It Happened on the Way to War (28 page)

Although most lieutenants in the Marine Corps reported to captains, my boss at Camp Lemonnier was a colonel, an old-timer from the reserves who had built a thirty-year career as an intelligence officer. The colonel understood our business and took a hands-off approach. A few days after our arrival, the general called him for a meeting. The colonel invited me to join him to brief the general. In the hyper-rank-conscious Marine Corps, it was as rare for lieutenants to brief generals as it was for them to directly report to a colonel.

When I finished my briefing, the general informed us that his intent was to “push the envelope.” It was a phrase that I liked to use, and it was a good signal. In such a command climate, we could shape our intelligence collection based on our views of evolving key priorities, and there were plenty of ongoing operations from which to choose. The task force had too many civil affairs and military training teams spread out across five countries for us to support directly. Since the main effort at the time was in Ethiopia, I decided to dispatch four of my five Marines with interpreter support to the Ogaden region, the vast hinterland on the Somali border.

It was exciting work, and at first the mission appeared to be on the right track. The task force was building dozens of wells, repairing schools, and fixing clinics in a troubled part of the world, and we were doing it for relatively little cost. During our welcoming briefing we were told that the price tag for our task force's annual operations was about equivalent to what the United States spent every hour in Iraq, or every day in Afghanistan.

It took a month for me to deploy my team, catch my bearings, and establish a rhythm for managing daily communications, editing intelligence reports, and attending planning and liaison meetings. Before long I was itching to get out and operate. As I had done in Bosnia, I began by cultivating local sources around the capital city and keeping my eyes open for opportunities to make a more direct impact. One of the first opportunities I identified certainly pushed the envelope. Since nearly half the task force's resources went to military-to-military training, I proposed that we initiate military intelligence training with the Ethiopian Army.

My colonel supported my idea and arranged another meeting to brief the general. The general thought the proposal was “forward thinking,” though he cautioned us to handle the exploratory meetings with a high level of discretion. He didn't want to read newspaper headlines about the U.S. military collaborating with Ethiopian intelligence, which had an even poorer human rights reputation than the Ethiopian Army. One of the goals of the task force was to ease the heavy-handed approach of the Ethiopian Army through constructive engagement.

Within days of briefing the general, I was off with my interpreter in a Land Cruiser stacked with gear, food, ammunition, and spare tires. We blasted across Djibouti's volcanic plains into the Ogaden Desert and toward the green hills of eastern Ethiopia's highlands.

A captain from Ethiopian military intelligence, my counterpart, met me in the back room of a bar down a narrow cobblestone street. We were in the old-town section of Harer, an ancient walled city that was once East Africa's center of Islamic culture and religion. Although we were indoors, the captain wore wraparound sunglasses similar to my own and a white Panama hat that looked like something out of
Miami Vice
. His gray blazer concealed a nine-millimeter, Soviet-era Marakov pistol. My own nine-millimeter Beretta was locked and loaded in a concealed holster beneath my safari shirt, close to the pocket where I clipped my new Spyderco knife.

Our meeting had been arranged through back channels. I was concerned about who might be watching us and with what intentions. For decades the Ethiopian government had been waging a low-intensity counterinsurgency campaign against a separatist faction of the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group. The U.S. military wanted no part of that dispute. Unfortunately, the captain chose our meeting point, and the city of Harar was near an area considered to be a stronghold of Oromo resistance. I knew little about these long-standing ethnic tensions apart from the fact that Ethiopian intelligence had interests in using the U.S. military presence for reasons beyond simply preventing the spread of international terrorism.

The captain removed his sunglasses and extended his hand.

“Nice hat,” I remarked.

“Thank you.” He smiled with pursed lips. “Like
Chinatown
.”

My interpreter looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

“The movie,” the captain clarified. “Jack Nicholson.
Chinatown
.” He tipped the brim of his hat.

“Ah, yes, great movie.” It happened to be one of my father's favorite films. We built rapport for a while by talking about other famous American movies. With one thumb tucked into his belt, the captain spoke in a smooth Amharic, Ethiopia's official language. We concluded our introductions with a discussion of
The Godfather
. It was among my favorite films. The captain admired that I was a Marine, “like Michael Corleone.”

“You've been to Iraq?” he asked.

There it was again, that irritating question. “No, not yet.”

The captain looked taken aback. It was the same awkward hesitation that I received in the States. Marines deployed to the front lines. Why was I in Ethiopia if the fighting was in Iraq?

“Iraq's next.”

“Humph.” The captain nodded, and with that we got down to business. The captain began by remarking that he was happy the United States knew how to interrogate its enemies “creatively.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Abu Ghraib.” The captain combed his mustache with his index finger.

His response rattled me. Months earlier, the press had released ghastly photographs of abuse and torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. I didn't understand how American military men and women could perpetrate such evil, and I was shocked that the senior levels of the U.S. military command had not been held accountable.

“That's how these people need to be treated,” the captain added. I assumed he was referring to members of Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, the regional terrorist organization in eastern Ethiopia and Somalia, though he might have had Oromo separatists in mind. “They're terrorists. Pigs, all of them.”

“No, that's not how we do business. Abu Ghraib was a mistake, a crime.”

“You think?” The captain tilted his head.

“Are you an interrogator?” I asked.

“Of course. I wouldn't be talking with you if I wasn't.”

“Then you know abuse isn't effective. Anyone will break under torture. The information isn't reliable. Professional interrogators are above that.”

The captain eyed me curiously. He had a different impression of his job, and a far different set of life experiences. The gulf was too wide to cross. Nothing of operational value would come out of our meeting, and there would be no future plans for joint training. It was a flop. Beyond that, it disgusted me that our actions at Abu Ghraib could actually serve as inspiration to others. The United States was supposed to be a force for the oppressed, not the oppressors. I launched into a lecture about human rights and the Geneva Conventions.

The captain listened to my rant without affect. At the end of it, he lit a cigarette and nodded. We shook hands. Before I turned away, he added, “You know, I've learned things about interrogation from you.”

Was he talking about me?

He took a long drag from his cigarette.
“The Godfather,”
he said with his pursed-lip smile. “Corleone, Don, the father, not the son. Don Corleone, he taught me things.”

DESPITE MY DESIRE to be on the frontiers, I spent most of my time at Camp Lemonnier and out and about in Djibouti City, “the ville.” My Marines were autonomous and performing well, and I continued to develop a network of local informants to provide us with early indications of threats. Al Qaeda may have considered Camp Lemonnier, a large American military base in a Muslim country, one of its prime targets. But Al Qaeda probably had no presence in the tiny country with a population of less than one million. One American intelligence analyst assessed the situation as such: “If Al Qaeda is ever stupid enough to show up here, the Djiboutian internal services will be on them like flies on poo.”

Nevertheless, we couldn't rely solely on Djiboutian intelligence for protection. Since we assumed the slums would be the most fertile recruiting ground for any terrorist organization, I focused my efforts there. I figured my time in Kibera would be good preparation.

During the summer hot season, the temperature in Djibouti City spiked as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Much of the city benefited from a steady breeze coming off the Gulf of Aden. However, the slums were located in what was once a swamp, a natural depression where the winds stalled and the air stagnated.

My interpreter and I took a cab into Djibouti City's largest slum for my first meeting one afternoon. Mosquitoes splattered the windshield. I spotted a tin shack that appeared to be on fire, black smoke billowing out of its front door. A woman emerged from the smoke, tossed a bucket of wastewater into a sump, and walked back into the shack. My interpreter, a Djiboutian American, explained that women made small fires in their homes to “smoke out” the disease-carrying mosquitoes and the persistent hordes of flies. I knew from Kibera that tin roofs intensified the sun's heat, making the slum an especially miserable place during heat waves. Seeing that woman's life in the smoky shack in Djibouti City during the hot season at the hottest time of day was the closest I'd come to witnessing hell on earth.

By the time we arrived at our meeting location, an open-air shack, I was suffering from a serious case of swamp ass. My boxer shorts clung to my rump like a wet swimming suit. We sat down and waited for our source to show up. The stink of rotting fish mixed with the smell of smoke. The waiter didn't bother taking our order. Wearing a tired, bored look, he brought us two cups of steaming tea and bowls of warm spaghetti with red beets, a staple Djiboutian dish inherited from Italian colonial rule in Somalia. My interpreter waved off his tea and spaghetti by pointing to his stomach and watch, a gesture to signal that he was fasting.

The eyes of a dozen patrons turned toward me. A swarm of flies formed a rain cloud around my head. The last thing I wanted to do was eat. I felt like I was back in Kibera with young men sizing me up. So I dove in. Shoulders forward, I dug into the spaghetti with my hands, shoveling fistfuls of noodles into my mouth as if I hadn't eaten in days. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead into my bowl. When a fly landed in my mouth, I thought about Tracy. She always reminded me to eat with my mouth closed.

The other patrons went back to their business as I devoured my dish. Salim once told me that it was good to have chai when it was hot out because hot drinks counterintuitively helped cool the body by regulating its temperature. This may have worked for Salim, but not for me. By the time I had finished my hot tea and spaghetti, I felt on the verge of becoming a heat casualty, like one of the unfortunate candidates who fell out of forced marches at Officer Candidates School and took the silver bullet.

My source, a local power broker in the slums, was the type of contact who might provide nothing for months until he heard something of value and decided to call because we had an established relationship. That day, he was rambling on about his nomadic grandfather and a herd of goats when my cell phone vibrated. Desperate for a diversion, I excused myself.

“May I ask who's calling?” I'd learned from my father never to identify myself first.

“It's Randy, Randy Newcomb from Omidyar Network.” A couple of weeks earlier, CFK's administrative officer had asked if she could give my Djibouti cell number to a foundation in California. “I hope I'm not interrupting you.”

“No, no, not at all.” My source was talking to the waiter. A fly landed on my nose. A mosquito nibbled into the back of my neck.

“Well, I know you're deployed, and, first, thank you for your service,” Randy said before telling me that “Pam and Pierre” had watched Sarah McLachlan's “World on Fire” music video and wanted to make a matching gift. “Would you be willing to take a check for twenty-six thousand dollars for CFK? You can use it for whatever purposes you need.”

We occasionally received random donations for anything from ten to a hundred dollars, never thousands.

“Yes. Yes!” I exclaimed, and began to tell Randy the story of Rafiki, the abandoned puppy from Kibera who had attracted the attention of Sarah McLachlan's videographer. Then my cell phone lost its signal.

Later, when I had downtime back at base, I checked my e-mail and discovered a note from Randy confirming the donation from the Omidyar Network. My jaw dropped when I googled
Omidyar
. Pierre Omidyar was the founder of eBay. The Omidyar Network, led by Pierre and his wife, Pam, was one of the largest foundations in the world. I immediately called Salim.

“Now we can really begin building a new clinic,” Salim said. He was always ready for the next big project. The new clinic would give us much needed space and reduce our rent, our most costly recurring expense after payroll.

Next, I called Tabitha. I blurted out the news as soon as she picked up.

“Omosh, this is a good thing. Good work.” Her voice was weak and tired.

“Are you okay?”

“Me, I'm okay. Yes, just a fever.” There was some noise in the background. It sounded busy at the clinic.

“Feel better,
mama
. Maybe you can take a nap.”

“You know, I cannot. But me, I'm fine.” Tabitha was thirty-eight years old and she was building more than just a clinic. She viewed our work as a movement to bring high-quality, locally directed health care to the poor, and to see doctors in and from Kibera.