RATTLESNAKE DREAMS CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE/ TABLE OF CONTENTS/PROLOGUE (3/12/2012) RATTLESNAKE DREAMS An American Warrior’s Story Dean Metcalf This book is dedicated to KRIP who was killed at the US Special Forces camp at Mangbuk, June 18, 1968. He was 18 years old, or so they said… and to TATYANA SAVICHEVA who watched her extended family starve and freeze to death around her during the siege of Leningrad, September 1941 – January 1944. She was eleven years old when her last surviving family member died, leaving her alone. She was evacuated with other children through the blockade in August 1942, and died of disease resulting from the siege on July 1, 1944. and to the Marines who waded the lagoon at Tarawa, November 20-23, 1943. Copyright© 2010 Dean Metcalf All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-578-08809-9 CONTENTS I. Prologue 1 Tho An II. Learning War 5 Cowboys and Indians 8 Toys 8 Cartoon 9 Roy Rogers 10 Atomic Stove 12 Mumblypeg 13 K’reans 14 First Blood 15 Hunger 1 17 Rogue River 1 19 Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue’s Knife 20 A Rifle, A Pistol 24 Dress Blues 1 29 Almost a Cowboy 31 Canal 39 Dogs of Eberlein Street 42 Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air 44 Sunset Over Klamath Lake 55 Second Buck 56 Crater Lake 59 Semper Fidelis 67 Gunny Rogers 1: Mama’s Boy 67 Sergeant Vance 69 Man and Rifle Reaching 71 Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon 74 Dress Blues 2 77 Marine Corps History 80 Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis 84 Banning 87 29 Palms: Ungentle 89 Old Enough to Bleed 91 Footprints 92 Okinawa 94 With God On Our Side 98 Tonkin 100 Olongapo 108 Put Me In, Coach 110 III.War 112 Oakland 113 Going Over 115 Ky Hoa 124 Gunny Rogers 3 126 Phantom Pisser 127 Hunger 2 131 To Kill a Gook 131 Tam Ky 132 “You’re Too Late” 135 An Tan 144 Request Mast 148 Tho An 150 Man and Pistol 167 Rats 169 Marines in Skivvies 175 Howard’s Hill 178 Sergeant of the Guard 181 Wartime Is Wonderful 184 Danang 189 IV. Relearning War 193 Kicking the Leaves 194 Townies 198 Missouri Squirrels 200 Hunger 3 204 Dark-Skinned Warriors 1 205 Packing 206 Seminar 208 Cho Lon 210 Interlude: A Veteran’s Dreams: 215 Dream: Nazi Pursuit 216 Dream: Money Man Pursuit 217 Mangbuk: The Camp 219 Soldier Tin 227 Dream: Bodies of Water 235 Dalat 237 Saigon 1. LA Cop 239 2. Kids 240 3. Dream: Vietnamese Children 242 Spook Hunting in Laos 243 Mark 269 J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac 271 Leningrad, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague 278 Samaritan in Los Angeles 308 Chinese Soldiers 309 Dream: A6 and Wolves 311 Tumalo 313 Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove 320 Triptych The Clubbing 333 Bait 335 Dream: Vietnamese Women 337 Spider and Fly 338 Fear 340 Guard Dog 342 Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle 343 Zen Warrior Bass Player 345 Sandinistas 346 Missing Man 356 Dark-Skinned Warriors 2 368 Dream: Guts 369 Indians and Cowboys 370 Mercenary 1 370 Rus Rus 1. Maco Stewart’s Letter 375 2. Flaco and Luque 378 3. Babes in James Bondland 380 4. Rus Rus 384 5.The Tape 391 6. Lasa Tinghni 395 7. Red Chief, White Chief 399 8. In Camp 399 9. Border Crossing 402 10. Skulls of Tulin Bila 406 11. Perico’s Garrote, and Other Stories 410 12. Meeting 416 13. Out of the Woods 425 14. Aftermath 428 Dream: Deadribs 437 Mercenary 2 437 Guns in Costa Rica 444 Interview with Bill Gandall 457 Guatemala: La Violencia 465 At the Battered Women’s Shelter 467 Palestinians and Israelis and Americans 469 Ants 488 Dream: Dance of the Arrows 489 The Rattlesnake Dream 491 Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol 492 The Last Nightmare 494 V.The Web (Essay) 496 APPENDIX: FAVORITE BOOKS AND WRITERS...533 Acknowledgments 535

FAITH AND FIGHTING

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is a memoir of half a century or so of trying to understand why we go to war. Stories from my time as combatant and journalist in Vietnam, and journalist in Cambodia, Laos, Leningrad, Moscow, Baku, Kiev, Prague, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, East and West Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Miami.... 11,279 THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2011 THE WEB part 3: LA FE AND EL COMBATE When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the women and children and the old man at the well in the village of Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war (1968), through some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned. More importantly, because of what I unlearned. Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.” I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk. I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons([1]). I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. Every year on November 10th, I celebrate the Marine Corps Birthday with a few buddies, in person or by email. Some of these guys I would die for, at the drop of a hat. We often combine that day with the next, Veterans’ Day. We thank entities from Jesus Christ to “shit-house luck” for the fact that we are still alive. I, of course, am in the latter group. The guys all allow me that; some agree with me and some disagree, with varying degrees of stridency, regarding questions of patriotism and religion. This is done with the same respect with which I allow some of them their continued belief in Jesus Christ: we all came by, or solidified, our deepest beliefs under the gun. In the presence of public patriotic celebrations, I get uncomfortable if there is more than one flag, or if it’s deliberately oversized; if the speakers’ voices seem overwrought with too much sincerity, or use too many over-generalized phrases that draw an ideological line in the sand between “us” and “them.” And I become downright angry when a speaker, especially a public official or clergyman, extols faith as something to sustain our soldiers in combat. Faith is what we use to take up the slack between what we know and what we hope for, or what we wish were the case. Or what we pray for. Of all the emotions along the spectrum from the most sincere to the patently phony, which constitute the fabric of human feelings and beliefs we use to send young men – and, now, young women – to war, faith is the killingest. Having viewed what we humans do for 40 years now from outside religion, what I see when organized religion is at play is people telling one another what to do: how to behave, whom to obey, whom to love and whom not to love, whom to hate, and whom to kill - all by claiming to speak for a higher power that is unimpeachable, yet at the same time non-specific. For me religion became like a greased pig at a carnival: impossible to get ahold of. Since no one, in my view, has ever seen the God who is the source of these commandments, it falls to God’s messengers to do the heavy lifting. To me, those people are nothing more than an ancient but ever-renewing parade of older males in long robes and funny hats who claim to have been sent by God, and to have been told by God how to instruct the lesser humans below them: do this, don’t do that. Pray. Obey. Do what I say, because God, or this or that Holy Book, told me to tell you to do so. I don’t believe any of that. But what continues to astonish me is that so many people do believe it, in the face of so much evidence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the people we fight against are inspired by, commanded by, driven by, ideas which are nearly interchangeable with ours. Not mine any longer, but ours. Here I can’t help but note that Abraham, the religious patriarch featured in the Kierkegaard essay “Fear and Trembling”, is regarded as a prophet by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: the very people who are now killing one another with such conviction in the Middle East. Kierkegaard’s essay is the one which got me in such hot water with J. Glenn Gray (see above, pp. 298-305), when I was so angered by Abraham’s being prepared to sacrifice his son because God told him to, and by Professor Gray’s use of the word “sublime” to describe Abraham’s faith. I even wrote my own version of Genesis, Chapter 22, where God commanded Abraham to kill his son: “And Abraham raised both fists to the heavens, middle fingers extended, whence had come the voice of God, and screamed at the sky: ‘FU-UUUCK YOU! What kind of god would command a man to kill his own son? C’mon, Isaac. Let’s go home.’” I downloaded from the Web a photo of the belt buckle worn by Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII. It has an eagle perched on a swastika, and the by now well-known motto GOTT MIT UNS: GOD IS WITH US. Hitler’s soldiers, the perpetrators of the Siege of Leningrad, of Treblinka, of Sobibor, of Babii Yar, of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald – were praying to the same god our soldiers prayed to. The same God I prayed to, the night before I entered Tho An with “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. The same god about whose loyalties Steve McLaughlin and I had been so confused as we listened again and again to Joan Baez sing Bob Dylan’s song “With God on Our Side.”

     We need to look at how we look at things.

     Combat is specific. It is excruciatingly specific. But faith is nonspecific. The moment a bullet or an explosive device rends tissue and separates life from death in a young person is the moment when, in this so-common human event, the specific and the general diverge, and somebody dies. The bullet is not aware. It has no faith, is not directed or deflected by faith. It goes where it goes. The bullets that snapped past me on April 19th, 1966, did not know or care where they were going. I simply happened to be standing in a lucky, rather than unlucky, place. That’s all there is to it. But faith is general: “The Lord will protect us.” “God’s will be done.” “Masha’allah (God has willed it)”. “There is a divine purpose....” Or that most general of all: “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.” Well. Bullshit. All that means to this very lucky veteran is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, and we try to bridge the gap between reality and what we know of that reality with phrases that we cling to in desperate, willful ignorance, in the absence of knowing what we’re doing. It happens with 23-year-old individuals (and now, in some armies, with 8-year-olds), with squads, platoons, companies, nations, alliances... it is how humans have done business for these millenia. It is how history has been built.

 [1] Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.

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MAN AND RIFLE REACHING

Man and Rifle Reaching

     It was near the end of our three weeks at Camp Matthews, the rifle range. Our drill instructors had behaved like blacksmiths, sticking us and our M14 rifles into a fire until everything in every boy-man of us that did not have to do with rifle was burned away, then hammering what remained of each of us, together with his rifle, until a new, unified instrument was forged. This is pretty literal: in the sitting position, for example, the rifle's sling pulled the left elbow in toward the body's centerline in an attitude which muscles and tendons aren't really designed to adopt. After ankles were crossed in the dirt so that each knee was supported by the opposite booted foot, the spine had to curl forward until each elbow reached past the supporting knee.

     At the beginning, few of us could get even near this position. As Marine Corps drill instructors always had, ours simply kicked us into it: it was a boot to the back, a knee to the neck, a kick to the elbow, all amid a whirlwind of shouted curses and warnings that failure to get it right could result not only in the individual Marine's death, but in the deaths of his comrades as well. That was against regulations. In fact, it was the ultimate crime, not because the Marine Corps loved us, but because such a death would end that Marine's contribution to his unit's victory and because it would necessitate writing letters to our mothers, whose usefulness on the planet had ended once they had turned their sons over to the men who would temper all that softness out of us.     

     One of Gunny Rogers' favorite exercises was for the purpose of preparing the muscles of the right shoulder to hold the rifle steady in the offhand position. The M14 weighed over nine pounds unloaded, closer to eleven charged with a 20-round magazine, more yet with a bayonet fixed on the end. Accuracy could mean your life, or someone else's. Accuracy required holding the rifle steady. Holding the rifle steady required strong shoulder muscles. This was what Marines did.

     The exercise started by turning your body ninety degrees, so that your left shoulder, instead of your chest, pointed downrange. Then you put the rifle to your shoulder for the offhand position. They taught us a special way of doing this. First you brought the rifle up in front of your chest, with the muzzle pointed downrange. But instead of holding it in the normal firing position with the sights and top of the weapon pointed at the sky, you rotated the rifle ninety degrees away from your body so that the bolt handle pointed toward the ground, and the sights away from you. 

     Then you curled your head and chest out over the rifle, the way you would lean over to pick up a baby from a crib. This made a nice hollow at the base of the shoulder for the toe, or bottom, of the butt plate. With the rifle still flatways to the ground, you tucked the toe of the buttplate into that nice little pocket you'd made, snugged it in tight, then rolled your head and upper body and rifle upright all in one motion, at the same time rotating your right elbow clear up past the horizontal until it was nearly vertical. That put your upper arm in the most efficient biomechanical position for supporting the rifle's weight, with the right arm making a vertical triangle like a section of bridge truss, from the shoulder up to the elbow and back down to the hand at the rifle's grip. The left arm made a triangle supporting the rifle from below, with the left hand cradling the stock at its balance point. 

     The Gunny would have the whole platoon spread out with double spacing between the four squads and our rifles raised in this position, then order us to drop our left hands. He ranged in front of us, scowling and taunting those who wavered with the usual insults: pussies, girls, non-hackers, pukes. The contest was to see who was the last to lower his rifle. One time, I remember, that was me.

     So we lived Rifle. Not gun. Rifle. In boot camp, to call your rifle a gun was a sacrilege the penance for which was to stand in a place where the rest of your platoon could see you but the outside world could not, with your penis in one hand and your rifle in the other, reciting:

This is my rifle,

This is my gun.

This is for fighting,

This is for fun.

We cleaned our rifles and fired them and cleaned them again. We cleaned our rifles and did calisthenics with them and cleaned them again. We became rifles: the Marine Corps expression for grabbing a man by the shirt front and bracing him up against a wall was to "grab him by the stacking swivel," which is that little metal hook near the end of the forearm on many military rifles, used to engage three rifles with one another to form a freestanding tripod on a parade ground or bivouac area. 

     Each of us was forcefully laminated around his own rifle, like the blades of the Japanese katana swords that had been faced in their youth by some of those who were now training us. And, though all our rifles would have looked alike to an outsider's eye, each of us was so familiar with his own as to be able to recognize it from a few feet away as easily as one could pick out his own brother or sister on a playground full of kids. We caressed their walnut stocks with linseed oil, and scrubbed their machined steel parts with Hoppe's #9 solvent, then wiped that off and oiled them lightly. Then we snuggled our boys' cheeks and noses down alongside them again, to store forever in our synapses the remembered smells of linseed oil and Hoppe's #9 and burnt powder. 

     One day, as we were getting ready to go back to the firing line after noon chow, I stepped to the corner of our tent and reached for my rifle, which was leaning there. Something happened, a quick small thing which I will remember when I have forgotten most of the rest of my life. As I reached for the rifle, and my hand came near it, the rifle itself seemed to move, to tip itself out from the corner of the tent, taking a little hop into my hand as if it were impatient with the slowness of my reach. The rifle seemed to have had the same intentionality forged into it that had by then been forged into me, and was leaping from the corner of the tent, into my ready hand, in its eagerness to get back to work.   

TWO SERGEANTS

Sergeant Vance

     Sergeant Vance was a recruiting poster Marine, a redhead who wore his hair so short that what little was left blended with his skin, leaving the impression when he wore his Smokey the Bear drill instructor's hat that he had no hair at all. Can't get any neater than that.

     He had stood some serious sentry duty. One day he was instructing us on how Marines went about doing this. He told us of having a prestige assignment in Washington, DC, where he'd been posted at gates and doorways used by high - ranking government officials to attend important meetings. There was this high muckety-muck conference, he said. It was more important than usual, and it was even more important that no one but people with this certain pass be allowed to enter. Some would try, he was told. They might even be legitimate government officials. They might try to pull rank on you. But if they don't have this pass, you stop them, period.

     Vance was put on the gate because his appearance was always impeccable and because he could be counted on to follow orders and to not be intimidated by powerful people trying to go where they didn't belong. Sure enough, here came this long black limousine, with the driver in a black suit and tie, and a very authoritative-looking older gentleman in the back seat, dressed in a tuxedo. Sgt Vance thought he recognized him from news photos, but wasn't sure. He didn't spend a lot of time with newspapers.

     The driver stopped at Vance's guard shack and rolled down his window. Vance asked for the pass. The driver said he didn't have one, but it was okay because his passenger was Senator So-and-so, whom everybody knew. Vance told him he was sorry, sir, but his orders were not to allow anyone to enter without a pass. The senator rolled down his back window and spoke to Vance, saying he was in a hurry and indeed had a pass but had forgotten it and didn't have time to return for it, or he'd miss this very important meeting.

     Vance said, "Sorry, sir. No pass, no entry."

   The senator had had enough of having his authority usurped by a lowly Marine Sergeant. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to drive on through the gate.

  The driver barely had the limousine in gear when Vance's .45 service pistol was out of its holster, he'd jacked back the slide and chambered a round, and touched the pistol's muzzle lightly against the driver's temple.

     "You move this car one inch, and I'll kill you," he said softly.

     The driver and the Senator both turned pale. The limousine turned around and left. The senator squawked like hell, and tried to get Vance busted. His commanding officer said he'd done the right thing, and quietly transferred him to another unit.

     When Vance had finished his story, one of the recruits raised his hand. Vance nodded: "Yes, Private?"

     "Sir, would you have shot him, Sir?"

     Vance looked the kid in the eye, letting the tension in the Quonset hut build as if he were conscious of only that one recruit and not the other seventy of us who fretted around the edges of the seconds he waited to speak.

     "Yes," he said quietly, with a slight shrug. "And so will you, if those are your orders. The point, Privates, is this: nobody gets by a Marine sentry who's not supposed to."

Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon

     We were on the platoon street between the tents that were our billets at Camp Matthews, sitting on our upended buckets cleaning rifles. Each of us had a towel which had been designated part of our rifle cleaning gear spread out between his feet in front of the bucket. M14 rifle parts were laid out on the towels. Toothbrushes scraped blued steel. Hoppe's #9 solvent crowded other smells from the air.

     Gunny Rogers was supervising. He stood quietly, looking us over. Of our five drill instructors, he was the one who really took it upon himself to disabuse us of the romance so often tagged onto war stories, to forge us into warriors. One phrase we heard from him often was "Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die." That was what we were here for, he said. Kill or die. And since some of the people we'd be going up against were very good killers on their own, and wanted to stay alive at least as much as we did, we had to be better at killing than they were, or each of us - or, what would be worse, the comrades who depended on us - could die. And that would be against Marine Corps regulations. Sometimes he would paraphrase General Patton, who was the only Army general who was ever worth a shit, as far as Marines were concerned: Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make that other poor sonofabitch die for his country.

     "Listen up," Gunny said. Buckets and boots scraped; rifle bolts and operating rods clinked onto towels. Silence.

     He waited a long time to speak, looking up and down the rows of us, letting us look at him. That was his signal that what he was about to say was important, real Marine Corps "straight scoop" rather than "petty shit," and we had goddamned well better pay attention. He didn't raise his voice. Once in a while he would bellow, but more often he would let his medals and scars and combat record and personal charisma - the whole totemic package of his stature as a warrior among warriors - speak for him. At such times he would speak softly, and we would lean forward and scoop up his words like a dying man just arrived at a desert oasis scoops water, which was what he intended.

     It came as a question. "What is the most powerful weapon in the world?" he asked softly. It was repeated in urgent whispers to recruits at the ends of the formation who hadn't heard. Necks craned; glances danced.

     It was always better to avoid answering a question unless you were sure of the answer. These were the times when abuse and extra duty were handed out if you guessed wrong. But this was an easy one; the answer was obvious. A recruit raised his hand. "Yes, Private," the Gunny recognized him. The kid stood to attention. "Sir! The most powerful weapon in the world is the atomic bomb, sir!"

     Gunny waited another of his long pauses, paced slowly, shaking his Smokey the Bear campaign-hatted head in an expression that was intended to come across to us as a mixture of profound disappointment and disgust. How could they ever expect him to make Marines of such imbeciles, his body language said.

     He turned and faced us. His face would have made the four on Mount Rushmore look like a bunch of wimps: car salesmen, or the like.

     "B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t." The word rolled out like far-off thunder. We looked at each other in puzzlement. My mind flipped through everything I knew, looking for the answer he wanted. One of two guys in the platoon with some college behind me, I had actually read quite a few books. Aha, I thought. He must mean the hydrogen bomb. I was about to raise my hand when Gunny gave the correct answer, parsing out his words: "The most powerful... weapon...in the world...is a Marine...and his rifle."

     Pause.

     "Think about it. Carry on, Privates."

     Each of us, squatted there on his bucket, bore a look on his face of perfect astonishment. We looked at one another, whispered. "Gaww-awwd damn!" Delighted grins appeared as we went back to cleaning our rifles.

                    

Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story: OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983

Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story: OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983:   Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded t...

OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983

  Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded the Sandinista bureaucracy (efficiency was apparently not a revolutionary concept) into giving me written permission to travel and work as a journalist in areas near the Honduran border where contra ambushes had recently been taking place.

     Ocotal's central plaza was like many in Latin America. Broad paths connected adjacent and opposite corners to form an X-in-a-box. Blue-painted concrete benches sat, cool and quiet, at intervals along the pathways, in the shade of banana and palm trees. Children too young for school played around the benches on weekdays; adults gathered to sit in the shade and talk during the hot noons. The old Catholic church on one side of the square faced the municipal building on the other. A mural portrait of Che Guevara covered a large wall directly opposite the municipal building.

     Ocotal was the locus of a history I needed to touch. That history seemed embodied for me in a drinking fountain on one side of the square. It was a cairn of irregular stones and mortar seven or eight feet high, with the ceramic fountain and a bronze plaque set into the side facing the street. The plaque said that the fountain, and the potable water system of which it was the culmination, were a symbol of the cooperation between the peoples of Nicaragua and the United States. The ceramic fountain embedded in the stone cairn was long since broken; the plumbing which had once furnished water to it was also broken.

     The fountain had been erected during the reign of Anastasio Somoza García, the first of the Somoza clan of Nicaraguan dictators. He had risen to power through the Guardia Nacional, the anti-guerrilla army that had been trained and officered by U.S. Marines in the 1920's. The guerrillas, or "bandits," as the Marines called them, were the band of nationalist revolutionaries led by Augusto César Sandino, namesake of those in power when I was in Ocotal. One of the Marine officers who fought with the Guardia against Sandino was Chesty Puller, the greatest Marine hero they'd told us about in boot camp. Another officer, from an earlier intervention just prior to WWI, was Smedley Butler, one of two Marines ever to win two Medals of Honor.

     Somoza García, stepchild of those Marine heroes, had had Sandino assassinated, and once the Marines had left, turned the country into his fiefdom (“Nicaragua es mi finca” was a favorite expression) and the Guardia into his palace guard and counterinsurgency police. 

     The old Marine cuartel, or headquarters, was also facing the square, on the street at right angles to the one with the fountain and the mural of Che. The small original USMC plaque was still on the door in late 1983. 

     There was a major battle in Ocotal in 1929 between Sandino's men and the Marines, who were surrounded all night in the cuartel. The siege was broken by Marine aircraft from Managua, in what was apparently history's first use of the technique of dive-bombing.

     I looked up a fifty-seven-year old man named Joaquín Ponce, who had been a boy in the town at the time of the battle. I asked him to tell me what he remembered, and he told what he’d heard as a boy growing up, saying that the Marines were caught by surprise and trapped, and that only the bombing had saved them. He said that the bombing killed many people in the town; he didn't know exactly how many. 

     A heavy-set young woman was in the room with us, a militant Sandinista soldier who seemed to be a political watchdog sent to keep tabs on what was asked by, and said to, a foreign journalist. As I told Ponce about my own Marine history, including Vietnam, she became visibly furious. How could I have done that, and what was I doing here? 

     I explained to her and to Ponce that I now felt very differently than I had then, that I now thought that the Vietnam war was stupid and unjust, but that at the time I thought I was doing the right thing, and that I had been lied to about the situation there, and that in any case I'd been like so many other young men, thinking more with other parts of my body than with my brain. She bought none of that, and just sat there and glared at the ex-Marine who had dared crash the gate of her hard-won revolutionary world. 

     Ponce smiled a rueful, knowing smile: "Sí, Usted tuvo más corazón que cabeza;" literally, that I had more heart than head, but a fair translation of the phrase we'd used among ourselves in the Marine Corps, "more balls than brains."

     I was hanging around the corner in Ocotal where the local buses loaded and unloaded, asking if there was a bus to Teotecacinte, which is about a kilometer – a half hour’s walk - from the Honduran border. There were none. Someone said I could get as far as El Jícaro (which the Sandinistas had renamed Ciudad Sandino) or Jalapa. Someone else said I'd have better luck heading for El Espino or Las Manos, which are near a section of the border much closer to Ocotal than is Teotecacinte, but not as far north. I was puzzling over whether to take the path of easier access or to chance striking off in the direction of Teotecacinte, with less hope of getting there but, I thought, more to write about should I succeed. 

     An intense Nicaraguan man in his late twenties, who  reminded me of the actor Ricardo Montalban, approached. I'd noticed him scrutinizing me from the crowd. He asked where I wanted to go. I hesitated. Was he a cop? An agent? If so, for which side? And what did he want with me? 

     He wanted business. He had a jeep, he said. Doble tiro, four wheel drive. It ran good, he said. For fifty dollars, I could have him and the jeep for the whole day. He'd take me anywhere I wanted to go. Teotecacinte? I asked. His wince was visible. Why there? I'm a journalist, I said. I hear the contras have been crossing the border and raiding in that area. He nodded, winced again. Teotecacinte, okay. 

     His name was Alejandro Guillén. We drove around Ocotal while he bought fuel, said goodbye to his wife at their little house on one of Ocotal's dirt back streets, then to his girl friend on another street across town. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure, gave a tense shrug, and we headed northeast into the bright morning.

     As we drove north from Ocotal, I asked Alejandro if he’d seen any other North American journalists in the area. He reached into a cubbyhole in the dash, pulled out a new business card, and handed it to me, saying this guy had recently been through, and was his last customer. It was the card of Stephen Kinzer, of the New York Times.

     We passed ambush sites marked by white crosses and fresh flowers (it was shortly after November 2, Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, when Latinos honor deceased relatives). We drove through the village of San Fernando, where, Alejandro told me, Sandino had led a miners' strike in what turned out to be one of the early armed confrontations between Sandino and the government of Somoza García.

     In San Fernando we had to stop and visit the local comandante, who, when we entered the building where he held sway, had one boot up on a low stool, getting a shoe shine from a young boy. His manner with the boy, and with Alejandro and me, was that of someone who liked the fact that he had been given some authority, and was not averse to letting us know that. After making sure that his boots were shined to his liking and taking his sweet time signing my permission slip to continue up the road, he dismissed us.

     Alejandro didn't seem to have any particular love for either side in the war; he seemed mostly to want to be left alone to do business. He didn't mind telling stories against both sides. He asked the rhetorical question, Who are the new bourgeoisie? and answered it himself by saying that it was the Sandinista comandantes and their hangers-on, with their nice houses and cars and special privileges.

     And he told a story, which he said was well known among Nicaraguans, about the former dictator's son, who was named after his father and nicknamed "Tachito" by those who liked him, because his father had been known as "Tacho,” but was called "El Chigüín" behind his back. The nickname had some derogatory origin; when I asked about it I never got a better answer than a shrug and a contemptuous leer(

). "El Chigüín," the story went, returned after his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and assumed command of EEBI, the Guardia Nacional's Escuela de Entrenamiento Básico de la Infantería, or Basic Infantry Training School. More than a military training institution, EEBI was the Guardia's counterrevolutionary elite. If you called it a Soviet-style NKVD with US military training and weapons, you wouldn’t be far off.

     Guillén said that, while training his recruits in EEBI, Tachito Somoza had a little call-and-response shouting match to raise their fighting spirit:

     Somoza: What are you?

     Recruits: Tiger!

     Somoza: And what does the tiger drink?

     Recruits: Blood!

     Somoza: And where does it get this blood?

     Recruits: From the Nicaraguan people!

                         

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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