It Happened on the Way to War (24 page)

Marines moseyed out to the field across the street from our team house, a one-story, asbestos-infested brick building. Some of the Marines sounded eager as they speculated about the prospects for war in Iraq, “the sandbox.” Our company was one of the few Marine units where the average age was over twenty-five, and the Marines came in many different shapes and sizes. Some HUMINT Marines ran marathons. Others were horribly unfit, such as one nicknamed “the pumpkin smuggler” because from a distance it could appear as if he had a pumpkin in his pants and another beneath his shirt.

The game began. Full contact. I was the youngest man on the field, and I went all out. As the hits got harder, a couple of Marines dropped with twisted ankles and dislocated shoulders. One of my teammates took a helmet to the mouth and had to be carried off the field, where he watched the rest of the game on the sidelines spitting blood and shouting obscenities at the opposing team.

I stepped up for a rotation as quarterback. We marched upfield with short completions: ins and outs, slants, a buttonhook. I dropped back into the pocket on one play and spotted a break in the line. Pump-faking, I tucked the pigskin under my arm and barreled forward. It looked like I had an open field to the goal until Sergeant Mo came out of nowhere and crushed me. My helmet's chinstrap unbuckled as I smacked the ground. Tiny white stars appeared in the sky, then I saw Mo's thick bronze face and flaring nostrils.

“Welcome to the company, sir.” He hovered over me, extending his club of an arm to help me up.

The rest of the game was pure pain. I pushed through it to save face, showered, and limped to the office of the company commander to formally report for my first day on the job. Our commander, a Marshall Scholar who'd finished first in his class at the Naval Academy and spoke Russian, was at a meeting at higher headquarters. I figured I would catch him later. Rumor had it he worked so hard and was so frugal that he lived out of his office. His executive officer, First Lieutenant Michael Dubrule, caught me at his door.

“Heard it was a hell of a game.” Lieutenant Dubrule shook my hand with a firm grip. We were about the same size and build. “I'm sorry I missed it. Too many injuries, though. I was battling the battalion about this Iraq deployment. They want sixty Marines ready as soon as the balloon goes up.”

We were America's force in readiness, first to fight and always on the move. True to form, Lieutenant Dubrule's cubicle looked fully “expeditionary,” with no photos or decorations. Apart from a couple of stacks of paper and a laptop his desk was barren. A map of the world yanked out of a magazine was tacked to the wall. A wooden T-stand made of three two-by-fours supported his kit: flak jacket, load-bearing vest, KA-BAR fighting knife, and Kevlar helmet. He wore two silver pins above his heart. The scuba bubble indicated that he was a combat diver. An emblem with lightning bolts and a shield designated his former military occupation—Explosive Ordnance Disposal. In the years to come, those EOD units would suffer the highest casualty rates in the U.S. armed forces.

A veteran of the first Gulf War, Lieutenant Dubrule had served a decade as an enlisted Marine before graduating from Florida State University and earning his commission. He led me into the commanding officer's room to a whiteboard filled with acronyms. Each acronym represented a school or deployment. Our unit had one of the fastest operational tempos in the Marine Corps, with typically less than half of the company back at Camp Lejeune at any given time. The commander's whiteboard showed teams attached to Marine units, Special Forces, NATO, and other government agencies around the world in Djibouti, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, the Indian Ocean, Bosnia, and elsewhere. Other acronyms denoted schools where we received additional training: FBI Counter-Surveillance; Jump School; Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape; High Risk Personnel; and Bill Scott Raceway High-Speed Pursuit Driving. I felt like a kid in a candy store.

A natural leader, Lieutenant Dubrule was the number two officer in the unit. He spoke with competence and candor. When I left the office, I took out my pocket-size pad and scribbled down everything I could remember from his brief orientation to the company, my new home.

LOCATED ON THE coast of North Carolina near the edge of the Outer Banks, Camp Lejeune felt like an ideal launching pad. It was close to Tracy in Greensboro and CFK's U.S. office in Chapel Hill, and it was on the ocean, the great blue divide across which we would deploy. It was important for me to live on the beach. The only problem was money. I didn't want to pay beach prices for a place. After a couple of weekends of fruitless searching, I began to lose patience. One day Lieutenant Dubrule remarked that if he weren't married with two boys, he would live on a houseboat or in a camper. His comment triggered my recall of Rogers Bay Family Campground, a nest of campers on North Topsail Beach.

Located twenty minutes out of Camp Lejeune's back gate, Rogers Bay had three campers for rent. I chose the least expensive one and moved in for a hundred bucks a month. It was perfect. Less than a thirty-second jog to the beach, my camper had walls so rickety thin that I could hear the ocean at night after my neighbor, a retired shrimper who drank Crown Royal whiskey mixed with Sun Drop citrus soda throughout the day, turned off his country-and-western music and went to bed.

As for the work, my responsibilities were minimal relative to what I would soon face. I was expected to learn as much as I could about our field and build relationships with Marines until the next class for basic HUMINT training began at a base in Virginia. That was it, and it was a blessing, although I met it at first with frustration because the company was preparing for another war. It was early October 2002, months before Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his “Weapons of Mass Destruction” speech to the United Nations. Yet in Camp Lejeune it felt as though an invasion of Iraq was preordained. Even though I was skeptical of why we were about to make war in Iraq, I found myself worrying that I might miss the action.

OUR BATTALION COMMANDER authorized a long leave over Christmas and the New Year so that Marines could be with their families before the probable deployment to Iraq. With that decision, the stars were aligned for me to return to Kenya during what I believed might be one of the country's most historic elections. As far as my military command was concerned, I was one of the few Marines with expertise on East Africa. Lieutenant Dubrule joked that my trip looked like a self-funded opportunity for professional military development. My request to spend another Christmas in Kenya sailed up the chain of command.

Once again, however, my decision went over poorly with Tracy. “Are we ever going to spend Christmas together?” she asked over the phone one night as my neighbor at the campground sang along to David Allan Coe's “If That Ain't Country.”

“And will you please turn down that terrible music,” Tracy added with an uncharacteristically sharp tone.

“Babe, it's not my music. You know my walls are thin. Listen, I want to be with your family, but I really need to be in Kenya with CFK.”

“CFK will always need you.”

“Oh, come on.” I was getting frustrated. It had been a long day. “The elections are coming. It'll be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Do you know how many times I've heard that?”

“That what?”

“That, that ‘once-in-a-lifetime,' ” she said, raising her voice.

“Well, I can't help that.”

“Yes, you can. These are
your
choices.”

“But it doesn't feel like a choice.”

“I know, I know. You say that all the time, too.”

I held the phone in silence. She was right to be upset. If I were in her place, I probably would've quit the relationship long ago.
How much of this would she tolerate?

“Just go. Go. But it can't keep being like this.”

A WEEK BEFORE Christmas I arrived in Kenya to find a letter from the former councillor Taib waiting for me at the clinic. Evidently, he had postmarked a copy to my old dorm room months earlier. Salim knew that Taib was still upset about our initiative to create CFK instead of fund KIYESA. Over the past year, we had received a couple of e-mails from people claiming to live in Kibera and accusing CFK of taking advantage of the community. We assumed Taib was behind the letter and e-mails. As far as we knew he and Oluoch were CFK's only two enemies, and Oluoch had no real ties to the community. An excerpt from one e-mail read:

WHO EVER YOU ARE!!!

OMONDI BARKOT

WE PARENTS HAVE FOUND YOU ARE SPOLING OUR YOUTH BY PRETENDING YOU ARE MAKING PLAY FOOTBALL. THE YOUTH ARE USED IN FETCHING DRUGS, MARIJUANA, BY YOUR ORGANIZERS IN TURN THE SAME YOUTH ARE USED AS PEDLLARS … WHEN YOU STEP HERE YOU WILL KNOW THE TRUE SLUM FEELINGS WHICH YOU WILL REGRET.

We took the e-mails seriously. Salim replied to each anonymous sender with requests to meet and discuss their accusations. Our fourteen youth representatives conducted community-based investigations. Although Taib's letter to me made no references to the anonymous e-mails, he concluded his three-page letter by accusing me of taking advantage of his hospitality. As I read the letter, I could hear Taib's shrill, high-strung voice shouting: “WHEN MY GOOD FRIEND OLUOCH FROM FORT JESUS INTRODUCED YOU AND HANDED OVER YOU TO ME, YOU WERE IGNORANT ABOUT KIBERA.”

Taib concluded his letter with a demand and a carbon-copy list: “We want full explanation of the betrayal otherwise we will file court injunction to stop all your illegal activities in Kibera.”

CC - Dean of the University of North Carolina—USA

- Director of Social Services (Youth Development)

- Area Member of Parliament

- Area Councillor

- His Worship The Deputy Mayor

- CNN

- BBC

- ALJEZIRA Television

- Local Print and Electronic Media

Perhaps Taib wanted some type of payout. He had introduced me to local leaders, and we had mentioned KIYESA and other organizations as examples of potential local partners in Kibera. Yet this in no way obligated CFK to fund KIYESA. If Taib did send the letter to his ridiculous carbon-copy list, I never heard about it. I suspected any person who read the letter would discredit it for being so haphazardly argued and full of factual errors, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes.

Tabitha reacted by saying that if Taib walked into her clinic, she would escort him out on a stretcher. It was the first time I had heard Tabitha voice a threat, and it struck me as out of character. When I mentioned it to Salim, he corrected me. “That's the Kibera in Tabitha talking. She won't just stand back. She'll fight. You know, even me, I wouldn't want to cross Tabitha when she's mad.”

Salim was equally upset by Taib's letter and focused on the paragraph where Taib attacked him personally: “How do you call Salim Mohamed from other area, yet there are so many youths in the area who are conversant and capable than him. If he was the best why isn't he still with MYSA? He has never been with them either.”

Much as I had never heard Tabitha make a threat, I had never before heard Salim swear. “KIYESA is nothing,” Salim said. “This guy is shit.”

Salim and Tabitha knew they could handle Taib. I took a copy of the letter to Cantar, CFK's Nubian youth representative. Sounding like a salty Marine sergeant, Cantar responded, “This guy is nothing. The community has no respect for him. Don't worry. We'll take care of it at our level, ghetto level.”

APART FROM OUR conflict with Taib, which our team handled peacefully with the support of the community, our attention was focused on the historic event before us. A Kenyan constitutional mandate was about to replace President Daniel arap Moi. Salim suspended CFK's soccer activities in advance of the presidential election. Kenyan politicians often used soccer as a way to mobilize votes before elections, and Salim and Tabitha wanted us to stay far away from politics.

I found their viewpoints fascinating. Salim and Tabitha were change agents, yet they believed nothing would change at the highest levels of their government. Like many Kenyans, they had lost faith in their leaders. Although they both wanted CFK to be apolitical, they acknowledged that real change would require a generational shift in leadership, and that, at its core, was our mission. From a long-term view, everything we did in Kibera was political because it all served the larger purpose of creating leaders who would prevent violence instead of inciting it.

In the days following Christmas the Kenyan people released decades of pent-up frustration and elected the leading opposition candidate, Mwai Kibaki, in a landslide. A public inauguration ceremony was scheduled to occur two days later in Uhuru Park, an emerald stamp of land adjacent to downtown Nairobi. It was the same place where Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai staged her courageous protest against President Moi in 1989, when Moi had wanted to clear the park and construct a statue of himself and a skyscraper to house his party's headquarters. Flummoxed by her audacity, Moi declared that women should follow “the African tradition,” respect men, and be quiet. His comment drew widespread outrage and forced him to abandon his construction plan, thus preserving one of Africa's great urban parks.

Initially, Salim had no interest in going to the ceremony, which was projected to draw a crowd of an estimated half a million people. He predicted it would be a “messy thing” that could become dangerous, and he felt little connection to the euphoria gripping much of the nation. I didn't understand his detachment because I was wrapped up in the public outcry. I blamed Moi for many of Kenya's problems, including the existence of Kibera. “A fish rots from the head down” goes the worldly proverb I had heard many times in Swahili. More than any other person, Moi embodied the “big-man” culture of graft and patronage politics. He had presided over what academics called the criminalization of the state. I wanted to see him go down in person, to be a small part of that historic moment, cheering and jeering with the masses in the arena, justice triumphing.