The Profession (13 page)

I was feeling better now that I could see the horizon. I introduced myself and they did the same; when I couldn’t pronounce their names, they just said, “I’m Dimitri,” and “Me, too.” They were drinking Early Times straight from the bottle; they offered me some, which I took. I asked them what ranks they had held in the Russian air force. “I was a corporal,” said Dimitri who was flying the plane. He had to shout over the wind screaming through the cracks in the superstructure. Dimitri the copilot said he had been a private first class. My face must have gone white because they started howling.

“We’re jerking your chain, dude,” said Dimitri the pilot. “I was a major. He was a lieutenant colonel.” I asked why they were flying in Africa. “We couldn’t get visas to America,” said Dimitri the copilot. “Why else? We’re not crazy!”

I had thought of myself as a pretty good drinker till I met my first Russians. These characters are freaks of nature; the human liver must have evolved to some supernormal level north and east of the Ukraine. Black Africans are worse, except they don’t drink distilled spirits; their booze of choice is
kishar
, fermented cow’s or goat’s milk, and other poisonous brews made from melons and sugar cane. This stuff is
living
. It’s not antiseptic like vodka; you can’t sterilize a wound with it. It’s like compost; it’s organic. The Western gut can’t
take this stuff. But these black Africans, even children, pour it down by the bucketful. They can live on it.

Africans don’t really get drunk. Instead they achieve a state of detachment, a species of walking oblivion, and they stay in it. Many can do it without alcohol. It’s a state of mind. The level of misery in some of these places is so intolerable that a sentient being can’t endure it without some means of leaving his body. In the West we have hope; that’s our drug of choice. The tribal African harbors no such illusions. The city African does, unfortunately for him. He’s got a little education; he’s seen movies and read books, studied the Bible or better yet the Koran. This is where suicide bombers come from: the hopeless who have been given hope. Some well-meaning Westerner gave it to them, probably a woman and probably as brave as she is clueless. When the bubble bursts, the city Africans can’t take it. Hope has softened their skins; they’re vulnerable now.

In place of hope arises hate.

We should leave them without hope. They’re happier that way. The little kids with smiles on their faces and flies crawling across their eyeballs. That’s their life. What’s wrong with it? Who told us we had the right to mess with it?

I used to see A.D. on those flights. I ran into her once at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi and another time at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. We became friends before we were lovers. A.D. was back and forth to Sudan and Darfur all the time then, when both of those places were so hot not even the Chinese went in. She would catch rides on helicopters and small planes; I’d see her bundling across the tarmac packing sixty pounds of kit, then reaching up to be hauled aboard as the aircraft taxied down the runway.

A.D. at that time was not above donating her college-educated booty if she thought it would help her get a story. She slept with Pierre Mboku, the P.M. of Zaire. She was in Hans Klekker’s bed,
the UN chief inspector, as well as Colonel Karl-Jurgen Pedersen of Southwestern Mobe. I picked her up for breakfast once as she was tucking her blouse in, leaving the presidential palace at Harare.

It was A.D. who first made me aware of ambition. When I was courting her, I asked why she risked her privileged white bacon traveling to these crazy-ass places.

“Blond ambition.”

A.D. had a philosophy about it.

“I come from a good family, Gent. My mum’s a college administrator, my dad’s a justice on the South African Supreme Court. I was raised never to strive for any object too conspicuously. Bad form. One was permitted to grind for grades, but only so she could marry well. I was raised to be a high-class brood mare.”

A.D. was telling me this on another of those vulture-dodging flights. At least once on those jaunts, the plane would drop four hundred feet in one sudden, unanticipated plunge. A.D. used to confess all kinds of shit to me in those moments.

“Then one morning I woke up and I realized, I’m ambitious! I want to succeed! I want to be famous, I want to make a name for myself. It was like some great weight had been lifted off me. I felt like myself for the first time. I walked around that whole day, going over in my mind all the times growing up when I had felt crazy and wrong and different, in a bad way, from everyone else. I realized that they were all moments of ambition—and that what had made me disown my true feelings was that I had internalized this upper-class inhibition against manifest aspiration, against wanting anything in too unseemly a manner, or making a spectacle of myself by striving and failing.” She smiled. “I packed my kit and got out the next day.”

Why did A.D. cover war zones? “Because it’s a fast way to get recognized and because there’re only a few other women doing it. And I’m curious. I love train wrecks. They’re horrible but one can’t look
away. I want to know what the human heart is capable of, the evil and the good.”

What A.D. said made sense. I began to realize that I was ambitious too. I had an ego. I looked around at the guys in TacOps and it was clear they did too. It seemed that just about everyone in an elite, all-volunteer unit had some vaguely defined but nonetheless tangible aspiration, which was usually not fame or wealth so much as the desire to be
present at the center of events
.

We wanted to see what was going on.

We wanted to be part of it.

“You’re no different from me, Gent. You want to see your name in the paper.”

A.D. is a Jew. She doesn’t have the drinking gene. I made it a point to stick with her when she was partying, to make sure nobody took advantage of her. One night we were in a corrugated-tin dive called the Coconut Club in a UN compound outside Djembe, West Congo, and A.D. had to pee; I walked her outside (the loo was unusable) and stood discreetly by while she squatted on some palm fronds in the warm rain.

“What the hell am I doing here? I should be home writing my novel.”

When A.D. got down on herself, she hated everything, mostly herself.

“I gotta get out of here. I’m wasting my life.”

She declared that journalism for her was a distraction, an excuse to avoid her real work. “Thrill seeking,” she said. “I’m jerking myself off.”

A.D. was the one who blew the whistle on Salter in East Africa. It ended his career and made hers.

ZAMIBIA WAS A BREAKAWAY
republic on the east coast of Africa, on the Indian Ocean.

The nation doesn’t exist anymore; its territory has been reabsorbed as provinces into Somalia and Kenya. Its northeast border, when the state was sovereign, was marked by the tiny port of Sainte-Therese, which abutted the capital, Princeville. Refugees fleeing tribal wars in Somalia, and even Darfur, had been a problem there for thirty years; there were camps all along the border, with UN peacekeepers manning a supposedly demilitarized corridor called the Agarua, which means “Broomstick.”

The president of Zamibia was a former Olympic sprinter named Innocent Mbana. He and his soldiers had left the poor people in the villages alone as long as they had nothing. But in the summer of 2022, a major push by U.S., Swedish, and Dutch NGOs brought in tons of humanitarian and medical supplies, along with rice, corn and barley meal, flour, and oil. A convoy of forty trucks, manned by KBR and Advance Systems drivers, left the port protected by a few Force Insertion mercs and locally hired security contractors, traveling under
a guarantee of safe passage from Mbana. He broke it. The president found out how much the drugs were worth. To make a long story short, a massacre ensued. Cell-phone video got out. The images showed drivers and contractors being dragged out of their vehicles and shot or burned alive while Mbana’s soldiers danced over them in glee.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps keep two Amphibious Ready Groups, ARGs, at sea at all times. One comes out of the East Coast, the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune; the other is from the West Coast, the First Marine Division at Pendleton. Each ARG carries a battalion-sized MEU(SOC), a Marine Expeditionary Unit, Special Operations Capable. There are other MEUs in reserve but in this case we had two together, the Eleventh MEU and the Twenty-Ninth, to form Task Force 68. Salter was its commander. He was a brand-new three-star. This was August 2022, right after AfPak II and the end of the second Iran-Iraq war.

In Zamibia at that time there were about two hundred American, Canadian, and European civilians, mostly pipeline engineers, doctors, missionaries, and humanitarian workers. The State Department, then under Secretary Echevarria serving President Jack Cole, had ordered them evacuated. Our job was to make sure they got out okay.

Salter called our teams together aboard the flagship, the USS
Peleliu
. Before Marines go ashore anywhere, Force Recon teams (or, at that time, TacOps) are sent in to seize and prepare HLZs—Helicopter Landing Zones—or ALGs, Amphibious Landing Grounds. That was us. Capt. Jack Stettenpohl ran the first team, Hellboy One; he was in overall command of the three-team section. My team was Hellboy Three. Two was Captain Robert Salter’s, the general’s son. We gathered around our commander on a platform overlooking the
Peleliu
’s well deck. This is a huge, cavernous space that can be flooded from the sea; the ship launches and recovers her landing craft from there.
Time was about midnight; the place was deafening with engine noise and reeking of salt water and diesel fumes. Col. Mattoon and his S2, Maj. Cam Holland, gave the briefing.

Holland told us that a full-on revolution had broken out ashore. He showed us UAV video from two hours prior. Buildings were burning; mobs roamed the streets. Salter let Holland and Mattoon finish, then he stepped forward.

“I’m expecting a total goatfuck, gentlemen. You’ll see shit happening that you never saw on the worst days of AfPakI or II, Iraq, or Yemen. Keep a cool head. Do not react out of emotion. Your job is to locate and secure LZs for the main force, nothing more. Keep out of the way of Mbana’s soldiers. Do not light anyone up without clearing it with higher, and when I say higher, I mean me.”

Salter shook each of our hands. Our Super Stallions were cranking up on the flight deck. “You and your Marines represent the United States of America.” That was all Salter said. He looked into our eyes, rapped each of us on the shoulder, and we took off.

The advance teams went in fast and encountered no resistance. Streets were empty; the city was calm. Mbana’s troops had restored order. They welcomed us.

When I say troops, I use the word in its loosest possible meaning. Most were untrained, illiterate
kalashes
, nineteen to twenty-four years old, fresh in from the villages or off the streets of the shantytowns and squatters’ camps—commanded by thirty-year-old “captains” who couldn’t read or write and were, like their subordinates, whacked out on crystal meth, double-dope (dopamine-enhanced crack), “brown-brown” (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder), and khat, an African narcotic that you dip like snuff and that’s cheap as air. The soldiers were called Brown Bombers from the color of the berets they wore.

The status symbol for these thugs was a video camera. Squad leaders wore plastic Chinese SolarShooters on lanyards around their necks. The cameras were used to take pictures of any civilian that the soldiers intended to rape or murder later on. The locals were terrified of these cameras. The Brown Bombers’ weapons were AK-47s; their uniforms were surplus Albanian and Bulgarian cammies acquired from Teddy Ostrofsky or one of the other Eastern-bloc gunrunners, who also supplied the thirty-year-old Chinese 7.62 mm ammunition that was so moldy and rotten you could snap off the slug from the cartridge case with two fingers. The way you could tell an officer was he had boots. Everyone else wore flip-flops or went barefoot. The amazing thing was they all spoke English, pretty good English. They got it from TV.

Zamibia at the time, for all its troubles, had a lot of native charm. The architecture of the capital Princeville was colonial French, with Victor Hugo-esque manses built around courtyards and boulevards shaded by tall, leafy magnolias; cottages at the beach had palm-sheltered drives and big mahogany louvers built into the doors and windows for ventilation and shade. If a divorced woman or a widow wished to announce her availability, she left the shades open. Street vendors gave you oranges and coconut shavings for free, but shoppers voluntarily kicked in a few coins for the little paper umbrella, called a “flute,” that came with the treat. The custom of “lagniappe,” where merchants donate a little something extra for free, was practiced throughout the city. It lent a grace note to everything, as did certain endearing turns of phrase. When road crews shut down a street for repairs, the sign said

All married females were called “mamas,” and those of marriageable age but not yet wed, “pretty mamas.” If you greeted a mama as “pretty mama,” you would always get a smile.

The soldiers who preyed upon these people were, in Zamibia as elsewhere in Africa, the scourges of their defenseless compatriots. But in truth, it was they who had been betrayed and swindled by their own elders. Any half-assed Western sergeant could’ve whipped three hundred of these young men into a solid, disciplined company and they would have thrived on it. But there were no trained NCOs in Mbana’s cadre. Instead the youths ran riot. The energy of one fed on and inflamed the hot-blood emotion of every other. When their pay came late, which it invariably did, the mob got meaner and more dangerous. Mbana wanted it that way. He wanted his men to bully and intimidate the populace; it kept the people cowed and docile.

Mbana’s army was so destitute it didn’t even have insignia of rank. Corporals and sergeants used any sparkly geegaw they could pluck off a trash pile. They had Nike swooshes and Chinese red stars (the People’s Republic had twenty thousand troops and over one hundred thousand laborers in neighboring Ethiopia) sewn onto their collars and pinned to their berets. Fire discipline was unheard of. When the Bombers cut loose with their weapons, it was in “death blossoms”—pull the trigger and spray the planet. As a collective entity, these troops didn’t even rate the name of gang, which at least would have possessed a code of shame to hold its members to a standard of behavior. They were a rabble. They went from friendly to lethal in two seconds with no visible sign or warning. They were as nodded out as junkies and as murderous as a riverful of piranha.