It Happened on the Way to War (3 page)

I caught my breath and asked Looseyia about his ambitions. He looked at me curiously and replied that it was a very American question. After a pause, he told me that he wished to guide for the rest of his life because it was his main talent, and because he respected the tradition of passing knowledge on to others.

“And you, what do you want to do?” he asked, facing me.

In the third grade we had an assignment to identify whom we wanted to be like when we grew up. Every night my parents and I watched the evening news with Tom Brokaw. Brokaw reminded me of a friendly uncle, and I liked that he had an impact on how people viewed the world. I wrote an essay on being a news anchor and appended a glossy photograph of Brokaw in the newsroom. However, explaining who Tom Brokaw was to Looseyia seemed out of place, so I told him the truth.

“I don't know. I want to do something significant.”

“Everything we do matters. Don't take what you have for granted. You can do something significant. But you know who makes that possible?”

“What's that?”

“It's your parents.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” I replied.

“No, you're not getting me. You have more opportunities than I can even dream. You have these because of them. You should treat them with more respect.”

I was at a loss for words. What he was saying resonated deeply. I had taken a lot for granted.

The following morning Looseyia accompanied us to the dirt airstrip. I gave him one of my baseball hats and we exchanged addresses. It had only been four days, yet it was difficult to say good-bye. My father handed Looseyia his cane in an impromptu gesture of appreciation.

“For me?” Looseyia asked in disbelief.

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” Dad said. “We're grateful for all you've done for us.”

“In our culture a man's walking stick is the most significant gift. It's given from a chief before he passes to the next chief, or to his son.”

“Well, I don't plan on croaking anytime soon, but I do hope you'll be a chief.” My father laughed, though I could tell he was deeply moved by the meaning his gift conveyed. He asked Looseyia to join us for a final family photograph.

As our plane lifted off, Looseyia stood on the savanna holding the cane above his head. My father, peering out from his window, saluted him.

FIVE YEARS LATER I was in my first of four Swahili classes at UNC. The language had a smooth sound and a rhythmic flow, and I enjoyed studying it even though the class itself was one of the most polarized I had ever been in. A dozen male athletes and a few guys looking to complete their foreign-language requirement with as little work as possible sat in the back rows. Separated by a no-man's land of barren desks, the rest of us, about eight students, sat in the front.

It wasn't a classic geek-jock divide. The students with me in the front rows were an eclectic and adventurous group. A friend to my left studied the plight of child soldiers in Uganda. The student on my right aspired to be a missionary in Tanzania. For those of us in the front, Swahili directly connected to our life plans.

Professor Alphonse Mutima did the best he could teaching the bifurcated class. With his stocky build and infectious laugh, one could easily have mistaken him for a man who had lived a comfortable life. But few comfortable lives came out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and his was not one of them. Professor Mutima didn't speak about his upbringing in class. He was reserved and didn't want to feel pitied. We captured only glimpses of his former life when he explained certain words with unique cultural meanings and applications, such as
kanga
s, the colorful wraps that hung on walls or were worn as skirts, baby carriers, and shawls. When Professor Mutima spoke of such things, the elevated, engaging tone in his voice conveyed the longing he felt for the home he had never returned to. I found him to be fascinating and often walked with him across our wooded campus after class.

Professor Mutima devoured what little news came from press coverage of Central Africa. When we came to difficult subjects, he made light of the ironies that emerged from insecure lives, such as the absence of obesity in many parts of Africa. His laughter veiled a pain and anxiety so deep it would cripple most men. Professor Mutima dealt with the boys in the back rows, but he had little respect for them, or for anyone who he believed took the great gift of a university education for granted.

With time, Professor Mutima told me about his home in Goma, a city perched on an active volcano at the Rwandan-Congolese border. Goma earned notoriety as home to the largest refugee camp in the world after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Professor Mutima recommended I read a book about the genocide by a writer named Philip Gourevitch, and he pointed out a vivid excerpt from the book that described Goma as “one of the most bewildering spectacles of the century,” where “bulldozers had to be brought in to dig mass graves and plough the bodies under. Picture it: a million people, shifting through the smoke of cooking fires on a vast black field, and behind them … the Nyaragongo volcano had come to life, burbling with the flame that made the night sky red.”
*

I had also been told about the book by an army officer who served on a humanitarian assistance mission to Rwanda. The officer predicted that my military career would be dominated by American responses to ethnic conflicts that threatened to destabilize entire regions, as had occurred with the Rwandan genocide.

For winter break that year my mother and I took a short vacation together. I spent the first two days engrossed in Gourevitch's book. Its cover featured an intriguing photograph of a lawn chair in front of a foggy lake, and its title was the longest I had ever seen:
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
. The author's photo was equally striking. He looked off to the side with a devilish smile, heavy bags sagging beneath his dark eyes, his hair whisking up from his forehead as if he had just stepped off a motorcycle.

I vigorously circled and underlined entire passages of the book. It was a habit of interactive reading that I had learned from my father. Returning to some passages a half dozen times, I read many excerpts out loud to my mom. It was baffling. In Rwanda more than eight hundred thousand people were killed in one hundred days. I recalled watching the evening news as a fifteen-year-old when a segment aired with footage of a group of Rwandan boys murdering a wounded man. They used machetes and clubs spiked with nails. This was my first realization of humanity's capacity for great evil, and I found it and my reaction to it as fascinating as it was repulsive. I wanted to battle the forces that created such horrific frenzy, and yet, at the same time, the darkness itself held some attractive power that I didn't understand but could not deny.

How and why genocide happened were the obvious questions, and they went unanswered. They were disturbing enough, though beyond them, a more personal question lingered. If I had been born in Rwanda and was confronted with the ultimatum of killing an innocent person or being killed, would I kill? While I wanted to say that I would resist, in truth I didn't know, and that uncertainty made me all the more curious.

Gourevitch's book with its lucid meditations reawakened these thoughts and emotions. As enlightening as his writing was, so many elemental questions about good and evil remained. By the time I put down his book, I knew I wanted to go to Rwanda to understand for myself the elements of darkness that I could one day be called on to battle as a Marine.

DURING OUR LAST night of vacation, I told Mom about Swahili class with Professor Mutima. We talked about anthropology and her former academic adviser at UNC, James Peacock, a beloved anthropologist with long, salt-and-pepper eyebrows and a kind, unassuming presence. I had reached out to Professor Peacock after growing bored with my first semester of freshman classes. He had invited me to his office in Alumni Hall, the building on campus where my parents met as graduate students in 1969. I was anxious about the meeting until I walked into his office and found him sitting cross-legged on top of his desk, shoes off, listening to Indonesian hip-hop. After our meeting, Professor Peacock had let me join his graduate-level anthropology seminar on globalization. The theory was over my head, but I had enjoyed the small group discussions. When I chose to write my term paper on the Masai in Kenya, Professor Peacock had introduced me to a graduate student named Jennifer Coffman. Jennifer focused her fieldwork in southern Kenya and generously helped me navigate my first major research paper.

Mom listened eagerly as I told her about how Professor Peacock's class and my conversations with Jennifer had opened my mind to anthropology and the power of ethnography.

“I'm so glad to hear this,” Mom responded. I could tell that she was relieved that I had shaken my teenage apathy.

“But, Mom, there's something else.” Unsure how she would respond, I had saved it for the end. I had enough to keep me busy with a demanding course load and ROTC commitments. Yet I felt that I needed to do more. I needed to go to Rwanda.

“Rwanda?” Her voice cracked.

“Yes, Mom, I want to go. I need to go.”

“Oh, my.” She paused. “Are you sure?”

I had wanted to return to Africa, and Rwanda seemed to be the right fit. I explained to my mom that I could learn about ethnic conflict there, develop my Swahili, and make a real contribution with research. After an hour or so of discussion, my mom told me that she understood and would support me. Although I had anticipated her support, her words felt great to hear. Mom, too, was an explorer. As a young nurse she had lived alone for a year in a village in Peru. She knew about the drive to go to places where many others would not venture. It was part of my inheritance, as was my middle name—Mead—in honor of the legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Mom and I spent the rest of the night talking about Rwanda. She helped me think about how to get there safely and in a way that would not jeopardize the security of the local population. Weeks later, she sent me a handwritten note with one of her favorite Margaret Mead quotes: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

“CHANGE THE WORLD.” It sounds cliché to me now, but it didn't back then. The phrase spoke to me throughout college and, before that, adolescence. It had connected with me ever since one day, as a boy, when I fell through the ice into the pond behind our home. Something extraordinary happened that day. I was with Peaches, our golden retriever whom my parents had named after their favorite tree in our backyard. Peaches was my most loyal playmate. She slept in a hay patch in our barn, and I could often tell where she was by the jingle of the miniature cow bell that my parents hung from her collar. That day we were playing catch with her favorite tennis ball when the ice gave way beneath me. Engulfed by the frigid water, my head smacked a piece of ice when I tried to come up for air and escape. Trapped, I panicked. I thought I might die.

Kicking violently, I inhaled a gulp of water. Not until my head collided with another piece of ice did my body relax, and I detected rays of light filtering in through the hole that had swallowed me. I swam to it, hoisted myself out of the water, and gasped for air. Peaches barked then licked my face.

Although Peaches often ran ahead of me, that day she stayed by my side. I shivered back home across frozen fields and collapsed into the shower with my clothes on. The steaming water cascaded over my head, slowly replacing the bitter chill with a numb, tingling sensation. As my body warmed, my mind expanded with euphoria. I had survived. I had faced death, and it was exhilarating.

Curious to return to the spot where the pond ice had collapsed beneath me, I trudged back out over the snow with Peaches that afternoon. A thin layer of ice had formed over the hole by the time I returned. When I raised my walking stick to break the ice, Peaches barked. She dropped to the ground, paws out. Her cow bell stopped jingling. The wind died. I froze and looked around for an animal or a person approaching us. There was nothing, and then, suddenly, there was everything.

The force swept me into its embrace. It felt like I was floating outside of my body. I heard no words and saw no form or shape. All I could see was light, just as when I had touched the grenade that saved my father's life. This time, however, the light lasted longer and came with a sense of clarity. It was warm and glorious. I was a believer, but never before had I felt God. Never before had we communicated directly.

That day at the pond made me realize that life could be cut off at any moment. I don't really know why, but I started believing that I wouldn't live past thirty years old. When I told some of my closest friends about my premonition, many of them thought it was a morbid idea, a death sentence, a noose. But I found it to be liberating. I didn't think about having a career in a profession that would take me years to learn. I didn't imagine getting married or having children. From that point forward, I had a new sense of purpose and time, and there was an awareness that I was alive for a reason that was larger than myself. What I sought was a short, intense life that would make a bold impact and live beyond me.

YEARS LATER, AT some point near the beginning of high school, I realized that my greatest fear was an ordinary life. The Marine Corps was the answer, and although I had been groomed and guided to it implicitly by my father and his closest friends throughout my childhood, it felt like a revelation.

With my mind made up, I started wearing a USMC T-shirt, cut my hair into a high-and-tight, and bought an American flag for the antenna of my old Ford Ranger pickup truck. Football became my sole sport, and I used my off-season to lift weights and bulk up so that I could compete as a defensive tackle against linemen twice my size. I watched war movies such as
Platoon
and
Full Metal Jacket
so many times that they influenced my language. “Take the pain!” and “What's your major malfunction, numbnuts?” were among my favorite lines.