It Happened on the Way to War (37 page)

Kibera and the Marine Corps. I had separated them neatly into isolated compartments in my head and convinced myself that with discipline and perseverance I could live two lives. Yet here they were again, my compartments crumbling and clashing, falling apart as they always did. The walls were, after all, figments of my imagination. It wasn't possible to keep them separate, and I had never really viewed them as distinct. They were different means toward the same goal: peace and stability in a violent world. In Kibera, I could feel the impact directly. Our annual budget that year was less than what the United States spent every minute in Iraq. Surely we would always need a strong military, though there had to be a better way toward peace than this, our detention at Abu Ghraib of two kids almost half my age. At a fundamental level it was like Kibera. It shouldn't happen. It wasn't right.

Could the eleven-year-old be rehabilitated or was his life truly behind him?
Salim would say yes, the boy could be rehabilitated, but it would take some work and the boy would have to want it. The battle-hardened Marine colonel said no. Some people may think that the colonel was jaded; others may see him as a realist. Standing there at Abu Ghraib as the boys were celebrating their goal, I had to believe the answer was yes. Yes, they could still have a healthy and productive life. Something in my soul needed to believe this, and I didn't want to lose that hope, as much for the boys' sake as for my own.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Impact

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

SUMMER 2006

“KASH WAS KILLED.”

“What?”

“I called Nate already,” Salim said. His high-pitched voice cracked at the end of each sentence. “I tried you earlier. I couldn't get through.”

“How?” Stunned, numb, I needed more information. We were all about the same age. Kash was in perfect health when I had last seen him in his UNC basketball shirt in front of Tabitha's Clinic.

“He was shot. Not that late. Maybe eight at night. Thugs came. Outside the clinic. They, they shot him in the stomach.”

“Robbery?” Eight P.M. was early. Kibera bustled in the evenings. There must have been witnesses, and with witnesses, the specter of mob justice.

“No, they didn't take his things. All they took was his life.”

“All and everything.”

Salim exhaled. My eyes swelled. A prickling heat shot across my back.

“Did anyone see?”

“Yes, but they haven't any suspects. The thugs, they must have come from outside Kibera.”

“How'd Nate take it?” Nate was living in New York City waiting tables at high-end restaurants.

“Not so good, man.” Although Nate and I never spoke openly about it, he still believed we should have given Kash a second chance.

Salim and I stayed on the phone, sharing memories. Kash had helped keep my mother safe when she slept overnight at the clinic. Mom loved to tell the story about how he studied French while listening to Edith Piaf. Salim recalled the 2001 riots, when Kash defended the clinic from marauding thugs while Tabitha treated streams of patients. I told Salim about the first time Nate and I discovered Kash's handmade gym with its hand-welded bars and scrap-wood bench tucked in an alley next to a pit latrine. We were so sore after our first day of lifting with Kash that we couldn't raise our arms over our heads to flag a
matatu
minibus heading downtown.

Salim laughed.

“And his smile, man.”

“Yeah, his smile. It could make you feel good.” Salim remembered how Kash's Hollywood smile had electrified the room full of donors at the Peacocks' house.

Eventually Kash appeared to rebound, yet again. He helped start a girls' education program with Ali's charismatic friend Kassim. Afterward, Kash launched a “slum tourism” company that had some initial success until he found employment at a Western-owned safari company. Kassim told me that before he died Kash had a
mzungu
girlfriend and was “really doing well.”

When we had seen each other in Kibera in the years that passed since he had left CFK, Kash and I still exchanged fist bumps. But there was always a tension. It frustrated me that Kash had never apologized. Yet I still cared about him. He was the closest friend I knew who had died from gunfire. I wanted to bring his killer to justice, and I imagined that doing so might help somehow restore my memories of him to only the happy ones.

Kash embodied the best and worst of Kibera, its talent and its temptations, its promise and its spoil. We never found out who killed him.

BACK AT CAMP Lejeune, my departure from active duty was bittersweet. One moment I would find myself embraced by nostalgia and oblivious to the world. Minutes later I would be brooding about the past, worrying about the future, and struggling to contain inexplicable, violent urges.

“What's next, sir?” enlisted Marines sometimes asked me. I had spent four and a half of my most formative years departing and coming back to our team house and the patch of grass outside where Sergeant Mo had leveled me during our flak-jacket pickup game. A large part of me wanted to stay with them.

Graduate school was the last thing I wanted to discuss with enlisted Marines. I always felt terrible and terribly privileged, even though most Marines didn't seem to pass negative judgment. The men were going back to war, and I was heading to one of the most elite institutions in the world. It was easier to share plans with the other junior-grade officers, many of whom were preparing to leave the Marine Corps after four years. The standard career track looked frighteningly dull to many of us. It involved becoming staff intelligence officers and facing years of analytical and administrative duties far from the front lines. In my cohort of a dozen officers, a handful chose to pursue law or business school degrees, while most transitioned with relative ease into the FBI or CIA, where they would continue to fight in the global war on terror.

On my last day at the company Captain Joe Burke joined me for a lunchtime beach run. We took my Green Bean from the team house to Camp Lejeune's Onslow Beach. Joe commented on my whitewall tires, which pleased me because I took pride in keeping them shiny with steel-wool pads and Armor All protectant. He thought it was hilarious that I had additional adhesive safety reflectors stuck to my rear bumper.

“Safety first, that's what my dad always says.” I laughed, recalling how my father had stuck the reflectors on my bumper one day without asking me first.

“Your father, he's a Vietnam vet, right?”

“Sure was.”

“Infantry?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, as far as I'm concerned, he can say whatever the hell he wants about safety.”

“No doubt.” I didn't mind the reflectors. They added some more color to the old Caravan and gave me a reason to talk about my father with a friend like Joe.

We started running at a moderate pace, which was good because it was noon and Joe wanted to go on a long run. As one of the few undeveloped points on the southeastern seaboard, I imagined the beach resembled the same stretch of wide, flat sand two hundred miles north along the Outer Banks where a century earlier the Wright brothers had made their first flight. A half mile inland the air was so humid you could taste the swamp in it. But on the beach it was breezy and cool.

Nostalgia returned, overpowering my senses. When I had needed escape during deployments and trips to Kibera, I returned in my mind to these beaches and the memories of long, barefoot walks with Tracy, hand in hand, sometimes talking, sometimes dreaming, often just listening to the ocean and the rhythm of its release.

Joe and I talked shop as we ran, as always. I brainstormed with him about our strongest and weakest Marines, and how to man future teams. We talked about training, and we griped about higher headquarters. By the time we finished our eight or so miles, I was winded, thirsty, and struggling to keep up. As we walked to the Green Bean, Joe removed a pack of Marlboro reds from his sock. The smoke seemed to take his mind to a deeper place.

“Ya know why I joined the Marine Corps?” he asked. We had never spoken about his decision, though I knew a bit about his childhood growing up in a depressed part of East St. Louis. He once told me that after college he had planned to go into the Peace Corps.

“Why's that?”

He took a hard drag on his cigarette. “To make a difference. Ya know, it's all about impact.”

“That's what I fear I'll miss the most.”

“Yeah, maybe. But you won't miss the staff meetings.” Half of our days were consumed by meetings with staff officers Joe called “oxygen thieves.”

“Or the awards board,” I added. We spent countless hours crafting awards citations and fighting administrative battles.

Joe shook his head. “Well, I'm glad we got you yours before you left. I once received an award for a deployment two years after I returned.” Days earlier I had received a medal Joe had nominated me for. Its citation read
Captain Barcott's engagement of theater and national-level intelligence organizations, detention facility interrogation teams, and Iraqi intelligence and security personnel led to the capture of numerous high value individuals
.

When I reread the citation my mind flipped to Abu Ghraib and the fifteen thousand detainees in our custody in our prisons across Iraq. That's where those “high value individuals” ended up. They went to our prisons and sat like Boy Scouts in tents, where they could plot future attacks and recruit new blood from the thousands of other detainees. Then, in most cases, the detainees were released because many of them were innocent, our priorities were elsewhere, and our prisons themselves were badly overcrowded. In 2006 we were told the average time of detention at Abu Ghraib was three to six months. It had been five months since we sent the man with the black watch and the smirk to Abu Ghraib. More likely than not, he was back on the streets trying to kill Americans and brave Iraqi leaders, the next Sheikh Kamals. The two child assassins came to mind as well. I would never know what happened to them. There was so much we would never know. Six months in country, then we were gone. “My involvement in military life features opportunities gained and lost, variable probabilities, illusions and disillusions, and elusive uncertainties, some of which remain,” my father wrote about his war before I experienced mine.

“So, Joe, let me ask you something. Did it meet your expectations?”

“What d'ya mean?”

“Do you feel like you're makin' that difference?” I suspected his answer was yes, but I was curious because Joe and I were both pessimistic about the trajectory of Iraq. The country appeared to be on the verge of civil war.

Joe took another long drag, drawing the embers of his cigarette down to its butt and pinching it out with his tar-stained fingers. “Most days I don't know and don't think about it.” Sweat dripped from his gray brows. “There's a lot that sucks. But that's life. Yeah, I do. That's why I stayed in. Plus, what would I do in the real world?”

“Play the blues?” Joe had once told me that he had spent a couple of years in his twenties as a vagabond musician strumming a guitar in smoky jazz clubs in New Orleans.

Joe shook his head and opened the door to the Green Bean. It was time to get back to work. There were less than four months to prepare the company for another Iraq deployment, its fourth in four years.

That afternoon we had a good-bye gathering at Hooters for the handful of us who were changing duty stations or leaving the Corps. We joked and told war stories. It was a good group, some Marines more scarred than others, all struggling with the transition from war to the banality of American life.

When I drove out of Camp Lejeune's main gate past the streams of homemade WELCOME HOME WARRIOR banners, a young private spotted the blue officer's sticker on my window and popped to a crisp salute. He wasn't saluting me. He was saluting my rank. He was saluting our Corps. What Joe said was true for most Marines. We volunteered for military duty to make a difference, and to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Had I made enough of a difference?

I HAD TO admit the truth: I didn't know. I knew I was blessed to have served under exceptional commanders and to have returned from dangerous places with all of my men physically intact. I had proven myself, seen part of the elephant, fulfilled a dream, and grown considerably. Yet, things were missing.

At one level, it was important to me that the greatest value of my military experience wasn't simply my personal development. I wanted clear results that I could point to and say, “We did that, and that mattered because of _______.”

Maybe it was presumptuous to think that I would be able to measure the impact of our actions. We were, after all, small teams, and I was just one Marine in a military with nearly three million active and reserve members. In my five years of service, my Marines and I had operated in eleven countries, and that was part of the challenge as well. Near the beginning of my active-duty service, my mentor Colonel Greenwood had warned me that, in his opinion, lack of continuity was the Achilles' heel of the U.S. military. Part of the reason I couldn't discern what impact we had made was because our transfer of knowledge was dysfunctional. At the time, my sentiments may have been different if we were on more stable courses in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere in the world. But even still, it would have been difficult to identify any specific contributions of lasting value. We were temporary, limited parts of an enormous organization, and that, like most things in life, had many trade-offs.

No one in CFK or the Marine Corps ever asked me which form of service mattered more to me. Salim, Nate, and Tabitha never asked. Colonel Greenwood, Captain Burke, and Sergeant Thompson never asked. Yet this was one of the most frequently asked questions I received when I spoke on behalf of CFK. My colleagues knew that it was impossible for me to choose. Each world was special and important in its own right. In Kibera I could feel our impact directly. It was clearly identifiable, and, to a certain extent, it was measurable. We had built CFK into a unique organization from scratch. It was ours, and we had to fight to keep it alive and thriving. In the Marine Corps, I was part of a historic institution that would last regardless of me or any one person and would be respected long after I died. It was noble and called for extreme sacrifice. Both worlds cultivated leaders and celebrated actions over words. Both served. Both mattered.