Buying the Night Flight (40 page)

But then, what I was seeing, day after day and week after week and month after month, was less and less room for the "humanists" and no room at all for distinctions.

Finally it was time to leave. We had been there seven hours: seven hours of this wondrous and terrible outpouring of grief and memory. Before I left, I ask Chaim Chur, softly, whether he could think of the Kemal Nassers or the other Arabs who also died that fated day.

This good -- this quintessential decent -- man could only whisper, "I just can't go that deep."

When I wrote about these two men of the Middle East, I ended with what I really believed:

It would be naive to suggest that peace would descend on the Middle East if such men as Avida Chur could come to know such men as Kemal Nasser. Good men both, as are many of those caught up in this new holocaust, they were, nonetheless, driven by memories and circumstances that surpassed their powers of rational and humane reflection. But the hard fact is that, sooner or later, such men as these
must
come to know each other.

Perhaps, even after this most recent war, there is still some hope because there are such men as these. Perhaps, as a result of this conflict, the Arabs will lose some of their self-contempt and the Israelis will lose some of their over-assurance. Perhaps, then, the Israelis and the Arabs -- the Churs and the Nassers -- can look upon each other with awareness that they must live together, like the mountain and the sea. Perhaps, then, for the first time, they will see hope.

You Are Not in Our Plans

"Mystery alone is at the root of fear."
--Antoine De Sain-Exupéry

In retrospect it seems ironic that I should have been so pleased that spring day in 1976 when I was notified from Luanda that the new "revolutionary" government of Angola had awarded me a visa. Since the revolution in 1975, when the
MPLA
or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola had caught in its Marxist hands an exhausted Portuguese colony that was virtually abandoned by the Portuguese colonialists, the country had been harder for a journalist to get into than the White House bedroom at three in the morning.

My delight was only slightly cut short by the knowledge, which came by the way, that the "new Angolans" were allowing in a large group of journalists so they would cover the trials of the British and (a few) American mercenaries who had come in, paid by the

CIA
and others, to fight against them.

That night in early April when I arrived in the war-wracked city of Luanda on the luxuriant coasts of the South Atlantic, I perhaps should have been aware of many indicators of trouble ahead, but in fact everything went almost too smoothly.

"Ah, yes, Miss Geyer," the dour young woman sitting at the table to "welcome" the foreign journalists said, "you are the correspondent of the
Los Angeles Times
. Welcome to Angola." But she didn't smile.

"No," I remonstrated hastily, "actually, I am not the 'correspondent'of the
Times
, I am a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate." This was a very delicate thing, because the correspondents belonged to the paper, and thus certainly deserved more direct attention in countries like this than I did. Belonging to the syndicate, one of the corporate bodies of the Times Mirror Company, meant only that I was an "independent contractor" and on my own, for I had left the
Daily News
in 1975 to become a columnist.

She stared at me in an odd way. It was clear that she wanted me to be the correspondent of the
Times
, so I let it drop.

The next morning when I phoned Dial Torgerson, the top-notch journalist who really was the
Times
correspondent, this always gracious man was gracious but a little restrained. And when we met for coffee in his room, I understood why.

"It was interesting to come in the other day," Dial, a wiry Nordic soul who in another era would have skippered a great sailing ship to the New World, "and tell them I was the
Times
correspondent. They said, 'No, Miss Geyer is the
Times
correspondent.' Then they got very suspicious.... "

It turned out that since Miss Geyer was the
Times
correspondent, they held Dial at the airport for
eight hours
before allowing him to enter the empty city of Luanda. It is really quite a wonder -- and credit to his good humor and wonderful spirit -- that we became such close friends.

Luanda in those days (and still in these days, six years later, as I write this) was a ghost city. The beautiful pastel-colored colonial buildings that the Portuguese had built were still there, but they stood now as eerie fronts for the new emptiness of the society. Cobblestone streets wound up the hillsides to the glorious old pink, yellow, and blue buildings of the once luxuriant Portuguese overseas empire. But behind these lovely facades there was only the omnipresent emptiness. The poor black Angolans, who were supposed to gain from the revolution they were told they had "won," had prudently run away to the edges of the city. There they paused, collectively and hesitantly, in the thrown-together camps and shantytowns that spring up around all revolutions as palpable expressions of people's new freedom, and fragmentation, and fear.

It is difficult to explain how a journalist operates and lives and continues as a (more or less) normal human being in such a gruesome place as Luanda was that peculiar spring. During the day Dial and Lee Griggs of
Time
and I would walk down the graceful hill to the Old Opera House, where the trials of the mercenaries were being held. There in the steamy, crowded upper balcony we sat for as long as we could bear it, watching the poor fools of mercenaries who had risked their lives for cash or adrenaline, some to see the world and some to kill their kings, being tried with all the pomp and circumstance of a simulated European court.

The new Angolans of the
MPLA
"government" wanted to impress everybody with their power and with their efficiency, and so they brought handpicked, ideologically approved observers from all over the Third and socialist world and they would have been very angry indeed had these observers not supported them on every single move.

On the way down to the trials we would often peer into a most wonderful and magical shop where one "Dr. Sambo" had his wares. Most unfortunately, it was closed at the moment. It seemed that Dr. Sambo, a black Angolan resplendent in his pictures in a black top hat and tails, had his herbs for any need, whim, or particular disability. I still have one box, which Dial was able to procure for me on the rare day Dr. Sambo opened up to the revolutionary air, which reads:

SPECIAL TEA FROM CABINDA
,
ANGOLAN PLANTS NO
.
5,
FOR
SEXUAL MASCULINE WEAKNESS AND INDIFFERENCE
OR FEMININE FRIGIDITY
.

It then told you to take three spoonfuls in three liters of water and to abstain from eating alfalfa, fried meats, fruits, grapes, tapioca, chocolate, ginger, and any alcoholic drinks. Clearly a complicated solution to complicated problems.

There were pathetic little dramas day after day. The second afternoon it was duly announced by the "government" that there would be
demonstração grande
by all the good folks crazed by the revolution. Naturally we did not intend to miss something like that, so Dial and I got to the square early and eager. It soon became clear that they were busing into the center of the city all the poor black Angolans who had been hovering out there on the dark borderlands of the city, waiting to see what the revolution would bring them.

Dial and I climbed up the littered, broken back stairs of a once elegant apartment building in order to get to the roof. The scene was so sad it made me want to cry. Here were all these poor, good, black people, like those of my youth, now having had "the revolution," and now being massed and managed by the new rulers. They held giant signs saying
DOWN WITH MERCENARYDOM
(Mercenarydom?). They were against -- yea, united against -- "imperialism." They shouted when they were told to shout and sloganed when they were told to slogan and sang when they were told to sing. (Prince Sihanouk had once said wryly to me, "When I tell them to dance, they dance.") Then the black marchers -- the new revolutionary breed -- would withdraw inside themselves, just as the peasants had in Vietnam. They would be standing there, still carrying the signs, having sung and chanted, but now with their eyes covered as by a film, with their eyes now looking inward at themselves again.

Then there were the times that Dial and I would set out in the morning (with one of the exactly six taxis still extant and working in Luanda) to find "the government." It is always a mistake to assume there is a government in these situations, but we always kept diligently trying. We went from ministry to ministry, from building to building, from hope to disappointment. No one was ever there. Where were they? Who knows? It was a ghost city with a ghost government.

At night we sat on the roof of the Hotel Trópico, still then a pleasant place, and looked over the darkening city that once had been the pearl of the southern Atlantic. We drank up, systematically and happily, a good deal of Portuguese wine that was left behind. The nights didn't touch us -- yet -- but we knew enough to know that "out there" at night there were roving gangs of bandits and lots and lots of trouble. It was a little like the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, when the Japanese were invading and everyone sat at the bar daring the world by drinking to life.

We often complained about the toughness of the meat, and Dial later found that the revolutionary Angolans, so resourceful in everything, had raided the protected animal refuge and that we were eating the poor wildebeest!

There were early indicators of trouble, but in truth they did not loom very large on our busy horizons. I kept having small run-ins with Luis da Almeida, the "press secretary" of "the government," who was the only person we were permitted to see. And despite my Spanish and reasonably good Portuguese he kept misunderstanding me.

I kept saying, in Spanish, when he would ask me what I was,
"Yo soy columnista"
("I am a columnist").

For some reason da Almeida, who talked to me in a normal human manner only once -- and that because he had just stepped on my foot -- kept thinking I was saying,
"Yo soy economista"
("I am an economist"). And he would answer, his eyes wary and clouded, "It is a strange time for an economist to come to Angola." And indeed it was, there being no economy!

Nevertheless we forged ahead, covering the trials and gazing with hope ever sprung anew into Dr. Sambo's closed shop. I filed a story on the trial:

They brought in scads of the world's press and a strange international commission of 44 people from 27 countries (whom they also peevishly won't let the press see). They even got 10,000 of the Angolans who remain in this beautiful, empty stage setting of a city to march with a marked display of lack of anger with perfectly lettered signs (all of which came out of the prosecutor's office) saying growly things like "Death to the Mercenaries." And then, oh my, and then you see the mercenaries, and you have to know the West is declining.

Remember the days of William Morgan, the handsome, gentle American who fought with Fidel Castro, only to be finally executed by him? Remember Rolf Steiner, the Brit who led black armies in the south of the Sudan and who finally was sentenced to jail for dispensing medicine without a license and being in the country without a visa? Remember mad Mike Hoare from South Africa?

Well, they may not all have been very nice, but at least they had a certain class. Errol Flynn and Clark Cable would not have delicately excused themselves to throw up when they saw them.

What, on the contrary, do we have here? Since the world is growing more and more ethnocentric, we will bypass the 10 Brits on trial and focus on the Americans.

This leaves us with Daniel Francis Gearheart of Kensington, Md., a dropout Vietnam veteran, and Gary Martin Acker of Sacramento. He flunked out of the Marine Corps and on his last job, which was getting paid piecework for putting up gutters, he ruined so many gutters he owed the contractor money....

Certainly nobody in the press corps at the Hotel Trópico is drinking any toasts to these poor saps. But neither are most of them drinking any toasts to the Angolan Marxist regime here, which is charging them for crimes in February under a law written the first of May.

After the parade the other day, in which the happy marchers demanded death to the mercenaries, Information Minister Luis da Almeida held a press conference accusing the foreign press of prejudging the trial. Maybe da Almeida and the government are correct in saying that imperialism itself is on trial, but if this was imperialism, one has to ask, "How did imperialism ever manage to function?"

Mercenaries. Soldiers of fortune. Dogs of war have never been exactly the kind of clean-cut boys you'd want your daughter to marry. But there was at least a time in history when there were Janissaries and Mamelukes and Morgans and Steiners. And today we have a world where a great mercenary extravaganza is being waged on behalf of the Cearharts and Ackers. The losers. The dropout marines. The poor half-baked machos of an evermore-tasteless world.