The Profession (15 page)

That night another massacre took place. Of men, this time. The soldiers hit the first village and two others. I won’t tell what they did except to say that if Lucifer himself had flown in from hell, he would’ve turned around and gone back to where it was civilized.

It wasn’t Pope, Harvey, or Larson who initiated the call for payback. My squad radio beeped. “Gent, it’s Rob. Meet me by the ball field.”

We came together just before sunset, in the field adjacent to the
soccer stadium. Jack Stettenpohl was there already. The grass was filled with displaced women and children under tents and lean-tos. Rob Salter led Jack and me to his Humvee. On the hood he had taped a mission plan, scrawled on a panel cut from a cardboard MRE box. In black lines drawn with a Sharpie, Rob had sketched the river, the Bomber compound, and three routes of approach and egress.

“Here’s their camp,” he said. “Are you with me or not?”

“WHO’S THIS FROM?” JACK
confronted Rob. He meant: Have you cleared this with higher? Has this been ordered by your father?

Rob said no.

“Have you even told him?”

“I’ll tell him when it’s over.”

I’m out, Jack said. He made the case, which he declared was self-evident, that a stunt like this, if it got out in the press, would destroy not only Gen. Salter’s career and our own, but also would blow up into an international moral catastrophe for the United States and for the Marine Corps. More to the point, Jack said, it was wrong. “They’ve got a name for this, Rob. It’s called a war crime.”

I have never seen a look like the one on Robert Salter’s face. “And what is it,” he said, “when these motherfuckers pour battery acid down the throats of eight-year-old girls?”

“It’s evil,” said Jack. “But it’s not our business. We have orders and we’ve sworn to obey them.”

Rob turned on his heel and ordered his men to start their trucks. They did. Plainly he had briefed them and they were all for it. I
could see Sgt. Pope with Rob and Harvey and my own guys heading my way.

Stettenpohl turned to his radio operator. “Get General Salter.”

But the task force commander couldn’t be reached. He had flown to Bahrain that morning to confer on the Taiwan crisis. Col. Mattoon was with him. Next down the chain was our group commander, whom I’ll call Major T. I could hear his voice through Jack’s handset. “What do you want from me, Captain? To countermand my boss’s son?”

Jack turned to me. “Don’t tell me you’re down for this, Gent.”

“You’re doing the right thing, Jack. Somebody’s gotta keep clean.”

I called my guys to circle up. This was beneath a grove of jacaranda trees beside the creek that flows through the stadium part of the park. Rob Salter had just finished briefing us on the site of the Bombers’ camp and his idea of how to hit it and get out. I put in my two cents and we brought the plan into a shape we could all get behind.

Then I spoke to my guys alone. This is a life-changing moment, I said. I won’t order any man to strap up. Do it or don’t, but let no one take this decision lightly. The actions we take here tonight, we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives.

“We’re not going in as Marines,” I said. “Take off everything that says USMC, dog tags, everything.”

“What about tattoos?” said Germain, our youngest. That produced a laugh.

A couple of years later I chanced to read a paper by a professor from Tulane, whose daughter I knew from back home. It was a study of clans and tribes in East Africa. The paper said that the typical black African despot did not see himself as a criminal. Quite the contrary. In his own eyes, he was acting under the honorable imperatives imposed upon him as a clan and tribal champion, that is, to take everything he possibly could from people who were not of
his blood and either keep it for himself or dispense it in the form of patronage and gifts of influence to members of his own family, clan, and tribe. In Mbana’s eyes the country of Zamibia was not a nation or a people over which he ruled as steward, but a fat sow for him and his buddies to feast on. I could understand that. It was like Iraq. It was like Afghanistan.

I held out my hand, palm down. Every man put his on top. Stettenpohl had vacated. He was a good man, a Dartmouth grad, father of two, with a future as promising as Rob Salter’s.

Rob came back; we went over protocols and recognition signals one last time. “No phones, no radios. Don’t even talk. Hand signals only.” He was so calm it was spooky.

There was a crossroads in the bush a few miles south of the Bombers’ camp. That would be our Vehicle Drop Off. The teams would travel separately to that site. We would stash the trucks in the treeline and go on dismounted.

0215, my trucks idled up to the VDO. Robert Salter’s vehicles were already hidden in the trees. He came forward with his men in their night-vision goggles. Then we heard other steps.

Jack Stettenpohl came up out of the dark. His face was blacked; he carried an H&K 416, a modified M4–40 with ACOG infrared sights and an M203 grenade launcher underslung. He had twelve 30-round mags on his vest and one 20-rounder in the weapon. He didn’t say anything. His guys were with him. Rob Salter was the senior captain; he had only one order: “Charlie Mike.”

Continue Mission.

We came in from the landward side, trapping the Bombers against the river. My element and Robert Salter’s entered the camp on a skirmish line fifty meters across and dressed at a double arm’s interval. We wore NVGs. With the laser sights on our M4–40s, where
you put the red dot is where the round goes. Stettenpohl’s team had set up on a sandbar that ran about forty meters out into the river. They were prone, on line, with four SAWs, two AA-12s (automatic shotguns that fire Frag-12 explosive shells), and every other man’s M4 on automatic.

Mbana’s soldiers were bivouacked in about forty shelters and tents, spread over an area half the size of a football field. There was no security. We slung ICs into each hooch. These are mixtures of C-4 plastic explosive, flammable oil, and incendiary thermite; they blow with a sharp bang that coats everything with flaming jelly like napalm. After the first flash we didn’t need goggles. The soldiers came out on fire. There’s a tendency to shoot high in situations like that. The recoil of the weapon, fired in a burst, throws the muzzle up. I signed to our men to aim for knees and bellies. We came through in line abreast with no gaps. I stayed four or five paces to the rear, dressing the line and directing fire.

The massacre was over in less than three minutes. Probably half the Bombers were cut down in the river. They were highballing, naked and unarmed, or if they had retained the presence of mind to grab their AKs, they flung them away now so they could run faster. Stettenpohl’s gunners tore them up from the flank. The soldiers that reached the far shore, he blew away with claymores his men had planted. A few got away into the bush. We didn’t chase them. Our trucks came up; we collected all the camp’s weapons and loaded them aboard. We policed up all our own brass, wires, and whatever scraps of primers or detonators we could find strewn around from the cannisters. There were a few wounded Bombers on the ground, crying and moaning or trying to crawl away into the dark. We left them.

It was four in the morning when my team got back to its own camp at the southern end of the city park. The three teams had split up at
the crossroads after the action. Each unit had returned to its Area of Operations. The plan was to resume our stations and carry on as if we knew nothing. Privately I was concerned; we had to take seriously the possibility of payback. The soldiers who got away would bolt straight to other units. What would I do if I were them? I’d sure as hell come after us.

My team’s perimeter was an oblong under acacias at the south end of the park. It was on a rise with good fields of fire on all sides. We had camo nets rigged low over slit trenches that linked all positions. Razor wire protected the perimeter; we had a fortified vehicle-entry behind sandbags. I had left one man on guard; he reported no activity. I sent in Chutes and Quinones to get water bottles and stuff to clean up with. We intended to remain on alert till dawn outside the wire, in a new perimeter about two hundred yards west in a denser grove of acacias. Suddenly we heard Chutes cursing, or what sounded like cursing. He reappeared at the wire, waving me and Sgt. Kean, our weapons specialist, forward. “You ain’t gonna believe this, Skipper.”

We crept up to Chutes’s hooch, which was just two sleeping mats behind a low row of sandbags. We had to go in on our knees under the camo net. “What’s that smell?” Kean said. Something light and oily had been spread over the bedding. Chutes was laughing. “Touch it,” he said.

It was flowers. Petals. Thousands of them.

Chutes tugged Kean and me to the side of the position, which was stacked with Chutes’s water bottles and MRE boxes. We could see half a dozen straw baskets set down like an offering. “Check this shit out,” Chutes said. “It’s papayas and mangoes.” He held one up. “This is a fucking guava!”

By dawn the capital knew everything. Word had spread to the entire province. I was in camp, boiling water for our morning mud when a seventy-year-old African woman materialized out of the mist and handed me a hot bowl of the best coffee I’d tasted
since I left Louisiana. Another lady was taking down my shirt and socks, which were drying on a line. How these women got inside our wire, I will never know. Girls and grown females glided through the camp, collecting dirty laundry. Their smiles were as shy as virgins’.

Downtown when we went for breakfast, no one would let us pay. The mood was sober. No one high-fived us. Nobody clapped our backs or shook our hands. But grandmothers and young girls would come up and slip us colored scraps of paper. On them was written “Merci” or “God bless USA.”

No word appeared in the paper or on TV. It was as if nothing had happened. I asked an old man named Emile who sold us phone cards. “There is a proverb here in East Africa: ‘Do not follow the footsteps of the morning.’ It meant things change. What has happened is not what is to be.”

All that day, the mood was like nothing I, or any of us, had ever experienced. Trucks and minibuses had begun fleeing the city—Bombers and their families. As soon as dark came, the people would butcher them. The women would do the killing. They would use machetes. In East Africa, as in all tribal societies, no crime or outrage is ever forgotten. The name and face of every transgressor is known. The victims, whose turn it was now to take vengeance, knew to which districts their tormentors would flee and among whose clan and family they would try to hide.

Next morning, Marine landing parties came ashore from the flotilla. Throngs lined the beaches, cheering the amtracks as they landed. More thousands ringed the soccer stadium to greet the CH-53s whoomp-whoomping in. Gen. Salter flew in on a Cobra from the
Peleliu
and set down on the lawn of the presidential palace. When the tracked vehicles rolled into downtown, Marines on top were inundated by delirious mobs of women and young boys, who climbed aboard and hung off every kit rail and porthole.

Mbana had made his bird, as Vietnam-era Marines would have said. His private jet had taken off without running lights in the middle of the night. A second plane followed, carrying Mbana’s women and his gold. The neighborhood of the presidential palace, when Salter’s Cobra set down on the lawn, rocked like the Vieux Carré on the final night of Mardi Gras. Everyone was dressed in bright orange and hot pink, purple and tangerine. In East Africa when women are happy, they wrap their heads in bright turbans called
akeeshas
. That was all you saw, bobbing and bouncing, an ecstatic ocean as colorful as a crayon box.

Salter took over the country as efficiently as Alexander the Great, whose campaigns he had studied in detail. The two onshore battalions assumed their AOs—3/7 south of the river as far as the second-largest city, Amintra; 5/9 in the capital where we were. A third and fourth Battalion Landing Team of the Fourteenth MEU remained offshore as a reserve and Quick Reaction Force.

I wasn’t there when Salter took possession of the palace but I heard that his first official act was to run up the black-and-green flag of Zamibia and salute it, along with every member of his staff and combat team, standing at attention, while Mbana’s military band played the national anthem—theirs, not ours.

His second act was to bring in the ministers of every governmental agency and have them publicly swear allegiance to the flag of their country. Normal life would resume, Salter announced. Power and water would be restored; fuel would be rationed but available. Disorder would not be tolerated. Thieves would be delivered to justice; looters would be shot on sight. Any merchant charged with profiteering would answer to a jury of those he had attempted to exploit. Marine patrols would guard residential neighborhoods and stand sentry at private businesses, hospitals, and government offices. This was a Saturday. Today and Sunday, Salter declared, would be a national holiday. Monday everyone would return to work and to
school. Banks would open. Public ministries would be staffed. Salaries would be paid.

A Marine Expeditionary Unit carries with it twenty million in Uncle Sam’s greenbacks, secured in the commodore’s spaces aboard the flagship. That night Salter had the lump sum from both task forces flown ashore. The cash was in hundred-dollar bills, in eight brushed-aluminum caskets. He went on the civilian TV channel, not a military one, and declared that these funds now constituted the financial reserve of the country. They were backed by the government of the United States. It seemed a ridiculously tiny amount to serve as the currency reserve of an entire nation, but then again, trust is everything with money—and the people trusted Salter. They trusted the Marines. I was watching the general’s speech, with Rob Salter and Jack Stettenpohl and the rest of our teams, on a satlink parked on the hood of a Bedford truck in the middle of a village street with electric lights running off a diesel generator and about a thousand men, women, and kids packed around so tight you couldn’t lift your arms from your sides and if you did, you couldn’t get them back down. The people couldn’t hear a word and neither could we, but they never stopped cheering.