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.

EXCERPT: MERCENARY 2

Mercenary 2

     I got my film from the Rus Rus trip developed - nearly thirty rolls of 35mm - and invited Mickey up to the house to look at the pictures. When he came into the cottage Annie and I shared, he took off the rain jacket he was wearing. He immediately noticed that I'd noticed how he handled the jacket, and how it looked: he'd shucked his arm out of the left sleeve first, then slid the right sleeve off more carefully. The bottom right coat pocket hung heavily toward the floor; that was what had caught my eye. Mickey smiled, almost appreciatively. He said something like "Yes, there is something heavy in there," meaning, of course, his pistol.

     He was visibly surprised by my photos: the Miskito and Sumo fighters with their M16s and AK47s and G3s and assorted uniforms; the incongruous, sweaty Texans; the visible tension in the bodies of the youthful warriors as they clambered out of the dugout canoe ahead of me on the Nicaraguan bank of the Río Coco; the carefully arranged skulls at Tulin Bila.

     I saved the clear photo of Flaco for last. "Recognize this guy?" I asked. Mickey smiled: "What's he calling himself these days?"  

     "Colonel Flaco. So you know him?"

     "Oh, yeah. Flaco and I go way back."

   ”What's his real name?" Mickey just smiled again and shook his head. Then: "Dean, you'd have made a hell of a soldier." 

     Mickey and I continued talking every few weeks for another year or so. A story unfolded about the junior-high school son of the woman Mickey was living with. I never met the boy, but I heard about him repeatedly from what became two sides of a struggle for his soul. He'd grown up mostly without a father, and suddenly there appeared in his life this cocksure figure, Mickey, who was wildly fluent in the manly arts: he could take anything apart, explain its workings, fix it, build it, destroy it, blow it up, kick the shit out of it, or shoot it. 

     Especially shoot it. The boy, of course, went for that immediately. So Mickey, liking the idea of being a hero to the kid, soon had him out in the woods with pistols and rifles, burning up ammunition. But, Mickey told me, there was little of the breathe-in, breathe-out, hold 'em and squeeze 'em accuracy that I'd been taught by my stepfather and uncle and Marine marksmanship instructors. No: what Mickey taught the boy was combat shooting, two hands on the pistol, crouch, aim quickly with the entire body at the center of mass of your target, shoot rapid-fire until the man was down, then quick! on to the next target.

     A simultaneous attempt was being made to make an opposing claim on the boy's future. Mary Duffield, a peace activist who lived near Santa Cruz, owned a seaworthy sailboat and was a serious ham radio operator. She would organize local and longer-distance sailing trips for youngsters, as well as providing instruction in ham radio operations and equipment. Sometimes she would combine the two. The ax she had to grind was international peace. She felt, and taught, that getting children from different countries to talk with, and to meet, one another was one way to reduce the level of violence in the world. Mickey snorted at that idea, but the boy happened to be infatuated with ham radio as a hobby, and his mother apparently encouraged him to spend at least some of his free time with Mary. Besides being an experienced open-ocean sailor, she was also a qualified operator of international short wave radio equipment.

    Many months later, in 1986 or '87, I would get a worried call from Mary. Mickey, the woman and the boy had disappeared suddenly and without leaving a hint of where they had gone. She was worried about the boy, and asked if I'd see if I could locate them. I tried, but had no luck. Dropping out of sight was one of Mickey's professional skills. All we heard was a rumor that the three of them had been witnesses to "something really awful," and had to disappear. After still more months had passed since Mary's call, she got a cryptic note from the boy, with no return address, saying that he wouldn't be in touch anymore but wanted her to know that he was all right. None of us ever heard from them again.

     Before that last episode, I asked Mickey for a favor. I'd done him a few smaller ones, like getting him a free appointment with my wife, a dermatologist, to treat a fungus he'd brought home from one of his adventures in Central America.

     It was late 1985. News reports were coming out about contra raids in southern Nicaragua. Apparently a "second front" was being opened, to force the Sandinistas to divide their resources and relieve some of the pressure on the main contra units operating out of Honduras in northern Nicaragua. This meant to me that contra groups must be operating out of Costa Rica, raiding into southern Nicaragua, then jumping back across the border for sanctuary. Yet Costa Rica's policy of neutrality forbade the use of its territory for any such activities. There seemed to be an opportunity to break significant news here, but major news organizations had done next to nothing about it. 

     What I asked Mickey for was information about contra base camps in northern Costa Rica, and crossing points the raiders used to get into Nicaragua.

   Now, this is an interesting thing to try to describe. Mickey and I were just flat on opposite sides. Mickey was a mercenary, an admitted CIA operative - contract, not career - a "professional soldier," as he called himself. I was a veteran with a chip on my shoulder, a small-time crusader against the very type of operations by which he made his living. Yet we had, after a fashion, become friends. This was, in part, because we had a soldierly respect for one another in matters of nerve and heart and experience, which at times matter more deeply among men than does what separated us: that is, conscience.

     There was something else to it. I was never able to put my finger on it until a couple of years later, when Doyle McManus (of the Los Angeles Times' Washington, DC, bureau) and I were in Miami doing interviews to follow up the story of the Rangers allegedly having parachuted into Nicaragua. Doyle and I were driving in a rented car on our way to an interview, and talking about the quirks involved in chasing down stories about covert military operations. We had both found sources, a couple of them very good, within the covert operations community who had been willing to talk, on a limited basis, about what they knew. And the reason they'd talk was because we already knew things which we weren't supposed to know. We agreed that there was a certain gamesmanship involved here, which made how much you knew more important than which side you were on. It amounted to a form of cooperation among enemies, perhaps even in the interest of richening the experience of the fight itself.

     I asked Mickey for the help over a beer in one of those places that was so crowded and noisy a dozen people could meet and plot a terrorist bombing and nobody'd be the wiser. He got quiet, and looked at me for a long time with the soberest expression I ever saw on him. It was clear that he was looking into me, trying now to see past all our war stories and repartee, trying to see my very bones, who I was down deep. 

     Then he leaned over the table, onto his elbows, halving the distance between our faces. "What are you prepared to do?" he asked.

     "Huh?

     "Costa Rica es un fogón," he said, Costa Rica was a bonfire of covert operations activity.

     "It's gotta be," I said. There was no other way they could do those raids, repeatedly, on the Sandinistas' own ground, without getting caught.

        "So. Can you help me?"

    Mickey shrugged, then sighed, having come to his decision. He said he would call Langley (Virginia: CIA Headquarters), give his account number, and ask that a courier be sent with information about camps and border crossings. It wouldn't be all of them, he said, only a few, maybe only one or two.

     "But it won't mean shit unless you follow through," he said.

     "What does that mean?"

     Mickey looked at me in a way that told me, as no form of documentary evidence could have, that he was who he said he was: a serious player in a deadly game. 

     He told a story. He'd been on an operation in the Dominican Republic in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines ashore there. He and a partner had been flown inland in a C47, and told to hang loose for a few days, near the airplane, until they were contacted. That evening, they got bored, decided What the hell, we're Latinos, we can find our way around, let's walk down to that little town. They passed three peasants on the road. All nodded, said “Buenas noches,” walked on. As they passed, Mickey and his partner looked at each other and simultaneously concluded that their operation was compromised. Without a word, both turned, pulled their pistols, and killed the three men. "Pah, pah, pah," Mickey said, imitating the shots, and shrugged. "They're only peasants."

     He asked the question again, this time parsing out his words and sliding each one along the conduit between our eyes: "What...are...you...prepared...to do?"

     His words, borne upon that look, made me shudder. "What do I have to do?"

     "I will give you the name of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You will go there and wait in the room. When the man comes, you stand behind the door, knock him in the head, take what he brought you, and split."

     I thought for a long moment. I did believe in what I was doing, believed that many human beings would live or die depending on the quality and quantity of information to reach the mainstream press about covert operations in Central America, believed that the work was not being thoroughly done, that I could contribute. I also believed that, if I so much as nodded at this moment, Mickey would do what he said he'd do, or at least try. And I believed that the chance of a breakthrough story about illegal covert operations, involving agents of the U.S. Government or private U.S. citizens, compromising the neutrality of Costa Rica, was worth some serious risk. It might even be worth fighting for.

     I spread the thing out in my mind. Most of my friends, I knew, saw me as someone who'd lived an eventful life, done difficult and dangerous things, was capable of doing more such things, if perhaps a little nuts for having done so many. I treasured, in myself, that part of me that had pulled the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was still a teenager, while everyone else looked on; the same part which had run across the clearing by the well in Tho An with my automatic rifle because the First Sergeant had called for such a rifle, and I was the only man present who had one; the same part that had caused me to be instrumental in hauling the anchor in Shelter Cove.

     But Mickey was from a different world. In his world, the man coming through the door was an impediment, to be removed. But what if he were very alert, very strong? I didn't have the skill to be sure of knocking him out, without killing him. But wasn't he an enemy, a bagman for people who ruined families and nations for fun and profit? Wasn't I on the right side? But what if I had a moment of moral hesitation? I could be killed, then and there. The man coming through the door would be more like Mickey than like me.

     He had asked the right question. I wasn't prepared to do that.

     He'd told me his real name. At least, to my knowledge it was his real name. He’d even showed me his driver's license. At first I wondered why he had done so. But by the time our association ended, I understood that part of his communication to me had been unspoken, had been contained between the lines of his stories, in the expression on his face when he said certain things, in the fact that he was always armed and that using his weapon was the core of his way of being in the world. Put into words, that part of his communication would have been something like this: You know what world I live in. You understand its basic rules, and the penalties for breaking them.

     I do. That's why his real name is not used here.

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.

Deadribs

In January 1985, I spent 8 days with some Miskito Indians who were based in southern Honduras and sometimes raided  across the international border (the Rio Coco) into Nicaragua. They were anti-Sandinista, so were allied with the US, in this case in the form of some mercenaries hired by a Texas oilman. Most of the Miskito warriors were teenagers who were casual about where their weapons were pointed. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week...

   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 (CA) 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.

MERCENARY 2

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Mercenary 2

     I got my film from the Rus Rus trip developed - nearly thirty rolls of 35mm - and invited Mickey up to the house to look at the pictures. When he came into the cottage Annie and I shared, he took off the rain jacket he was wearing. He immediately noticed that I'd noticed how he handled the jacket, and how it looked: he'd shucked his arm out of the left sleeve first, then slid the right sleeve off more carefully. The bottom right coat pocket hung heavily toward the floor; that was what had caught my eye. Mickey smiled, almost appreciatively. He said something like "Yes, there is something heavy in there," meaning, of course, his pistol.

     He was visibly surprised by my photos: the Miskito and Sumo fighters with their M16s and AK47s and G3s and assorted uniforms; the incongruous, sweaty Texans, the visible tension in the bodies of the youthful warriors as they clambered out of the dugout canoe ahead of me on the Nicaraguan bank of the Río Coco, the carefully arranged skulls at Tulin Bila.

     I saved the recognizable photo of Flaco for last. "Recognize this guy?" I asked. Mickey smiled: "What's he calling himself these days?" 

     "Colonel Flaco. So you know him?"

     "Oh, yeah. Flaco and I go way back."

     ”What's his real name?" Mickey just smiled again and shook his head. Then: "Dean, you'd have made a hell of a soldier."

     Mickey and I continued talking every few weeks for another year or so. A story unfolded about the junior-high school son of the woman Mickey was living with. I never met the boy, but I heard about him repeatedly from what became two sides of a struggle for his soul. He'd grown up mostly without a father, and suddenly there appeared in his life this cocksure figure, Mickey, who was wildly fluent in the manly arts: he could take anything apart, explain its workings, fix it, build it, destroy it, blow it up, kick the shit out of it, or shoot it.

     Especially shoot it. The boy, of course, went for that immediately. So Mickey, liking the idea of being a hero to the kid, soon had him out in the woods with pistols and rifles, burning up ammunition. But, Mickey told me, there was little of the breathe-in, breathe-out, hold 'em and squeeze 'em accuracy that I'd been taught by my stepfather and uncle and Marine marksmanship instructors. No: what Mickey taught the boy was combat shooting, two hands on the pistol, crouch, aim quickly with the entire body at the center of mass of your target, shoot rapid-fire until the man was down, then quick! on to the next target.

     A simultaneous attempt was being made to make an opposing claim on the boy's future. Mary Duffield, a peace activist who lived near Santa Cruz, owned a large sailboat and was a serious ham radio operator. She would organize local and longer-distance sailing trips for youngsters, as well as providing instruction in ham radio operations and equipment. Sometimes she would combine the two. The ax she had to grind was international peace. She felt, and taught, that getting children from different countries to talk with, and to meet, one another was one way to lessen the violence in the world. Mickey snorted at that idea, but the boy happened to be infatuated with ham radio as a hobby, and his mother apparently encouraged him to spend at least some of his free time with Mary.

      Many months later, in 1986 or '87, I would get a worried call from Mary. Mickey, the woman and the boy had disappeared suddenly and without leaving a hint of where they had gone. She was worried about the boy, and asked if I'd see if I could locate them. I tried, but had no luck. Dropping out of sight was one of Mickey's professional skills. All we heard was a rumor that the three of them had been witnesses to "something really awful," and had had to disappear. After still more months had passed since Mary's call, she got a cryptic note from the boy, with no return address, saying that he wouldn't be in touch anymore but wanted her to know that he was all right. None of us ever heard from them again.

     Before that last episode, I asked Mickey for a favor. I'd done him a few smaller ones, like getting him a free appointment with my wife, a dermatologist, to treat a fungus he'd brought home from one of his adventures in Central America.

     It was late 1985. News reports were coming out about contra raids in southern Nicaragua. Apparently a "second front" was being opened, to force the Sandinistas to divide their resources and relieve some of the pressure on the main contra units operating out of Honduras in northern Nicaragua. This meant to me that contra groups must be operating out of Costa Rica, raiding into southern Nicaragua, then jumping back across the border for sanctuary. Yet Costa Rica's policy of neutrality forbade the use of its territory for any such activities. There seemed a good opportunity to break significant news here, but major news organizations had done next to nothing about it.

     What I asked Mickey for was information about contra base camps in northern Costa Rica, and crossing points the raiders used to get into Nicaragua.

     Now, this is an interesting thing to try to describe. Mickey and I were just flat on opposite sides. Mickey was a mercenary, an admitted CIA operative - contract, not career - a "professional soldier," as he called himself. I was a veteran with a chip on my shoulder, a small-time crusader against the very type of operations by which he made his living. Yet we had, after a fashion, become friends. This was, in part, because we had a soldierly respect for one another in matters of nerve and heart and experience, which at times matter more deeply among men than does what separated us: that is, conscience.

     There was something else to it. I was never able to put my finger on it until a couple of years later, when Doyle McManus (of the Los Angeles Times' Washington, DC, bureau) and I were in Miami doing interviews to follow up the story of the Rangers allegedly having parachuted into Nicaragua. Doyle and I were driving in a rented car on our way to an interview, and talking about the quirks involved in chasing down stories about covert military operations. We had both found sources, a couple of them very good, within the covert operations community who had been willing to talk, on a limited basis, about what they knew. And the reason they'd talk was because we already knew things which we weren't supposed to know. We agreed that there was a certain gamesmanship involved here, which made how much you knew more important than which side you were on. It amounted to a form of cooperation among enemies, perhaps even in the interest of richening the experience of the fight itself.

     I asked Mickey for the help over a beer in one of those places that was so crowded and noisy a dozen people could meet and plot a terrorist bombing and nobody'd be the wiser. He got quiet, and looked at me for a long time with the soberest expression I ever saw on him. It was clear that he was looking into me, trying now to see past all our war stories and repartee, trying to see my very bones, who I was down deep.

     Then he leaned over the table, onto his elbows, halving the distance between our faces. "What are you prepared to do?" he asked.

     "Huh?

     "Costa Rica es un fogón," he said, Costa Rica was a furnace of covert operations activity.

     "It's gotta be," I said. There was no other way they could do those raids, repeatedly, on the Sandinistas' own ground, without getting caught.

     "So. Can you help me?"

     Mickey shrugged, then sighed, having come to his decision. He said he would call Langley (Virginia: CIA Headquarters), give his account number, and ask that a courier be sent with information about camps and border crossings. It wouldn't be all of them, he said, only a few, maybe only one or two.

     "But it won't mean shit unless you follow through," he said.

     "What does that mean?"

     Mickey looked at me in a way that told me, as no form of documentary evidence could have, that he was who he said he was: a serious player in a deadly game.

     He told a story. He'd been on an operation in the Dominican Republic in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines ashore there. He and a partner had been flown inland in a C47, and told to hang loose for a few days, near the airplane, until they were contacted. That evening, they got bored, decided What the hell, we're Latinos, we can find our way around, let's walk down to that little town. They passed three peasants on the road. All nodded, said good afternoon, walked on. As they passed, Mickey and his partner looked at each other and simultaneously concluded that their operation was compromised. Without a word, both turned, pulled their pistols, and killed the three men. "Pah, pah, pah," Mickey said, imitating the shots, and shrugged. "They're only peasants."

     He asked the question again, this time parsing out his words and sliding each one along the conduit between our eyes: "What...

are...you...prepared...to do?"

     His words, borne upon that look, made me shudder. "What do I have to do?"

     "I will give you the name of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You will go there and wait in the room. When the man comes, you stand behind the door, knock him in the head, take what he brought you, and split."

     I thought for a long moment. I did believe in what I was doing, believed that many human beings would live or die depending on the quality and quantity of information to reach the mainstream press about covert operations in Central America, believed that the work was not being thoroughly done, that I could contribute. I also believed that, if I so much as nodded in this moment, Mickey would do what he said he'd do, or at least try it. And I believed that the chance of a breakthrough story about illegal covert operations, involving agents of the U.S. Government or private U.S. citizens, compromising the neutrality of Costa Rica, was worth some serious risk. It might even be worth fighting for.

     I spread the thing out in my mind. Most of my friends, I knew, saw me as someone who'd lived an eventful life, done difficult and dangerous things, was capable of doing such things, if perhaps a little nuts for having done so many. I treasured, in myself, that part of me that had pulled the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls while I was still a teenager, as everyone else looked on; the same part which had run across the clearing by the well in Tho An with my automatic rifle because the First Sergeant had called for such a rifle, and I was the only man present who had one; the same part that had caused me to be instrumental in hauling the anchor in Shelter Cove.

     But Mickey was from a different world. In his world, the man coming through the door was an impediment, to be removed. But what if he were very alert, very strong? I didn't have the skill to be sure of knocking him out, without killing him. But wasn't he an enemy, a bagman for people who ruined families and nations for fun and profit? Wasn't I on the right side? But what if I had a moment of moral hesitation? I could be killed, then and there. The man coming through the door would be more like Mickey than like me.

     He had asked the right question. I wasn't prepared to do that.

     He'd told me his real name, even showed me his driver's license. At first I wondered why he'd done so. But by the time our association ended, I understood that part of his communication to me had been unspoken, had been contained between the lines of his stories, in the expression on his face when he said certain things, in the fact that he was always armed and that using his weapon was the core of his way of being in the world. Put into words, that part of his communication would have been something like this: You know what world I live in. You understand its basic rules, and the penalties for breaking them.

     I do. That's why his real name is not used here.

Rus Rus

                    1. Maco Stewart's Letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                      

    2. Flaco and Luque

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                   3. Babes in James Bondland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DARK-SKINNED WARRIORS

Dark-Skinned Warriors 2

     Ruben Gómez, a friend from the Bill Motto VFW Post, came over so we could use my computer to work on a resolution opposing the Reagan Administration's policies in Central America. I had written the original version and had taken it to a Post meeting, where the membership suggested some changes, and directed Ruben and me to make them. Later, another member of the post, Bill Watkins (who later converted to Hinduism, changed his name to Iraja, and moved with his wife to Hawaii), carried the resolution to Nicaragua and personally presented it to President Daniel Ortega. It raised a ruckus for a while; Dan Rather spent about two minutes on the story on the CBS Evening News.

     Ruben was looking over my shoulder at several photographs spread around my desk. "Are these from your recent trip to Nicaragua?" he asked.

     At first, I was startled by what I took as his ignorance. There was a photo of people crowding around a bus in Cambodia, one of South Vietnamese soldiers, one of Montagnard soldiers, one of a Laotian army soldier standing in front of a thatch-roofed building, and one of a Sandinista soldier who had told Alejandro Guillén and me how close we were to the Honduran border just before his two compatriots roared up on a tractor and told us to turn around before we got mortared from across the border.

     Something about Ruben's observation was more accurate than mine. I stared at the photos anew. Every one showed people with dark skin and dark hair. All the people were much shorter and slighter in build and skeletal structure than I. And most were armed with weapons made in, and supplied by, the United States, and were warriors, on one side or the other, in conflicts of which the U.S. Government was the major instigator.

  Dream: Guts

I'm driving on a freeway. There is an awful wreck: explosion of impact, screech of rubber, accordioning collapse of metal, shattering of glass. I stop, get out, run over. I'm inside the vehicle, a smoking hell. The driver is a black man. He is lying on his back, his belly ripped open, his intestines spread out over him and spilling into the wreckage. I see colors in his guts: yellow fatty tissue, transparent and translucent shiny membranes, blue veins, red arterial blood, brown shit. His eyes. He says nothing, but his eyes implore: Please help me. He begs me with his eyes to put his guts back in his body. I try, putting one hand on the guts still in his body, trying to keep them there, reaching with my other hand for the guts that have spilled the farthest from him, trying to bring them back to him. I try again and again. Every time I try, they spill out of my hands. He is begging me to help him, but I can't.

B. Indians and Cowboys

                                                   Mercenary 1

     "Mickey" said one of his parents was Basque; the other Puerto Rican. He said his life as a soldier had begun when, as a younger man - he was now nearing fifty - he'd been a member of a navy Underwater Demolition Team, the forerunner of today's famed SEALs, elite commando units highly trained in everything from hand-to-hand combat to jumping out of airplanes to a whole spectrum of work with explosives. Besides being a SCUBA diver, he'd later been trained in "hard hat" diving as well, working at greater depths in a pressurized suit.

     I think part of why Mickey decided to tell me as much as he did was that he had recently taken up with a local woman who had a son about ten years old, and he wanted to develop contacts who might help him get out of the mercenary business and into a legitimate trade in our area. He said it was too uncertain: you do a job, you get paid thirty grand, you blow it all, then you're a pauper until the next gig comes along. Besides, though he insisted he was still as fit as he ever was, that couldn't last forever. His conversation showed him to be both talented and experienced in technical things, and he hinted that, as a general contractor, I might steer him toward work in the building trades. He chortled when he mentioned this, however, saying that his experience of looking at building plans had had more to do with blowing them up than with building them.

     It was funny. The more Mickey told me about his life, the more I realized that he embodied some of the things I hated most. After he got out of the service, he'd worked as a mercenary in Rhodesia, in Brazil, in Central America. He'd even worked as a collector and enforcer for some Colombian cocaine dealers a few miles from where I lived in northern California. He scoffed at values, even the right-wing ones he'd defended in his argument with the peace activist who'd given me his phone number. She'd been picketing Bank of America because of what she and others thought of as investment policies which helped support right-wing regimes in Latin America. "Show me a patriot, I'll show you a dead man," Mickey said to me. (And the young woman had been right about his motive for giving her his phone number. He told me the first time we talked that he'd been both angry and aroused during their argument. The way he put it to me was that "if ever there was a time when my sex drive and my propensity for violence got connected...." and ended by shaking his head in such a way that made me shudder at the thought of what might have happened had she called him and offered to get together and continue their conversation. She’d given me his number instead.

     Yet, in a way, I liked him. I felt a certain kinship with his impatience, his seething physical energy, his hands-on approach to life, his knowing shrug about how dangerous it is, not just to lead the life he led, but to be alive at all.

     Besides being a diver, Mickey was a parachutist, a pilot of both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, and a small-arms expert. I've encountered all manner of wanna-be's who made similar claims; even those who've done enough homework to mouth authentic phrases are transparent when certain questions are asked. I became satisfied that Mickey was not a bullshitter, that he really was who he said he was. When my questions probed something he didn't want to tell me or didn't know, he didn't make something up. He just shook his head no.

     We were talking not long after the helicopter piloted by the American mercenaries Dana Parker and James Powell was shot down in northern Nicaragua during their raid from southern Honduras on a Sandinista base. I had read that the chopper was a Hughes 500. I asked him how readily available that helicopter was on the civilian market, especially one outfitted as that one had been with machine guns and rockets.         

     Mickey smiled animatedly. "Great little bird," he said. It could mount two General Electric Vulcan machine guns - "what you call a 'minigun'," he said, referring to the electrically operated, incredibly fast-firing Gatling-type machine guns that blanket an area with bullets and shred anything in it. He leaned forward, as if I wouldn't fully appreciate the wizardry of the chopper outfitted as a "gun platform" if he didn't physically hand me the information. He said that the bird shot down in Nicaragua was the military version, which would carry one Vulcan in a fixed mount on the port side so that it fired wherever the helicopter pointed, and the starboard gun was on a moveable mount and connected by a tracking system to the pilot's helmet, so it would automatically track with the movements of the pilot's head. All he had to do was look at something through the cross hairs on his visor and press the button, the guns would belch (in Vietnam we had likened the sound of a minigun firing to a long, continuous fart), and poof. And the rotors on that version were special, he said. "You know that sound the Huey makes, that real sharp wap-wap?" I sure did; every Vietnam vet will carry that sound to his grave. Mickey explained that the sharp part of that sound was the tip of one rotor blade - the one moving in the same direction as the aircraft's forward motion - breaking the sound barrier, due to the addition of the aircraft's forward speed and the rotor tip's rotational velocity.

     I said that might help explain why the sound of the Huey's rotor made us so nervous; that it was kin to the sound of a rifle bullet breaking the sound barrier as it goes by your ear.

     Mickey grinned now in full delight at having heard something from me that indicated that I might be equipped to understand him. "That's why they changed the rotors on the military version of the small Hughes helicopter," he said. He explained that a chopper's rotor is really a rotary wing, providing the same lift as a standard aircraft's main wing. The lift is a function of the surface area of the blades and their rotational speed. The Huey achieved sufficient lift by applying great power to two long rotor blades, moving them very fast. It was powerful, but noisy. Hughes had used four rotor blades, thereby shortening them. But, he said, they had gone further on one version, using five blades. Since the rotational velocity of the rotor tips was a function of the circumference of their arc in the air, the use of five shorter blades slowed the tips' velocity below the speed of sound, thereby making the bird much quieter than any other. Great for covert operations, he said.

     "Speaking of the sound barrier...." he continued, and settled back in his chair as if he were about to share something with me that was in a way embarrassing but which was so delicious he couldn't keep it to himself. He asked if I knew which handgun calibers were best suited for use with a silencer. I said no. He held up two fingers. "Two calibers," he said, "the two with the slowest muzzle velocities: .22 and .45." He said his favorite weapon for "that kind of work" was a small .22 automatic with a silencer, because it was quietest. You had to get up close, though, so you could be sure of a brain shot. He smiled that smile again, the excited smile, tinged only a little by guilt, of the neighborhood boy who sets the cat on fire when goaded on by his buddies.

     I asked Mickey if he could help clear up for me any of the mysteries about who had done what, and how, in some of the more notorious incidents in Central America in recent years. I brought up the debate about the helicopter crash which had killed Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, and asked him if he knew whether or not a bomb had caused the crash.

     "There was a bomb on that helicopter," he said emphatically. But when I asked for more, he averted his eyes in a way which I would see him do only once or twice more in all the conversations I had with him over two or three years' time. "That's a complicated subject," he said. That same phrase in Russian, “Eto slyozhnii vopros,” had been a stock answer by Soviet citizens during my summer in Leningrad when our questions got too close to politically sensitive territory.

     I asked him about the raid on Sandinista oil storage tanks at the Pacific port of Corinto in October of 1983, just before I’d arrived in Nicaragua. News reports had said that the fires were ignited by boats firing from the sea. But I'd been to the site and seen the blackened, crumpled storage tanks, and had wondered at the time about the thoroughness of the job. I asked Mickey if there had been more than firing from the sea, if some commando types, with special equipment and training which were ostensibly not available to the contras, hadn't swum ashore and placed a series of charges at the tanks, under cover of diversionary fire from the boats.

     "There was more than firing from the sea at Corinto," he said, but would give no more details. This part of our talk came during his recitation of his career as a diver/explosives expert. He had again become delighted in the storytelling value of some underwater breathing equipment, specially developed for secret operations, which allowed no bubbles to escape, meaning that a swimmer could approach a heavily guarded bridge, attach charges and timers, and swim away without ever showing a trace of his presence until the charges went off. When I asked if he'd ever gotten to use that equipment in an operation other than training - in Nicaragua, for instance - he smiled and said he had, but that I was getting too close to things he couldn't talk about. He did, however, float the name "Río Negro." I remembered having read news reports about a clandestine attack on a river by that name in Nicaragua.