It Happened on the Way to War (21 page)

He pointed to a thin white line in the X-ray. “Stress fracture, upper femur. If you keep on it, it may break clean, and you can say good-bye to your Marine Corps career.” My recovery would take at least six months, the doc said authoritatively.

I had broken my leg because I was too cheap to purchase new running shoes and too thickheaded to listen to advice about how to properly train for a marathon. Spiteful and bitter, I finally sent my letter about Oluoch and his delinquent $1,500 loan. CFK was running out of money, and I felt like a failure for getting recycled to Mike Company, a holding ground for “broke dicks.” I thought mailing the letter would feel good, but that too was disappointing.

THERE WERE TWO dozen lieutenants in Mike Company, and I wanted nothing to do with them. Their low morale was toxic. Fortunately, the commander assigned me to be a training officer for a company of new warrant officers.

The training-officer job was the most perfunctory work I had ever been given. Each morning I showed up at 0700 hours and collected rosters. I kept a captain informed of the numbers, then sat around all day in an office with a phone that never rang. My peers were heading into the field to learn land navigation, call for fire, and machine-gun handling, and I was at a desk in a job fit for a chimp.

It would've been depressing if not for CFK. Being a training officer allowed me to volunteer nearly full-time. I sent hundreds of e-mails to Kenya, pitched foundations for funding, and developed our U.S. board. In the evenings I hit the weight room and then returned to my barracks to work another six hours with CFK. The work was sedentary but surprisingly exhilarating. Our decisions each day directly contributed to the growth of an organization that I believed had wartime relevance. We were fighting some of the root causes of terrorism by empowering youth and reconciling ethnic tensions in one of the world's most volatile slums.

It seemed unlikely that my assignment as a training officer would change my life, and for a while my Marine Corps plans remained intact. I wanted to be an infantry officer and then go to a reconnaissance unit, as my father had done. I had even written about this career ambition in my high school yearbook profile. Infantry was the backbone of the Marine Corps, and recon was so elite you couldn't join as an officer until you'd served a tour in the infantry. I figured the combination of the two would give me the best chance I had to get into the fight. However, after September 11 there was a lot of talk concerning the need for more human intelligence (HUMINT) in Afghanistan. Each Basic School company had one or two HUMINT billets for which lieutenants competed. I searched for more information online about HUMINT but couldn't find much. The manual of military jobs described it in vague terms as a job for “people persons.” None of my mentors apart from the State Department officer Peter Whaley seemed to know anything about it, and Whaley was cryptic when I mentioned it over the phone. “Be careful where you speak about that,” he had said, and offered no additional advice. The absence of accessible information further piqued my interest.

Warrant officers dropped by the training office from time to time to check the schedule and make small talk. I figured one of the warrant officers who specialized in counterintelligence might know something about HUMINT. Apart from my father, Warant Officer R.R. was the only person I knew who still smoked a pipe. One afternoon he offered me an overview. “Now, Lieutenant, nothing that we tell you here will be classified, but ours is a field of quiet professionals. So please keep it to yourself,” he began.

Counterintelligence (CI) involved safeguarding sensitive information and deceiving the enemy. It was often defensive in nature. HUMINT on the other hand referred to the collection of information through human sources and was often offensive. In the Marine Corps, the two specialties merged into one field called CI/HUMINT. Marine HUMINT officers led small teams of highly trained Marines on missions with infantry battalions, Special Forces, and other government agencies. They led interrogations and developed networks of informants on the battlefield. The operational tempo was intense because it was a small field in high demand. “You'll be deployed most of the time,” Warrant Officer R.R. advised. “Not easy if you have a family.”

I thanked him and told him that I might compete for a HUMINT billet once my leg healed.

“Good,” he replied. “If you do, and if you get it, you may join us in Camp Lejeune. You'll be attached to infantry units, so you need to learn those skills. But most important are your listening and writing skills, and asking questions. You need to know how to ask good questions. That's the real secret.”

Warrant Officer R.R.'s final words set the hook. I knew from Kibera and UNC that I could listen and write well, and I enjoyed interacting with people from diverse backgrounds. Most important, HUMINT sounded like a field that could take me to the war's front lines, perhaps even more frequently than the regular infantry. I called Tracy that night eager to tell her the exciting news that I might have found a new calling in the Marine Corps. Describing the field to her in general terms, I explained that it involved interacting with people, collecting and distilling information, and writing time-sensitive reports.

“Sounds like what I do.” Tracy was in her second year in her Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. “But what is it that you actually do?”

I was hoping she wasn't going to ask that question. I apologized and said that I couldn't give many other details.

“What? That's ridiculous. Do you just not know?”

“Babe, I can't.”

“At least give me a clue.”

“It has something to do with espionage.”

Tracy paused. She didn't impress easily. “That's intriguing. It could be a good fit. I'm happy for you.”

“Well, I need to get it first. It's really competitive, you know.”

“Yeah, I'm sure, but you'll get it.”

“I don't know.”

“I do, but what I want to know is if you'll be gone a lot in this job?”

“Some, but I don't know how much. Depends.” I couldn't bring myself to tell her what the warrant officer had said about the operational tempo, or that I was torn between my love for her and my need to prove myself on the battlefield.

“I see.” I could tell from the sound of her voice that she knew there was much more to it, and that in the end each of us had only so much control over our destiny. Things had changed, not between us, I hoped, but around us.

*
  Andrew Carroll,
War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars
(New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 445–446.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Change and Continuity

Washington, D.C.

NOVEMBER 2001

MY MENTOR, COLONEL GREENWOOD, WAS STILL a director of defense policy at the National Security Council. Our fathers had served together in Vietnam, when mine was a lieutenant and his was a colonel. One day he invited me to lunch at the Army and Navy Club, two blocks from his office in the White House compound. I didn't have to mention the anxiety I felt about having my military career delayed eight months because of a stress fracture.

“We're hard chargers. Injuries happen,” Colonel Greenwood said before I brought it up. He arched one of his eyebrows, grinned, and told me to keep my head up. He knew that I was worried about missing the fight. Every Marine understood that. However, from his vantage point Marines would be fighting long after I finished my training. Though I didn't know it at the time, and much to Colonel Greenwood's dismay, some of the neoconservatives in the administration were already planning to launch an Iraq invasion.

As for HUMINT, Colonel Greenwood thought it was an excellent choice of specialty. It was an essential part of any serious counterterrorism operation. Every day he read dozens of classified intelligence reports, including occasional reports with information collected by Marine teams at the forward edge of the battlefield. Additionally, he thought the field would be a good complement to my own interests. Colonel Greenwood was one of the few senior Marine officers who knew about CFK. When he asked me for an update, I gave him an overview: We had merged sports and leadership development with health care, and we would soon launch the first all-girls' soccer league. If the doctors and my command authorized my travel, I would return to Kibera for Christmas leave.

Colonel Greenwood commented that CFK reminded him of his deployment to Haiti as a battalion operations officer in 1994. His battalion had taken on a hybrid mission to establish security and provide humanitarian aid. Such missions embodied what the Marine Corps called the “three-block war.” This was the idea that Marines needed to be prepared to face high-intensity combat, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid delivery at the same time. The military was experimenting with noncombat operations that supported nation building, and Colonel Greenwood suspected I would be a part of this experiment.

There were downsides to these hybrid military missions. While Colonel Greenwood was proud of the work his Marines had done in Haiti, he acknowledged that his unit had left before he could establish any depth to their relationships with Haitians. The military's short deployment cycles resulted in a constant change in personnel. Knowledge was frequently lost in never-ending transitions. “We lack continuity,” Colonel Greenwood said. “These places need long-term engagement. That's why it's like a revolving door for the U.S. in Haiti.”

Colonel Greenwood believed this constant change and failure to develop cultural expertise was the Achilles' heel of the U.S. military. Marines typically deployed for six months in order to avoid burnout, which was a crucial consideration in high-intensity combat. However, if we wanted to do nation building, that work required long-term commitment. It required a paradigm shift in our way of thinking.

“What you're developing in Kibera is the continuity,” he observed, which in his opinion was valuable for Kibera as well as for my professional development. “Do you intend to stick with it?”

“Yes, sir, with everything I have.” There wasn't a doubt in my mind. Ever since the day I reunited with Tabitha and we went zigzagging through the alleys to her little clinic behind the Mad Lion, I knew I was in it for the long haul. Even at the lowest points, I had faith. Most of the others had shifted gears. Nate was back in Wilmington, North Carolina, bartending and thinking about a career as a high school teacher. He wasn't that involved with CFK apart from his mentorship to Kash, which was a considerable commitment. Semaj was busy preparing for law school. My mother doubted we would survive as an organization, though she never said that to me. Thus Tabitha, Salim, and I, perhaps for very different reasons, were the only three people resolute in our unbridled commitment.

A PORTION OF Kibera exploded with violence shortly after my lunch meeting with Colonel Greenwood. Fueled in part by careless remarks from President Moi, rent control riots displaced thousands of people within days. Salim immediately suspended the sports program and helped Tabitha focus on providing emergency care at the clinic. We spoke together on the phone once a day. Salim sounded calm and confident. He told me he drew strength from Tabitha, and that I shouldn't worry about their safety because the fighting was isolated to a different part of Kibera. His reassurance gave me some peace of mind, though I still found myself waking up at night thinking about Tabitha, him, and our team on the ground.

Colonel Greenwood called me before the first press reports about Kibera's riots emerged online. He wanted to arrange a meeting for me to give a private briefing to the president's senior adviser for African affairs, a former Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor named Jendayi Frazer. He offered to call the Basic School commander, a fellow colonel, to have me excused from duty for an afternoon. I thanked him for the phenomenal opportunity. I would figure out a way to be there whenever Dr. Frazer wanted to meet, but I asked Colonel Greenwood not to call my commander. It was easy enough for a buddy of mine to cover for me at the training office.

The grand marbled halls in the National Security Council were surprisingly quiet when I arrived thirty minutes before my meeting with Dr. Frazer. I wasn't particularly nervous. By that point in late 2001, I had presented dozens of overviews about Kibera and CFK. Nevertheless, for a moment I stopped in the middle of a hall and took it all in. There I was, a lowly second lieutenant in the White House compound about to brief the president's senior African adviser.

A gracious African-American political scientist with hair almost as short as my own, Dr. Frazer warmly welcomed me into her office with high ceilings and a view of the West Wing. I moved through my brief without notes, occasionally referencing a photo or map from my handout. After my briefing, Dr. Frazer thanked me for my military service and our work in Kibera. She suggested that I consider Harvard's Kennedy School when the time was right for graduate work. Her thoughtful personal advice caught me off guard. Graduate school was the last thing on my mind. However, I did have a goal-oriented thought as I briefed her—maybe one day I could work at the National Security Council. In a rather clumsy way I asked her what she thought of her job as she escorted me out of her office.

“It's great,” she said. “A lot of fighting fires. Every day brings a new challenge.”

Colonel Greenwood enjoyed hearing about her parting remark when I mentioned it to him after our meeting. She was absolutely right, he said. So much was happening on any given day, it was easy to become reactive. In this regard, Colonel Greenwood's time at the White House was similar to many of his military deployments. As Marines, we often moved so quickly that it was difficult to see the larger picture.

“That's why what you're doing in Kibera is important. It's all about continuity. You'll see the change you make over a course of years.” That was Colonel Greenwood's parting advice. He had been overly generous with his time. His in-box was exploding with classified traffic that needed his attention. “You know, Rye, it won't be easy to do both, and obviously the Marines come first. But you should try to balance these two things, and your family. Don't forget your family. Some commanders will be more supportive than others. Hopefully you'll have good ones, for your Marines' sake, for your family's, and for Kibera's.”

TO RETURN TO Kibera for Christmas leave, I needed to route a formal request up the Basic School chain of command. The command had no particular reason to support my request. I hadn't built any meaningful relationships with the staff, and my travel could easily have been viewed as a risk without payback. Figuring that my best shot was to fully explain CFK in a written request and hope that it would appeal to my commander's humanitarian sentiments, I spent a day writing and editing a two-page justification that included references to credible outside sources. My strategy was full disclosure, so I included quotes such as this one from a United Nations report:

NAIROBI, 13 December 2001—After weeks marked by tension, violent clashes, killings, rioting and looting, residents of Kenya's biggest slum, Kibera, have slowly begun rebuilding their lives. But even as an anxious calm returned this week, deep-rooted tensions remain in the sprawling suburb, home to hundreds of thousands of people.
*

To my surprise, my leave request sailed up the chain of command and was approved within days.

My Christmas plans went over less smoothly with Tracy, who wanted to introduce me to her family over the holidays. Our relationship had matured that fall, in part because we were able to spend most weekends together. Although we hadn't made plans about our future as a couple, visiting family was an obvious next step. The problem was the timing, and the fact that I didn't realize that our families valued holidays differently. Tracy grew up with a tightly knit extended family that lived close to each other and always spent holidays together. My parents were far removed from their families in Washington State and Pennsylvania. Holidays were not as special for us. We had some family rituals—Dad, Mom, and I played tag football and basketball games with anyone who would join us, and we'd take long walks together in the woods behind our house—but it wasn't a big deal every now and then if something else came up.

Tracy expressed her disappointment and left it alone. She certainly didn't give me an ultimatum. Her patience was a blessing because I was still torn between her and my desire to be independent. Once my military command gave me authorization, I had to go to Kibera. I wanted to be there on the ground with Salim, Tabitha, and Kash defending those who needed it. I was moving to the sound of guns.

FROM THE OUTSKIRTS around Fort Jesus, where Salim rented an apartment, everything looked normal. Not until I stepped into the clinic did the damage become visible. Patients' faces conveyed emotional anguish and physical pain. The “anxious calm” that the United Nations' report had identified was palpable. Even Tabitha wore an exhausted expression that I would years later come to recognize as a numbness from overexposure to trauma.

Patients trickled in with wounds from the clashes: infected, pus-filled machete gashes, diarrhea from wastewater, and victims of rape and abuse by riot-control police. In three weeks a few dozen people had been killed, many more had been raped, and perhaps as many as three thousand residents had lost their homes to fire or eviction.

Once the violence subsided our soccer players lobbied Salim, Kash, and our fourteen youth representatives to hold the final match of the CFK tournament before many families returned to their rural homes for the holidays. Salim saw it as the first great test for our interethnic soccer league. Could we help reconcile tensions, or would a final match backfire and explode?

“For the youth, soccer is more important than who's in what tribe,” Kash reasoned. “It's not the players. It's the fans. Those are the ones I worry about.” Salim and Tabitha agreed, and Salim gave Kash the go-ahead to begin planning a final match.

Kash was thriving. Still living at the clinic to provide Tabitha with security, he appeared to command the respect and admiration of the fourteen volunteer youth representatives who helped him pull together the CFK soccer tournaments and monthly wars on garbage. Nate helped Kash edit his college essays, and we were optimistic about his chances of being admitted to UNC provided that we found funding to cover his expenses. To secure the funding, we assumed that Kash needed to travel to the United States with Salim and meet some of our top donors in person.

Kash spent most of his time during the clashes in the clinic with Tabitha. He recommended that we spend an afternoon with Ali's friend Kassim to learn more about what had happened. I was glad to hear that Kassim and Kash had become friends. Before CFK, Kash, a Kikuyu living in a predominately Luo village, had practically no contact with Nubians such as Kassim.

We met one afternoon near the majestic blue gum tree at Darajani Massive, the bridge in the center of Kibera where Nubian youth had congregated before the Nubian-Luo clashes of 1995.

“Kash! Omosh!” Kassim greeted us and wrapped me into a powerful embrace.

“You look good, man.” I pulled back and gave him a friendly forearm to the shoulder.

“Aye, no, you, you look good. An officer and a gentleman, a soldier and a scholar,” Kassim laughed, recalling phrases from
The Marine Corps Officer's Guide
, which I had once lent him. During my first summer in Kibera, Kassim had told me that he had inherited his ancestors' martial spirit and dreamed of becoming a soldier. Unfortunately, the supply of potential soldiers in Kenya far exceeded demand, and Kassim didn't have the funds to bribe his way in.