target was a bridge at a crossroads across which the Sandinistas, he had told me, would have to bring their tanks to deploy them in opposition to a major landing on the northeast coast of Nicaragua. The plan provided one or two secondary targets for them to hit on the way back.

     None of it happened. Several days into the march, Adams told me, the Americans (there were several, he said) and the Cubans and the MISURA leadership, tired and with nerves frayed, had a falling out. The group split up before ever reaching their main objective; the various groups found their own ways back across the Coco.

     In one of these conversations, I asked Adams to tell me more about Perico. Terrell had already told me that his real name was Marcelino Rodriguez. I'd told Terrell that I'd had the clear impression, from the garrote incident at Rus Rus and from his general demeanor, that Perico was a "stone killer." Terrell had searched his memory for a  moment, then nodded.

     Adams told me that he had run into Rodriguez in Miami, and had reflexively called him "Perico." The latter had shushed him emphatically, saying "'Don't call me that here!'" Perico was a Latin American slang term for cocaine. At the time of our last phone interview, Adams said the last he'd heard about Rodriguez was that he was back in Costa Rica running cocaine.

     Larry Pino's paratrooper "cousin" - the one he'd claimed had parachuted into Nicaragua as a U.S. Army Ranger - turned out to be a Mescalero Apache friend named David Michael Little. Little showed up on the roster of a US Army Ranger battalion that had been on an unpublicized "training mission," according to the Army, during December, 1984, very near the area where we traveled with Maco Stewart the following month. During the period of that "training mission," a US soldier was killed. He was a young black West Point graduate, a captain named Winburn Drew Harrington II, from Moultrie, Georgia. His death might well have been a training accident, and the Ranger battalion might indeed have been on a training mission in southern Honduras, as opposed to having parachuted into Nicaragua across the river. But we([2]) found one source, who was in a position to know the truth but whose credibility was sometimes questionable, who, unbidden, recognized a photo of Harrington and volunteered that he had seen Harrington and another Ranger officer cross the Coco into Nicaragua on a secret reconnaissance mission. This source said that the other Ranger officer, who seemed to be of equal rank, spoke fluent Spanish with a Puerto Rican accent. On that mission, he said, the two had worn black uniforms and carried night vision and special camera equipment. They were gone about three days, he said. Their target was something at La Tronquera, but our source wouldn't say what it was. He wanted money to talk. La Tronquera, or La Tronkara in the Miskito spelling, was the location, according to a very reliable retired U.S. Army source who had had access to that kind of intelligence at the time, of a new radar installation which the Sandinistas intended to use to spot and shoot down contra resupply flights. The first source also told us that he'd kept a detailed journal of events at that time, but he wouldn't show it to us without being paid, which we couldn't do.

     That radar set also showed up in Ollie North's notebooks.

     The Second Ranger Battalion's S‑2, or intelligence officer, at the time was a Captain who was described to me by another member of the battalion as "New York Puerto Rican." The last I knew of him, he had been promoted to Major.

     By the time Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait, I had narrowed the circle of people who would have to know just how Harrington had died, and whether he and others had been on missions into Nicaragua, to three or four officers. I had found them, too: I had addresses and home phone numbers, even of one Captain who had left the Rangers and entered a unit so secret that his name had been wiped clean from all but one of the reports investigating Harrington's death, even though he was supposedly the first to reach Harrington when he fell.

     By the Spring of 1991, I was about ready to begin showing up on these men's doorsteps with a series of hard questions: tell me the truth about Harrington's death and about any Ranger incursions into Nicaragua, or the story I publish, alongside the facts which I have verified, might cause your refusal to say what you know to be interpreted by the objective reader as participation in a cover‑up.    

     But the country was festooned with yellow ribbons in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War; suddenly there was no market for any journalism which might reflect negatively on the US military. My credential with the Los Angeles Times, which had been signed by Jack Nelson, wasn't renewed. Neither Doyle McManus nor I ever published a word of the Harrington story because we were pulled off it before we could finish our research. Hardly anything else had been published, except for brief announcements about Harrington's death in local media near Moultrie, Georgia, his hometown; and articles in the Seattle Times just after his death on December 16, 1984, and later when their reporter received a copy of the Army's initial 15‑6 investigation into the incident. Harrington’s battalion was stationed at Fort Lewis, not far from Seattle.

     In late summer of 1988, I got a call from Major Garrett, a reporter for the Houston Post. He was working on a feature article about Maco Stewart. He used several quotes from me, and two photos. The piece ran on Sunday, September 18.

     Garrett found out some things by talking with friends and associates of Stewart in the Houston area that I hadn't known. His report quoted people as saying that Stewart had been elected a state representative from Galveston in 1960; that he had written a book titled Sex, Money, and God, but had been unable to get it published; that he was well known for Valentine's Day parties in Aspen, Colorado, where "guests would strip naked, don heart‑shaped paper cutouts and cavort until the wee hours of the morning"; was a close friend of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, for whom Stewart had expressed admiration to me; maintained residences in France where he threw "lavish parties attended by French models, artists and lawyers. Sometimes he will take his guests on yachting tours to ports of call on the northern coast of the Mediterranean." Garrett confirmed a tidbit I'd learned from a researcher in Houston, that Stewart had for a time appended the title "Mahatma" to his name.

     Garrett also reported that John Laughlin, described as a "former business associate" of Stewart's, said that Stewart was "a frequent visitor to Bohemian Grove, a male‑only retreat north of San Francisco for the nation's political and corporate elite." Garrett also said that some who knew Stewart saw him as "intellectual and generous."

     In the article, Stewart's attorney, David Savitz, is quoted as saying that Stewart's motives for his excursions among Central American Indians were humanitarian: “He was trying to help poor, displaced Indians being ravaged by the communist Nicaraguan government."

     About this time, I'd also had a call from Savitz. He wanted photographs I'd taken during the trip to use in his defense of Stewart against charges which had been brought in Federal court in Miami that Stewart, Terrell, Adams, and others had violated the US Neutrality Act, which forbids US private citizens from conducting military operations against foreign countries.

     I refused Savitz's request, giving two reasons. The first was that it is standard professional practice for a journalist to refuse requests for unpublished material, since such material is often obtained by making certain promises about how the material will be used, what names will or will not be kept confidential, and so forth. While I'd made no such promises to the MISURA fighters or the refugees, I agreed with my colleagues who said that caving in to such pressures sets a dangerous precedent.

     The second reason I refused to give Savitz the photos was because I disagreed with their intended use. I felt strongly that Stewart was in Honduras and Nicaragua playing cowboy for his own purposes, rather than trying to help the Indians. I particularly felt that because of the near‑starvation I saw in the village of Lasa Tinghni, where Stewart hadn't furnished a morsel of food, as far as I could see, while he provided supplies to the young men who carried weapons and conducted military raids into Nicaragua.

     Savitz threatened to subpoena the photos and have me jailed for contempt of court if I refused to comply. I told him I'd go to jail if necessary, but either way they'd never see the photos. The calls stopped coming, and I was never subpoenaed.

     Maco Stewart, Jack Terrell, and Joe Adams, along with a few other Americans, were indicted and tried in a Miami federal court for violations of the US Neutrality Act. Joe Adams had told me in a phone interview that after his testimony, the Federal judge, whose name was King, dismissed the case, stepped down from the bench, and invited him out for a beer. I could never verify that, but they were all acquitted.

For some time after I returned from that trip, I was virtually dizzy trying to remember it all, to write it down, to process it first in my own mind, then into my article for the San Jose Mercury News. As I looked at the photographs, at my notes, and at the images in my mind, one that was among the most recurrent was that of rifle muzzles: brownskinned teenage warriors, serious yet for all the world like neighborhood kids playing war, handling their AK47s and G3 automatic rifles and M16s and M1 carbines, with their limited training, as if they were toys instead of fully loaded assault weapons. They'd climb aboard the Toyota pickups, letting the muzzles point where they would, often including in my direction. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week.

     A few nights after I got home, I had this dream:

                                                 Dream: Deadribs       

I am dead. I'm a skeleton. Wind blows between my ribs. I can't move; can't leave the place that is death. People who aren't dead can visit me here. My wife comes, and friends. They ask what it's like. I answer that I'm sad I can't go back with them to the place of the living, but that loneliness isn't the worst part. The worst part is not being able to move. That, and being a skeleton, with the air passing freely between my ribs, not blocked by any organs or skin, the uncaring wind blowing through me and not finding any life there, no warm barrier between my bones and the wind.

---

[1] Shortly after returning to California from this trip, I was working with an editor named Jonathan Krim at the San Jose Mercury News on the version of this story they published in the Perspective section in the Spring of 1985. When I told him of Flaco’s remark about “the owner of Coors Brewery” being a supporter of Flaco’s group, he had me call the Coors brewery then and there from the phone on his desk. I did, and received a categorical denial that any member of the Coors family or anyone in their employ had ever given any aid to any Contra organizations. Some months later a member of the family, under oath before a Congressional committee, admitted that well, yes, he had bought them a helicopter.

[2] Doyle McManus, of the Los Angeles Times’ Washington DC Bureau, and I.

SKULLS OF TULIN BILA, + PERICO'S GARROTE

                    10. Skulls of Tulin Bila

     Clouds darkened and the rain increased as the afternoon wore on. Less than an hour downstream from the first village, we pulled in again on the Nicaraguan side. We climbed the bank, on an overgrown trail as before, to the abandoned Sumo village of Tulin Bila. Raúl Tobías said its Spanish name was San José. As we entered the village, Shooter stamped his foot, revealing an overgrown concrete sidewalk none of the rest of us had noticed. He said, "This is what always gets me ‑ here's a village in the middle of nowhere, big enough for them to have sidewalks, and the Sandinistas just burn it down." I was standing beside him; his manner of calling our attention to the sidewalk and his general familiarity with the surroundings made it obvious that he'd crossed the border before.

     Tulin Bila was also completely abandoned, with its dooryards overgrown and a number of its houses burned. We were led down a trail near the village, to a spot away from any buildings, not even distinguished by being in a clearing. We stopped. Someone moved to the side of the trail and called our attention to a place on the ground at the edge of some dense brush, where lay three intact human skulls, side by side, in a shallow depression in the topsoil that appeared to have been scooped by someone's hand. Comandante Raúl told us that they were the skulls of Indians who had either been killed outright by Sandinista soldiers, or of old people, ancianos, who had been goaded into a forced evacuation march which they didn't have the strength to survive.

     There were no other bones visible in the vicinity. The neat side‑by‑side placement of the three skulls, and the absence of the usual scattering of skeletal bones left by animals and birds and insects that have cleaned a corpse of flesh, made it clear that the arrangement of the skulls was a recent one made deliberately to show to us.

     In a way, that didn't matter. We had seen and heard enough evidence of Sandinista misconduct toward Indians, ranging from mismanagement and broken promises to murder, that whether or not the particular skulls we were shown were those of murdered Indians, they could have been.

     Raúl Tobías had made his speech short. As I translated it for the four North American Indians, Raúl grew silent and stepped back from the skulls, to let his visitors experience the situation as we chose. His manner seemed sincere, his grief for the trials suffered by his people genuine. The rest of the party, including the two Texans and the three mercenaries, did the same, becoming silent and pressing their circle back into the brush at the far side of the trail. Some spread out to provide security.

     I felt terrible. What I had just witnessed seemed such an improbable admixture of an attempt at cheap political theater with evidence of real human suffering that I didn't have a clue as to how I should do my job as a journalist and try to sort it out.

     But as I turned to look at Gary, Bill, Mike, and Larry, gathered solemnly around the skulls, I saw in a rush how stupid it was of me, and how misplaced, to be concerned about my own feelings at all, in the face of what was happening with them. I particularly remember the look of Gary Fife's face, how its light coppery skin, the color of some clayey soils, took on a distinctly gray overlay, as if the blood had left his face and retreated to deep inside him, or even as if his face had been rubbed with ashes.

     The four of them settled into a profound silence, standing in a close circle and looking down at the skulls. It seemed to me that these four men, who had met one another for the first time in the Houston airport three days earlier, felt something between them that made them feel as if they had grown up together, even lived past lives together. Their silence closed out the rest of us.

     They decided, almost wordlessly, to smoke tobacco over the skulls. Someone solemnly rolled a cigarette with pouch tobacco and paper.

     It was more than a cigarette. They handled and passed and smoked the cigarette like any people in the world will handle something they consider sacred.

     I desperately wanted to photograph them. What I was seeing, I thought, would tell more about what was happening on this trip than any other image, or any words, if I could get the right photograph. It had the human urgency of Larry holding the refugee infant at Lasa Tinghni the day before. I gently pushed myself back into the brush to get enough distance, since I didn't have a wide‑angle lens on the camera. I caught the eye of one of them ‑ I believe it was Gary ‑ and raised my camera and made a questioning look with my face. He barely moved his head, but it was a clear "no". The others agreed, again without speaking. There have been times in my work as a journalist when I was not willing to take no for an answer, or even to ask the question. This wasn't one of those times. I lowered the camera without shooting.

     They finished their smoke and knelt around the skulls and tore open the cigarette and sprinkled the remaining tobacco around the skulls, still treating the tobacco as a sacred offering. They stood up and looked at one another without speaking, then stepped back. Their ceremony was over.

     I took a step forward, getting their attention without speaking, raised the camera and the question again. They nodded yes. I took several photographs of the skulls.

     We returned to the canoe and headed downstream again. The afternoon grew darker and rainier. We landed near dark close to the place where the first canoe's motor had broken its shear pin the morning before. We trudged through the rain until well after dark, slipping in the mud and cursing like any ragtag, worn‑out army in history.

     We came upon a Miskito refugee camp. It may have been Karas Ankan, but I'm not sure. Dark‑skinned people squatted in pole‑and‑thatch huts, their faces and skin illuminated only by cooking fires as they stared at us as we passed. Blue smoke hung in the air between the huts. Just as I was having a feeling that it was all too familiar, Shooter, who had been walking behind me, said in my ear, "Ain't this a flashback?"     

            

11. Perico's Garrote, and other stories

     The next morning we washed clothes, and ourselves, in the creek near camp, and sat around recovering from the day before. Mike Hunt had brought a frisbee, and got a game going in the clear area between the tents. Someone came, someone muscular and very military‑looking and authoritative in camouflage fatigues, who stayed on the opposite side of the clearing from us and talked with Flaco and Shooter and Perico, always standing so that one of their bodies blocked our view of him. Their conversation seemed intensely focused.

     I took out my camera and started taking photos of the intertribal frisbee game, then used that as a cover to aim the camera through their game and snap photos of the group of mercenaries. They were too far away. I changed to my longest lens, a 100mm, and shot again. I never got anything but the back of the head of the newcomer, and Perico never turned anything but his back in our direction. Maco Stewart noticed what I was doing, and paid closer attention when I changed to the longer lens. I pretended to be delighted with the action shots I was getting of the frisbee game. By the time Stewart started to hover near me, it was too late. I had what turned out to be, after it was enlarged, a recognizable photo of Flaco. But I did not get a decent shot of the military-looking visitor, which I desperately wanted. In later years I’ve wondered if it was Oliver North – Flaco was mentioned in the notebooks that North was forced to relinquish during the Iran-Contra investigations, and I have seen a reference to Rus Rus in something that North wrote – but I have no way of knowing whether he was the stranger in camp that day. This man’s physical bearing, his uniform, and the way he wore it presented, to me, a clear impression of someone who was not a mercenary. I pegged him as active duty U.S. military.

     We went out to another refugee camp, where the people had been established longer than those at Lasa Tinghni, but not so long as those at Awas Bila or Karas Ankan. The interviews were so obviously canned, with the subjects being visibly and audibly goaded by armed men standing behind them, that I didn't even take notes.

     We were back in our tent at the TEA camp by noon, sacked out, still tired from the day before. Gary Fife was playing country music tapes on his interview recorder. Just after a song about "tryin' to love two women," he said, "I got another tape in there, by a friend of mine. It's called 'Custer Died for Your Sins.'" Flaco, standing just outside the tent, laughed along with the rest of us.

     Moses Fiske was working on the 16mm movie camera in the tent, and was having problems. All four Indians and I were there as well. Fiske told Stewart he wasn't sure he could get the camera to work. "Can't you nigger‑rig it?" Stewart asked.

     We were lying around the tent. The four Indians were discussing the situation of their fellow Indians in Nicaragua. A year or so earlier, Bill Pensoneau had traveled there and visited some of the camps to which the Sandinistas had relocated Indians to clear the border area for combat operations against the contras, possibly including some of the people who were now our hosts.

     Their conversation got around to the history of the Sandinista movement, beginning when someone wondered where they'd gotten their name. Someone knew that there'd been this guy named Sandino, but didn't know who he was or what he'd done. They asked Stewart to clarify it, and Stewart gave an answer which I don't remember, but which was inaccurate. I had been keeping my mouth shut in the interest of self-preservation, but now I blurted out a short history of Sandino's guerrilla fight against Somoza’s Guardia Nacional, and the US Marines who trained and led them, during the 1920's.

     Stewart turned to look at me with alarm. "How did you know that?" he asked. I told him I'd worked in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist in 1983, had written some pieces about it, and had since then read quite a lot about the history of the country and US interventions there.

     I'd said too much. Stewart wanted to know more about me, where else I'd been, what else I'd done, what I thought of the present situation and about US policy in general - the sort of questions he should have asked in the Houston airport. The four Indians were listening; we'd already had some conversations along these lines ourselves, out of Stewart's presence. I'm a lousy liar, and didn't want to appear to them to be hiding something they already knew I knew, or felt. So, I told Stewart that I knew about CIA interventions in Vietnam and Laos and with the Kurds in the area of the Persian Gulf, and allowed that US intelligence operatives had a history of recruiting poor, darkskinned people to fight our wars for us, which too often turned out to be losing wars, and then abandoning our former proxies to bloody retribution by our former enemies.

     It didn't seem a wise thing to be saying in an armed camp of just such operatives a short walk from the Río Coco, but I was pissed enough about the situation to risk having Stewart hear me say that in order that the Indians would hear it too. They'd heard the basic story about the Montagnards in Vietnam, but very little about the Kurds, or about the Hmong people in Laos who'd been slaughtered in large numbers as a result of their participation in US‑initiated or ‑widened military conflicts.

     From that time on, I was looked at differently by everyone in the camp, though I was never specifically threatened. That is, unless Perico's visit was a threat. Within a day after my talk with Stewart, Perico came over to our tent while the four Indians and I were standing outside it talking. Perico entered our circle and stood next to me. His dark eyes glittered even more than usual. From his pocket he pulled a length of spring steel or piano wire, rolled loop upon loop into a coil about four inches in diameter, with a steel ring affixed to either end. He held it up for us to see.

     "Do you know what thees eez?" He asked in heavily accented English.

     "It's a garrote," I said.

     "Isn't that for strangling people?" one of the others asked.

     "You bettah believe it," Perico said, with a smile like dry ice, at once hot and cold. He looked at me as he smiled.

     That evening, in the little mess area by a creek a short walk from the tents, I sat at one of the rough wooden tables with Maco Stewart, Moses Fiske, Mike Hunt, and Miskito officer Mario Córdoba, who was wearing his new silver captain's bars on his hat. I'd become somewhat friendly with him; he seemed someone committed to struggling for his people, but not overly excited about the fighting itself. He seemed to see no romance in it, and seemed bemused, rather than impressed, by the propagandizing of both sides. He seemed particularly unimpressed with rank, his own or others'. He reminded me of Harris, the young black Marine who'd treated the Marine Corps mostly as a joke, to whom I'd tossed the rifle after we saw the three caskets on the loading dock at Oakland as we were shipping out for Vietnam.

     We had, as usual, mess‑gear metal plates of gallo pinto, standard peasant fare of rice and red beans. It was likely that we were eating the rice and beans that Stewart had brought in aboard the Setco Air C‑47, saying that the food was for the refugees.

     During the meal, Mike Hunt([1]), the only one of us five tribal representatives who had accepted Flaco's offer of a weapon, told stories about the 1973 confrontation between Indians and federal agents at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. He had apparently been one of the armed Indians, though he was careful not to say anything that would be provable if it got back to the Feds. But without coming right out with it, he alluded to the fighting in such a way that it seemed to me that he might be hinting that he was in on it. Mike said he was a member of the Survival of the American Indian Association located in Olympia, Washington. I never got a feel for how large its membership was.

     He also said he acted as a bodyguard on occasion for his friend Hank Adams, head of the Association. In the company of the four North American Indians that week, I got a glimpse of their informal but very active nationwide network, which they called the "moccasin telegraph," a word‑of‑mouth and telephone web, augmented by Indian media outlets, which informs Indians in the US about things which concern them. BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) policies, treaty violations old and new, Federal legislation regarding Indians and their lands, any such stories which often barely surface in the mainstream media are given full treatment by the "moccasin telegraph."

     The other strong feeling I got was one of danger, of yet another group of people who have so consistently been treated so badly for so long by the larger society that two very different, but perhaps equally dangerous, reactions are becoming more and more common. One is a deep despair resulting in severe alcoholism, drug abuse, and a disproportionate suicide rate. The other is an accumulated anger, especially among some of the younger men, that makes them itch to grab a rifle, put their backs to the wall, and go out like warriors.

     Once during the week Gary Fife had told of his favorite trick while waiting for a table in restaurants. He and a couple of friends would put "War" as their name on the waiting list, and later there would come the announcement "War... party of three," and diners would look up in surprise when three Indians trooped past to their table. He clearly told it as a joke, but it just as clearly had an edge to it.

     I noticed that Mario Córdoba, the Miskito officer, was eating more slowly than the rest, so I slowed down too. By the time he and I walked down to the creek to wash our plates, the others had left.

     I wanted to talk to Mario. But I was worried about two things: that I would compromise my journalist's neutrality by what I had to say, and that I would get my ass in serious hot water, especially after what I'd said to Maco about US use of minority peoples as proxy soldiers. Perico's bit with the garrote didn't seem to have been done just for the sake of entertainment.

     Finally I just said "Fuck it," and did it anyway. There was enough light left to see Córdoba's face. I moved close to him and spoke quickly, in Spanish, in a low voice. Be careful, Mario, I said. I told him, as succinctly as I could, about how the Montagnard highland people of Vietnam, and the Hmong of Laos, had had their populations decimated during and after their service with the US CIA and Special Forces, and about how the Kurds in the Middle East had been recruited, armed, and then abandoned to their enemies by a sudden policy change.

     He listened, nodding in a way that intimated that either he knew more about those histories than I'd assumed, or that he wasn't at all surprised to hear it. Be careful, I admonished again, and ended by asking if he trusted "these people" as I nodded toward the mercenaries' tent.

     He looked at me with a flat gaze that was neither friendly nor hostile: "No tengo confianza en nadie demás de los indios." I don't trust anybody except Indians.

     His look made it clear that that included me.

---

[1] I have since heard, among other Indians, joking reference to “Mike Hunt” as “my cunt,” for example calling a bar that was a local hangout, and asking if Mike Hunt was there, to a round of laughs. I’ve wondered if the whole thing were a particularly Indian smokescreen, a “moccasin telegraph” kind of communication among Indians, that was a coded way for the Indians in a group to talk past any others present. But I don’t know. I do know that there is a specifically Indian humor.

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.

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[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.