I WAS LIVING IN YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon in early 1996, working at the embassy there on my first Foreign Service assignment. Cameroon borders the Central African Republic, and both posts were considered sleepy little African backwaters at the time. I came to work one morning to learn that the capital of the Central African Republic, Bangui, was enveloped in a shooting war between the Central African army and the few troops remaining loyal to President Ange Felix Patasse, and that U.S. Marines were flying in to provide security at the embassy and evacuate Americans.
At the time I was stuck in the consular section of the embassy, involved in issuing visas and passports mostly. There were two Americans in the section and between the two of us, I was determined to be the one who went to Bangui to work rather than sitting in Yaoundé helping to get American citizen evacuees home or into hotels and such.
I packed my bag that night, and flew to Bangui on a Marine KC-130 aircraft the next evening. As we were loading the aircraft, a Marine handed me body armor to put on. “We took some fire flying in last night,” the sergeant said. We took off around sunset and flew almost due east towards Bangui.
As usual, I knew pretty much fuck-all about the place I was flying into. I had grabbed a copy of the U.S. Government’s Central African Republic: A Country Study at the embassy library and skimmed the basics. I learned things like the birth rate and the name of the national anthem (La Renaissance), but otherwise, it was not much use.
Luckily, the flight was uneventful and I even napped a bit, lying on the ramp of the aircraft as it crept over the Central African forest. One of the Marine crew members woke me just before we began our descent into M’poko Airport. I strapped myself into one of the red nylon seats as the pilots did a kind of corkscrew maneuver down to the tarmac. I don’t think anyone fired at us.
Once we were on the ground, there was a kind of mad scramble to figure out where to go. Often, on less modern airfields, there is a truck or jeep with a “Follow Me” sign that leads the aircraft to where the ground crews want the pilots to park. I don’t know what happened that night, but the pilots parked about a kilometer or more from where the Americans were sited.
The passenger door slid open, and I jumped out with one of the Marine communications guys. He popped open a mini-satellite antenna, and within about thirty seconds I was on the phone with the embassy’s Regional Security Officer (RSO) who was standing on the airfield 1,500 meters away, waiting for us to taxi over to his location.
The RSO and members of the Marine detachment on the ground had lined up the thirty or so passengers for the flight home, expecting to simply load them up and turn the plane around. My arrival had changed everything, of course. My job was to conduct an initial screening of everyone who wanted to get on the aircraft and have them complete a set of documents (by hand, in ink, in triplicate) including a promissory note through which the United States government could, if it chose, require payment for the flight out.
The existing ground team took this all in stride, and over the next two hours, I interviewed each passenger, checking passport details and having them complete the set of documents. Then we called the embassy in Bangui (again over a satellite connection), read off the list of names—spelling out each name—in a painfully slow process in order to get approval to load them on the aircraft. Only then could we load them up and ship them off to Yaoundé.
After that first load of mostly Americans and a few Cameroonians were off, the RSO loaded up onto a French Armored Personnel Carrier for a ride over to the American embassy. I stayed out at the airfield, and the Marine first sergeant and I sat down to hone the process a bit. As we were getting to know each other, he pulled a bottle of whisky—given to him by the French sergeant major the day before—out of his bag and offered me a paper cupful while he sipped out of his canteen cup.
The process: interview to determine status, completion of paperwork, approval of transport list by the embassy. This was to become our pattern, two or three times a day for ten or eleven days. One of the Marines was an administrative specialist, so the first sergeant assigned him to me, and the young lance corporal took over the majority of the documentation work.
That night, just before we went to sleep, there was a firefight on the perimeter of the airport. We could hear the report of the rifles and see red and green tracers—incoming and outgoing—for about fifteen minutes. Most of the Marines were eager to join the fight, but their French counterparts—most of the French colonies in Central and West Africa had been explored and placed under the military governance of French Marines—had things well in hand. Still, it was a chilling reminder that we were in the midst of a military mutiny.
A couple of times each day I would receive a message about a group of Americans in some remote location—these were usually missionaries, but there were also hunters, scientists, and Peace Corps volunteers spread around the country. When I got a message I would walk across the airfield in the 114-degree heat to the French military’s air operations center and request their help in finding our people.
Each night, the air operations planners would spend long hours sketching out flight plans for the following day, working the complex equations of temperature, altitude, weight, and distance involved in every helicopter operation. Then I would arrive and ask them to go find seven American missionaries who really didn’t want to leave their village, and who were probably safer out on the border with Chad or Sudan than they were at the airfield surrounded by an ongoing rebellion. The French non-commissioned officers would sigh heavily and glance at their meticulously planned schedule, then stoically begin to erase sorties in order to incorporate my request.
“Oui, Monsieur, nous les trouverons,” was invariably the response: Yes, sir, we will find them.
In one such case, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, the hottest part of the hot day, a family of missionaries arrived and trundled over to the hangar: two parents and five kids, all with that clean-scrubbed, optimistic look that is universal to missionary families. The parents immediately set up a shortwave radio powered by a car battery—we were working and living in a ground vehicle garage—and made calls to other families still in the bush to say they had arrived safely. We handed them some MREs (Meals Ready to Eat—packaged military rations). The kids complained that we didn’t have African food to serve them, but their complaints were good-natured. I processed them in after they had eaten. The kids stood in line quietly from tallest to shortest while I was checking their passports. Again, typical of missionaries in the bush, they were squared away. Everyone had their passport, everyone knew their blood type, was easy to work with. I’m not sure I remember their names but I always think of them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Abigail.
The parents told us that many of the other missionaries preferred to stay in place rather than evacuate to Bangui. They were actually going to be safer outside the city on the Sudanese or Congolese border, but I was supposed to encourage them to evacuate because that was the official U.S. government position. In some cases we were able to turn their information over to the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilots and let them work out a pick-up and destination that worked for everyone.
The MAF guys were great. They flew around the continent dropping off missionaries, delivering food and other supplies to missions, and showing the “Jesus” film as part of their proselytizing mission. We referred to the MAF as the “Missionary Air Force.”
All the while we were processing a few dozen passengers out each day, the French were processing hundreds a day. They had a very efficient system set up in the main airport building with computers and pretty French women filling contracted DC-10s and 747s for flights back to Paris (for the French) or Gabon (for the Africans).
And the French, of course, had good food and wine at their meals. We were eating (and feeding everyone who came through) MREs. I asked the French adjutants if we could eat in their facility, but they had to refuse, pointing out that they were already operating at about 300% capacity. They said they would get us some fruit if they could. We asked the Marine pilots to ferry some real food for us as well.
About halfway through our time there, the French embassy officer tasked with running development programs (called in their foreign service “Le Cooperant”) came by to ask if we could transport some Catholic nuns to Yaoundé. “Of course, we can,” I answered. Fifteen minutes later twenty-one nuns in grey habits arrived on foot at our front door. I initially thought no good deed goes unpunished. But they were wonderful. They filled out their own paperwork quickly and quietly, and then set about cleaning up the hangar and organizing the kids in games. The women had come to the CAR from all around the world. Some, I think, were from Vietnam and the former Soviet Union. I missed them after they flew out that evening.
I spoke regularly with the RSO at the embassy. He told me one day that there had been a running battle in front of the embassy the night before. It turns out that the building directly across the street was the warehouse for Bangui’s brewery and both sides were fighting to control it. It seemed to change hands every couple of days as both sides replenished their beer stock. With a platoon of Marines guarding the American embassy, neither side seemed particularly interested in taking that fight on. Most of the damage to the embassy consisted of bullet holes in the outer perimeter fence—and those from rounds passing up and down the street rather than fired onto embassy grounds.
The U.S. had a Peace Corps mission in the CAR. The volunteers were scattered all around the country, and it took us a while to bring them all in. As they arrived, I would put them to work. They all spoke French and could conduct interviews and complete forms as well as I could. One in particular stood out. When we distributed rations he asked, “Do you have anything vegetarian?” We did not. He shrugged and slipped just outside of the small circle around me. After everyone else had received the meals, he came back and quietly asked if he could leave the building for a few minutes.
“I have to say good-bye to my boyfriend,” he said. Several of the Marines standing nearby blanched.
“Okay,” I said, “but stay close or you’ll miss the flight.” He vanished.
The Marine first sergeant went around the hangar collecting cheese and a couple of apples for the vegetarian with the boyfriend. As the two young men—one American, one Central African—sat quietly on the curb holding hands, the first sergeant strode up to them and handed the volunteer his lunch. The Marine smiled a little as he came back to the hangar.
The first sergeant and I were about the same age—it turned out that we were born about a month apart—and had both grown up in military families before joining the service. We got along well and things ran beautifully, or at least as well as they could under the circumstances. I was glad I had chosen to deploy to Bangui rather than stay in Yaoundé.
A couple of days later, the French Cooperant came back and said that there were some Canadian children who needed consular services. The nearest Canadian embassy was in Yaoundé and, he asked, would they be able to fly on the American aircraft? As soon as I said yes, he walked to his pick-up and lifted the canvas flap covering the back. Six disheveled black children tumbled out of the vehicle and formed a rough line side-by-side. The Frenchman grinned and waved as he left.
We fed them and gave them water, then began to coax their story out of them. The eldest said they lived near Bangui but that their father was Canadian and their mother was visiting him in Canada, so he was taking care of the others. He was, I guessed, eleven or twelve, and there may or may not have been an uncle or auntie checking in on the kids. None of them had any form of identification, several were only half dressed, only a couple had shoes. One of them filled us in that soldiers had come to their house drunk after looting the brewery. There had been some shooting and the soldiers had stolen anything of value the family had.
One of the smaller kids looked at me in the middle of all of this and asked in French, “What is Canada like?”
“Very cold,” I said, thinking there was no way these kids were going to leave the Equator and end up north of the 49th parallel. With no documentation to prove their case, I faced a dilemma. I wasn’t supposed to board Central Africans—we couldn’t encourage residents to leave to become refugees. But they said they were Canadians. I called the Canadian ambassador. He and my boss, the American ambassador, agreed that I could put the kids on the next flight and that the Canadian embassy would take charge of them at the other end. A few hours later when the kids walked up the ramp of the C-130, one of them was wearing a t-shirt about five sizes too big, emblazoned with “Devil Dog USMC Camp Lejeune N.C. “
About a week into our work, the Marines replaced the first sergeant with a first lieutenant. Things were winding down; we were only pushing one flight out per day. The Marines in Bangui were part of Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment. They were embarked as the ground combat element of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). The MEU was simultaneously conducting operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone as part of Operation Assured Response (our mission was known as Operation Quick Response) and that operation involved ground combat. I suspect one of the Marine company commanders was missing his first sergeant during those combat operations, and asked to swap him out for the engineer lieutenant.
In point of fact, the Marines in Bangui were getting a little restless: you can only do so much PT during a day. We had processed out about four hundred fifty people from twenty-one different countries. Over the ten days we were operating in Bangui, the expatriate population of the country had dropped by 90%.
The lieutenant and I got along just as well as I had with the first sergeant. He followed me around a bit to get the lay of the land and then took on some of the additional tasks I had as a way of fighting off boredom.
Just before we were to re-deploy, a French brigadier—the ground commander—came by to visit. He apologized for not coming by sooner to pay his respects, but noted that he had been occupied with quelling the mutiny. He asked if there were anything we needed and I reiterated my request to eat in the dining facility. He nodded his assent, and that night we had our first hot meal in nearly two weeks.
At dinner, the French adjutants asked if they could come see me at eight pm. Of course, we said, yes. The lieutenant and I expected something was brewing, so we had set up a small table and some chairs out on the apron. The two captains came through the garage building we had lived and worked in for ten days out on the apron, and with the Southern Cross shining down on us, they pulled a bottle of chilled champagne and some plastic cups out of a musette bag. We popped the cork and toasted Franco-American cooperation.
They invited us to join them at the officer’s club. I drank a fistful of beers, played some songs on a French flier’s guitar, and, at the end of the night, we shut down the place with full-throated renditions of La Marseillaise and The Star Spangled Banner. It was a night I want to remember as long as I live.
The next morning the Marines and I packed out and trundled aboard the KC-130 that had been our lifeline for the previous ten days. I was smiling as the ramp closed. I was ready to be gone from the dirt and heat of a ground vehicle garage on M’Poko airfield, ready for a hot shower, ready for a long sleep in an air-conditioned room on clean sheets, ready to see my wife.
But just as the crew chief was closing the passenger door, a Land Cruiser pulled up and someone ran up to the aircraft. It was the RSO. He motioned me off the aircraft. I sagged. The Marines around me smiled and shook their heads. One of them, the admin Marine I had sat next to while we processed evacuees for ten days, leaned in towards me and said over the road of the engines, “BOHICA, Sir.”
BOHICA: Bend Over, Here It Comes Again: the high hard one, the mind-fuck. I wasn’t leaving, but instead would be staying in Bangui, just moving over to the embassy. In my place, the Deputy Chief of Mission stepped onto the aircraft. She was wearing high heels and a dress, a beautiful silk scarf around her neck. She looked completely out of her element and extremely uncomfortable. One of the Marines hoisted her bag onto the plane. I waved goodbye to the Marines as the door slid closed.
The RSO and I knew each other well, so he got right to the point. Things weren’t going smoothly at the embassy; the DCM and the ambassador were fighting, so the ambassador had ordered the DCM out. I would stay for a couple of days to help him sort a few things out. We watched the aircraft take off, called in ‘wheels-up’ to the embassy, and headed into Bangui proper from the airport.
At that time the airport at M’poko was a relatively new facility. As we pulled out of the gate and turned onto the highway, I noticed that the road was extremely wide and that there were aircraft landing markings on the pavement. I had seen this sort of thing before, on an alternate landing site for the Space Shuttle, so I immediately flashed on to that idea. Wow, I wondered, is Bangui an emergency landing site? Apparently not, the African sites were in Gabon, Senegal, and Morocco, I learned. When the newer M’Poko airport had been built in the 1980s, the old runway simply became the road to the terminal.
We reached one of the main intersections at the edge of the old city. At the side of the road, I saw a man walking down the street with the business half of a toilet balanced on his head. The RSO and I looked at each other. He said, “If your building doesn’t have a French paratrooper standing outside the gate, all your stuff is gone.” Apparently, “all your stuff” included toilets.
At the embassy the Marines had established an observation point and had set up a bunch of comms antennas on the roof. Inside the main building, Marines in full combat gear worked alongside the few remaining State Department officers. I met the ambassador; she thanked me for my work at the airport.
We went upstairs to meet the Marine major who was commanding the security team—I think they were from a Fleet AntiTerrorism Security Team (FAST), but I didn’t ask. He quietly told me the embassy leadership was, in his words, a soup sandwich. This description, while perfectly clear to anyone who has served in the military, probably requires explanation to anyone else. Imagine trying to make a sandwich that you could eat with your hands out of two slices of bread and a ladle-full of soup, but without the ladle. You get the picture. The major confirmed what the RSO had said: that the ambassador and the DCM were at each others’ throats, and that neither had seemed very competent or composed during the fighting. I was happy I had been out at the airport the whole time.
We wandered around the embassy compound for an hour or so, the RSO checking the perimeter, as I tagged along to get a feel for the place during daylight.
In the late afternoon the RSO and I drove over to the DCM’s house to package up some of her shoes to ship out to her. Her house was in a pretty nice neighborhood, for Bangui. There were ficus trees in all the yards; tall, whitewashed walls surrounded the compounds and steel gates that for the most part remained in place and locked. A few French paratroopers were at each major intersection. We went inside and packed up a boxful of shoes—we might have packed out more stuff, too, but I only remember the shoes. Then we loaded them into the Land Cruiser, pulled out of the gate, and headed back to the embassy.
The route we took—which really was the only way to get where we were going—passed uncomfortably near the presidential palace. The mutiny had broken out because President Patasse had failed to pay most of the military, and his troops had rebelled. Patasse’s Presidential Guard had remained loyal (and paid), and the French supported Patasse through the uprising while the surviving mutineers were paid. As we approached the palace, we heard Kalashnikovs firing ahead. Not too much, just a few rounds and a reply. The RSO turned quickly onto a side street, and we avoided whatever the skirmish was, but it seemed awfully silly to be out running around town in a thin-skinned vehicle to rescue some FSO’s high heels.
I loaded onto another Marine flight a couple of days later and went back to Yaoundé. It was nice to be home. I went to a party at one of my colleagues’ houses the first night back, but I was so exhausted I could only stay for half an hour.
Back in the office, things were incredibly boring in the consular section. Never mind, though. Within a week I came down with malaria and typhoid. For the record, this is a really effective weight-loss program—I think I shed about eighteen pounds in a week or so—but I don’t really recommend it. Like I said, no good deed goes unpunished.