SKULLS OF TULIN BILA, + PERICO'S GARROTE

                    10. Skulls of Tulin Bila

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            

11. Perico's Garrote, and other stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     "It's a garrote," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     His look made it clear that that included me.

---

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

Lasa Tinghni>>>BORDER CROSSING

                         6. Lasa Tinghni

     At 11:35 that morning, the 24^th (the day after my 42^nd birthday, which was also my second wedding anniversary), our little convoy of Toyota pickups rolled into the Miskito and Sumo refugee camp at Lasa Tinghni, a few kilometers upstream from the TEA camp, and still not far from the bank of the Río Coco.

     I saw no morsel of food in that camp, not so much as a single kernel of rice or corn. The thatched huts had floors raised three or four feet above the ground, which keeps them above the mud during the rainy season, and allows air to circulate all around the dwellings during the hot dry season. They reminded me of Montagnard houses in the highlands of Vietnam, where I had helped patch up Tin and his Sedang comrades after he shot them near the Special Forces camp at Mangbuk sixteen years earlier. The bare earth that stretched under these Miskito huts looked as if it had been swept with a vacuum cleaner. A large wooden mortar and pestle for pounding grain into flour lay on its side in the hot noonday dust.

     A new group of refugees had just crossed the river from Nicaragua. They told –

some through MISURA fighters who would translate Miskito or Sumo into Spanish for

me to re‑translate, some directly to me in Spanish ‑ of being driven from their homes

by Sandinista soldiers, or by fear of the war's increased incursions into their lives. These

stories were not canned: facial expressions and body language were obviously

unrehearsed. Desperation was palpable. Women, dressed in trail‑weary clothing that

was already becoming rags, crowded around us, pleading with their eyes, even more than with their voices, for help. A few had a little Nicaraguan money. They were in

Honduras without benefit of any immigration process; they had crossed the border –

the Río Coco – in dugout canoes. They had no way of dealing with any sort of

paperwork. We had been told to leave all our money in camp. I had disobeyed, so

started to change what Nicaraguan currency they had. Finally, the four Indians and I

just gave them the Honduran lempiras we carried in our pockets.

     I got busy taking photographs: a young boy and girl sitting in the dirt under a hut's raised floor, only occasionally trying to brush the flies from the open sores on their faces. The flies had more energy than the children. There was an old man, his pants and shirt filthy and in shreds, holding a listless infant; an emaciated dog, soft brown eyes bulging from taut skin, too weak to plead for food, waiting to die; a teenage boy in a Houston Astros T‑shirt; a striking‑looking young Miskito mother, one child on her hip and another clinging to her filthy skirt, wearing an old T‑shirt with the Playboy Bunny emblem on the front. (Apparently CMA had organized, or cooperated with, some church‑based relief organizations in the southern United States to collect clothing and transport it down to the people in these camps.)

     The four North American Indians in our group were visibly stricken. The hour or two we spent in Lasa Tinghni was the first of several times that week when I would see this change in them: a visible identification with other Indians and with their suffering, a too‑easily tapped reservoir of blood memory, of being hounded and starved and killed by agents of the white man's government. It affected Gary, Larry, Bill, and Mike physically: some circulatory change would visibly alter the skin color in their faces. I have a photo, which I think is one of the best I've ever taken, of Larry Pino holding a Miskito or Sumo infant at Lasa Tinghni, holding the child close to his chest and nestling its head next to his chin, bending his own head down, his own eyes staring deep within himself, remembering stories of his own people.

     "Just like what happened to us," one of them murmured.

     I noticed something else while we were in that camp ‑ this not about Indians, but about men who carry guns. As I moved slowly about with my camera, I was pained at what I was seeing through the lens but relieved that, for once, my subjects were too preoccupied with their own survival to be offended by being photographed. Like most Vietnam veterans, I have a perpetual itch between my shoulder blades. In any public place, I am always looking about, wanting to know who is present, what sort of force fields or psychic disturbances they emanate, what sort of trouble might come from what quarter. And especially, who is carrying what weapons, and what they're doing, or intend to do, with them.

     This habit caused me, even while moving in the emotional whirlwind of photographing the refugees, to lift my gaze above the immediate scene, to probe the edge of the forest at the camp's boundaries, to look at everything I saw through another lens in addition to the one that studied human suffering: this one calibrated to ask Where are the weapons? What's the current disposition of those who are carrying them? Is anyone there in the brush beyond this circle of suffering?

     At Lasa Tinghni, every time I changed my way of looking in this manner, no matter how subtle I tried to be about it, I would look out above everyone else and immediately meet the eyes of Flaco, Shooter, and Perico staring back at me. I realized that their focus was much greater on the military aspects of the scene than on the humanitarian aspects. I also realized that they considered cameras to be weapons, and mine particulary so. (We had been warned early and repeatedly not to photograph any of the three "security men;" I considered it another of my most important tasks, besides getting the tape of Larry Pino talking about US soldiers parachuting into Nicaragua back home intact, to somehow sneak photos of Stewart and the three mercenaries. I would succeed at three out of four.)

                         7. Red Chief, White Chief

     We were back at the TEA camp in early afternoon. My notebook has this 2:44 pm entry: "Gary Fife just came by from the creek: 'Somebody just hung out the Stars and Bars.'" I looked out from under the rolled‑up tent flap. A large Confederate flag was draped on the front of the mercenaries' tent. Gary "says he's descended from Stand Watie, a Cherokee who was the last Confederate general to surrender."

     Then Gary began to tell a story he'd heard from his people ‑ I believe it was from the Cherokee side ‑ about how the decision was made to go to war. He said he wasn't sure about the details, but that the tribe had two chiefs, a Red Chief and a White Chief. The Red Chief was the war chief, whose job was strictly military: once the tribe decided to go to war, he was supposed to make decisions that would bring success, and to lead the warriors in battle. But, precisely because of his fighting ability and experience, he was never allowed to make the decision about whether to go to war. That decision was made by the White Chief, in conjunction with the tribal council. The White Chief would often be a woman. It was her job to be the guardian of life, and to never let the warriors' enthusiasm for fighting get them into a situation which brought more death than life to the tribal community. I thought it was the most sensible political idea I’d ever heard.

                           8. In Camp

     I asked Maco how he'd gotten his name. He said that when his great‑grandmother was pregnant with his grandfather, two spinster aunts had come to his great‑grandfather and insisted that the baby be named after them, since neither would ever have any children. The patriarch had said that would be fine if the baby were a girl, but how could he name a boy after two women? They insisted, and the baby was a boy, so two letters each were taken from "Mary" and "Cora," and Maco Stewart I had a name. Our host was Maco Stewart III; his grandson is Roman numeral V.

     About 3:00 pm, Shooter invited us over to their tent. Flaco was handing out rank insignia, and indoctrinating the Indian officers about the responsibilities of their respective ranks. Alejo Teofilo translated into Miskito. The insignia were those used by US military officers: Comandante Raúl was given the silver leaf of a lieutenant colonel, and made "Second Comandante." Hilton Fagoth, brother of Steadman Fagoth, the elected MISURA leader who had been expelled from the country by the Honduran government a few weeks before, also got the silver leaf, and was put in charge of supply, which made him junior to Raúl. (I later asked Flaco why he hadn't made Fagoth senior, since he was Steadman's brother. Flaco replied that Hilton was a wimp. The next morning, Flaco wore on his camouflage cap the silver bird of full colonel. He was First Comandante, the military commander of the MISURA warriors. I don’t know how long that arrangement lasted.)

    Then it was trinket time. Teofilo, who I think was made a major, got some of the best stuff: a new fighting knife, a new mess kit with skillet, plate, pot, and green plastic cup. The others removed their hats, one at a time, and ducked their heads to enter the tent. It made it look like they were bowing. I knew it was just because the doorway was lower than their heads; still, it made me wince because of what was going on. The Indians emerged with their hats half full of cheap red and silver flashlights, batteries, brushes for cleaning weapons, pocket knives. Some Miskito boys hung around the wall of the tent looking at a weapons magazine. Flaco was entertaining the troops. "Dos años in Vietnam," he said, pointing to his chest, then made a motion like boys do at play to imitate the firing of a submachine gun on full automatic: "Kill many gooks." There was a little polite laughter. I wondered whether the Indians identified more with Flaco, or with the "gooks" he supposedly had killed. (I learned later, from Flaco himself, that he'd never been in Vietnam.)

     That evening one of the pickups returned from the little store at Rus Rus with scarred old 355 milliliter bottles of Coca‑Cola, some "Tropical" orange soda and some cellophane ‑ wrapped cookies from San Pedro Sula. That was our dinner.

     Another outboard motor had been found; we would cross the Río Coco into Nicaragua tomorrow. As dusk turned to dark and someone started the generator to light the bulbs in our tents, Shooter came over and demanded our identification. All of it: passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, everything with our names on it. He said something which I already knew about covert operations, which was that it is standard practice during “black ops,” including illegal border crossings like tomorrow’s, to "go in sterile," to preserve deniability in case anyone falls into the hands of the other side. Dead or alive. He assured us there was very little chance of that happening... but just in case.

     I asked Shooter what this kind of soldiering was like, as opposed to the more normal kind we had both known in the Marine Corps. He shrugged: "Somebody comes from Washington and says, 'Do it, and don't get caught.'"

                       9. Border Crossing

     The next day was overcast with dark clouds. It rained on and off all day, ranging from drizzle to moderate. It took about two hours of violent jouncing in the Toyotas to get upstream to the refugee village of Awas Bila, where our canoe was waiting. Unlike Lasa Tinghni, Awas Bila was populated by people who had been on the north side of the river long enough to become somewhat established. It was obvious from looking at them and their animals that at least some minimal nourishment was available to them, and that life there had settled into a routine. This time Honduran soldiers followed us about. They were very pushy about stopping us from taking photos of more than two or three refugees at a time. Just by reading their behavior, I could see that their orders were to prevent outsiders from gathering evidence of either significant refugee populations, or anything suggesting that military raids against Nicaragua were being staged from their side of the river. That was a change from when we’d first arrived.

     It was after 10:00am when we walked down to the riverbank and climbed aboard a long dugout canoe with a squared transom on which was mounted a small, but working, outboard motor. There were a little over twenty of us: Maco Stewart, Moses Fiske, Flaco, Shooter, Perico, Gary Fife, Larry Pino, Mike Hunt, and Bill Pensoneau; plus about a dozen MISURA warriors. Hilton Fagoth stood in the bow with a long pole and sounded for obstructions in the shallow channel. Neither Stewart nor Fiske, so far as I could see, was armed. Flaco carried a short‑barreled autoloading shotgun and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Perico had a similar pistol ‑ I believe he had borrowed Shooter's ‑ and an M16 automatic rifle. Shooter carried his Uzi submachine gun with extra magazines. Mike Hunt, the only tribal representative to accept the offer of a weapon (I had declined), had been given an M16 to carry; he had a magazine loaded into it. Each MISURA fighter was armed with either an M16 or an AK47.

     We spent most of the day on the river, letting the current carry us downstream, using the small motor for steerage as much as propulsion. To keep the canoe from tipping, we had to distribute ourselves evenly along the two sides, which meant that those seated on the starboard side had their backs toward the Nicaraguan bank, toward danger. Those on the port side had to keep their weapons pointed up, or leaned across the opposite gunwale between passengers. Perico was seethingly alive, just sitting there. His weapon was always ready, its action shielded from the rain but its muzzle pointed in the direction of his communist enemies. I had the strong feeling that, beyond wanting to fulfill his professional responsibility to provide military security for our excursion, he really hoped for a fight, for the chance to kill anyone ideologically connected with the hated people who had stolen his Cuba.

     I seated myself next to Perico, figuring that if anything happened which was very important to photograph, he'd be in the middle of it. I also kept an eye out for a chance to snap shots of him and the other "players" at work. Before the day was out, I managed to get recognizeable facial shots of Shooter and Stewart and Fiske (who didn't care whether he was photographed or not). And Flaco, though he always managed to have his back to my camera or to duck behind his hat brim just as I snapped, is recognizable to anyone who knows him.

     But never Perico. As alert as he was for Sandinistas on the Nicaraguan riverbank, he seemed to regard my camera as no less an enemy. I finally just asked him if I could lower my camera and aim it out along his M16, showing it and his arm against the background of the far shore. He let me. But no matter how intently he'd be looking at the bank, every time I began moving the camera in his direction, he would either have his face hidden before I could focus, or turn and fix me with a look of such unfiltered menace that I got the point and swung it back away.

     Sometime during the morning, we passed the mouth of a fairly large tributary flowing into the Coco from the Nicaraguan side. As we passed, Mario Córdoba told me it was the Río Sang Sang, and that it came down from the country where were located the three major gold mines of which Alejo Teofilo had spoken the day before.

     At 12:30 we beached the canoe at the mouth of a creek on the Honduran side, and took time for lunch. I washed my plate near two Miskitos; Mario Córdoba was singing in Spanish, "...he perdido un gran amor...." ("... I have lost a great love...."). The other, younger, Miskito sang a Moravian([1]) hymn in his own language.

     It wasn't much farther downstream after lunch that we pulled into shore on the Nicaraguan side. All the MISURA men (and boys: several were teenagers) aboard knew that we were approaching what was for them a regular crossing point. Rifles were checked yet again; people who had alternated sweeping looks at the Nicaraguan shore with conversation among themselves now turned their complete attention toward it.

     We nosed into a small brushy cove where a trail led up the steep bank. Everyone stood up as those in the bow of the canoe jumped ashore and spread out in the brush. It may have been, as we had been told, quite unlikely that we would encounter any Sandinista military presence. But the electric jolt that ran through everyone in the canoe told me that the people who lived here and had made this crossing before still considered it possible.

     I was near the stern of the canoe. I stood up just as the bow went aground, braced myself, and snapped a photo that caught most of the people in the canoe just as the first Indians jumped ashore. Shooter is clearly visible in the photo.

     We climbed the steep, muddy trail. Shooter, walking behind me, said, "Welcome to Nicaragua." Stewart and Fiske lagged behind, and were winded when they came up to where we were waiting at the top. We walked along an overgrown trail not far from the riverbank, and not over a quarter mile along it, until we came to an abandoned village of crude but comfortable‑looking wood frame houses. Several had anti‑contra slogans written on the walls. I've lost track of the town's name. I remember some of the houses having been painted in fuschia and turquoise green, colors which are seen a lot in Central America. Some of the houses had been burned to the ground. Raúl Tobías told us it was an Indian town, and that the Sandinistas had burned some of the houses and forced the people to leave, sometime in 1981 or 1982, about the time the new Reagan Administration began heating up the contra war. 

     When it had started to rain, the mercenaries had broken out several translucent, very civilian‑looking rain slickers and put them on. These made a visual mockery of their camouflage fatigues, and sounded like a battalion of old ladies on a rainy‑day shopping spree as they walked through the brush. Gary Fife carried a large, bright orange backpack. I gave up trying to guess if this were a real or pretend military mission.

     We returned to the canoe, convinced that the little town we'd seen had indeed been an Indian village, and that the Sandinista military had been primarily responsible for emptying it out and destroying some of the buildings. The larger responsibility, of course, lay with the war itself.

---

[1] Moravian Baptist missionaries had evangelized among the Miskito beginning in 1849, and it stuck. At the Moravian Church American headquarters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, archives still exist of this history.

In the CONTRA camp, + THE TAPE

                  4. Rus Rus    

     The aircraft was a silver, twin engine C‑47 "gooney bird," the workhorse twin-engine aircraft which had been hauling cargo and passengers since before WWII. The plane belonged to Setco Air, a company which was said by the Sandinistas to be a CIA proprietary in the tradition of Air America, the so‑called "civilian airline" which had been wholly owned by the CIA and had done so much of its hauling ‑ and some of its fighting ‑ in Southeast Asia. Christopher Robbins wrote in his 1979 book Air America that at one time that airline was the largest in the world.     

     I was never able to nail down the precise pedigree of Setco Air. Flaco would only say that the company was "very, very cooperative... they try in their own way to help with what we're trying to do."

     The plane was loaded with several large, heavy sacks. Stewart said they contained a thousand pounds of rice and beans which he was donating to the Indians at Rus Rus. Most of the Indians there were Miskito; some were Sumo. (The anti‑Sandinista military organization there, MISURA, took its name from the first two letters of the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama tribes. The Rama lived farther down the Nicaraguan coast.)

     Flaco and I talked as we flew. He had called Shooter and Perico over to see if they remembered what UNIR meant. (It was being floated as a new name for the contra umbrella organization.) They didn't, but both stopped to chat. My notebook has this quote from Shooter: "You can call it UNIR, FDN, whatever the fuck you want. But if I don't get to kill communists, I'm out." This was the kind of blunt honesty that journalists later came to value him for. He was unapologetic about what he did for a living, thoroughly enjoyed it, and didn't much give a shit who knew about it, except for the kind of information that might shut down the operation.         

     Perico didn't have much to say. I asked him how he chose his nombre de guerra, which I knew as a common name for small parrots in Central America. He said it was the name of the village he'd come from in Cuba. I didn't learn until later that "perico" was a Latin American slang term for cocaine.

     Flaco said that UNIR included the major contra organization, the FDN, as well as MISURA and ARDE, or Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática, the organization headed by the charismatic former Sandinista guerrilla hero, Edén Pastora. (“Arde” is also the third person singular of the Spanish verb “to burn,” while “unir” is the infinitive “to unite.”) Pastora had electrified the world in 1978 when he led an astonishing raid on the National Palace, right in downtown Managua, capturing so many influential hostages that he was able to demand a sizeable ransom, an exchange of the hostages for Sandinista prisoners held in Somoza's jails, and get away clean. But following their revolution's triumph in July of 1979, Pastora had become disenchanted with the comandantes'  increasingly leftist policies and ties with the Soviet bloc. His critics would claim that his objections grew more out of having his nose bent by not being given a position in the new government appropriate to his heroic status as "Comandante Zero," Commander Zero.

     In any case, Pastora had broken off with the Sandinistas in Managua, calling himself and his band the only true followers of Sandino, formed ARDE, and began conducting guerrilla raids out of Costa Rican sanctuaries, and southern Nicaraguan hideouts, against Sandinista government forces. He managed to cause serious discomfort to the Sandinista leaders, though his small units were not as serious a military threat as the FDN operating out of Honduras. Managua was forced to allocate scarce resources along its southern border to deal with Pastora, a tiny version of the problem faced by Hitler in WWII when he tried to add the Soviet Union to his list of conquests, resulting in his having to fight a war on two fronts.

     For the CIA, Pastora was a pain in the ass. They liked the idea of harassing the Sandinistas from two directions; what they didn't like was not being able to control Pastora. For Pastora's part, he needed recognition, arms, and money from the interna-tional community; but not, he claimed, at the price of the independence of his movement. He insisted that alignment with the two elephants playing Cold War politics with their country was what was hurting Nicaraguans most.

     As Flaco spoke with me on that C‑47 from Tegucigalpa to Rus Rus, he was particularly animated about the issue of Pastora. His manner seemed to indicate that a decision was then being made about how to deal with Pastora, and that some sort of showdown was imminent. Months later, I would have cause to regret not having taken more notes during that part of our conversation aboard the plane. In my notebook, I have two direct quotes from Flaco regarding Pastora. One is "They've made a dozen attempts, and he just don't cooperate." "They" was understood, in the context of our conversation, to mean some unspecified people calling the shots in Washington regarding Central America.               

     The other direct quote regarding Pastora from Flaco's comments on the plane is that the unspecified situation then playing itself out between Pastora and whoever "they" were in Washington constituted "Pastora's last chance." Terrell repeated those words, or others to that effect, several times during the week. Adams would make similar comments. All this took place, of course, only a few months after the attempt to assassinate Pastora with a bomb at a press conference on May 30 of the previous year at La Penca, in southern Nicaragua. Besides injuring Pastora and some of his guerillas, that bomb had killed three journalists and wounded more than a dozen others.

     The C‑47 banked steeply; I looked down the wing at a small cluster of wood‑framed, metal‑roofed buildings beside a red dirt road, and had a startling flashback of flying into the Special Forces camp at Mangbuk, in the Vietnamese highlands, over sixteen years before. Someone said it was the village at Rus Rus. At 11:03, less than five minutes later, we touched down on a straight stretch of the red dirt road a few miles away. "Suave," someone said: soft landing.

     We climbed out and piled our gear off to the side of the road. We were immediately approached by a patrol of 3 or 4 Honduran soldiers, but they seemed neither surprised nor alarmed by our presence. I made a questioning motion with my camera, and one soldier stood obligingly at attention alongside the C‑47 while I took his picture. He seemed unconcerned that he was giving me photographic evidence of his government's knowledge of activities taking place on its soil which it claimed were not.

     The area was a grassy savannah, flat to gently rolling, sprinkled with sparse young pine trees. We sat on our duffel for nearly three hours waiting for a vehicle ‑ our circling over Rus Rus had been the signal for them to start toward us. We brushed aside cartridge casings (M16, AK47, and .308, which is the civilian equivalent of the 7.62mm NATO round used in the M14 rifle and M60 machine gun), stetched out, napped, talked, took pictures of one another. Maco Stewart was perched on his duffel bag reading Robert Heinlein.

     Larry Pino was saying he remembered stories of his people, generations earlier, taking journeys as long as ten years to this part of the country in search of parrot feathers. I heard Shooter talking with a couple of the Indians, saying "I love it down here. There's no law..." except the gun, or except strength: something like that. Flaco told us we were only a few kilometers from the Nicaraguan border.

     We were driven to a camp where we were directed to a large olive drab tent and told to claim a cot. I looked the place over and immediately grabbed a cot nearest one of the two tent openings.

     "You got a thing about doorways too, huh?" It was Shooter, dropping his gear onto the other cot near the opening. We began to chat, discovering that we were both ex‑Marines and Vietnam vets. He said he'd been there for a short time in the early 1970's. As we talked, he picked up an expensive‑looking black and chrome briefcase, set it on top of his gear, and snapped it open. Inside, in its custom‑fitted velvet nest, was an Israeli‑made 9mm Uzi submachine gun, along with a folding stock and two long magazines. He took it out, snapped the heavy wire stock into place, slid a magazine into the receiver, slapped it home, and pulled back the bolt, chambering a round. He did all this with the easy dexterity of an experienced secretary dialing a touch‑tone phone. He also took from his duffel bag a pistol belt with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in a black nylon holster with a Velcro flap. He loaded the pistol and strapped it on. Good system, he explained: two weapons firing the same cartridge. Easy resupply.

     Before we'd settled in, it was decided that we shouldn't stay there after all. Back in the pickup, back on the red dirt road. We came to another, larger camp comprised only of tents, save one tiny pole structure with a barred door which had obviously been a jail cell. This was one of several such camps slightly removed from the Rus Rus river, but generally referred to by its name. The Indians thereabouts pronounced the name "Roos' Roos'," with a softly rolled initial r and a sibilant, near ‑ "sh" sound at the end. I took it to be an onomatopoetic mimicry of the sound of the river flowing.

     The camp was unoccupied when we arrived. On the way in we passed a small sign that read HOGAR DEL TEA (HOME OF TEA). I remembered reading an article in Soldier of Fortune magazine about Tropas Especiales Atlánticas, which the article had said was MISURA'S version of Special Forces.

     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.

     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. There 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 some 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 had some base 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 putt 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.

                           5. The Tape

     We spent a good part of that week riding in the back of Toyota pickups with teenage Miskito and Sumo warriors armed with AK47 and M16 automatic rifles. They climbed in and out of the trucks with no regard as to where their rifle muzzles were pointing. By the end of the week I'd looked down so many rifle barrels that I began to have the physical impression my torso was perforated, that breezes were passing between my ribs, that I was breathing in and out directly through my chest. Meeting young Miskito and Sumo Indians who'd been wounded in combat, and showed us their scars, intensified that feeling.

     One of the Miskito we rode with in the back of a pickup was Alejo Teofilo Barbera. He was older than most of his fellow warriors; I'd say in his mid‑30's. He was from Puerto Cabezas, the Nicaraguan Caribbean port I'd flown out to in late 1983 to interview people after a contra raid, possibly conducted by some MISURA warriors in a speedboat supplied by the CIA, had damaged a freighter docked there and injured a few people.

     Teofilo said that he'd been fighting against forces of the government in Managua since 1973, which meant that he had fought first against the Guardia Nacional, then since 1979 against the Sandinistas. He echoed a common Indian complaint: that "los españoles," the Spaniards, as they called the European‑derived culture and political structure in the nation's capital, mostly ignored the indigenous people who lived in their country; and when they did pay some attention, that attention was typically racist and exploitative. He gave examples: there were three major gold mines, he said, in what was traditionally Miskito territory: Bonanza, Rosita, and La Luz. "The Sandinistas promised that 80% of what richness come from Indian lands would be for Indians; 20% for the government. But it is not like that." Teofilo was speaking in broken but clear English, unlike most of his comrades, who spoke mainly their own languages and Spanish.

     I took notes as we bounced along in the truck. My notebook still has mud splotches in it, and the writing makes it clear when we were moving and when we weren't. Most of this information came from Teofilo as he was conversing with Larry Pino. I was seated on my pack at arm's length from the two of them.

     After the talk of the gold mines and the broken promises and the Indian elections, their conversation took a shift, and they began to compare older Indian stories. They weren't exactly current news, but they were interesting, and things I hadn't heard before. And it was becoming harder to take notes, with the jouncing of the vehicle. I turned on my tape recorder and set it between Larry and Teofilo. Both noticed it, and didn't seem to mind. They continued with their stories.

     Suddenly Larry remembered something he'd wanted to ask Teofilo about. Following is an unedited transcript of the next portion of my tape:

DM: Larry was asking Teofilo if their people came down from the north as well. He [Teofilo] said yes. That's when I turned the machine on.

(Saying the above, I stepped on the first part of Larry's next sentence, when he'd said something about white men, or about Columbus):

LP: ...discovered the Indians. Bullshit.

TEOFILO laughs.

DM: Teofilo, what was the name of the reverend who knows all your history in Tegoosh [Tegucigalpa]?

TEOFILO: Molling Stellet (phonetic).

DM: Molling Stellet?

TEOFILO: Mm‑hmmm.

DM: How do... how does a person find him?

[A few words where LP, TEOFILO, DM all speak at once.]

LP: Miskito office.

TEOFILO: MISURA office.

LP: Oh, MISURA office.

TEOFILO: ...there's ... other reverend, Silvio Díaz. Him too.

LP: Did you hear a story about two months ago, about American paratroopers coming here, landing seven miles into Nicaragua? Have you heard that story?

TEOFILO [guardedly eyes red light on my tape recorder]: Yeah.

LP: 'Cause one of my cousins was in there.

TEOFILO: Oh yeah?

LP: He parachuted into Nicaragua. He didn't tell me anything 'cause it was top secret, he said. The government won't let him talk about it.

TEOFILO: Top secret?

LP: Yeah.

TEOFILO: Top secret. Only for them. [laughs]

LP: He says, 'Just know I was there. And don't ask me no more questions, 'cause I'm gonna have to tell you to shut up.'

TEOFILO: Mmmm. [laughs]

GARY FIFE: You can tell him you were there too, and you can ask anything you want....

[DM laughs.]

[Here GF and LP both speak at once: GF says "...providing we have a propeller tomorrow.' as LP says something about "...rangers....' The propeller remark refers to the broken shear pin which had stopped us from crossing the Coco earlier the morning of this conversation.]

     At that point the conversation shifted to something else. Larry Pino hadn't seemed to realize the newsworthiness, or political significance, of what he'd said, or the fact that he'd spoken directly into a tape recorder with its red on light clearly visible. Or his nonchalance might be explained by the fact that he was a Native American, that he had a certain built‑in disdain for the political shenanigans of the white men's nation, the United States; it was clear that mainstream journalists were included in that disdain.

     Alejo Teofilo Barbera was different. I could tell by his body language that he immediately knew the ramifications of what was being said, and particularly that a U.S. journalist was listening in. And, most particularly, that the red light on my tape recorder was glowing. His first reaction when Larry mentioned the paratroopers was to look down at the red light. Teofilo had already demonstrated his political savvy in his long discourse about Miskito troubles and alliances. He would obviously know about the Boland Amendment, and, whatever he might privately think of the ongoing tug of war between Congress and the Reagan Administration over Central America policy, he would realize that if what Larry said were true (and he seemed to be admitting that it was), and if it were proven and published in the mainstream US media, the whole Central America equation might be changed, likely in the direction of even less aid getting to his people to fight the Sandinistas.     

     I couldn't believe my luck. I fervently hoped that the recorder was working properly (it was), and that the growling of the truck's engine hadn't drowned out the critical parts of the conversation (it had not). I resolved that, no matter what else happened, my most important task now was to get that tape back home in good condition. 

     Over the following six years, I would spend hundreds of hours of unpaid time, at least four thousand dollars of my own money in travel expenses and long‑distance phone bills, and travel something like eighteen thousand miles (about a third  of that in my pickup), chasing that story. I started out using my status as correspondent for Pacific News Service([1]); then, from the summer of 1987 through the Spring of 1991, I worked on a Special Correspondent's credential with Doyle McManus of the Washington, DC bureau of the Los Angeles Times. 

---

[1] PNS was an independent international news service based in San Francisco. Sandy Close was Executive Editor, a tough-minded ex-Southeast Asia hand, and my boss. After I made several trips to Central America with her credential, she was awarded a Macarthur “Genius” grant for her work at PNS.

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.")