WHEN THE PHONE RANG I jumped—startled—and nearly shot myself. This would have been somewhat ironic, because I was sitting in a truck, about to kill myself and was already holding the pistol in my hand. But I would have pulled the trigger while the pistol was pointed at my foot rather than my head. After all the crying and shaking, the moralizing and justifying, the calming of hands and nerves, the intense focusing on the immediate act of charging the weapon to put a bullet into the firing chamber, and then taking off the safety and preparing to put the barrel in my mouth, the sudden ringing broke the spell, and pulled me back from the brink.
I looked down at the phone lying on the seat of the pickup. It was my wife, Maureen, calling from Washington, D.C. I then looked up just as a boy with a camel in tow walked past my truck. The boy’s face was dirty—he’d probably been walking in the desert all day—and he was wearing a stained, full-length thawb (the classic garment worn by many Arab men) and dusty sandals. He looked at me, our eyes locked for a second. Then he turned away and pulled the camel’s rope bridle a little harder. I picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
The static on the phone cleared up.
“Hey,” Maureen said. “What’s up?”
I paused. I certainly couldn’t answer with the truth.
“Not much,” I said. “What’s up with you?”
I swallowed hard to clear my throat and fought to get control of my breathing. The pistol felt good in my hand. I felt surprisingly deft with it. The selector switch had two painted dots, one red and one white. White is safe; red is not. With my thumb, I put the pistol back on safe and laid it on the seat. While I talked to my wife for a few minutes, I stared out through the windshield and watched the sun setting over the rocky brown desert of Darfur.
“I’ll be careful, don’t worry. I’ll be home in a few weeks.”
I started the truck’s engine and drove back to the United Nations guesthouse where I was staying. On the way, I returned the pistol to the peacekeeper sergeant I’d borrowed it from. We had served together for five months. He had loaned me the pistol, no questions asked, because he knew me and because I was a senior officer with more than twenty years of field experience whom he believed to be competent and trustworthy. I’d given him no reason to think otherwise.
This book tells the story of how I got to that point in my life when I was sitting alone in a pickup truck in the middle of the African continent ready to end it all, and how I came back from there. It is the story of five wars in ten years.
But, it is only in the vaguest sense a war story, in that it takes place in the midst of wars. During the story people will die and people will be horribly wounded, lives will be destroyed along with villages and towns. During part of the story I am a soldier in a war, but I don’t kill anyone. There is no moment where I level a weapon towards an enemy and recognize in that brief instant before I kill him that we are both human beings sent by our masters to kill and die for vague concepts like honor and patriotism.
There are no massed movements of forces on an epic scale, nor small unit combat pitting handfuls of warriors against each other. There are no moments of stark courage in the face of sustained enemy rifle and machine gun fire, nor the ungodly fear of an artillery bombardment. No, it’s not that kind of war story.
This is instead the story of one person going in and out of wars, sometimes as a soldier, sometimes as a Foreign Service political officer for the State Department—a bystander for the most part to hideous violence, an observer among hundreds of thousands of dead on three continents.
I joined the Army in 1983. I had been in and out of different colleges for seven years, first studying music and then working off and on towards an English degree. I wasn’t making much progress at school until I decided I wanted to join the military. I guess I didn’t have a real reason to want to graduate, so it wasn’t a priority. But I realized that playing my guitar and singing in bars around Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks of North Carolina wasn’t going to hold my interest for too much longer, so I decided I would try to get in to flight school. I was too old for an ROTC scholarship, so when I enrolled in ROTC I simultaneously enlisted in the National Guard to make a little extra money. When I graduated from school a couple of years later, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in armor branch—not aviation, so no flight school—and went on active duty in the regular Army.
After training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on the East-West German border. The Cold War was in its death throes and the Army had just passed the height of the build-up begun under President Reagan. Everything we did in my unit had to be bigger and shinier and faster than any other unit in the Army. For three years I cruised around Germany on M1 Tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, patrolled the East German border, and shot up boatloads of ammunition on the ranges at Grafenwoer.
At the end of that tour, I was transferred to Military Intelligence branch and assigned to Korea for a year. My first assignment was in Seoul as a liaison officer to the Korean Defense Intelligence Agency. I wore a suit and shiny shoes to work. I was told to get a membership—using government funds—at the local golf course and to plan to play a lot of golf with senior Korean officers. The joke was that this was the only job in the Army where your golf handicap was a part of your evaluation. It wasn’t far off, and it wasn’t what I had in mind when I joined the intelligence corps; I thought I would be the staff intel officer in a combat arms unit rather than doing strategic collection among allies. I volunteered to move north to the De-Militarized Zone and spent the second half of my year in Korea in the Second Infantry Division.
At the same time, the U.S. was preparing to go to war with Iraq in Operation Desert Shield. Because of the war, the regular assignment process was disrupted and officers who had been assigned to schools were deployed, leaving seats to highly competitive schools open. So while I was in the 2nd Infantry Division, two guys walked into my office to ask if I would be interested in attending some specialized training as a case officer. The training would take me out of the big Army—the regular Army—and into the small world of clandestine intelligence operations. I said yes.
For the next four years I worked in units based in the Washington, DC and Fort Meade, MD area as a case officer, a team chief, and a company commander. It was challenging. But, although I worked with, and eventually led, a team of talented and creative people, I wasn’t happy. I still wanted something else. I had served for seven years in the regular Army, but hadn’t yet found a real niche. I was constantly looking around the corner for the next cool thing to do.
I went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. I applied for another special program in the Army—this one to become a Foreign Area Officer, a regional specialist who would more than likely be working as a military attaché out of an embassy. One evening in 1992, I was sitting in a lawn chair out in my yard, drinking wine with my wife and a friend, and listening to John Miller call a Baltimore Orioles game on the radio. I remember complaining about being sort of brain dead because I had taken the Graduate Record Exam that day as preparation to enter the Foreign Area Officer program. As our conversation went on, the talk turned to other hard, standardized tests. My friend asked if I had ever taken the Foreign Service Exam. I hadn’t even heard of it.
He explained that the Foreign Service Exam was considered the ne plus ultra of standardized tests—for liberal arts majors, anyway. He said only a tiny percentage passed the test, and then applicants had to take and pass an in-person oral exam that lasted a full day before they could actually join the Foreign Service. We were drinking. We decided to give it a shot.
On test day in the fall of 1992, three of us—we had recruited a third friend to join us—showed up to take the exam. My friend was right. It was a butt-kicker of a test. But a few weeks later we learned that we had all passed. Neither of my friends was interested in taking the oral boards, but I signed up. I went to the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington one morning the next spring for the day-long series of interviews, writing exercises and tests that comprised “the orals.” At the end of the day, I was told I had passed. I was given a packet of materials to complete that would get my medical exams and security clearance background checks started.
I had then to decide whether to stay in the military or move to the State Department. I was in company command, in theory at least the best job an officer can ever have in the Army, and I wasn’t having fun. I talked it over with my wife and we decided to jump, but only partway. A year later, I left the regular Army and joined the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. But I stayed in the Army Reserve.
After a year of training in Virginia, I was assigned to the American Embassy in Yaoundé, Cameroon. At about the same time, I was assigned as an Army reservist to Special Operations Command-Europe, the headquarters and staff of U.S. military special operations forces for Europe and Africa.
About halfway through my tour in Cameroon, in May of 1996, I started an odyssey of assignments alternating between the Department of State as a political officer, and mobilized from the Army Reserve onto active duty as a Military Intelligence officer or military attaché.
From 1996 to 1998 I served in Cameroon and the Central African Republic as an FSO, and in Uganda and Zaire as a soldier. From 1998 to 2000, as an FSO, I was an international diplomatic observer in Kosovo. Then I returned to Central Africa—to Rwanda—until 2002 as an FSO, assigned as chief of the political section of the American Embassy in Kigali. Nearly every day of those six years I was in the midst of murder, rape, mutiny, the burning of villages, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. I was left with deathly images of the hacked and burnt bodies of men, women and children stuck in my head. Images that would and will never leave me.
After the attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001, and until 2007, I served in Afghanistan as a soldier, Iraq as an FSO, Darfur and Chad as a soldier, and back to Darfur as an FSO.
Against the tableau of the two larger wars and the genocide in the desert of over 300,000 people, I lost my sanity, took a pistol in hand ready to end my life, and saw a successful career disintegrate along with my twenty-year marriage.
In five wars—Central Africa, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur—I was a party to, witness to, and a survivor of unthinkable violence. It changed me as I assume it would change anyone. My mind, once my most potent weapon, grew treasonous. The government that sent me to war, that encouraged me to return again and again, dropped me as soon as I stumbled.
During these wars one of my jobs was to talk to people and report their stories and what I thought about them back to my readership—U.S. government policy makers. Early on in my work I began keeping personal notes about what happened because I wanted to remember details. We were instructed to write crisp, dry reports about messy, horrible acts of cruelty. I knew those reports were not sufficient to tell the tale. I needed to tell the deeper story of what was happening in these “small wars.” So I wrote in order to remember.
Over time, I didn’t want to remember any longer. But that’s not how these things work. Once an image is in your head, it’s there forever. And a traumatic memory causes the body to react in the same way it did during the original event, and operate in fight-or-flight mode. This is a part of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Writing helps me control the memories through repeated, controlled exposure to them. Writing is a learned skill, so it brings higher brain functions back into service rather than allowing the brain and body to remain in fight-or-flight mode. Just as a glove protects a hand around hot iron, writing allows me to hold onto the memory long enough to shape it. It allows me to distance myself from it. In a very real way, I wrote my way into it, and this book is my attempt to write my way out of it, to write my way home.
Throughout the book I have relied on my memory of events to reconstruct dialogue and scenes. My memory, once exceptional, is alas imperfect. I used field notes and journals whenever possible, but there may be small errors in time and place. There are as well a few points where I have had to excise names or blur details of events for reasons of security.
This is a small story, one person’s story. Mine. There are lots of other people in it or it wouldn’t make sense. No one goes to war alone.