The Tattooed Soldier (32 page)

How could anyone even think of opposing this country and what it stood for? The guerrilla snipers he had fought would lay down their arms in an instant if they came here and saw what they were up against. Longoria laughed at the thought of these Communists in the hills who had no idea of this limitless arsenal of tanks and armored personnel carriers and God knew what else. Idiots! If they came here they would see the futility of fighting the will of a country with so much strength and wealth.

Walking past the last of the parking lots, Longoria came upon a cluster of brick apartment buildings. This was where the American soldiers lived with their families. A man in a red beret emerged from one of the buildings with a martial stride, a portfolio tucked under his arm. Nearby was a sandbox where children played in swings.

Everything in this country was so well thought out. Everything was planned down to the last detail.

*   *   *

“Do you think that will solve everything, just because you cry? I'm happy to see you can feel things. I was beginning to worry what kind of man I got mixed up with. But crying isn't going to fix what's wrong with you.”

Longoria was sitting on the edge of the bed, near the window, listening to Reginalda. Somehow the argument had renewed itself. He had been silent, mostly, since he recovered from his crying fit. From his perch he watched as the ambulance crew performed a ritual of shaking heads over the body of the fallen cholo. A paramedic unwrapped a bandage and then tossed it to the ground as if to say, Why bother?

Longoria kept his face turned to the window because he felt ashamed. He could not look at Reginalda because she had seen him crying and kneeling on the floor like a spoiled child, like a woman. A “breakdown,” that's what it was. He had come across this word in Dr. Wayne García's book, without knowing what it meant. Dr. García said that if you allowed the conscious, rational mind to be overwhelmed by sensations and emotions, you were headed for a breakdown. Now he understood. He could not lose control, he could not lose hold of what he knew to be true, of his faith in himself, in what he had done and who he was.

The shots outside had shaken him out of his trance. Longoria did not believe in miracles, but it seemed to him that the gunshots on Bonnie Brae Avenue had been a message from the warrior gods in the heavens, a signal to wake up and remember.
You are a soldier who fought to defend his country. A professional soldier. A man of honor.

“I deserve some respect,” Reginalda was saying. “That's all I'm asking for.”

Longoria nodded faintly in assent, a gesture that seemed to appease her. She had been standing; now she sat down on the weightlifting bench by the dresser.

“Everyone wants respect,” she said.

A movement on the street caught his eye. A crowd was forming on the sidewalk. The defeated cholos, routed from the front steps, had gathered a hundred or so feet away, behind a line of yellow tape that seemed too flimsy to keep them there. With them were some women—their mothers and sisters, Longoria surmised—and assorted residents and hangers-on, the curious.

“You shot him in cold blood! In cold blood!”

A woman in a polka dot dress stumbled toward the yellow tape, steadied by an older man, her brown features heavy with tragedy. A police officer greeted her at the tape, stretching out his arms to block her.

“Let her see the body!” someone yelled.

“It's her only son!” said a young woman.

“He didn't even have a gun.”

“The body! Let her see! She's the mother!”

“He didn't have a gun and you shot him!”

They shouted at the police, some raising their fists, anger swelling and gathering in the air above them like an acid mist, a swirling cloud of bile. It infected even those who had come only for the spectacle, people who didn't know the victim or his friends. From the fourth floor, high above it all, Longoria could feel it spreading.
He didn't have a gun.
The mother disappeared into the crowd, and people reached out to touch her as if they could be sanctified by contact with her loss.
She's the mother! Let her through!
Shouted and whispered, the words passed from person to person.
The cops did it. The cops.
Like a vapor, words seemed to rise from the body of the dead cholo too.
I didn't have a gun but they shot me.

“Pigs!” shouted a voice from somewhere below Longoria. “They shot him in the back. I saw it. Three times! I saw.”

“They shot him in the back.”

“¡Asesinos!”

Asesinos.
The word startled Longoria. He stepped quickly away from the window, jarring his injured arm. When he tried to adjust the sling, he only redoubled the pain. To ease himself, he lay down on the bed gently, resting his arm on his stomach.

“Longoria, what happened to your arm?” Reginalda asked, breaking a long silence. “Is that why you're acting so funny? Yes, that's it. That's why you're so strange today, even for you. You're in some sort of trouble, aren't you? What is it? Why don't you tell me,
amor.
Tell me.”

“I already told you what happened. I fell this morning. At work.”

“
Mentiroso.
You think I can't tell when you're lying? After all we've been through.”

Longoria closed his eyes and prayed for the pain to go away, wondering if he should give in, finally, and take the pain-killers they had given him at the hospital. He had always avoided medicines because he thought they would poison his body, deaden his mind.

“Go ahead and suffer, then,” Reginalda said. “Suffer alone. Because I've had enough.”

With his eyes still closed, he listened as she struggled with the locks and left, slamming the door behind her.

Over the quick march of her footsteps in the hallway, he heard a tiny explosion from outside. The sound of a window breaking.

*   *   *

The classes were held in a long white building with rows of windows that flooded the rooms with bright North Carolina sunshine. Longoria sat at his desk waiting for the instructor, who was uncharacteristically late: 1440 hours, ten minutes after the class should have started. Unsure of himself, Longoria shifted anxiously in his seat, his frame resisting the small space between the chair and its attached desk. The students around him looked uncomfortable too; they propped their arms clumsily on the small desks, legs overflowing, boots heavy on the floor, canteens and bullet cartridges clanking. Some stared at the black rectangle of the chalkboard, others fidgeted with the buttons of the new Casio watches they had just purchased at the base mall in imitation of the Green Berets, who said Casio was the most reliable model.

It was the first time Longoria had been in a classroom since he was ten years old. He wondered if the Special Forces instructor would be like the missionary teachers who pinched him when he came up with the wrong numbers or stuttered over the long lists of historical dates and presidents he was expected to memorize. Carrera, Barrios, Orellana, Ubico …

Longoria was silently rattling off the names of dead Guatemalan presidents when the instructor finally stepped in. To his great relief, this new teacher didn't look anything like those meanspirited missionaries; he was wearing the standard camouflage uniform and beret tilted smartly to one side.

The instructor was a tall, round-faced Puerto Rican who spoke excellent Caribbean Spanish. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Sanchez of the Second Special Forces Battalion. Longoria decided that Sanchez looked just like Lieutenant Colonel Villagrán, the legendary founder and leader of the Jaguars, whom he had met just two or three times. Sanchez was an older man, a bit thick around the waist, but solid. He had the frame of someone who'd enjoyed his beer over the years but hadn't neglected himself. Few Guatemaltecos were so sturdy. Longoria aspired to look like this man when he reached his forties and fifties.

Sanchez began his lecture by writing a single word on the chalkboard:
PSYOPS
.

Longoria stared at the word, trying to decipher its meaning. The rest of the class was equally befuddled. Lieutenant Sanchez proceeded to explain that “Psyops” meant “psychological operations” and that he was an expert in “
guerra sicológica
.” When half the students still squinted and scratched their heads in confusion, he pointed to his temple: “We use the tricks of the mind to defeat the enemy.”

The soldiers nodded their shaved skulls.

“The enemy deals in deception,” Sanchez said. He sounded at once serene and authoritative, like good preachers and priests Longoria had known. “The enemy deals in ideology. Ideology is one of his most effective weapons, perhaps the most effective. Disinformation, lies. To defeat him we turn his own weapons against him.”

Longoria listened attentively. Sanchez said the enemy used ideas to take control of the minds of the peasants. This was easy because the peasants were so gullible, because they were poor and desperate. “They are simple people and they will believe anything. They will follow anyone.”

Longoria had heard this before, from his officers in Guatemala, who believed that the peasants were to blame for everything. The country was backward because of the peasants, because of their superstitions and their bad habits, like having too many children. When the officers said these things, Longoria couldn't help looking at the ground in shame, remembering his own family. Sitting now in Carolina, he was ashamed again of the image of his former self: stooped over the soil, fingernails black with dirt, frayed sandals on his feet.

His nails were clean now. He had new boots and a new way of walking to go with them: proud and erect, the soldier's gait, the posture you learn in basic training. The lice had disappeared after that first shaving in the barracks. The army had saved him from desperate poverty, and now they were showing him the world, showing him things he never imagined, educating him, expanding his mind.

“In Psyops we fight terror with terror,” Sanchez was saying. “We fight confusion by creating more confusion. We fight lies with lies.” He put his hands on his hips. “And we separate the enemy from his sustenance, starve him.” The guerrillas depended on the peasants for nourishment, Sanchez explained. If you cut off the source of nourishment, the guerrillas would slowly die, like a corn plant deprived of water, withering in the sun. To separate the guerrillas from the peasants you had to break the bonds of ideology, the attraction of their twisted beliefs. The guerrillas promised the peasants a paradise of free land, free seed, and easy credit. These ideas were the glue that joined the peasants to the guerrillas and held the subversive Communist movement together. To break these bonds of the mind you had to strike at the mind. And the most powerful weapon to aim at the mind was fear. Terror. The guerrillas had already mastered this: they killed suspected informers, they kidnapped the rich, they bombed cafes. Now the forces of good had to master the art of terror as well. And the army and its allies had to use even larger doses because the war was being lost.

Some of the men in the class seemed perplexed by the instructor's arguments, but Longoria understood perfectly. This Sanchez was the most brilliant man he had ever met, a man who could shape the words so you could understand the idea, see the beauty in the logic. If Sanchez had taught him to read and write, he would have learned more, learned better. Sanchez had studied the problem of the guerrillas and their ideology, had put everything together and written it down, and now he was sharing his knowledge, with this class. The peasants would only learn through brutality. Longoria understood this because he had been a
campesino
once, until the army rescued him. The peasants would be with you only if you beat them, if you forced them to take your side. You had to make them fear you before they did what you told them.

“This is what the enemy has taught us.” Sanchez lowered his voice a little, as if confiding a secret. “We're speaking Spanish here, so there's certain things I can tell you that I wouldn't be able to say in English. The value of terror, the beauty of terror as a weapon.” Stepping away from the chalkboard, Sanchez circled the room, the eyes of the soldiers locked on his. “You must create a sense of disorder. Disorder is your friend. Violence and randomness, that's the recipe. If the people believe death can come from anywhere, anytime, they will be paralyzed by fear. This is something anyone can understand. It's simple mass psychology. Dispense enough fear, and the people will be paralyzed into inaction. And inaction is what we're shooting for here. Inaction is equilibrium, the balance of things, the way things should be. Make them believe you are chaos personified, and they will fear you. We see this all the time. Crazy people walking on the street, everyone steps away from them, gives them room, right? You must be this way. And not just with the enemy. Because every neutral is a potential enemy unless you convince him otherwise. Do you understand what I mean when I say this? Do you understand or don't you? It's this simple: they have to believe you're capable of anything, absolutely anything. There is great power in your randomness, the chaos of you.
¿Entienden?
”

Sanchez scanned the classroom. None of the students spoke or moved. Longoria was confused by some of the terminology, but he could feel the rightness of the lieutenant's words.

What's the matter with these people, Longoria thought, why don't they say anything? Idiots! They are like cattle. Trembling with anger, he raised his arm.

“¡Sí, mi teniente! ¡Yo entiendo!”

*   *   *

The crowd below Longoria's window was growing. It occupied half the block now, spilling over from the sidewalks to the street, separated from the police only by the drooping yellow line of tape. Longoria leaned on the windowsill with his good arm and took in the scene, a welcome diversion after the fight with Reginalda. He wanted to forget about her for now, the female complications of her. She was like those unsolvable problems he found in his chess books, a riddle you couldn't puzzle out even after you'd looked at the arrangement of the pieces from every possible angle. Two attendants had just slid the cholo's cadaver into the back of a van marked “Coroner,” pushing it with the nonchalance of men closing a file cabinet, for some reason shaking hands when the task was accomplished: The coroner's van was painted a muddy brown, the color of soil in a burial plot. The van door slammed, and suddenly there was silence on the street, the din of voices dissolving into the night air.