It Happened on the Way to War (4 page)

Acquaintances often looked surprised when they first learned of my career choice. Rhode Island was such a liberal place that many people I knew in the affluent community of East Greenwich, where I attended public high school, thought that only kids from disadvantaged backgrounds chose the military. “Why would you do such a thing?” I was often asked.

“To serve my country,” I said, using the common refrain without any real understanding of what it meant.

My career choice changed the way I viewed the world, and it gave me a greater sense of purpose in school. In American-history class, I argued that “might makes right.” In English, I read
The Red Badge of Courage
multiple times in search for clues to how I might respond the first time I faced enemy fire. I imagined artillery applications in precalculus homework. Chemistry offered insights into the capabilities of enemy weapons of mass destruction. Spanish could be a tool to communicate with Latino Marines. I was becoming a better, more engaged student.

Unfortunately, my improved performance in school came too late for the Naval Academy, which turned me down. The rejection stung. My grades were strong but not stellar. I barely ranked in the top 10 percent of my high school class and had underwhelming SATs. A lot of valedictorians, SAT aces, and captains of varsity teams were applying to the same schools. I lacked those accolades. My only recourse, I assumed, was to work harder. So I threw everything I had into my ROTC scholarship application, spending weeks preparing for my interviews, rewriting essays, and training for the physical fitness test. The final question in the application asked, “What word do you feel best describes you?” I wrote, “Determined.”

IT HAD WORKED out. I had made it to UNC with a full ROTC scholarship, and by the time I was in my third semester of Swahili, I knew that I wanted to go to Rwanda. But I was struggling with how to get there. One day Professor Mutima brought in a former student named Ted Lord. A thin, young guy with a marathon runner's physique and a serious face, Ted stood at the front of the room and patiently waited for the chatter in the back rows to stop. Once it did, he began speaking in Swahili, a Swahili that was as smooth and as fluent as Professor Mutima's. Had I not been looking directly at him, I would never have guessed that Ted was a
mzungu
, a white guy who grew up in Baltimore.

Realizing that our comprehension was limited, Ted transitioned to English. In a calm, low-key manner, he told us briefly about the year he'd spent in Tanzania. He explained that he had received a Burch Fellowship, an award that any UNC undergraduate could apply for so as to have “a unique life experience.” Ted used his fellowship to work as an apprentice to world-renowned door carvers on Tanzania's Zanzibar island. My mind raced with possibilities as he spoke.

Professor Mutima proudly announced that Ted had arranged for a set of Zanzibari grand doors to be installed at the entrance to the new UNC Honors Office. When he opened the floor to questions, I asked, “How did you do it?” It was a clumsy question, but Ted sensed what I was getting at.

“Once you know what you want to do,” he explained, “start sending e-mails, making phone calls. You've got to be flexible, be persistent. Reach out to a bunch of people and eventually a few, maybe five percent, will give a damn. That's enough, though. When they respond, you can follow up and start pulling it together.”

I couldn't pay attention during the rest of the class. I was thinking about Ted's apprenticeship and his contribution of grand Zanzibari doors to the university. Ted pulled it together as a sophomore. I was a junior. “Reach out to a bunch of people and eventually a few will give a damn.”

That afternoonI returned to my dorm room, finished the one-page proposal to study the Rwandan army's invasion during the genocide, and sent it to two dozen people.

“Sir, I am in the Marine Corps ROTC program at UNC and am learning Swahili,” I wrote to the author Philip Gourevitch, hoping that he would be one of the 5 percent. “Your book inspired me to focus my university studies in Rwanda. I know you are busy but I would appreciate it if you would give me your thoughts on this brief one-page proposal attached.” I included a few of my reflections about his book and clicked SEND.

THE FIRST PERSON to respond to my e-mail blast was a USAID officer who had worked in Rwanda. We met at a national security conference that I had helped organize at UNC. Unlike many of the conference participants, she was approachable. She suggested that I forward my proposal to her ex-husband, a diplomat named Peter Whaley.

“Give his e-mail to no one,” she said, “and tell him I recommended you be in touch.”

With Ted's advice in my mind, I relentlessly pursued every lead. A week later, I had a meeting lined up with Peter Whaley and a few military officers who had worked in Africa and were based in the Pentagon. Fortuitously, my mom was in Washington that week attending a conference. Whaley left me a voice mail two hours before we were scheduled to meet. “Come to 20/20 K at seven,” he said, his voice sounding too high-strung to conform to the James Bond impression I had of him. “I'll be at the bar. Hope you like calamari.”

My mother dropped me off at 20/20 K at a quarter to seven. The lacquer on the oak bar reflected the soft light from hanging lamps with green shades. A balding man in a pink dress shirt sat at the end of the bar closest to the exit, hovering over a heaping plate of calamari with a martini glass close at hand. He had a small potbelly, and his legs were so short they may not have reached the brass footrest at the base of the bar.

“Mr. Whaley?” I asked, trying to make my voice sound deep.

He didn't look up. “You're younger than I thought. Here, have some calamari. Ya like calamari, right?” He spoke quickly with a strong New York accent. “How old are ya?”

“Twenty, sir.”

“None of that sir stuff on me, and none of these for you.” He tapped his martini glass with his fork. “Sorry.”

I ordered tonic water.

“Good colonial drink,” Whaley remarked, launching into long digressions about the history of tonic water as an antimalarial and his favorite preparations for cooking calamari.

The waiter handed Whaley another martini, “dirty, shaken not stirred.”

“So were there any good calamari joints in Rwanda?” It was an awkward transition, but Whaley liked it. He slapped the bar and roared with laughter.

“That's why I had to leave. No goddamn calamari and too many dead bodies.” His face turned as pink as his shirt. Then he started. He didn't eat another calamari or touch his martini for the next hour.

“Whaley's War, that's what they call it,” he said, adding that he hated very much to have a war named after him. I had heard about Whaley's War from another source and assumed it had something to do with the violence that spilled over from Rwanda into the Congo after the genocide. Whaley's own explanation didn't help much. He spoke of Tingi Tingi and other obscure places that I had never heard of. He took me deep into battle tactics, drawing on a napkin with forceful movements: fat arrows for the armies,
R
for rebels, ovals for the “thousands of civilians.” Balls with
T
's on top represented air assaults. He pushed so hard on his pen that he ripped into napkins and had to start over multiple times. Sweat formed on his brow. I didn't know where he was going, but I knew I couldn't stop him. I could only feed him follow-up questions and propel him to the next story. Each battle ended with Whaley slashing an
X
across the ovals and tearing the napkins to shreds with his ballpoint pen.

At nine P.M. my mom walked in, put her hand on my back, and greeted us in a soft voice. She said she would be having dinner in the back of the restaurant, and she left before Whaley could engage her in conversation.

Whaley looked down at his pile of destroyed napkins and appeared to be puzzled. We hadn't spoken about my project all evening. I sensed I had an opportunity before losing him to another war story.

“So, what do you think of my proposal?”

He looked at me as if it were a foolish question. “I'm meeting with you because it's important. It's a story that needs to be told. You've read Gourevitch, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Gourevitch had even responded to my e-mails, though it seemed unlikely that the famous writer would help me apart from answering a few questions about his book. I didn't know at the time that Gourevitch had lived in Whaley's house in Rwanda. They were friends.

“Well, if you read Gourevitch, then you understand that the RPA [Rwandan Patriotic Army] story needs to be told.”

I nodded and waited for Whaley to offer some advice or perhaps even make a gesture to help me. Instead, he turned back to the Congo, and I sat there listening for another hour. By the end of it my mind was spent. The names of people and places twisted my brain into knots, reminding me again of how little I knew. I had stopped my part-time job bouncing at bars in Chapel Hill to focus on Rwanda, but a few meetings and a few months of extracurricular reading could get me only so far. As Whaley destroyed more napkins, I began to wonder if our meeting was a waste of time. Then, at precisely ten P.M., Whaley stopped, flagged the waiter, and placed his credit card on the table. I offered some cash but he waved me off and made a remark about remembering what it was like to be poor and in college. When he stood up, his demeanor suddenly shifted. Lowering his voice, he leaned forward and said, “Tomorrow I'll introduce you to a man. He works for the president of Rwanda, and he'll help you. Tell no one that I introduced you two, and call him as soon as you get my e-mail.”

I had spent three hours for a ten-second offer of an introduction that might be able to take me where I needed to go.

BEFORE I COULD proceed with my plans to go to Rwanda, the Marine Corps had to sign off on my proposal. I had a good relationship with Major Boothby, my Marine commander, and I was about to test the strength of it with my proposal. The major could shut me down for any number of reasons, not the least being that I would need to spend the second half of my summer in Quantico, Virginia, at Officer Candidates School (OCS), the Marine officer's equivalent of boot camp.

It was an unseasonably warm January day. My armpits were sweaty and my chest was tight as I walked across our campus greens passing students in flip-flops tossing Frisbees and laying out beach blankets. By the time I reached the major's office in our handsome brick armory, my armpits felt like a swamp. I pounded his hatch with my fist and announced my presence as he had trained us to do.

“SIR, MIDSHIPMAN BARCOTT REPORTING AS ORDERED, SIR.”

“Enter, Barcott. Good sounding off. Stand easy.”

“OOHRAH, SIR,” I barked.

Major Boothby didn't need a briefing. He had already read my written proposal. “Barcott, can't you do anything normally?” He swigged black coffee from a mug with the inscription MARINE CORPS SNIPER. “Most midshipmen will spend the month and a half before OCS physically and mentally preparing themselves. You want to go attach to an army in Rwanda?”

“Sir, it's good training. Plus, I'll be a better Marine if I understand the ethnic fighting in a place like Rwanda.”

Hands locked together, Major Boothby sat in silence for a moment before concluding that he would send my request up the chain of command because I had taken the time to study Swahili and had performed well in ROTC. “And because you've got guts,” he added, “and it takes guts to make stuff happen. Marines have a bias for action. In life, you have to take risks. In the Marines, you take even greater risks. Understand what I'm saying, Barcott?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” I popped to attention.

Major Boothby stuck his trigger finger out at me, “Just make sure you pass OCS.”

THE BURCH FELLOWSHIP Selection Committee awarded me a $6,000 grant to travel to Rwanda that summer. Everything seemed to be falling into place until one morning when I woke up at five A.M. for an ROTC run. Before heading out of my dorm, I quickly checked my e-mail. To my surprise, there was an e-mail with a blank subject line from Whaley's contact in the Rwandan Office of the President. I had not heard back from the man after our initial phone call, when he pledged to personally support my proposal. “Anything for Peter Whaley,” he had said. His e-mail, however, contained only one, cold sentence:

“You are no longer welcome in my country.”

There was no salutation, no signature block, and no additional explanation. I stared at the e-mail in stunned disbelief before forwarding a copy to Whaley with a request that he call me.

One of my ROTC buddies who knew about my Rwanda plans detected something was wrong after we finished our run through the quiet trails surrounding the campus. When I told him about the e-mail, he smiled and whacked me on the arm like my father would do. “Semper Gumby, devil dog,” he said, making a play on the Marines' motto,
semper fidelis
. Always faithful, always flexible. The ability to adapt to rapid change was a touchstone of Marine Corps “maneuver warfare.” Most setbacks were temporary if you approached them with the right attitude.

My phone was ringing by the time I returned to my dorm room.

“Rye, Peter Whaley here. I'm not surprised by the e-mail. It's bad in the Congo right now and the Rwandan army needs to focus there. I'm sure you understand.” He was direct as ever. The security situation had changed and the Rwandan military didn't have time to take responsibility for a Marine-in-training on a research project.

“So it's a dead deal?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“No other channels?”

“No. But you'll find something else, and when you do, let me know. I may be able to help.”

I needed to consult with my other advisers. Out of convenience and familiarity, I went to Jennifer Coffman first.

“
Hujambo
, Rye,” Jennifer greeted me in her office as she prepared for an African-civilizations course that she was teaching later that morning.