BUT THESE KISSES... poem by Dean Metcalf

Sometimes even I get weary of so many of my words being about fighting and dying and human folly. 

Here's a poem of mine: http://rattlesnakedreams.blogspot.com/
BUT THESE KISSES... by Dean Metcalf


But these kisses. . .

These kisses don’t sprint:
they slow jog the steep switchbacks
carved in cliff walls
by hooves of mountain goats
in the canyon
east of town.

These kisses swim pollywoggy
in dark underwater grottoes,
rub their backs on
cool blue stone.

These marmot kisses furryscurry home
to our sun-heated crack
in this granite rock.

These kisses sweat in the dark
like a nightshift coal miner
who wants to see his children
before they leave for school.

The other night one kiss fell asleep
and woke up under a taco stand
in East Los Angeles.

I’ve kissed before, been kissed before
but these kisses gambol out along the savannah
where we find lions
and lions
find us.


© Dean Metcalf
1/15-2/6/2004

GUATEMALA - LA VIOLENCIA + DREAM

From the chapter “Guatemala: La Violencia”

Our idea was to use Roger’s contacts and familiarity with the country to introduce me to people who had stories to tell about the history of systematic killing and repression, particularly under General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Roman Catholic-cum-Evangelical minister-cum de facto President and trusted friend of, and recipient of military aid and public praise from, U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Roger had friends in San Cristobal de las Casas, a lovely Mexican town in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. We stayed there for a couple of days, then went off the beaten path to a smaller town – I think it was Las Margaritas - nearer the border, and eventually to a small cluster of thatched makeshift homes of Guatemalan Mayan refugees who had managed to escape across the border during la violencia.

Roger now asked in the refugee camp for a specific Mayan man, by name. After a few minutes’ wait, a man appeared and approached us cautiously. Roger introduced us and we sat on stools in one of the huts.

He had a photo, several years old, of himself with a Guatemalan Mayan man. By itself, it meant nothing. But both men were readily identifiable, and Roger’s friend, the other man in the photo, had written a note about Roger on the back, and signed it. Roger handed the photo to this man, and sat quietly. The man looked at the photo for a long time. Then he turned it over and read the note on the back for a long time. Then he turned it back over and looked at the picture, again, for a long time. Then he looked up at Roger. His nod was the acknowledgement: I see that you are a friend of someone I trust. His face was now a question: what do you want?

Roger introduced me again, this time into a human situation that was categorically different from what it had been a few minutes before. He said that I could be trusted. He said I was a writer, a journalist who could get stories published about things that had happened in Indian towns in Guatemala. I could be trusted to name no names, to tell no details, that would endanger the life of the teller of a story, but that I could still tell the story to people in the United States, the same people who elected the presidents who were instrumental in giving military aid to Guatemala. The rest went unsaid; didn’t need to be said. It would have been like telling an Iowa farmer that too much rain at the wrong time might damage his corn crop.

The man was quiet. His head was bowed. He was sad. His sadness filled the hut. His sadness made us quiet, made us parishioners in the church of his sadness. He took a deep breath, let it out, spoke:

The soldiers came to our village. They gathered the young men who were there at the time. They tied their hands behind. They lined them up in front of the rest of us, their families. They painted them, their hair, their faces, all over, with gasoline.

Then they lit them...

Some of them we could only identify by their belt buckles....

I have seen – we all have seen, those of us who have been so lucky as to have a few decades of life behind us – a number of American presidents, speaking with utmost sincerity, on national television, appealing to us to believe their explanations of things, of what was happening to all of us, of what must be done in the face of these events.

I have never seen, on the face of any one of those presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - anything that made me believe he was telling the truth as that Mayan man in an unofficial refugee camp near the Guatemalan border made me believe that he was telling the truth.

Dream: Bodies of Water

I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, rifles ready, up and downstream. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a dark haired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another dark-haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark haired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creek banks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creek banks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?  

RUS RUS 4: LASA TINGHNI

1. 7. 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 retranslate, 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 trailweary 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 North American 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? and if so, what are they doing, and what do they intend to do?

     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 particularly 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.)

GUNNY ROGERS: THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON

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. 

RUS RUS (PART 3)

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 mid30'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 [of the dictator Anastasio Somoza], 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: Mmhmmm.

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.

!![NOTE]!!


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? [THE "COUSIN" OF WHOM LARRY PINO SPEAKS HERE WAS ACTUALLY AN APACHE  FRIEND WHO WAS A MEMBER OF A US ARMY RANGER BATTALION.]

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(); 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.  

RUS RUS (PART 2)

     THIS POST BEGINS WHERE THE LAST ONE LEFT OFF, WITH A LITTLE OVERLAP FOR CONTINUITY. MACO STEWART WAS THE TEXAS OIL MAN WHO PAID FOR THE TRIP. HIS ASSOCIATE, MOSES FISKE, WAS ALONG AS A MOVIE CAMERAMAN. THE THREE "SECURITY" MEN, KNOWN AS "COLONEL FLACO," SHOOTER, AND "PERICO," WERE EITHER PAID BY STEWART, OR UNDER ORDERS FROM SOMEONE IN THE REAGAN GOVERNMENT, OR BOTH. BY THE END OF OUR EIGHT DAYS WITH THEM, I SUSPECTED BOTH. IN THESE STORIES, I SIMPLY CALL THEM "MERCENARIES."
   
     Fiske, Stewart, the four Indians and I  were given a military surplus pyramidal tent with canvas army cots. The three mercenaries moved into a nearby tent with steel-springed bunks. They all changed into camouflage fatigues, and all were now armed. Shooter had his Uzi and pistol, Flaco had a similar pistol, and Perico carried an M16 rifle.

     [The four North American Indians were Gary Fife, a Cherokee/Creek journalist; Mike Hunt, representing the Survival of American Indians Association; Larry Pino, of Zia Pueblo; and Bill Pensoneau, a Ponca. Though not an Indian, I was accredited to represent the Tachi people from near Fresno, California. I learned years after this trip that my great grandmother was a half Cherokee woman named Gatsie Helen Widders. The Tachi people accredited me on the recommendation of my friend Chris DiMaio, a Vietnam vet who is part Cheyenne.]
       
     Stewart immediately grabbed an entrenching tool, went outside the tent, and began energetically digging at the hard, rocky ground. He said that he had been in the Marine Corps – late in the Korean War, I believe – and was digging himself a fighting hole, just in case. Several Miskito Indians gathered around and looked on with bemused expressions. We came outside the tent to watch. Shooter walked up and stood with folded arms. He turned and said to me in a stage whisper, "This is better'n TV. They never saw a millionaire dig a hole before." He chortled. "Come to think of it, neither have I."

     We were treated to a canned speech by "Comandante Raúl," a twenty-nine year old MISURA officer named Raúl Tobías. I copied the speech, then translated it for the others. It began "We are here in the Republic of Honduras, 37,000 refugees. They are young volunteers with the idea of returning to their country, Nicaragua. Then the young men put forth their sacrifice and their last drop of blood to regain their lands. It is a difficult war against communism, but we are making that war...." and so on. It was obvious that he hadn't written the words, and that his delivery was rehearsed. Over the next several days, we would hear a number of such speeches, some totally canned, with crude prompts from behind by armed MISURA officers. Though much was canned, it was also obvious that these people had genuine complaints about the Sandinistas, who had indeed killed some Indians and driven many from their homes and burned whole settlements and killed or run off their livestock. Sandinista claims that they had been forced to clear the area because of CIA-sponsored FDN and MISURA raids across the border were also based in fact, but didn't cut much ice with the Miskito and Sumo people who had been driven from their homes.
     At dusk someone cranked up a small red Kawasaki generator, illuminating a single bulb in each tent. We ate whatever we could scrounge from our own packs. One of the Indians had brought pemmican, a traditional food for traveling. In one corner of the tent, I noticed several silhouette targets and about half a dozen LAWs, the Light Antitank Weapon that had replaced the earlier "bazooka," or 3.5" rocket launcher, used during WWII and Korea, and with which I had trained before Vietnam. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was watching a large grey spider, over two inches in diameter, crawling upside down along the underside of the tent roof. With that, the smell of the canvas, the putter of the generator, the feel of the canvas cot... it was Vietnam revisited. I felt strangely at home.

     Life in the camps reeked of the presence of the old "special operations" network of CIA officers and agents, military intelligence types, Special Forces people, "civilian" adventurers of various stripes, even the odd civilian fresh off a plane from Washington with a briefcase and secretive manner. Somewhere in the camp at Rus Rus I had noticed a slogan which was clearly an attempt to translate into Spanish one that was drummed into our heads when I went through Marine Corps boot camp, and which has been used to motivate generations of US recruits: "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer." But in Spanish it had come out "Si es imposible lo haremos," or "If it is impossible we will do it," which to my ear sounded so odd that I imagined it evoking quizzical expressions among the Indians it was supposed to motivate.

RUS RUS

JANUARY 1985: SEVERAL NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN GROUPS HAD RECEIVED LETTERS FROM MACO STEWART, A TEXAS OILMAN, INVITING THE INDIANS TO SEND EMISSARIES ON A TRIP TO HONDURAS AND NORTHERN NICARAGUA, TO VIEW EVIDENCE OF PERSECUTION OF MISKITO AND SUMO INDIANS BY THE SANDINISTA GOVERNMENT OF NICARAGUA. THROUGH A STRANGE COMBINATION OF CIRCUMSTANCES, I REPRESENTED THE TACHI INDIANS FROM NEAR FRESNO, CALIFORNIA. THIS IS THE SAME RUS RUS CAMP MENTIONED BY LT. COL. OLIVER NORTH IN HIS NOTEBOOKS. HE MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN IN THE CAMP THAT WEEK...

      The C47 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 C47 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 exMarines 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 touchtone 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."