It Happened on the Way to War
Read It Happened on the Way to War Online
Authors: Rye Barcott
It Happened
on the
Way to War
A MARINE'S PATH TO PEACE
Rye Barcott
Contents
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3.  The Present and the Future Leaders
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6.  Doers
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7.  The Sword
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9.  Messiahs
12.  From Peacetime to Wartime
16.  Grass, Flower, and Wind
18.  The Elephant and the Velvet Glove
To Tabitha Atieno Festo
&
Salim Mohamed
Talent is universal; opportunity is not.
The Horn of Africa
NOVEMBER 2004
TABITHA LIKED TO SAY THAT YOU HAVE to sacrifice for success, and I was thinking about her and her strong brown eyes as we blazed into the Ogaden Desert. My interpreter and I were midway to our forward operating base somewhere near Somalia. We hadn't seen a living creature in hours. It was just the two of us in our Land Cruiser with an emergency supply of food and water, spare tires, an encrypted satellite phone, suitcases of counterintelligence equipment, a rifle, a shotgun, and a crate of grenades. I pulled over near a patch of thorny, sage-colored bushes. It felt more appropriate to whiz in a bush, even if we were in the middle of nowhere.
My urine evaporated as soon as it hit the cracked earth. I heard rustling as I zipped my fly. Something grunted. I reached for my pistol. A baboon bounded out from behind a bush up ahead. Another appeared, then another. Before I knew it, I was staring at a dozen miniature cavemen with arms that reached the ground.
It was a standoff. A headline from a government threat advisory flashed to mind: MAN CLAWED TO DEATH BY SAVAGE BABOONS.
I stepped back. The pack leader scampered forward. I stopped, switched the safety off my pistol, and took aim. The soft click of the safety carried through the desert air. The lead baboon hesitated. My hands shook slightly.
“Ergh, ergh.” One of the baboons shuffled forward. “Ergh, ergh.” It swayed like a boxer, knuckles to the ground, shoulders shifting.
One of them crouched, then sprang toward me. I jerked the trigger, turned to the Cruiser, and ran. As soon as I slammed the door shut, two baboons leaped onto the windshield, shining us with their hot-pink rear ends. I floored the accelerator. The hairy little men flipped into the air and into a cloud of dust behind us.
“Can you get a CAR for that, Lieutenant?” my interpreter, Hussein, joked.
The coveted Combat Action Ribbon was typically awarded for receiving and returning enemy fire. Hussein, a forty-year-old Ethiopian American who had previously worked as a manager at a luxury hotel in Georgia, had an impressive understanding of the Marine Corps and our martial culture.
Hours after the baboon ambush, the intense sunlight began to affect my eyes despite my dark, wraparound sunglasses. My sensitivity to light was a symptom of the laser eye surgery the military had given me the previous year. Hussein took the wheel, slid in
Ray Charles Greatest Hitsâ
one of my girlfriend Tracy's favorite CDsâand gunned it. I resisted my instinct to slow him down. I wanted to get to our destination as much as he did, and I assumed he knew how to handle the roads.
We sped toward a bend on a rocky ridgeline. Ray was singing “Georgia On My Mind,” and I was thinking about Tracy, her long, strawberry-blonde hair, almond eyes, and southern grace. We had been dating since the end of my senior year of college. I missed her, and I was only halfway into my nine-month deployment. Suddenly, a tiny deerlike creature appeared in the middle of the curving road motionless, staring at us. Our rear wheels began to skid. Hussein hit the brakes, throwing the vehicle into a tailspin. We careened off the ridge and flipped over. The Land Cruiser slid into a boulder, crushing the roof above our heads like tinfoil.
I WAS TWENTY-FIVE and hanging upside down in a Land Cruiser in Ethiopia's Ogaden Desert. Dust layered my khakis. This was not what I had imagined when, at seventeen, I signed an eight-year contract with the Marine Corps in exchange for a college scholarship. I had seen myself in an infantry battalion covered in camouflage and face paint. I knew it was dangerous. That was part of the attraction. If I died as a Marine, I envisioned an honorable death, a death in combat. I never imagined losing my life in a car wreck, or to a pack of baboons.
“Hussein, you all right?” I couldn't see his face.
“Yes, sir.” His voice trembled.
Ray Charles crooned:
Georgia, I said Georgia
A song of you
Comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines
“What the hell was that?”
“Dik-dik.”
“Dik-dik?” I had only a fleeting recollection of seeing deerlike dik-diks on safari in Kenya as a young teenager.
“Yes, sir.”
Gasoline fumes filled our vehicle. We needed to get out and secure our gear. I flipped the thumb release on my Spyderco knife, sliced the seat belt with the half-serrated blade, and pulled myself out of the shattered window. Hussein crawled out of his side. We stashed our gear and surveyed the damage.
“I should have just hit it,” Hussein observed.
Damn right you should have
, I thought to myself, bottling my anger.
Why didn't I tell him to slow down?
My blood pressure rose as reality set in. I was responsible for a team of five highly trained Marine human intelligence specialists on the frontiers of the Global War on Terrorism. I always told my team to drive safely, and there I was standing in front of a crumpled $40,000 vehicle, our mission stalled and our lives having faced unnecessary danger.
I was pushing too hard in more ways than one, and I dreaded the conversation that I would have with my boss back at our headquarters, an old French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti called Camp Lemonnier. My boss, a gruff Marine colonel, ordered me to report to his command post as soon as we returned.
“SIR, LIEUTENANT BARCOTT reporting as ordered, sir.” I walked into the colonel's tent and locked my body at attention. He was the senior human intelligence officer in our Horn of Africa task force.
“At ease, Lieutenant.”
I relaxed, locked my hands behind my back and widened my stance. “Sir, I need to apologize. There's no excuse. I was in charge. I screwed up. It won't happen again.”
“Lieutenant, that's right. You screwed up. But we have a mission to accomplish. Learn from what happened. Press on. Got it?”
“Yes sir.” I popped back to attention, the Marines' way of saluting superior officers when indoors.
“Carry on, Lieutenant. Carry on.”
I left the colonel's tent and changed clothes. I needed a run to clear my mind. It was noon. The thermometer read ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. My Marines thought I was too gung ho for running in such heat, but I preferred it. In twenty minutes, I could get a workout that would take an hour in a gym.
The sandy, three-mile trail behind our base's flight line stretched toward the sea like a long pier. There were two signs at its entrance: the first warned of snakes and scorpions, the second advised jogging with a buddy. I wasn't opposed to the idea, but I could never interest anyone in joining me. Most runners hit the trail at dawn or dusk. Every now and then I passed a bearded man running solo at the hottest time of day. “SF,” our Special Forces operators, were the only ones who wore beards to conceal their military identity on missions. I didn't know any of them well enough to propose a buddy run.
My stopwatch set, I took off with my shirt in one hand and cell phone in the other. When my Marines or an intel source needed to reach me, it was often urgent.
A musty breeze swept in from smoldering pits of garbage in Djibouti's largest dumping grounds, a landfill located adjacent to Camp Lemonnier. My conversation with the colonel spun on repeat in my mind. While it troubled me that I had messed up, the colonel's words were also comforting. I could still prove myself. We were human intelligence collectors. We were Marines. My team could ramp up our already intense pace, and I would set the example by personally taking on more. We would out work the old man's expectations.
I sprinted the final hundred-yard stretch. Dizzy and dry heaving, I stumbled to the cooler, pulled out a two-liter bottle of water, and doused my throbbing head. A faint ring rose above the sound of the wind. It was my cell phone with a call from Kenya.
None of my Marines were in Kenya. The call was from someone at Carolina for Kibera (Key-bear-ah), the nonprofit I cofounded three years earlier with the nurse Tabitha Festo and the community organizer Salim Mohamed. A microcosm of the world's problems, Kibera was Nairobi's largest slum. There, more than two hundred thousand people lived in an area the size of New York's Central Park. The United Nations projected that up to one fifth of the world could live in “mega slums” like Kibera by 2020. I had first traveled there as a college student to do research on youth culture and ethnic violence, and for the adventure. Over the years, however, Kibera became my second home. It wasn't easy to balance my Marine Corps responsibilities with service in Kenya, and it was becoming more challenging as Tabitha and Salim grew our organization from a small clinic and sports program reaching hundreds to a movement that empowered thousands of young people.
“
Habari
,” I answered, “Hello.”
“Rye, it's me. How are you?” It was Tabitha. While I called Tabitha from time to time to touch base, she never called me. It was too expensive, and she was conscious of my commitments as a Marine.
“Good,
mama
, how are you?”
“Oh, not well.” Her voice cracked.
“What is it?”
“It's not good. Perhaps you can come?” Her phone beeped three times and cut off. I couldn't get through when I tried to call back.
Tabitha rarely asked for anything, and she never complained. If she was reaching out to me, she needed me. I called Salim. He told me Tabitha was “really sick.” He thought it would be good if I could come to Nairobi.
Suddenly the two worlds that I worked so hard to keep in their own compartments were colliding. It was abrupt, and the timing couldn't have been worse. I needed to prove myself to the colonel, not ask him for a favor. Yet, I had to ask. Even though we shared neither blood nor skin color, Tabitha was family.
TABITHA AND I had first met in 2000, when I spent five weeks living in Kibera during the summer of my third year in college. She showed me around the slum after we had been introduced by her best friend, Jane Atieno. Tabitha wanted to welcome me to her home for chai, Kenya's staple drink, before I returned to the States.
We reunited the day before I left near Jane's ten-by-ten-foot shack, her “ten-by-ten.” I recognized Tabitha immediately from her oversized black leather coat. Her hair was pulled back in short, tight braids, and her brown eyes conveyed strength and wisdom. She wore a dark green, conservative skirt. If it weren't for her leather coat, which appeared to be designed for a man, I might have thought she was a no-nonsense librarian. Later, I would learn that she was only thirty-four and widowed with three children.
We crossed the railroad track and made our way into Kibera. Tabitha, in flip-flops, walked as if she was on a mission. I struggled to keep up as mud sucked against the soles of my boots. Women greeted her deferentially with smiles and the Swahili words for nurse and doctor:
nass, daktari
.
Old-school reggae music thumped from the Mad Lion Base, a small shack with a bad reputation. The face of a lion with fiery eyes was spray-painted on its tin wall. The lion's eyes appeared to be aimed at us.
“Me, I hate this place,” Tabitha whispered.
We were in a part of Kibera known for the wrong reasons. She pointed to charred remains on the ground: a patch of clothing, a half-burned shoe, and a head-sized rock stained with dried blood.
“Thief.” She shook her head. “Mob justice.”
The Mad Lion sold moonshine for twenty shillings, about a quarter per shot. The moonshine was illegal, though police rarely crossed the tracks to patrol the area. The corrupt police were hated in Kibera and they knew it.
A lanky man stumbled out of the Mad Lion toward us. Tabitha stopped. The man's eyes were as red as the lion's. He pointed at me, stumbled, and slurred, “
Mzungu
[white man], you give me something. You give me⦔ His arms flailed over his head and he collapsed. One of his hands splashed into the foul muck of a sump, an open sewer. A dozen young men watched with hard eyes.
Tabitha placed two fingers on the man's neck. She gently folded his eyelids back and inspected his eyes. The man remained unconscious as she lifted his arm out of the sump.
“Okay.” She straightened her back. “Let's continue.”
We walked toward Darajani Massive, the Massive Bridge. It arched over the tracks on one of the only dirt roads that cars could navigate into the slum. Weeks earlier, Tabitha had overheard a group of young men talking outside a shack near Darajani Massive. She referred to them as “hardcores.” She had said that they called me Van Damme and were “plotting” against me. It was the first and only credible threat I had received in Kibera. I didn't know what “plotting” against me meant, and Tabitha hadn't been able to clarify.
Nevertheless, I took any threat seriously. Security was always on my mind. I varied my routes, never flashed money, befriended local thugs, and identified myself by an African name. After a couple of weeks, I picked up some Sheng, a language of the youth that mixed Swahili, mother tongues, and gangsta rap lyrics. It had no formal rules, evolved rapidly, and was unintelligible to elders. Sheng helped me establish my bona fides in a way that I would never have imagined.
A gang of men hanging out at Darajani Massive looked at me curiously. A white man walking in Kibera without an entourage was uncommon. My dark sunglasses concealed my eye movements as I studied their midsections for weapons. Widening my stride, I tried to look cool and confident. My heart slammed against my chest. The hardcores needed to think I knew more about their lives and Kibera than I actually did. I moved my hand to my pocket and fingered the waffle grip of my Spyderco knife.
The biggest, meanest looking guy was at least six feet tall, with biceps the size of my neck. He snarled at me and gnawed on a piece of wood, a
toothbrush kienyenji
.
“
Vipi beshte. Napenda toothbrush kienyenji yako. Wewe una meno kama simba
,” I greeted him in Sheng and Swahili: “What's up friend? I like your traditional toothbrush. You have teeth like a lion.”
