The Ordinary Seaman (29 page)
He knew that modest mailman, new commander of hers, was keeping her alive. The Nightmare BON was just going to be stationed in Quilalí from now on—find something for them to do, plant an orchard, lay down pipes for potable water, build rabbit hutches, pull tics from donkeys’ ears for la Revolución. The little cardboard sign her new jefe put up promised: The greatest victory is the battle we avoid having to fight. And even the yanqui priest had promised to use his influence with the Comandancia in Wiwilí. He felt swept with superstitious relief and tenderness every time he saw a red squirrel in a tree, darting across a path. From a high ridge one night he watched a meteor streak through the star-bristling sky, suspensefully watched it fall all the way behind the hills of Honduras without going out—which meant she was alive, still loving him, thinking about him. Then his battalion came trudging through Quilali again nearly three months later, and the converted stables where Marta and Amalia had made their beds in the old hay, sleeping there terrified of rats and snakes, were deserted. And their jefe’s sign was a rain-washed flap of cardboard still hanging outside.
The yanqui padre was in his little office at the front of the church when Esteban burst in on him, sitting with a withered old campesino who held his straw hat between his knees. The padre was expressionlessly listening while the campesino complained that someone had stolen his only macho, how was he going to survive? Could the padre lend him the money to buy a new horse, or even a mule? “Where’s Marta?” interrupted Esteban. “Where’s the BON from León?”
The padre recognized him but had to ask his name, and already, from the tone of his voice, the sudden expression of sorrowful alarm in his blue eyes, Esteban knew … The padre stood, and the campesino looked up, following him with his frightened eyes.
“Esteban,” said the yanqui padre, his face burning bright pink, his blue eyes wet and magnified behind the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses. “Your friend Marta …” The padre took a step closer and held his hands out. “They were caught in a terrible combate. Amalia was very seriously wounded, but Marta did not make it, Esteban, her spirit is with God.”
Esteban stood in silence a moment. “But you promised them,” he finally stammered. Hadn’t he promised to talk the command in Wiwili, urge that the Nightmare BON be kept in Quilalí? Then he started to sob.
“I did, Esteban,” said the padre, his hand on Esteban’s shaking shoulder now. “But there were so many combates to the north all at once, and they sent in everybody, Esteban, the local militias too, as reinforcement. They sent everybody. Everyone in the town is still angry about it, or still grieving, Esteban. There was nothing I could do.”
The campesino, barefoot, his pants looking stitched together out of sugar sacks, his shirt frayed and missing most of its buttons, wrinkled face the color of an old cigar, just sat there holding his hat between his knees, mouth open, looking like he was about to wretch, his frightened little eyes focused on the paneled wall in front.
“Reinforcements? Hijueputa! They couldn’t have reinforced a rabbit hutch!”
“This war, Esteban,” said the padre almost indignantly, wet stare boring into his. “I pray for almost nothing else but for it to stop.”
“Sí pues,” rasped the campesino, not taking his eyes from the wall, briefly running his twiggy, viejo fingers through his gray, matted hair. “Si Dios quiere. Padre Guillermo es un buen padre. He helps the poor. He loves the young people.”
He wanted to hit the campesino. Wanted to take his AK and smash his head in with its butt.
“But what happened?” he asked. “Where is she?”
“It was one of those LAU bazookas, Esteban,” said the padre. “They fired it into her camp, and Marta was standing closest. They … I’m afraid they were under fire, so when the helicopters came, they only
took away the wounded, and some of the dead. Marta was buried there. I’m sure they’ll be going back for her.”
“She was standing closest?” he said.
“Yes,” said the padre. “So she couldn’t have known, or felt anything. She didn’t have to suffer.”
He turned away without saying good-bye or thank you, and walked out of the office and into the sun and the dirt street. An LAU bazooka. He knew the craters they left in the earth, the shards of steel propelled deep into the trunks of trees. She was standing closest. He had seen what that could do to a body. Sometimes you found them torn to bits, sprayed into the brush, up in the branches of trees…
Later, the morning after the ambush on the Zompopera Road, he saw the IFA truck that had been carrying the muchachas of the quartermaster corps that had taken a direct hit from an RPG. He saw a severed head with long, black hair, the skull so deflated that the scorched face was barely recognizable as a face, it looked like a flounder, hollow eye sockets staring up. And then he knew, and he lost the whole Marta he’d, until then, been able to keep inside. (But here, in this empty terminal, la Marta comes back to him whole.)
Much later he learned that Amalia stayed in her coma for three days after she was helicoptered out, so many broken bones, and severe neurological damage and memory loss … He did not go to see her in the military hospital, in Managua. He told himself that she would not remember him and that even if she did, she would not want to see him. But he should probably have gone anyway. He hadn’t been able bring himself to.
That little cardboard sign read: The greatest victory is the battle we avoid having to fight. The mailman-jefe wasn’t asking them to be cowards. He was just offering another idea of victory. One perfectly suited to a Juventud Sandinista volunteer Nightmare BON, totally lacking in
arte militar.
But he’s never been able to figure out what those words really mean. Claro, avoid
having
to fight. It’s a victory because those who force
us to fight have resolved their differences in a different way, decided that peace is better all around, which takes a different kind of human being from the humans who actually exist, which is why it’s too easy, a completely ignorant fantasy, and not the mailman’s fault or responsibility anyway. So what did he mean? A victory just to stay in Quilalí? If only.
Now Esteban sits up straighter in the sand. Has he been a coward? It’s just another word sometimes, no? Sometimes people forget they’re not supposed to be cowards, they live in a cowardly way without even realizing. You don’t have to fight all the time, just don’t shame yourself. On our ship we’re sick with shame, because our situation has become shameful. If I desert the ship like the viejo is always telling me to—will that be brave or cowardly?
Arte militar. Here you are going to learn to live and fight
con mucho arte militar,
Milton had told them, his very first day in the BLI. And they all had, because they had to. But when Milton was stripped of his command of the BLI, finally, it was for having too much arte militar. Milton, with his pocked, hard Indian face and granite build, his big, effusive personality, always going on about arte militar and amor, the love he wanted (ordered) everyone in the BLI to feel for one another; he didn’t need all the words their political officers used to be more convincing. Milton was full of amor, always bedding the compitas in the BLI’s quartermaster corps who trailed them into battles and waited for them at their bivouac points. A member of El Coro de Ángeles, the very first BLI, who lost nearly half their battalion back in ‘83 at the legendary battle of Jalapa and Teotecacinte, when they turned back the first big yanqui-contra invasion almost single-handedly, fighting across a flat, wide plain jutting into the triangle of Honduran hills the contras were attacking from, keeping up a constant hail of machine-gun fire and mortars, most of the fighting at night. Milton’s problems started during that last contra offensive, when he refused the orders to make them all carry three hundred extra rounds in clips in their packs instead of the usual hundred. Along with the extra bullets, the Comandancia’s
Grupo Operativo wanted all BLI troops to carry 82-mm mortars, extra grenades, and mines from now on, instead of just the usual AK, Tokarev pistol, and knife. Milton, explaining his vehement refusal of the orders to the BLI, said, If all of you carried just one bullet apiece, I guarantee you every one of those bullets would kill a contra. Because when soldiers have too many bullets, they shoot wildly, loose their concentration and focused fear, turn back into just a bunch of undisciplined draftee cipotes, firing off into the trees and all over the place, never hitting anything or anybody, and war turns into a fucking children’s game. And with their packs so heavy, by the time they encounter the enemy, they’re too exhausted from the march to fight well anyway. But the Comandancia was panicking, the yanquis had loaded up la contra with so much new firepower! Good, said Milton, let them be the tired and wasteful ones. Esteban’s BLI kept on fighting just as they had before, light on their feet, stinging everywhere, from one cachimbeo to another, always in hot pursuit (their only calamity that one with the dog near Wamblán).
But two thousand contra were pouring down through the Cerro Chachawáy and Wina, where the Coco and the Río Bocáy meet. Milton was put in charge of the counteroffensive: three entire BLIs subordinated to his command converged on the front. And when everyone was in place Milton directed a triangulated attack, and within a week had the enemy pushed back against the border and fenced in on three sides. Over the radio the Grupo Operativo said it wanted Milton to go in and finish the attack. But Milton thought too many compas would die if they went in: the contras were well dug in, had laid mines everywhere, they had riverbanks under control and reinforced hills at their backs, it reminded him too much of what El Coro de Ángeles had faced at Jalapa and Teotecacinte. He wanted to bring in the helicopters, rocket the territory from the fearsome Soviet M-27 transport-attack helicopters first. But the Grupo Operativo only gave him permission to use the helicopters to ferry soldiers to the edge of battle, they were afraid of more helicopters being shot down by the contras’ new Redeye missiles. They were afraid of provoking the yanquis. They were worried that there were too many civilians in that zone the contras were trapped in. Milton was
infuriated: why should his soldiers die instead of contras? Why should they die instead of civilian contra supporters, because of course they’re contra, because if they’re not, then what the fuck are they doing there? Degenerate satraps, that’s how Milton was beginning to refer to the officers in the Comandancia and Grupo Operativo, the new breed of subcomandantes rising up through the army, puteros, drunks, enjoying the perks of war in their headquarters and in Managua, always worrying about pissing off the yanquis, taking too much advice from the fucking Cubans. Milton ordered Esteban’s company to lead the attack, to ride the helicopters into battle. Ten came, huge, black and green, armored, bristling with rocket launchers and machine guns, petrol reeking, their whirring blades working up a hurricane gale of hot wind. But Milton had changed their orders at the last minute: the pilots were under his command, he’d been put in charge of this offensive, he ordered them to arrive ready and loaded to go in and attack … Milton climbed into the lead helicopter himself, and Esteban’s company stayed behind. They flew in high, firing off magnesium flares to divert the Redeyes, flew right at the hills, rocketing and strafing with high-caliber machine guns, and returned to their base to reload and then came back and did it again; the operation went on all day. While the BLIs on the ground and the artillery units aimed a steady fire of Katyusha rockets and shells into the zone. Not a single helicopter went down. It wasn’t until the next day that Esteban’s company boarded them and flew in, the helicopters firing off more rockets: Rigoberto Mazariego briefly held his novia’s doll out the bay so that she could watch the dirty, smoky explosions in the landscape below, the wind pulling out some of her hair. They were landed near now-empty trenches outside an abandoned hamlet that had been taken over by la contra. There was not that much resistance. And many contra dead, often found in clusters. The dead like the dead always, their deaths so poorly disguised by their grimacing and flinching and astonished and sometimes peaceful expressions, some already bloating, stinking. Vultures everywhere. And dead mules and horses. Milton claimed four hundred contra had died, but that must have been an exaggeration, there weren’t that many bodies; but who
knew how many dead they’d carried back across the border? They recovered at least that many weapons, and radios, all kinds of yanqui equipment, left behind when they’d fled. Milton wanted to cross the border and wipe them out, but the Comandancia forbade it. Esteban’s entire BLI lost five compas, three to mines, and nine wounded, several by cazabobos, those mines that blow off a foot. But the problem was, supposedly there were a number of dead civilians—women, children—too. Though he, personally, saw only a few, a family sprawled along a riverbank, a mother and three children, two of them chavalitas, their shredded dresses dark brown with blood, their bodies already dissolving into the warm mud. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such an obscene sight: more than a few times they’d come upon the still-smoking rubble of farming collectives and hamlets razed a day or two before. Supposedly there was a too high number of dead civilians. Supposedly the yanquis were already complaining about their counteroffensive. Milton was summoned to the Comandancia in Wiwili by helicopter, and as soon as he stepped out he was stripped of his command and publicly humiliated by the jefe of the Grupo Operativo for having disobeyed orders and acted irresponsibly, and transferred to the draftees’ training camp at Mulukuku to wait for the results of the investigation into the civilian casualties at Wina. And the BLI was ordered to stay where they were, in that landscape of silent death, to await their new comandante.
His name was Eliseo. He was buena onda. Though they weren’t the same BLI anymore, they were more like the other BLIs for a while, carrying the extra weight in their packs, fighting fewer combates, which was fine, though everyone remembered what it had been like before, and that was confusing, to feel proud of your past while you still had to keep on fighting. What happened later on the Zompopera Road wasn’t really Eliseo’s fault. That was after they’d returned to Quilali and Esteban had learned la Marta’s fate, so by then the extra weight he carried on his back was nothing compared with the weight of grief and dread in his chest. Though maybe what some said was true, that Milton would have checked over and over to be sure that the Comandancia had executed and confirmed and reconfirmed the order he’d requested for
army regulars to secure the road against ambush before the BLIs convoy traveled down it. It turned out that the officer in the Comandancia who’d received the order from Eliseo had been drunk.