It Happened on the Way to War (10 page)

THAT EVENING I returned to Fort Jesus for a shower. Elizabeth invited me to dinner. Oluoch was at a pub. With a week left in Kibera, I wanted to spend the night alone sorting out my thoughts about how best to act on my research. However, Elizabeth's beef stew smelled good, and I welcomed the rare opportunity to speak with her alone.

As we ate, I told her about Vanessa. Fighting to stay composed, I stumbled through the story about her unexpected act of kindness.

“I'm sorry,” Elizabeth responded with tears in her eyes. “Those, those are the ones I wish to serve at a nursery when they're younger.”

“Please, tell me about it, your dream.”

“You see,” she explained, “education begins in nursery school. Excellence begins early. These children, born to a single mother or maybe without parents, they deserve it, too. They can succeed, but we must start early. That's what I believe, anyway, and if you can help, it could be a great thing.”

So began a long conversation. Elizabeth told me more about her career and how Montessori schools functioned, which I found interesting in part because I had attended a Montessori as a five-year-old. She spoke passionately about breakthrough learning moments with children she had taught over her twenty-year career.

“Omosh, will you help me?” Well-timed, she asked directly.

“Yes, I'll help raise the funds,” I responded reflexively, though I had the wherewithal to add the caveat, “I have no idea what this will mean. I don't know how much money I can raise, but I'll try.” Although Elizabeth didn't have a budget, I assumed it would be relatively cheap to rent a room and launch a nursery school. Those details could be sorted out later. The important thing was her vision and her dedication to creating something extraordinary.

“Oh, Omosh, thank you, thank you
so very much
!” She embraced me. It was a more enthusiastic reaction than I had anticipated, and it felt good.

It felt good until I thought about it. I had a limited amount of time and resources. While I trusted Elizabeth and was sure that her initiative would be a worthwhile endeavor for Kibera, a nursery school had nothing to do with my research in violence prevention and youth development. It was a good gesture on my part to try to help fund-raise, but that was it. It wasn't taking research to action. It wasn't empowering leaders, or doing anything particularly innovative. I wanted to do something unusual and with consequence for people my age in Kibera whom I admired. And I wanted to battle the things that I hated.

Near the start of my final week I scanned my list of more than seventy sources and decided to meet with ten of the most promising ones, including Ali, Taib, Dan, and Jumba. I planned to ask each person if they had any ideas for new projects or businesses. My focus was still on preventing ethnic conflict, though I decided that I would remain open to different ideas as long as they came from community leaders. The talent was within Kibera, and I felt that engaging it would be the best way to fight extreme poverty and prevent violence.

That was my plan. Unfortunately, I fell ill and the plan collapsed. At first, I felt nauseated and lost my appetite. Hours later, dry heaving began, followed by cold sweats. I assumed it was food poisoning. Hunchbacked, I made my way to Fort Jesus and collapsed on my bed. I had been telling people that I was living in Kibera. But I never “lived” in Kibera. I always had the option of a quiet night in a warm bed with a hot shower and a flush toilet. I could always escape.

Jane helped remove my boots. She brought me water and checked on me throughout the day. Elizabeth returned in the evening and encouraged me to go to the hospital. It was a good idea, but the thought of a bouncing taxi ride and the hospital's fluorescent lights and polished halls turned me off to it. Plus, if it was just food poisoning, all I needed to do was take the pain. I spent the night in the fetal position shivering so forcefully that I imagined my teeth shattering.

The next morning, Jane brought me some small black tablets that she said would help my stomach. Her best friend, Tabitha, was a nurse and had told her about the tablets. Tabitha was one of many people who had taken time and graciously showed me around Kibera during my first couple of weeks. I remembered her mostly because she had tipped me off to the rumor that the hardcores at Darajani Massive were planning to ambush me. It was a threat that seemed to have disappeared after I walked the area with Ali.

“Jane, what is this?” I asked holding up one of the tablets.

“Makaa.”

“Charcoal? Like burnt wood?”

Jane nodded and explained that it was a traditional remedy for ailments ranging from upset stomachs to malaria. Desperate for relief, I popped the charcoal tablets into my mouth and tried to lie still. Every movement caused pain.

The second night of the shakes was the worst because the cold sweats were interspersed with extraordinary heat. It felt like I was trapped in a sauna, then suddenly submerged in ice water. The hot-cold cycle spun through the night. No amount of clothing made a difference. Hours passed. I curled in the bed, clenching my muscles, grinding my teeth, and cursing the invisible thing that ravaged my body.

Surprisingly, I regained some strength by morning and was able to eat a piece of toast. As Jane washed some clothes in a bucket, she spoke with me about her struggles raising five children in a ten-by-ten with her husband, who was an underemployed carpenter.

“How did you do it then, before you worked for Oluoch and Elizabeth?” I asked.

“I can say it was not easy.”

“You're so strong.”

Jane laughed. “Us, we are survivors.”

“Survivors.”

“Yes, survivors.” Jane explained that Tabitha had befriended her as a neighbor, even though Tabitha was educated. When Jane's children fell ill, Tabitha had purchased medicine and cared for them. She had never asked for anything in return. “And she is strong. Let me tell you, strong. Stronger than me.” Jane looked up from the soapy water. Every day she spent hours bent over buckets, scrubbing vigorously.

Tabitha was a survivor, too. Shortly after she lost her nursing job at a hospital when the government cut its health-care expenditures, her husband, a metalworker, passed away. By Luo custom, Tabitha was supposed to marry her late husband's brother, move back to her rural homeland in Nyanza Province, and become a second wife. But Tabitha refused because she didn't respect the man. “He was not a good one,” she had told Jane, who could not fathom how Tabitha mustered the courage to defy Luo marital customs.

Ostracized by her family and widowed with three children, Tabitha joined Jane in a search for work. For three months they worked together without pay as house help for an Indian man. When they found the job at Fort Jesus with Elizabeth and Oluoch, Tabitha insisted that Jane take it. Tabitha remained with the Indian man, working for room and board until he refused to feed her children, at which point she quit and returned to Kibera. That was two years ago. She had been searching for work ever since.

“And, Omosh,” Jane finished, “Tabitha, she still wants to meet you. You said you would meet with her before you left, so Tabitha, she could show you her house and make you chai. You are not forgetting, are you?”

The day before I left Kibera I met Tabitha near Jane's ten-by-ten. She was wearing her oversized, black leather coat. Her hair was pulled back in short, tight braids. Tabitha immediately detected that something was wrong with my body. When I told her about my symptoms over the previous nights, she said that it sounded like a mild dose of malaria. It was mild, she explained, because I seemed to be recovering and was still taking my antimalarial mefloquine pills. Typically mefloquine prevented malaria, although it could be overwhelmed by large doses of the disease through multiple insect bites, such as the many that had covered my shoulders and back after having traveled to Lake Victoria for a weekend and sleeping without a proper bed net.

Tabitha made me chai, answered some questions about her life, and then confronted me. “What we are crying out for is money,” she said, locking her strong brown eyes onto mine. Earlier that summer I had passed Dan $7 to give to Baba Chris for malaria medicine. In part for my own safety, I hadn't given out any other money in Kibera. But Tabitha had a plan, and there was something about the conviction in her voice. I handed her two one-thousand shilling notes, the equivalent of $26.

I didn't think I would see Tabitha again. As I said my good-byes to Jane, Dan, Elizabeth, Ali, and other new friends, I hoped that I could one day return to Kibera. But I didn't know if it would be possible, and my attention was turning to Officer Candidates School, OCS. My orders to the Marine Corps boot camp for officers instructed me to report to Quantico, Virginia, in a week. “Just make sure you pass OCS, Barcott,” Major Boothby had warned. Up until then I hadn't worried about passing the six-week gut check, as my father referred to it. I knew plenty of friends and colleagues who had passed OCS. If they could do it, I could do it. However, if Tabitha was right, and I had a mild dose of malaria, then my odds of passing OCS were suddenly in question. The disease was among the world's biggest killers, and Tabitha had warned that my recovery might take weeks. I didn't have weeks. In less than seven days I would be reporting to duty.

If I didn't pass OCS, I would be the laughingstock of my ROTC unit. It was agonizing to even imagine drill instructors shouting in my face like something out of
Full Metal Jacket
: “WHAT'S YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION, NUMBNUTS?”

The thought was unbearable. Even soft sounds sent my head ringing with bolts of pain.
What the hell had I got myself into?

CHAPTER FIVE

What's the Key?

Quantico, Virginia

AUGUST 2000

“GET UP MY ROPE, SCHWARTZ,” SERGEANT Instructor Staff Sergeant Sweeney shouted, sounding like a fire alarm. Although I grew up using Barcott as my last name for convenience, my true name was Schwartz-Barcott, and it was so long that my uniform nametape couldn't fit all fifteen letters. For the first time in my life, I became known simply as Schwartz, the name made famous by
Spaceballs
, the 1980s parody on
Star Wars
. “I see your Schwartz is as big as mine,” so goes the famous line. I'm all too familiar with it.

“SCHWARTZ,” Staff Sergeant Sweeney bellowed.

My head throbbed. It was the end of week three, the halfway point, and it had been a long three weeks. I had to keep taking mefloquine after I returned from Kibera, and the drug never stopped screwing with my mind. My nights were miserable blurs of bizarre hallucinations. Even though I was exhausted and on the verge of collapse, I slept horribly as my body battled the remnants of the malaria that had struck me weeks earlier in Kibera.

My eyesight had deteriorated from years of heavy reading in Chapel Hill's dark coffee shops. Contact lenses were forbidden at OCS, so I had to wear military-issue glasses with oversized brown frames and lenses so thick they resembled bifocals. The glasses appeared to have come out of an old World War II supply depot. We called them “BCGs,” short for birth-control glasses. A fellow candidate told me that I looked like a reject from a horror movie.

“SCHWARTZ!”

My BCGs fogged up as I strained to hoist myself up the rope. I knew the secret to rope climbing was form, but I always muscled my way up with my arms. Now I was only three quarters of the way and stuck.

“SCHWARTZ. SCHWARTZ. SCHWARTZY-SCHWARTZ!” He drew the attention of two dozen candidates waiting to move on to the next exercise.

Staff Sergeant Sweeney was one of the two drill instructors for our fifty-man platoon, and he had targeted me since the first run. I had finished the three-mile race near the top of the class of two hundred candidates in under eighteen minutes. Along the way, however, my bowels kicked in. The lingering effects of malaria robbed me of my control. Stopping the run to relieve myself wasn't an option. I reached into my Skivvies and pulled the blob out. It had the texture of Jell-O, and I was far enough ahead of the pack so that no one saw me. Sprinting by the commanding officer's building, I tossed it under a bush and finished the run with my soiled hand clenched in a fist.

Staff Sergeant Sweeney stood at the finish line with his arms crossed. Avoiding his eye, I made a beeline to the barracks.

“Schwartz, stop. You come here, you.”

I turned and ran to him. “Yes, Sergeant Instructor Staff Sergeant Sweeney.”

“What's in your hand, Schwartz, huh, what's in your hand?”

I hesitated.

“I SAID WHAT'S IN YOUR HAND, SCHWARTZ? ARE YOU TESTING ME? ARE YOU GETTING CUTE WITH ME YOU SHITBIRD?”

“I shit myself on the run, Sergeant Instructor.” I opened my fist and revealed the residue.

“That's disgusting, Schwartz. Get out of my face, you disgusting candidate. Go clean yourself.”

Six other candidates were on Sweeney's hit list. Within the first week he had determined that we were the “assclowns and bottom-feeders,” the lowest 10 percent of the platoon that needed to be weeded out first. He made it his personal mission to see that we would “never lead Marines.” Three of the targeted candidates were thrown out of OCS in the first two weeks for a variety of stress-induced infractions. Another candidate was caught passing a note during a class and lied about it. There was no discussion when it came to integrity violations. The candidate was immediately jettisoned and lost his $80,000 college scholarship.

I had my fair share of screwups. On day ten, I neglected to tuck in my bed sheets properly. “Why, look here, Schwartz.” Staff Sergeant Sweeney's voice rose. “Candidates, eyeballs. Candidate Schwartz has given us another example of what not to do. For his disregard to attention to detail, everyone pays.” He belted out orders as I stood at attention and the rest of the candidates ran around in a frenzy stripping and remaking their racks.

Did I belong here?
For the first time in my life I felt ostracized from a group that I badly wanted to be part of. For the first time I was at the bottom of a class trying to battle against a horrendous first impression. I was failing at something that mattered. Even without malaria I would have had a tough time. I was often a klutz and forgot simple things. I spent a lot of time in my own head, thinking and observing. I didn't consider myself to be a natural leader, though I wanted to lead. I wanted to be part of something with historical significance, to feel what the military historian John Keegan had called the mask of command. I wanted the burden, the challenge, and the responsibility. What I didn't realize was that the adversity I faced at OCS was deepening my commitment to military service. The calling could not be beaten out of me.

Other people I knew who had passed OCS came to mind: the upper-class midshipmen at UNC, my father, and a high school friend. I thought about Kibera and how the living conditions there were so much more arduous than OCS, where we returned to air-conditioned barracks each night and always had clean water, flush toilets, medical care, and food. I gave myself a pep talk. The stress of life in Kibera was real. The stress at OCS was artificial. If I could make it through Kibera, I could make it through OCS.

“SCHWARTZ!”

My hands locked onto the rope. I couldn't muster the strength to pull myself to the top.

“GET THE HELL UP HERE, SCHWARTZ, YOU TURD,” Staff Sergeant Sweeney shouted from his perch on the adjacent rope.

I threw my arm up and went for another attempt. The rope tore into my calluses as I slid down it and collapsed in a mulch pit. Sweeney pounced on me, pressing his finger into the bridge of my nose. “You're a quitter. God hates a quitter.”

A quitter?
I had been called many things but never that. I loathed the sound of it. Although my instinct was to fight back, that rope gave me self-doubt.

A candidate named Sean Gobin from Rhode Island approached me in the barracks after I had fallen from the rope. “Sha-watz, I'll help you get up that rope, man,” he offered. We had thirty minutes of down time each evening. That day, Gobin gave his time to me. He took me to the ropes and taught me the right form, which involved using legs more than arms. By the end of his tutorial, I had it down. I scaled the rope, slapped the wood beam, and sounded off with the word that accompanied our group exercises—
“KILL.”

It was a silly ritual, and saying it felt odd at first. But I took it for what it was. It was part of the acculturation into a service rooted in violence. OCS was the test. Most exercises ended with full frontal assaults where we charged targets head-on, running into a blaze of make-believe gunfire. There was little discussion of discretion in combat or ethically gray areas such as missions that could endanger civilians. That would come later, if we made the cut. Behind the scenes, we joked about it. Our own morbid sense of humor developed as we started to cope with the reality that our avocation might call on us to take the lives of other people. After a buddy of mine broke his wrist on the obstacle course he looked at me and groaned, “Kill.”

I laughed. I conformed. I convinced myself that my mind was still open and independent, and that ends could justify means. Sometimes we had to kill to reestablish peace.

When we walked back to the barracks that evening, I thanked Gobin for his lesson and made some comment to the effect of “I don't know how I'll repay you.”

“Sha-watz,” Gobin stopped me, “I'm not lookin' to be frickin' repaid. Just graduate. Maybe we'll fight together someday.”

The following morning we ran the obstacle course again. Staff Sergeant Sweeney had me run it twice to see if I could get up the rope the second time when I was tired. With the right form, it was a breeze. I launched up the rope, smacked the wood beam, and shouted,
“
KILL.
”

Gobin had taught me an invaluable lesson in leadership. He had taken the initiative and reached out when he saw a way that he could help. He had given of himself to better the unit. I respected that and began to emulate his style. In so doing, I made fewer mistakes because I was less focused on myself.

SOMETIME DURING WEEK five our platoon went on a three-day field exercise in the forested hills behind the school. I had finished my final dose of mefloquine and was sleeping better at night. We carried thirty-pound packs and M16s without ammunition for ten miles in the first movement of the long exercise. It was so humid it felt as if we were walking in a steam room. We hiked for fifty-minute intervals separated by ten-minute breaks to change socks and drink water. During the breaks, candidates were instructed to knock back two full canteens of water so that we didn't become heat casualties. I pounded my two canteens and envisioned the lukewarm water entering my body and running straight out of its pores.

A Humvee putted behind our formation with a water buffalo, a steel tank of water so large it needed its own trailer. It was a luxury for us to have all the clean water we could drink at no cost. I imagined the column of candidates balancing thirty-pound jerricans of water on our heads like the women in Kibera. The thought entertained me for a while and helped keep my mind off my blistering feet and chafing crotch.

We finished the ten-mile hike at a small clearing in the woods by a rocky road, staged our gear, and prepared to patrol in squads for the rest of the afternoon. We patrolled without packs, moving quickly and without direct access to the water buffalo's seemingly endless supply of water. We were trained to be always on the alert for heat casualties, which could cause serious, long-term injury, or death. That afternoon, two candidates collapsed from dehydration. As soon as they fell, our navy medic, the “doc,” removed their pants and inserted a rectal thermometer. It was a procedure known as the silver bullet. Candidates who received it had to wear a large
H
on their shirts for the rest of OCS to indicate their increased susceptibility to heat injuries. It was the Marine Corps' scarlet letter. At the time, I was convinced that I would rather die than receive the dreaded silver bullet.

None of us looked forward to the night exercise. Some candidates became cranky and complained when the drill instructors were not within earshot. We were told the exercises would go on for an undetermined period of time. Staff Sergeant Sweeney appointed a stocky football player named Miller to be our squad leader.

Miller delivered a crisp set of orders for our first mission, a long tactical movement to a resupply point. He was a top performer but had trouble with night land navigation. He led us through a swampy bog and into a jungle of green briars. Shortly afterward, Miller fell and badly twisted his ankle. The squad stopped and formed a circle around him. No one knew what to do as Staff Sergeant Sweeney stood off to the side in the shadows, quietly observing us. I followed an instinct and took charge.

“Our objective has changed. We need to get Miller back to the bivouac.” I paused to gauge the reaction from the squad. There was no response. I told our most capable navigator to guide us back. Since we didn't have a stretcher, we would have to carry Miller with one man under each arm. The most important thing was balance. I identified the largest candidates and told them to carry Miller out.

“The rest of us will be on security,” I instructed. “We'll move in a wedge formation around Miller.”

“No, no.” Staff Sergeant Sweeney emerged from the shadows, “You need more security. You can only have one candidate hauling Miller's ass at any time.”

Miller weighed over two hundred pounds. No one wanted to carry him. Tensions began to rise. I told the group I'd take the lead and that we'd take turns alphabetically by last name. Being in charge motivated me to carry Miller much farther than I had initially anticipated, and the squad became more energized as we progressed. Soon other candidates were volunteering to carry Miller.

When we arrived at our bivouac site, Miller leaned over and grabbed the back of my neck. “Thanks, I owe ya.”

I couldn't see his face well, but he seemed to be getting emotional. An ankle injury could threaten his graduation from OCS and his chances of becoming a Marine officer. I leaned forward and said to Miller, “You owe me nothin'. The doc will take care of your ankle and you'll graduate. One day we may fight together.”

AS WE ENTERED our final week of OCS, we began administrative outprocessing and had more time to think. We still marched everywhere we went. Candidates took turns calling cadence. One afternoon a candidate called cadence with a ditty I had first heard when I joined ROTC as an incoming freshman at UNC. “LEFT-RIGHT, LEFT-RIGHT, AND WHAT'S THE KEY?” the candidate sounded off, emphasizing each word to the rhythm of our boots on the asphalt.