It Happened on the Way to War (27 page)

My Marines were older professionals, and I believed I could learn as much as or more from them than they could learn from me. I maintained a similar attitude toward the foreign military members in the battalion. My job was to give clear directions, support the collectors in the field, and evaluate their performance. I took a hands-off approach. While there was plenty to worry about, from land mines to automobile accidents, we didn't face a significant threat of direct hostile fire. I encouraged our collectors to be aggressive and “push the envelope.”

The region and the work was so complex that I could easily have filled twenty-four hours a day in front of my classified computer reading reports and speaking to our collectors in the field over secure lines. But I felt like a fraud giving operational advice without any real experience. After a few weeks, I identified some sources and set up meetings in Sarajevo and the surrounding region. With interpreter support, a Land Cruiser, and a concealed pistol, I began to operate.

At first, my meetings only took up a small fraction of my time. However, the work was so fascinating that I started taking on too much of it. As I stretched to keep up with my duties, the compartments I had established for CFK and my family and friends became more important, and they seemed to be holding firm. I didn't speak about CFK on the job, and I tried to block it out of my mind, apart from one hour at the end of every day. Prior to sleeping, I scribbled some notes in my journal and used my e-mail account to stay connected with CFK, Tracy, and other friends and family. By the end of my deployment, workdays stretched to nineteen hours. I wasn't getting enough sleep. Yet every time I approached a point of collapse, something new and time-sensitive came up. The work was too important to slow down.

PLEASED WITH OUR performance, my boss, the Army lieutenant colonel, supported my request to nominate my Marines for one of the highest military awards authorized by the command, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal. After I drafted their citations, I learned that the colonel had also nominated me for this distinction. The recognition felt great, and I was disappointed the six-month deployment was coming to a close. Although Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were still on the run, our battalion had produced valuable intelligence, some of which assisted in the capture of lower-profile war criminals. In recognition of Sergeant Thompson's efforts in particular, President Bush placed a personal call to him on Christmas Eve. Our team had made significant contributions in a mission to punish the perpetrators of extreme ethnic violence.

One of the benefits of the NATO mission was a block of leave. On her first trip outside the United States, Tracy met me in Sarajevo. I turned in my pistol at the armory and picked her up in a tiny, two-door rental car. We spent the night in Old Town, Sarajevo, near the spot where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sparked World War I. I thought I was being romantic. Tracy didn't mind, though she had no interest in taking a military-history tour on our first evening together.

Setting off before sunrise, we made our way west toward the small fishing port of Vela Luka on the Croatian island of Korcula. It was the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, an entrepreneur who had emigrated to the United States with his parents before World War I. Frank Barcott had eventually settled in Washington State and started a paint store in Everett, a town on the Puget Sound. Decades of cigarette smoke and lead-based paint fumes destroyed his lungs, and he had died of cancer shortly before I was born. I knew him only from faded photos and the memories of the people he loved. Vela Luka would bring me closer to his spirit, and I wanted to share that moment with Tracy.

We rested for a night before a long ferry ride from Split, Croatia's largest port. An elderly couple sat next to us on the ferry. I greeted them in Serbo-Croatian, and we struck up a conversation in English. They, too, had family in Vela Luka. When I told them about my ties to the town, the man exclaimed, “Then you are a Croat!
Dobar dan
. Welcome home, son.”

My personal life was my third compartment. I rarely discussed it with others during my deployment. For the first time since arriving in the Balkans, I was telling someone about my ties to the region. The man's enthusiastic response surprised me. When he asked if some special occasion had brought me back home, I let my guard down some more and told him I worked for NATO in Sarajevo.

“What's taking them so long, this NATO?” He furrowed his dark, heavy brows. His wife averted her eyes. “NATO is not a serious organization. Serious people would have those bastard Serb war criminals by the balls. It's been eight years since Dayton. Eight years and nothing.”

“Yes, sir, we're workin' on it,” I replied deferentially. Although I knew the challenges of manhunting missions firsthand, it baffled me that Karadzic and Mladic were still free.

“You should work harder.”

“You know we have one Croat war criminal left on the list, too?” I said without thinking. I didn't mean to be provocative.

“No, no, boy. You're wrong.” He stuck his finger at my face like Oluoch. His wife looked at me with pursed lips. “As a Croat you should know better. There are no Croat war criminals. This happened because of the Serbs. It's those blood-hungry dogs, those barbarians, not us.”

Tracy gripped my hand. I should have walked away, but the man had struck something deep. “You're wrong,” I snapped, throwing my finger back at his face. “And your country will be worse off for your attitude.”

“Who are you to talk to me this way? What do you know of it? Have you seen combat? Have you ever lost a child? No, because you are a child. You should be ashamed. This isn't the way Croats speak.”

Our exchange drew the awkward attention of other passengers. Tracy and I excused ourselves and walked out to some benches at the bow of the boat. Vela Luka was a brown dot on the turquoise horizon. Tracy's strawberry-blonde hair flickered in the wind, gracing the back of my neck.

“You didn't have to make a scene.” She turned to me. She was right. I had lost my cool. After only five short months as a NATO peacekeeper, I thought I had real expertise about a culture and a place that could take a lifetime to understand.

“I'm sorry.” Two of my three compartments had momentarily clashed.

As much as it bothered me that I had argued with the old Croat man, his comment about war struck a deep nerve. At one level, I hated when people called me boy. I interpreted those comments as efforts to discredit me because of my age. More important, the man was calling me out on my military experience. I hadn't seen combat. In Bosnia I felt like a police detective. The work was important; peacekeeping was important. But it wasn't everything that a Marine should be, not when a real war was under way and our brothers and sisters were doing the fighting and dying. As meaningful as my time in Bosnia was, it was missing something essential. I was missing something essential, and it was an intensely personal thing, a thing at the base of my life's Marine Corps compartment.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Grass, Flower, and Wind

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

WINTER 2004

THE COMPANY RETURNED FROM THE IRAQ invasion without a single Marine killed in action. After five years of service, our commander decided to leave the Marine Corps to attend Stanford Law School and pursue a career in the private sector. Lieutenant Dubrule was promoted to the rank of captain, took over as our commander, and selected me to be the company executive officer, his deputy.

We had less than six months to regroup and take most of the company back to Iraq. There was too much to do: combat training, gear check, medical updates, weapons qualifications, language lessons, specialty schools, intelligence briefings, staff meetings, and many other issues that arose as Marines tried to readjust to life out of a combat zone. Additionally, as the ever-changing whiteboard in the commander's office illustrated, we continued to dispatch small teams to elite military training schools and missions in other parts of the world. These missions in places such as the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan often placed a heavy emphasis on unconventional operations, such as civil affairs and military-to-military training. The non-Iraq missions were in high demand among the Marines, many of whom were looking for something different after their first deployment to the Middle East. They were interesting assignments, and I thought the U.S. military needed to be more focused on operations that could prevent violence. But I wanted to go to Iraq.

Captain Dubrule's leadership embraced the Colin Powell philosophy that “perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” When we were tired and stressed-out from the training, the captain reminded us through his words and actions that we were all fortunate to be in one of the best jobs in the Marine Corps. No one in the company worked longer hours than he did. He set high standards and lived by them. He kept us grounded and focused on the priorities. On his first day after his return from Iraq, he briefed the unit on his command philosophy and posted a three-page overview at the entrance to our team house, where it remained for his fourteen months of command. The introduction read:

I challenge anyone to show me a group who works harder to successfully collect timely and immediately usable intelligence and in the places where it is the most dangerous and difficult to do so. Undoubtedly, many of our brother Marines are alive today and our nation's enemies dead or captured because of your efforts. You should be duly proud of yourselves, this Company and the Battalion. Here is what drives me.

He listed four bullets: “Marine first above all else, personal accountability, initiative, and ownership.” Under “ownership” he concluded with the words, “This is your house, your Company. Is it everything it can be? What more can you do to make it better? I am challenging you to take this very personally. Take a step back, take stock of the situation and then strive to leave your mark on this place. It's yours after all.”

It took leaders to inspire and constantly refresh a sense of ownership. In this respect, Captain Dubrule's leadership resembled some of the qualities of Tabitha and Salim in Kibera. Tabitha liked to say that the community owned CFK. Salim spoke about ownership in terms of perception and empowerment. It was a spirit and a belief that could exist at individual and collective levels. Once it took root, as it had at CFK and in our HUMINT company, it elevated organizations to new heights.

Leadership at CFK and our HUMINT company was critical at the time. CFK was about to suffer one of its greatest losses, and our company was preparing to go back to a controversial war. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government disbanded the Iraqi Army and stood aside as many of its soldiers joined the insurgency. Our daily stream of intelligence reporting indicated that sectarian violence was on the rise, Iraqi government agencies were nonexistent, and the insurgency was metastasizing.

I opposed many of the administration's decisions, and I thought the neoconservative idea of springing a democracy on Iraq through a preemptive war was reckless. It was an idea without historical precedent, and it was filled with the type of hubris my father had often described as the Marine Corps' greatest vulnerability. At one point, I became so frustrated that I sent my first campaign donation to a presidential candidate. On the job, however, I kept my mouth shut. Professional military officers didn't broadcast their political views. We had a war to prepare for. Regardless of how we ended up in Iraq, we were there.

MOST MORNINGS CAPTAIN Dubrule and I caught up on the company's business in the weight room. He was a great lifting partner. Although I was about ten years younger than he was, we were close to the same strength, and he worked out hard. We used our workouts to discuss the company's challenges, many of which involved personnel decisions. A key part of Captain Dubrule's leadership was putting together teams for specific missions.

One morning we spoke about our Africa counterterrorism mission. Our team in Djibouti, a tiny country at the northern tip of Somalia, supported a multinational task force with military training, civil affairs, and Special Forces units in Yemen and four countries in the Horn of Africa. Although the mission rarely appeared in the news, it was complex and needed to be led by an officer who could represent the Marine Corps to numerous government agencies and foreign militaries. It was a more independent assignment than the one I had recently completed in Bosnia, because the team leader in Africa was the highest-ranking HUMINT specialist in the fifteen-hundred-person task force. Unfortunately, our most seasoned officers were already attached to specific Marine infantry battalions for the upcoming Iraq deployment. None of the officers who were available seemed to be the right fit for the job.

We finished our workout without a solution and sprinted a quarter mile back to the team house, where I followed Captain Dubrule to the whiteboard for more brainstorming. Decisions that impacted lives forever were sometimes made in minutes in front of that board, and the captain was the triggerman. He picked up his dry-erase marker and wrote
Lt Barcott
under the acronym HOA (Horn of Africa).

“Rye, I need you to take it,” he said in a way that indicated his deliberations were complete.

“Sir?” I had not seen it coming. Despite my background in the region and relevant language expertise, I assumed Captain Dubrule would want me in Iraq with him.

“I know you want to come with us to Iraq. Believe me, I want to take you. But if an officer needs help in Iraq, the command is there to fix things. In Africa, you're on your own, and I know you can handle it.”

There was nothing else to say. “Roger that, sir.”

Later that day I bumped into another intelligence officer, a captain whom I knew from a few staff meetings. I saluted him and we made some small talk. I told him the news of being selected to take over our HUMINT team in Djibouti.

“Well, I guess you don't have to worry about the Marines screwing the locals.” He sounded as if he were joking, though I wasn't following his punch line.

“You know, unless your guys have jungle fever or something. Don't they still live in trees there?”

I didn't respond. For all the officers as gifted and thoughtful as Captain Dubrule and Colonel Greenwood, we still had our share of dolts with no business leading Marines anywhere. Fortunately, most of these officers were plugged into relatively harmless staff positions where they could ride out their tours, and sometimes their careers.

“So, you all going to go undercover?” he asked. Although he had been briefed many times, the captain had no clue how tactical HUMINT worked. “Dress up like missionaries or somethin'?”

“No, it's nothing like that.” I apologized for being in a rush.

“Oh, I see, if you tell me, you'll have to kill me,” the captain chuckled as I walked away.

THAT NIGHT I was feeling disappointed when I called Tracy. Her upbeat attitude caught me by surprise. She was happy that I wouldn't be going to Iraq, even though it could mean that I would be gone nine months instead of the standard six. “Honey,” she added, “this mission was meant for you. It's what CFK prepared you to do.”

That was part of the problem, though. How could the fire walls I had built in my mind to separate the military and CFK withstand such a deployment? Tracy was a private person. As a clinical psychologist in training, she kept a healthy distance between her clients and her personal life. She understood my concern when I explained it. But she encouraged me to think more broadly about how I divided my life. No one could isolate parts of his or her life completely, she argued. Separation was good in moderation, though I was taking my need to compartmentalize to the extreme. Tracy thought that I could deploy to the Horn of Africa and still keep CFK separate enough, while also using the knowledge I had gained in Kibera to help improve the military's efforts at capacity-building and community development. Her perspective made sense. My primary mission was still intelligence collection, not development. My identity would be as a HUMINT team leader who spoke Swahili, not as the founder of an NGO.

As she so often did, Tracy assuaged my fears. Soon I was excited to take on the Horn of Africa mission with a team of five noncommissioned officers. While Bosnia felt like the tail end of an engagement from a distant era, our counterterrorism task force in Djibouti was at the forefront of a fresh frontier of military thinking called distributed operations. The idea was that the U.S. military could prevent terrorism in volatile parts of the world by surging small teams assembled from Special Forces, intelligence, and civil affairs units. These teams used soft-power tools, such as repairing local health care and education infrastructure, providing medical and veterinary care, and helping train African militaries. It was a significant departure from the typical military emphasis on what was called kinetic operations, also known as “hunting and killing bad guys.” The distributed operations doctrine took a long view and appeared to be battling the root causes of terrorism, which included poverty and poor governance.

AT CFK, THE pace hadn't slowed down. Kim Chapman, who was beginning her master's degree in public health at UNC, managed our undergraduate student volunteers. These students kept CFK active on campus, and they provided a leadership pipeline for the organization. We attracted some of the university's top students, and Kim enjoyed working with them. That year we selected an undergraduate named Peter Dixon to be one of our summer volunteers. Peter wanted to join the Marines after he graduated from UNC, so Kim naturally steered him my way for mentorship.

Peter and I met in Chapel Hill one weekend and bonded over a run. His gung ho attitude and sense of adventure reminded me of my own not-so-distant college days. By the time Peter landed in Kibera for the summer, my team and I were about to deploy from Camp Lejeune to Djibouti. Peter called me after he had his first cup of chai at the Mugumeno Motherland Hotel, where he had passed my regards to the no-nonsense matron.

“I'm in love,” Peter announced.

“With the matron?”

“No, no.” He laughed. “A puppy.”

The puppy, a rambunctious mutt that vaguely resembled a Labrador, had been following Peter around Kibera. Peter gave him food and a Swahili name for friend—Rafiki. When Rafiki fell ill, Peter took him to a veterinarian, who remarked that he had never before treated an animal from the slums. From then on, Rafiki traveled everywhere with Peter.

One day in an Internet café in Nairobi's city center, an attractive American lady noticed Rafiki sitting on Peter's lap. She struck up a conversation. The woman was looking for a partner to film a music video called “World on Fire.” The following day, she arrived in Kibera with Peter and Rafiki.

When I told Tracy the news of the serendipitous music video, she asked me about the musician.

“I don't know, Sarah something,” I replied. Tracy often teased me for having a horrible lack of pop-culture knowledge. “McLachlan, Sarah McLachlan.”

“You mean you don't know who Sarah McLachlan is?” Tracy laughed. “Well, she's great, and she's one of my favorite artists.”

We pulled up a Web site with a link to the song. Wind swept off the Atlantic, shaking my camper's thin walls. We were thinking about the same thing. Soon I would be gone again, and nine months sounded like an eternity. Tracy put her hands on my shoulders as Sarah sang, “The world's on fire and it's more than I can handle.”

ONE OF THE few Vietnam veterans left on active duty, the Marine general in command of the task force welcomed my team to Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti. We were a high-value asset, the general told us. He believed our intelligence collection was critical for the security of our civil affairs and military training teams located on the far frontiers of the war on terror. My Marines were eager to get out into the field and immediately picked up on the value of the general's support.