It Happened on the Way to War (20 page)

“And you could die doing it?”

“Um, yes.” I had never been asked such a direct question.

“And you could kill?”

“I hope it doesn't come to that.”

“What if you don't believe in a war?”

“Well, that's a tough one.” I laughed, and then she laughed, and the laughter punctured the tension. I had answered her honestly, and that was enough for the time being. Mary Ann skillfully shifted the conversation back to CFK and left me feeling as if I had survived a short interrogation.

At the end of the meeting, Salim invited Mary Ann to Kibera for our final soccer tournament, and I offered to set up a meeting with Tabitha. Mary Ann pleasantly thanked us for our offers but remained noncommittal. She hugged Salim, shook my hand, stepped back, and concluded, “Well, you two certainly make an odd couple.”

I didn't know what to think of the meeting. Salim, however, was upbeat. He was certain that Mary Ann would support us, so certain that he agreed to leave MYSA and focus on CFK full-time. It was huge news. With Salim and Tabitha, we could move ahead with our plans to build an organizational structure on the ground, register as a Kenyan NGO, and form a formal governing board chaired by Jennifer's friend Ben Mshila.

GAME DAY CAME before we knew it. Although the average level of education in Kibera was low, much of the population possessed basic reading skills. The Ford Foundation let us use their photocopier to produce a thousand flyers with write-ups of the two competing soccer teams, a description of CFK, and a copy of our “fair play code,” which established our core values and began with the line “For those who want to win on and off the field.”

Thousands of residents showed up and crammed onto the dusty sidelines at one of Kibera's only two soccer fields, a patch of rutted dirt lined by sewage sumps in the middle of the slum. The turnout far exceeded our expectations, and we ran out of flyers well before the match started. I spent most of the game with Nate moving up and down the sidelines with our youth representatives spreading the word about CFK. During halftime, Kash set up a public address system he had borrowed from another organization and encouraged all of the fans to join the two competing teams the following morning at our community cleanup in Makina Village.

The tight, well-played match came down to a shoot-out with the team from Makina Village winning by a goal. Thousands of fans rushed the field and kicked up a tornado of dust. Ben Mshila presented the trophy and team award to Rashid “Kapii” Seif, the captain of the winning Zulu Youth Football Club. Unlike other tournaments, we decided against giving cash awards. Instead, we offered a set of uniforms and soccer balls from a large supply of used soccer equipment that we had received in a shipment from an Eagle Scout candidate in the United States. Salim knew that the team would appreciate the award. Uniforms and soccer balls were often prohibitively expensive. Most teams trained with “Kibera balls”—plastic bags wrapped in twine and squashed into small spheres slightly larger than a man's fist. Kibera balls typically lasted less than a week in the dirt and rubble fields. Rashid tossed the two soccer balls from Ben Mshila to his jubilant team and hoisted the trophy above his head. The crowd exploded with another round of applause.

I hadn't spoken to Rashid before that day. Most of my time with CFK was spent with Salim, Tabitha, Kash, and youth representatives. These were the leaders of the organization. Young men like Rashid, though, were whom we intended to serve most directly. After the celebration, I approached him and made some small talk in Swahili. I was struck by his composure and the confident, eager look in his eyes. Rashid carried himself like a leader, and he was only fifteen.

RASHID AND HIS team were among the first people I recognized in the crowd of hundreds of residents who gathered for our final cleanup the following morning. His team, dressed in the yellow soccer jerseys that we had awarded them, stood in front with rakes, shovels, and pushcarts. The second place team was there as well, standing side by side.

“Looks like an army,” Semaj said, reacting to the large gathering.

Kassim, Ali's charismatic friend and cofounder of the car wash, had helped mobilize a half dozen local women's groups to volunteer at the cleanup and lend us their equipment. “It's incredible,” Kassim said, “an army of
mamas
and ghetto
soldja
s.”

At that moment it hit me.
“Vita vya takataka!”
I exclaimed. That was what we were doing. It wasn't a cleanup. It was a “war on trash.”

“I feel it,” Semaj said.

Kassim laughed hard. “Yes, yes. That's it precisely,
vita vya takataka
.”

Salim rolled his eyes. He wasn't thrilled with the use of the word
war
, and he was right. It was counterproductive to our higher aim of preventing violence. I was too embedded in Marine culture to even acknowledge the most egregious cases of my excessively militarized language. Salim saw that I was enthusiastic about my war on trash and didn't push back on the branding, in part because words were less important to him. Our actions mattered most, and that's the point that he drove home minutes later in his opening remarks.

Salim thanked the
mamas
for joining in the day's cleanup and noted that although we were starting with boys' soccer, one day we hoped to create Kibera's first girls' soccer program. The cleanup, he emphasized, was more important than the games the day before because at CFK soccer was a tool for community development. As he spoke, Tabitha stood next to him with her arms folded behind her back. She was there in her CFK T-shirt and a tweed skirt to participate in the cleanup despite having been up all night delivering a baby at the clinic.

Salim introduced Kassim, who briefed the crowd in his booming voice about the task at hand. Each team of ten to twenty people would work together unclogging sumps and hauling out trash. Teams were responsible for the equipment they borrowed and would work until they ran out of garbage bags. We would dump all of the bags at one point on the main road. We were told the Nairobi city council had only three dump trucks for the city's estimated three million residents. But we had been persistent. One of the trucks would be making a special trip to Kibera.

Kassim concluded with a rousing crescendo: “This is a milestone for Kibera.
Mamas
and youth working together in this, the first CFK
vita vya takataka
! That's right, war on trash. One day you'll look back and say you were here, today, when it started.”

Armed with pushcarts and wheelbarrows, we rolled out. I stuck with Rashid and his team, who took to the war on trash with the same vigor and sense of purpose they had displayed the day before on the soccer field. Rashid led by example. He was the first to step up to the foulest and toughest jobs, of which there were no shortages. Hours later my pants were covered in black sludge that had the texture of mucus and the smell of rotting meat. I was sweaty, sunburned, and exhausted. And for a little while, Kibera was a little cleaner.

Rashid joined me for a soda after we finished. We talked a bit about his life growing up in Kibera and his dreams of one day playing professional soccer. Rashid spoke about soccer with great affection. He referred to his team as his family, and he said that the sport was important in part because it helped keep kids out of crime and other temptations that arise from “idleness.” When I asked him about his other family, I was surprised and saddened to learn that he was an orphan. Rashid didn't know his father, and his mother had passed away three years earlier. He was living with friends and struggling to pay for his education, having just begun his first year of high school. School fees at even the lowest-quality schools ran at least $50 a year. That was big money in a place where the average annual household income was under $500.

As I sat on a wood bench sipping Stoney ginger soda from a straw and listening to Rashid, I thought about purpose. We wanted to help young people like Rashid unlock their potential. We didn't have enough funds or organizational capacity to run a scholarship program, though one day maybe we would. With more resources we could do so much. We could be a rung in the ladders for hundreds of young people like Rashid, and that felt like more than just a worthy pursuit. It was more than a personal mission. It was a groundswell.

Part III

CHAPTER TWELVE

From Peacetime to Wartime

Quantico, Virginia

FALL 2001

WHAT I WANTED TO WRITE TO THE HEAD OF the American study abroad program that employed Oluoch appeared in my dreams one morning in September shortly after I had reported to duty in Quantico. I woke up at 0400 hours and tiptoed to the other side of our barracks room in my Skivvies. There, I didn't need to worry about waking up my three roommates while I caught up on e-mails, letters, and calls to Kenya.

The letter was my last recourse with Oluoch, who still owed CFK $1,500. That money didn't belong to Nate and me. It belonged to the community, and in my mind Oluoch's refusal to pay was the equivalent of stealing from the poor. There was something personal too. It felt like I was being conned, and that was as embarrassing as it was infuriating. After Oluoch and I almost got into a fist fight in Fort Jesus, we had hoped that Elizabeth would force him to repay the loan and that we could then continue to help build the Carolina Academy. These hopes disappeared shortly after I returned to the United States and learned that Jane had quit her job with Oluoch and Elizabeth to work for Tabitha. Although Elizabeth knew that the two women were best friends, she felt betrayed by Jane's decision.

Until that point I had viewed Elizabeth as a compassionate person. When I had called and spoken with Jane, however, I discovered that Elizabeth had paid her merely $30 per month. That was less than half the average rate for employment six days a week, six hours a day. Furthermore, according to Jane, Elizabeth never stopped Oluoch from making frequent threats to fire her for “offenses,” such as not making his bathwater hot enough. These threats had frightened Jane. Thinking she had no other option for employment, she had endured the low pay and abusive environment like an indentured servant.

“But they knew you have five children and your husband doesn't have a steady job?” I had asked Jane on the phone.

“Who? This Elizabeth? No, Omosh. Omosh,
no
! It's not possible. Elizabeth, she has never been to my house, never.”

Elizabeth lived fifteen minutes from Jane's house. She had spoken so eloquently about wanting to help the orphans that I had mistaken her for a leader who could earn credibility in Kibera. Yet Elizabeth was more of an outsider to the slum than I was. I should've realized this after our meeting with the U.S. ambassador. In the eyes of the residents, Elizabeth was just another
mtajiri
, “a rich person.” She was well-intentioned and wanted to do good, but she was trapped in the prejudices and fears of her class. Her outreach was from a place of pity, not respect.

“Sometimes we go with that hunger,” Jane once told me after I had asked her about her most difficult moments in Kibera. “And when I can't give, I tell my children, ‘Please, it's difficult now. We're really struggling, but please, be strong.' When I say this, they tell me, ‘It's okay, Mama. We understand.' They go without the food. They don't complain. They're good ones.”

As I pounded my keyboard in Quantico's morning stillness, I heard Jane's voice in my head and thought about how Oluoch often spent more on beer and bar food in a day than he and Elizabeth paid Jane for two weeks of work. My letter would accomplish nothing for CFK. In fact, it could make things worse for the community. If Oluoch lost his job, it'd be even more difficult for Elizabeth to create her nursery school. I knew this. Yet I couldn't rid myself of the urge to strike out, to punish Oluoch for Jane, for Salim, for everyone who had ever borne the brunt of his bigotry, and for myself. I was deliberating whether to send the letter when my roommates' alarms sounded off at 0530 hours.

A WEEK EARLIER, my three roommates and I had arrived in Quantico as strangers. We had reported to the Basic School and joined a company of two hundred other lieutenants. My mind was still in Kibera. I wished Nate, Semaj, and I had had another month to build CFK with Salim and Tabitha. Regardless, I didn't have a say in the matter. The Corps gave me three months of unpaid leave to launch CFK, and that was it. I had followed my orders and begun my military career.

The Basic School was the starting block. In keeping with the credo “every Marine a rifleman,” every Marine lieutenant, including the future pilots and lawyers, started his or her career with six months of training to learn the basics of being a rifle platoon commander. The initial week dragged as we waited for the course to begin. It seemed as if the staff were simply going through the motions. The school felt worn down by the legions of Marines who had preceded us. We were another company of peacetime lieutenants, one of at least six to cycle through each year. When I sent the curriculum to my father, he commented that it looked as though not much had changed since he went through the school in 1964.

We were training for war with lessons passed down from the generations before us, yet war of the likes of World War II, Vietnam, or the first Gulf War seemed unlikely. We would more probably deploy to peacekeeping operations, such as the one under way in Kosovo, or to embassy evacuations and humanitarian aid missions in places such as Haiti and Sierra Leone. These missions mattered, and I looked forward to them. In college I had written papers that supported our military intervention in Bosnia and excoriated the United States for not doing more to stop the genocide in Rwanda. While I realized that we needed to train for war first, the Basic School curriculum felt antiquated.

There was nothing to do until the course began. That morning we dressed, filled our mugs with coffee, and headed to a formation for a daily head count.

“All present,” a lieutenant sounded off to a captain.

We took a morning run through the woods and returned to the barracks. At 0845 hours I booted up my laptop to check my e-mail. Salim and I were trying to get a shipment of used soccer supplies through Kenyan customs without paying a bribe.

My roommate turned on the television.

“Holy shit. Look at this.”

“How the hell does a plane crash into the World Trade Center?”

“Maybe the pilot was drunk?” my roommate, the son of a New Jersey union boss, took a guess. Neither one of us imagined it was an attack. It was peacetime.

I called home.

“Yes, good morning,” Dad answered in his deep voice. When I told him about the crash, he turned on his television. After a long pause he concluded, “This is an attack. We've been attacked.”

“Lieutenants, on alert!” a thundering voice echoed down the barracks hall.

Doors swung open. I said good-bye to my father.

“Turn on your televisions!” someone shouted.

A few lieutenants jumped into our room to watch the coverage. Everyone thought it was a mistake. Then the second plane struck. Suddenly the room was quiet.

“We're under attack,” a lieutenant said, breaking the silence. “This means war.”

We were placed on high alert and training was suspended. But it didn't feel as if we were on alert. We sat in our rooms. The lieutenants who had completed the Basic School and were attending Infantry Officers Course received live ammunition and formed a defensive perimeter around the base. We were envious of them because we wanted to do something, anything, apart from watching television and wondering about our futures.

I stayed online and received dozens of e-mails with prayers and expressions of gratitude from friends and family, old and new. Rarely had I been thanked for choosing to join the military. When it did happen, I felt self-conscious about it. I hadn't done anything, and up until that day it seemed improbable that I would go to war.

Cell phone coverage remained unreliable. When I finally reached Tracy, it was nighttime. She told me that her family in North Carolina wanted to thank me for my service. As she spoke, I realized that the day's events meant we probably would have little time together in the years ahead. This thought brought with it a bundle of emotions. I wanted to spend more time with Tracy, but I had joined the Marines to be far out on the front lines of America's defense. September 11 shifted those front lines from peacekeeping missions to combat, which, at its core, is why the Marines exist. We saw ourselves as guardian leaders in a dangerous world, though there was more to it than this high ideal. While I told myself that I was content with being a peacetime Marine, a strong part of me wanted to experience war. I didn't fully understand that part and couldn't explain it to Tracy. There was a lot to it. It had to do with the desire to prove myself, the ecstasy of danger, and darker things that would come out with time.

“Marines move toward the sound of guns,” Staff Sergeant Sweeney had told us with his final words the previous summer at OCS. That drive was so powerful that it felt like part of our DNA, and it was a large part of what distinguished us. We wanted to be on the front lines of righteous battles. We wanted to be at Ground Zero with the firefighters running into the breach saving lives. We wanted to be in whatever fight was to come, and for me that desire was as strong as the forces that had taken me to Kibera and had me falling in love long before I ever intended to commit to a relationship.

THE BARRACKS HUMMED with speculation. Within hours Bin Laden's name arose as the primary suspect. A small minority of the lieutenants mouthed off about what they believed to be a larger problem with Muslims around the world. No Muslims were in our company of lieutenants, and I would later regret not confronting them. At the time, I didn't want to alienate myself from my new peers, and I didn't know how to object to them in a way that would be constructive. Our emotions soared, and I, too, was angry and out for justice.

Salim sent me an e-mail around noon. “We keep watching planes crashing into buildings in New York and Washington. Where are you? Are you OK? What about Semaj?”

Semaj was back at work in the South Bronx as a community organizer preparing to attend Howard University School of Law the following year. I assumed that he was fine, though I hadn't been able to reach him by phone. I told Salim that I was worried about American reactions if the attacks had been perpetrated by Muslims. Until that point, we hadn't written to each other about faith. We began an unusually personal e-mail exchange that Andrew Carroll, the writer who was CFK's first donor, later published in his anthology
War Letters
. One particular e-mail from Salim revealed the depths and power of his faith:

I wasn't born Muslim … Mama Fatuma was a Muslim. She didn't force Islam on us, but I got interested in it because she saved me. Islam is really important to me. I like the comfort it provides and discipline. In that way it is kind of like the Marines maybe. I found after I became Muslim that I had a community that cared about me. On the streets there was no one. The Marines helped you get educated. Muslims like Mama Fatuma helped me get educated too. So I feel a commitment and duty to Allah, praise be His name. I think we are all here for a purpose. I believe that purpose is guided by Allah. There is a lot of bad in the world. Allah I can count on to show us goodness and peace and so I hope this war will end and the terrorists will be stopped so that we can go back to goodness.
*

Our training began days later with a renewed sense of purpose. We were at war. We cheered when President Bush gave a speech at Ground Zero and said into a megaphone, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” We would deliver that message in person and through the barrel of a gun. Soon our brother and sister Marines would descend into the mountains of Afghanistan. Soon it would be our time to join the fight. I hoped that I wouldn't miss the largest battles because of the nine-month training cycle that awaited me if I was to fulfill my dream of becoming an infantry officer.

Weeks later I hit my first major roadblock.

“DOUBLE-TIME, MARCH,” a lieutenant sounded-off, kicking our platoon into a jog down the rifle-range trail. Formation runs were always like walks in the park for me. We ran as slow as our slowest man, and that was never me, fortunately—until then.

“Yo, Barcott, you all right?” asked my roommate from Jersey, who was jogging alongside me. I was falling behind. The pulsing pain in my hip was severe. It had started after three or four weeks of heavy-duty after-hours training for my first marathon. I was still wearing my old sneakers with treads worn smooth from years of pavement-pounding in Chapel Hill. Lieutenants at the Basic School had been given the special option to run the Marine Corps Marathon in honor of the 9/11 victims, and I had immediately signed up with twenty others.

“Barcott, I said, you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grunted. I finished the run but felt humiliated. I had slowed the platoon down.

Afterward, I limped into the medic's office. When the results from an X-ray returned, the doc told me I had a broken leg.

“What?” I didn't believe him. There was no time for a broken leg.