on the beach, with the sparkling waves done and undone, in black and white, Guatemala:

“John Moffat: A Hero in the Lists of Cain”

1     You could only get burgers or fried chicken. The bars weren’t to his taste, the music all sounded the same. He gave up trying to learn Spanish.

He spent a lot of time wasting time at the office. The boys had got Space Invaders on the computer; he played that, sometimes they all played Monopoly.

In the evenings, he sat in his hotel room, writing letters.

I miss you like all tarnation, he wrote. It’s hotter than Hades, the mosquitoes sweat. I can’t wait to get back to my own bed and my best girl.

2     By day, they talked, they had meetings and drafted plans. They distributed schedules and approved alterations. They had to find a new translator, the air conditioning needed work. Everything went through Washington.

With the Guatemalans, it was always, walking on eggshells. They came to meetings armed, they met every American proposal with outrage. If the General stormed out, the whole next week was down the drain.

They demanded:

        •  a deadly, not an incapacitating weapon

        •  vaccines for their troops, and the means to make more

        •  technology to breed the bacteria itself

They displayed an unsettling predilection for the word “plague.”

2.1   “It’s just yank, yank, yank – yank our damn chain,” said the Head, despondent. “No way they’ll get thing one of that stuff. All’s they really want is payoffs, and they had their thirty pieces of silver, it won’t fly.”

3     The Guatemalans pulled out.

3.1   Washington decided to go ahead.

3.2   The Guatemalans were back.

3.3   And again.

3.4   Time stood still. Whatever you tried to do, there was some Guatemalan hell-bent to stop you. In the morning, you put on a shirt ruined by the Guatemalan maid; the Guatemalan cab driver took you miles out of your way, to a meeting where a Guatemalan colonel would rattle on irrelevantly for an hour about trade concessions.

4     John would not allow the word “Spic” to be spoken in his presence. Where he was from, half of everyone was Mexican, and some real nice people. Just as bad as the f word, and he was raised Baptist.

But it came a point, the boys complaining and cracking jokes, and the old hands egging them on 101%, until John spent a week honestly believing what some guy told him, that the Spanish word for “lie” was the same as the word for “talk” –

The word “local” got to be like a swearword itself. He would not have called a man Guatemalan, to his face.

And it was just a darn fool South American war, cowboys and Indians. He wouldn’t give you two cents for the Spanish, if that was the best they could do in three hundred years. Be another three hundred years before he saw the end of this job. Well, had he known.

One day, he was shooting the breeze with the Head, and the bug just bit him. “Vietnam, we were fighting the Communists. All fine and dandy. Now, who in Sam Hill are we fighting here?”

The Head just looked away, dismal. He said: “Yep.”

5     It got worse. Time on his hands, he got hooked on thinking.

5.1   He’d make simple things real complicated. Then he’d take a break to over-generalize.

5.2   He started writing letters home just to tear up. To chew things over.

5.3   It was as simple as pie. He just didn’t understand.

6     It was a war of the rich against the poor.

6.1   The poor were Indians in bright cotton clothes, ever bearing loads on their backs and heads.

6.2   The rich

       •  exterminated them en masse and stole their land

       •  enslaved them, man, woman and child, to work the cotton fields

       •  hunted those who resisted down and tortured them to death

6.3   In the bloodier acts of this old American drama, the poor were now “guerrillas.”

6.4   But, in plain English: his was an evil cause.

7     You could count on John Moffat like death and taxes.

7.1   What he had undertaken, he would surely do.

7.2   He would soldier on. Under torture, John wouldn’t talk; in a prisoner-of-war camp, John, clean and buoyant, would rally the men’s spirits.

7.3   His honor crippled him: he could not shirk his task.

8     Then the details were finalized. Suddenly it was done.

8.1   The raid was dubbed Operation Pretty Boy. A reconnaissance plane and three dusters: psittacosis; from and to Panama; just as it had been envisaged from day one. It was set for 10:00 P.M., on the 4th of July.

8.2   The date’s feeble irony thrilled the Americans. They brayed and made jokes about fireworks and independence. They laughed boastfully, eyeing the deadpan Guatemalans.

It was a thing John never could stomach – disrespect. He stood and waited for the boys to hush up. Then he turned to the Guatemalans’ head honcho, a man he never spoke to if he could help, fellow looked like an honest-to-Betsy Gila Monster, but.

“Señor,” John said, “I’d like to apologize for my colleagues. I think we’re all a little bit crazy today. I sure hope our antics haven’t caused offense.”

The Guatemalans stiffened: mortally insulted. John had pointed out their cowardly submission to dishonor.

9     But then one Guatemalan – one of what the boys called Juan Does, who had no rank and no apparent role in the project, a hothead who’d been a keen advocate of anthrax at the fractious meetings, one Victor Caceres – stood up, crisp.

He said that in the light of Mr. Moffat’s apology, his countrymen would overlook the slight to their nation.

The Guatemalan higher-ups bristled, usurped.

Caceres walked away from the table with the confident ease of a good-looking man.

John followed him. They reached the door at the same time, and Victor held it open for John to pass. The door shut on the silent room.

In the corridor, John said to him cheerfully, “Whew! Do we get away with that?”

Caceres snarled, “They are pig cunts! Whores!”

and when John laughed, the mad Guatemalan nodded, as if that entered neatly into his plans.

They crossed the parking lot together, and John admired Caceres’s Mercedes sports car. It was a clear March day, like a June day in Texas, the moist heat good in the air, like a food. Parting, the men shook hands, and John got into his own car feeling fresh and excited, as if Victor had offered him a way out of his dilemma.