It Happened on the Way to War (30 page)

THOSE WERE SOME of the personal things on my mind at the end of my call with Captain Dubrule. Weeks later I was blazing through the Ogaden Desert with my interpreter Hussein when he swerved to miss a dik-dik standing like a little reindeer in the middle of the road. That was when we crashed into the ridge and flipped over. Our Land Cruiser totaled, I arranged for an Ethiopian tow truck to haul us back to Djibouti, and nervously anticipated the conversation I would need to have with my colonel.

My mother always said that the worst part of bad news was when it came as a surprise, when it blindsided you. Tabitha didn't sound well on the phone when she called. She had never called me before. I knew she was sick, and her tone suggested that it was more serious than I had initially thought. I needed to see her. I needed to return to Kibera.

Until then, the compartments of Kibera and the Marine Corps had withstood the pressures of my first two deployments. Then, for the first time, my service to Kibera was in direct conflict with my military duties. Nevertheless, I had no choice. I asked my colonel for permission to fly to Nairobi to see Tabitha. The colonel listened to my appeal, fingered the silver cross on his dog tags, and gave me the go-ahead. “God's work” was what he called what we were doing in Kibera. It didn't matter what he called it. I needed to see Mama Tabitha and give her whatever care I could muster.

TABITHA'S STRONG BROWN eyes were stoic and unafraid as I knelt at her hospital bedside. If it were not for her eyes, I might not have recognized her. She had lost clumps of hair and half of her weight. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead. The very effort to speak seemed to cause her pain. She was in one of Nairobi's top hospitals, but she wanted to be treated at her clinic, with her people, in her community.

The attending physician asked me to step out of the room with him. He told me that Tabitha was too weak to endure an ambulance ride back to Kibera. He touched my elbow and apologized. Her appendix had burst, and an infection was spreading through her body and could not be stopped. She would not survive much longer.

I was in shock. I returned to Tabitha and stood quietly by her side before giving her news about things at her clinic. In a soft, strained voice she recalled the week my mother had spent with her years ago nursing patients when the clinic was just getting started.

“Is she well?” Tabitha asked.

“Yes, Mom's well. Still teaching.”

“Oh, that's a good thing.”

“She loves to tell about when she first came to Kibera. You took her suitcase from my hands. Do you remember that?”

Tabitha nodded.

“You took the suitcase and you carried it on your head, and you took her hand and led her to the clinic. That was the first night. Mom, she loves that memory.”

“And the pussy.” Tabitha smiled faintly.

“The pussy?”

“The pussycat.”

“Oh, yes, yes, it ran on the roof and scared Mom that second night. She was worried but it was just a pussycat. She laughed about it with you the next morning, and Joy and Kevin were there, and Ronnie, too.”

“Yes, my children. Will you…”

“Yes, I will.” I promised her I would make sure her children finished school. Then she drifted off to sleep. I stood there by her side watching the birds in the hibiscus tree in the courtyard outside the window. I thought about the day in the summer of 2000 before I left Kibera for Officer Candidates School—the day that changed our lives forever. Tabitha, in her oversized black leather jacket, had led me to her home and prepared chai. She had taken me into her life and told me about her plan to sell vegetables. Pride and conviction were in her voice. She wasn't looking for pity. She had just needed a boost at a time that was tough by even Kibera standards.

When Tabitha woke up, she touched my cheek. Her fingers were like Vanessa's. They felt like a hot iron. “I have faith in you and the community,” she said. “Don't quit pushing this thing.”

I promised and kissed her forehead, breaking salty beads of sweat. Her voice began to fade as she recited a quote of some sort with the words
grass
,
flower
, and
wind
. When I leaned forward and asked her to repeat it, she had already fallen asleep.

I stepped out of the room and stumbled down the hall. I made my way out to the courtyard with the hibiscus tree, tears falling down my face.
Why? Why now?

There was no answer, and early the next morning, with her children asleep by her side, Tabitha passed away. Grass, flower, and wind. Her last words had a beautiful rhythm. She was quoting something, but I hadn't heard the sentences woven between those three words. For years they would remain a mystery.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Manuscript

Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti

SPRING 2005

I BECAME FAR MORE CRITICAL OF OUR MILITARY mission in the Horn of Africa in my final four months at Camp Lemonnier. Our deployment was considered a hardship post. I could only imagine what Tabitha would have thought if she were alive and saw the hundreds of steak and lobster meals served by Halliburton, one of the world's most profitable companies, or heard that the cost of fuel for one round-trip military flight from Djibouti to Kenya could have covered her yearly expenses at the clinic. Camp Lemonnier was teeming with colonels. Many of these senior officers went their entire deployments without ever having a real conversation with an African civilian. We ran CFK each year for less than the cost of a colonel.

Tabitha never used the word
development
, but in her mind fighting poverty and empowering others required humility and long-term commitment. She often called this “sacrifice.” Her approach, and our approach at CFK, was in stark contrast to the haphazard explorations of the military in the Horn of Africa. It wasn't a question of intentions. Most of the military men and women with whom I served wanted to do the right things. They wanted to help local communities develop. But good intentions weren't enough.

The problem wasn't simply our lack of continuity and our ignorance about the communities where we intervened. The larger issue was one that the military couldn't overcome. It was the fundamental impossibility of empowering a community through armed intervention. As long as we wore uniforms and carried weapons, we would be seen for exactly what we were—a foreign military.

These realizations, which occurred over many months, brought me back to the importance of compartments. “Do what you do well” goes the old saw. Institutions have core competencies. The military's core competency was war. Of course, security was a precondition to development, and militaries played constructive roles in establishing and sustaining that security, as we had done in Bosnia. Our military mission in the Horn of Africa, however, had lost focus. While the resources we spent there were insignificant in the larger scope of the hundreds of billions of dollars the Department of Defense consumed each year, it was still millions of dollars of impact lost.

TRACY MET ME at the airport outside Camp Lejeune as soon as my team returned from our nine months overseas. We fell back into our happy weekend routines on North Topsail Beach: long walks, movies, and grilling out. Tracy was pleased that I moved from my camper at Rogers Bay to a one-bedroom apartment farther up the island. The tourist season had yet to begin and we had miles of beach to ourselves. It was glorious.

I waited for a while until I brought up news that I knew would upset her. We were walking along a deserted stretch of sand, talking about the ocean's glassy horizon and the blue sky. “So I've got some news that you're not gonna like. I'm slated for the next Iraq deployment.” It was an abrupt transition. I didn't know how to say it other than directly.

“What?” There was a rare sharpness in her voice.

“Yes, babe, I'm sorry.”

“How long have you known this?”

“A couple of months, but—”

“A couple of months! What? You've known this that long and you're just telling me now?”

“I needed to tell you in person. I knew you'd be upset.”

“Well, you're right about that. When's this going to end? You've been gone for half of the last three years.”

I didn't know. Captain Dubrule had recommended that I consider a special program that, after Iraq, could take me into the Central Intelligence Agency. Such a program could allow me to continue collecting intelligence from sources in the field, which was the part of my job that I most enjoyed.

“What's this special program?”

I told her as much as I could.

“I AM SO SICK OF THIS!” she shouted. She never shouted. “I hate these secrets. I hate it that you can never tell me what you're doing, and sometimes you just disappear. Now you're saying this? This sounds worse than the last three years. And when did you think you were going to talk to me about this, this thing with the CIA?”

“Well, isn't that what we're doing?”

“Dammit, Rye.” She looked to the ocean.

“It's just an idea.” I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I was too self-absorbed to see that the woman I loved wasn't going to wait forever. “It probably won't work because of CFK. There's no way I could stay involved with CFK if I were in the CIA.”

“You think? CFK, it's always CFK. How about us? You think I just take second fiddle to everything else?”

“No, no, that's not it at all. Babe, I'm just putting out an idea. If you can't live with it, fine, I won't do it.” I reacted before I could think through the consequences.

“Good, because you've done your time. Why Iraq? Why are they making you do it?”

“Well, I volunteered.”

“YOU WHAT?! WHAT! I CAN'T … WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?”

“Stop, babe, please.” I paused. “Let me explain.” I was near the end of my four-year active-duty obligation and could have “dropped my papers.” However, if I went that route, the probability was high that I'd be recalled to involuntary duty and stuck in Iraq with a random unit. If I extended my service for another year, I could help lead my company and deploy with Marines I knew and trusted. I didn't want to let my company down and leave them when they were hard-pressed for officers with experience.

Tracy sighed. “And there's something else,” I added. “You know when I come back to the States, everyone asks, ‘Have you been to Iraq?' Even in the Marine Corps, it's like my tours in Bosnia and the Horn of Africa don't matter as much. They're peripheral. To some Marines, they don't matter at all. And, you know, sometimes I feel that, too. I mean, if I don't go, I feel like I haven't done my part.”

“I don't like it,” Tracy said under her breath.

Of course there was more to it than simply seeking legitimacy as a Marine. I still wanted to experience war, to see the elephant, as we called it. I sought a baptism by fire. For me, this craving for a taste of combat, which may strike many people as perverse, was more than a rite of passage or the ability to say “been there, done that.” Enemy fire was a test of courage, and I had wanted to know how I would react to it ever since I was a child and touched that old smoke grenade behind my father's desk.

“So what's next?” A tear trickled down her face. “After Iraq, you're still thinking about graduate school, right?”

Although Tracy wanted me to leave the Marines, I was tempted to stick around for at least another three-year assignment. There were plenty of options, including ones that would involve fewer deployments. I enjoyed the prestige of being a Marine, the camaraderie, and being a part of missions that could take me to new and challenging places. I knew that I wanted to propose to Tracy after Iraq, and I didn't want to drag her into something that would make her unhappy. Yet I suspected we could still make it work in the military. The CIA was an extreme option. Others were more compatible with family life, I thought.

Nevertheless, I had committed to applying to Harvard for the dual-degree program in business and public policy, so I threw myself into the applications. It was a good thing Tracy and I didn't live together because my work pace was insane. I spent my nights with CFK. Each morning I woke up at 0330 for two hours of GMAT problem sets. I scored poorly on my initial sample tests, and the results made me nervous—but also more determined. I started waking up without an alarm, clutched by anxiety. By 0630 hours I arrived at our company team house for a full day of war preparations.

Captain Dubrule transitioned to a new duty station and handed over the company command to Joe Burke, a Korean linguist with more than a dozen years of intelligence experience. I remained the number two officer, and we immediately hit it off after I spotted his collection of war and espionage books. Captain Burke was forty-two years old, nearly twice the age of the average Marine. His hair was as gray as the smoke from his Marlboro reds, which didn't slow him down. He could outrun nearly everyone in the company. The Marines appreciated his physical stamina, self-effacing humor, and approachability. He was the only commander I knew who signed-off his e-mails to subordinates with his first name.

Half of our company had fought in Iraq, and the Iraq veterans set the tone. In contrast to the eager anticipation that had braced the company before the invasion, the mood was somber and professional. It felt as if we were in the middle of a long, hard slog. Although we were worried, we rarely discussed our fears. We had a job to do and our work was crucial to the fight. HUMINT was at the heart of any effective counterinsurgency. Every week Marine combat commanders deluged Captain Burke with requests for support that we didn't have. We were stretched to the limit and running without brakes.

My own zeal to lead Marines in combat was tempered, though not extinguished, by reminders of war's complexity and cruelty. A brother lieutenant lost his leg in Fallujah. A roadside bomb killed one of our sergeants, and one of our most able interrogators suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and attempted suicide. My mornings at work began with a stream of classified reports from the front lines. The raw intelligence reporting suggested that we had a poor understanding of our enemy. We were floundering and our intelligence analysis offered no coherent assessment.

Among the lieutenants who had been to Iraq, the consensus was that things were going poorly, but there was no agreement about what to do. Some officers argued that we should ramp up our combat operations to destroy terrorist cells and quell the insurgency through force. Captain Burke and others believed that we were too focused on kicking down doors and needed to shift our efforts to building the capacity of the Iraqi security forces. “We can't kill and capture our way out of an insurgency,” he reminded us. His argument made sense to me. It was based on experience and years of studying classic counterinsurgency texts, such as Mao's
On Guerrilla Warfare
and the Marine Corps'
Small Wars Manual
. If we wanted to leave Iraq within the next decade, we needed to build the capacity of the local security forces. Nevertheless, the majority of our intelligence collection in Iraq was focused on targeting the enemy and locating IEDs, improvised explosive devices. Marines were still being killed at high rates, and there appeared to be no resources for broader reporting on “atmospherics.”

THE WAR'S MENTAL toll on our Marines reminded me of Peter Whaley. Whaley was trapped in his own wartime trauma when we had first met over calamari in Washington, D.C. I had kept in touch with him over the past six years, and he had remained a loyal and entertaining source of wisdom and advice. I was curious about his thoughts on Iraq. Unfortunately his e-mail was deactivated and his phone number no longer worked. I called the State Department and was eventually routed to a man who identified himself as “an old friend of Peter's.”

I told him I was a Marine first lieutenant and a mentee of Mr. Whaley's.

“Oh, you haven't heard?” the man sighed.

“No. No, sir. What is it?”

“Peter died three months ago. I'm sorry. He died of the cancer that he had fought for many years. Such a shame. He was only fifty-four, you know.”

His words knocked the wind out of me. “No, I didn't. I didn't know. Cancer?”

“None of us knew. He kept it to himself. That was Peter.”

“I only met him in person once. But all these years he helped me out.”

“You're not the only one. Peter cared, he gave a damn. If a young person reached out, he answered, always. He pissed off a lot of people. But that's what happens when you speak the truth and the truth is unpopular.”

“You said ‘he gave a damn.' ” I thought I might have misheard him. It was the line from Ted Lord, the student in Swahili class who had guided me with his advice to reach out and eventually a few people, “maybe five percent, will give a damn.” Reach out and you might find a Peter Whaley.

“That's right, Lieutenant,” the man on the other end of the phone replied, “that's what I said. He gave a damn, and we miss the hell out of him.”

I missed him too. I had spent three hours in person with Mr. Whaley that first evening when I was twenty years old with a crazy proposal to attach to the Rwandan military and write a history of their intervention during the genocide. Yet Peter Whaley had made a profound impact on my life. He had always responded to my e-mails and phone calls. Although I wished he had told me about his cancer, I admired his drive to make a difference until the very end. It reminded me of Tabitha. A lot of things reminded me of Tabitha. I thought about her every day.

SALIM AND OUR team were struggling in the aftermath of Tabitha's death. We renamed the clinic in her honor. Her legacy had to live on, and the awesome power of this legacy would bring us through some of our toughest moments to come. Salim had difficulty managing the additional responsibilities of the clinic until he was able to hire a clinic manager with the skills, heart, and community awareness to take over.