All Over but the Shoutin' (37 page)

An ultra-conservative commentator for a brainless cable TV show said we exaggerated the killing. I would have liked to have tied that son of a bitch to me with a rope, and made him see what I saw, hear what I heard.

I looked into the eyes of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls who had been gang-raped, and I will never forget the emptiness there, the blank, used-up, hopeless stares, as if someone had just snatched the life out of them and left the shell to wander. I shook the hands of men who had their fingers crushed with rifle butts, and sat under a tree with a man who had tried to hold a woman’s insides in her body after she had been hacked again and again with machetes. I don’t remember how many people I talked to who had seen their loved ones hauled away never to be seen again.

I know that some of them could have lied to me, some of them almost certainly did, and I tried to use in the newspaper only what I was most certain of. I remember one morning standing outside an old monastery, staring down at a bloodstain on a driveway. The night before, a beloved priest had been shot to death by thugs loyal to the military government, as he fumbled with the gate. The priest had been troublesome to the rich. He had once tried to organize the laborers who worked their fields. The government, of course, denied any involvement, and could not explain how the police arrived even before anyone called them, and took the body away.

As I looked down at that stain, I knew it would be hard to write too much or too strongly of the people who spread this misery. If they would kill a priest, why would they not kill a peasant without a second thought, or torture them for sport, or debase them. Common sense told me that much.

Sometimes it was unclear who was to blame. I walked through a nursery where the babies were doomed by a lack of medicine, medicine I would later learn was stolen by the military. But the military blamed the embargo, said it was killing the poor. One man stood over an emaciated baby, trying to get the child to grasp his finger with its tiny hand. The child—strange, I cannot remember if it was a boy or girl—lay as if dead. I took the man out in the hall and gave him some money, I cannot remember how much, and he grabbed both my hands and pressed his forehead to them.

I talked to a man who ran an orphanage who showed me the complaints he had filed with police, who had targeted the older children. I talked to a young prostitute who was forced to submit a dozen, two dozen, countless times a day, to soldiers who never paid. Her one possession was a tiny television. The soldiers destroyed it.

And around and around and around it goes. We are staying, me and most of the other reporters, in a nice hotel called the Montana, up the mountain in Pétionville. A man with a sawed-off shotgun guards the gate. But somehow the body merchants always sneak through. They lurk in the lobby, and sidle up to you with a polite “Monsieur? Excuse me, please. But I have a body for you.” They offer to take you to a place where a body has been dumped, for a price.

A
t the bar of the Montana Hotel, the foreign correspondents drink rum punches and discuss which restaurants are still open and which have been closed by the impending hostilities. A few of them befriend me, help me, and I will always appreciate that. One of the first people I see is Daniel Morel, but a different one. He has a wife and child now, and has a little more gray in his beard. He still looks like a man you do not want to mess with on a dark night.
“New York Times?”
he says, and laughs out loud. I am not sure if he is happy for me, or incredulous, but again he leads me to the good stories.

It would be a lie to say we had it rough there. On Fridays, as the people starved down the hill, there was shrimp curry. On Sundays, there was lobster on the grill. You couldn’t even hear the gunshots, we were up so high.

The uprising I had predicted never came, of course. Only Clinton could force change now. The only question then was whether it would be a shooting war to bring Aristide back, or a negotiated return.

God help me, but as I watched the people suffer under the government’s brutality, I wished for a war. I knew it could not last long. The commander in chief only came in from 2
P.M.
to 4
P.M.
They had only one functioning aircraft, and while none of the boats in the Haitian navy could run, one of them could float.

Their weapons were good only for terror of an unarmed civilian population. I knew that, with the first sight of a U.S. Marine, they would run.

I will never forget the night I heard a plane—it sounded like it was running too good to be Haitian—buzz by the hotel late one night. I thought the invasion was on. I thought the Americans were coming, and I jumped up and ran downstairs to find that the only thing that had dropped onto Haiti that night were transistor radios, which the U.S. government had parachuted down as instruments of propaganda. I later learned that the bad guys were confiscating them and selling them. As one of my uncles used to say, what a way to run a whorehouse.

The military tried to work its population into some kind of anger at the expected invasion, but the big despots had to bribe smaller despots with rum just to get them out in respectable numbers. I saw one man at both an anti-Aristide meeting and a pro-Aristide meeting a week apart. The government had voodoo priests block off the streets with hexes painted on the blacktop. A volunteer militia trained in the city square with rifles that had no bullets. The rifles were taken back up again after CNN had shot footage of the defiant Haitians. Cedras knew better than to let the people take weapons home. They might find a bullet somewhere. “So, what good is a militia if the attack comes at night?” I asked one officer. He shrugged.

But it never happened, of course. Jimmy Carter came and brokered an unusual three-legged dog of a peace that spared the despots and absurdly married the U.S. military with the same soldiers who had been the instruments of torture and terror. I always liked Jimmy, until then. Aristide would return, but there would be no sweeping justice, no mass executions by flaming necklace, no satisfaction.

For two days I stood outside the military headquarters and watched them hammer out that arrangement, listening to the bought-and-paid-for government supporters sing and chant that “if you come, we will eat you.” Twice I got knocked down. It was bad theater.

The U.S. war machine landed and had to be careful not to shoot the cameramen who came to record it. U.S. officials paid Cedras money to rent a villa from him. Good Lord.

The killing didn’t stop right away. For a full day and part of another, the soldiers hid behind walls, and did not intervene as the police and military clubbed dancing, cheering Haitians who came to greet them. The Haitian soldiers bashed one man’s skull in with a stick of firewood and stole his body, to sell back to his wife.

I have seldom been so sick to my stomach in my life, but I guess diplomacy is complicated. All I know is that, in an effort to disperse the crowd, one Haitian soldier started firing tear gas into the masses. In most places in the world, you aim high and lob the grenade into the crowd. In Haiti, there is no such sensibility. The soldier fired it head-high, but it miraculously missed ripping anyone’s head off at the neck—including mine—and landed against a government building a hundred yards away, which caught on fire, briefly.

I interviewed the American soldiers I saw and time and time again they said they wanted to stop the beating and the killings, that it made them sick, too. But they had their orders. They were young, they were from places like Niagara Falls and Fort Smith and Pensacola, and they were completely unprepared, morally, politically, for this place. I guess you could say their view was simplistic. We had that much in common.

A day or so later, pro-Aristide Haitians unwisely attacked a pro-government stronghold with rocks. The people inside put up with it for a while, then came out and started firing into the crowd. The packed bodies turned and ran, and I ran with them, watching a senior foreign correspondent closely, to see when it was right to run and when you were supposed to stand. Later I would learn that another journalist had been shot in the head, just yards away.

When the U.S. soldiers finally moved out from behind their wall and tried to set things right, I talked one platoon into letting me go with them. I wrote it for the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
, at a dollar a word, but I would have done it for nothing. Hell, I would have gone along for the ride. It was the only time in Haiti I felt any hope.

“T
he heroes of Third Platoon fumble toward history with canteens full of grape Kool-Aid,” I wrote, “scanning the rooftops for snipers and trying hard not to run over their admirers. Their deep-green Humvees weave along streets packed with ragged but cheering people who believe these young men have delivered them from evil. ‘We go where they tell us,’ said Sgt. Paul Stevenson, a blond, blue-eyed 24-year-old from Midland, Mich., who enlisted in the Army to escape the inertia of his hometown. ‘But this is a place we need to be. The people want us here. They dance for us and serenade us. I’ve been in this Army since I was 18 and I’ve seen countries get their freedom in the Eastern Bloc: the East Germans, the old Czechoslovakia. But this … you ride through these slums and see people starving on the streets. The next thing you know they’re running beside you, cheering, making you feel like royalty.’

“How often in a black man’s life, asks Pfc. Vondrain Smith, does he walk through a crowd of people of his own color and see them throw flowers at his feet? ‘It’s a good feeling being cheered,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been cheered before.’ Smith, 19, has never been so far away from home and he did not expect to feel any love for Haiti. His kin in Hampton, S.C., said black people had enough to worry about at home. ‘I like these people,’ he says, looking out on a group of children who stare at him like he fell from the sky. ‘They like me back.’ The others echo him. ‘We’re doing good,’ says Pfc. Paul Brady, from Billerica, Mass., who is 19 but looks 15. ‘We know what they’ve done to people here. We’re here to make sure that it doesn’t happen anymore. It stops now.’ Brady, a recruiter’s poster boy, is well spoken and mannerly, from middle-class parents in a nice, peaceful middle-class town. When he goes home, he will probably go back to college. But he has the sense that, whatever happens after Haiti, this will be the most important thing he ever does.

“They patrol the city in Humvee caravans of two, three and four, guns loaded but not cocked and ready to fire, since this is a peacekeeping mission. The gunners in the turret, the most exposed and most at risk, wear two bulletproof vests. The drivers and navigators keep one eye on their windows, afraid someone will drop in a grenade. And always there are the Haitians pressing in on them, curious and friendly but so many and so close that the men know they would never see an attacker coming in time. Ask Richard Rice, the 38-year-old platoon sergeant, what he thinks of the morality of his mission and he barks: ‘Sir, I don’t think. I react. If my Government tells me I am here to do good, I’m here to do good.’ He has enough trouble watching out for his 27 overgrown children in a military operation that has no precedent. In a year, Rice will retire. He plans to sit on his front porch in a rocking chair, in the center of 105 acres of rich bottom land in Maysville, Ky., and watch the chickens peck. Haiti will seem a distant memory, but he can only have that peace of mind if all the young soldiers in his command leave Haiti alive. ‘I came here with 27,’ he says, and the words seem riveted in the air. ‘And I’m by God gonna leave with 27.’

“Rice—a lean, tall, hard-looking black man with arms like telephone poles—is worried. He was for most of his career a soldier of the cold war. He worked a fence line in Korea, where razor wire divided friends and enemies, where soldiers were not expected to ride through towns drumming up good will. This post-cold-war mission seems to write new doctrine each day. Helicopters pound through the blue sky and blare a taped message in Creole on the humanitarian, democratic and peaceful intent of the 20,000 armed soldiers here. ‘These guys are more at risk because it is a walk-in mission instead of a forced occupation,’ he said. ‘If it had been a forced occupation, we would have just taken all these weapons out there. My job is to make sure they are prepared,’ but for what, no one is quite sure. More than anything, the men are afraid of a repeat of Somalia, where crowds first greeted American troops with smiles and later dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets, laughing as they did so. That image is burned into the mind of every soldier in the Third Platoon. They have heard stories about Père Lebrun. The poor of Haiti, the soldiers know, have their cruel dark side.

“But when the soldiers write home, they mention none of this. The thing Pfc. Jeff Harris hates worse than anything else is lying to his momma. In elegant script, he writes long, heartfelt letters home to Columbus, Miss., that describe Haiti as being safe, so his mother will not worry. ‘You only write your momma the good stuff,’ says Harris, who turned 21 in Haiti. He has the soft accent of the Delta. He also writes to a dark-haired beauty named Amanda Smith, whom he plans to marry if she will have him. He has two photos of her. He keeps them next to his
Playboy
magazine.”

I
liked Pfc. Harris the most. We talked about barbecue and deer hunting and hush puppies—the kind you eat, not the kind you wear to poetry readings—and about lying to our mommas. I rode with the soldiers for a few days, finding out who they were, where they were from, what they thought. I found them to be afraid, not of guns or grenades, but of the magic of the place. I saw it when we drove by a man sitting buck naked at the side of a winding road. His face was painted mustard yellow. His fingers tapped the ground in time to a song only he could hear. “Is that some kind of voodoo?” asked Private Matthew Gunn.

“No,” said the squad’s interpreter. “Just a crazy person.”

M
y last day with them, we stopped to rest in the shade high up in one of the mountain neighborhoods. A thin, slight man with a camera around his neck walked timidly to the soldiers and asked if he could show them some photographs. He said that for three years he has documented atrocities in this neighborhood, hoping that someday the people who committed them will be punished. The stack of photos is two inches thick. They show gunshot wounds to the head, mutilations, bodies hacked and burned. One is a young, beautiful woman, her breasts and shoulders crisscrossed with slashes. “I wish you could have come sooner,” the man said.