Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  “Nobody was killed here,” the boy said. “They died down there, in the souk.”

  In the souk — a casbah of winding narrow streets next to the harbor — there were three shell craters, from 15 to 20 feet wide, filled with brown, stagnant water. A three-story house had fallen into a mess of broken concrete, wood beams, plaster and corrugated iron.

  We drove out to the abandoned night club on the edge of the city where the International Red Cross had set up its headquarters. It was right on the beach. A Swiss woman named Nicole (she said her last name “was not important”) was running the office.

  “We had to move the first aid station into the center of the city, because it was too dangerous for the wounded to come out here,” she said. “So now we are just trying to help the refugees locate each other. So many got separated during the shelling and bombing. We have more than 700 messages here. All from people trying to find each other.”

  Outside her office was the old dining room of the night club. Rain pelted the windows. Out on the veranda a huge Red Cross flag was held in place by rocks. One of the windows had been smashed. The wind made a ghostly sound.

  We left the Red Cross building and went back into town to make our way to the UN command post. There were PLO soldiers at the bottom of the hill, most of them sitting aimlessly on piles of rubble. We started up the hill, heading east, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes ran out waving his hands.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go. Bad there. Shooting.”

  About 50 yards ahead, we saw PLO soldiers running in our direction. Some dived into ditches beside the road. I could hear the snapping of small arms fire. And then the heavier chung-chung-chung of an automatic. The driver pulled violently off the road, and went to the side of a building, out of the line of fire. We got out and peered around the side. The PLO was firing now, a mixture of carbines and machine guns, but there was no return fire from up the hill.

  Then, as quickly as it had begun, the firing mysteriously stopped.

  “Lebanese army!” the man in civilian clothes said. “Not UN! Mistake. Small problem. Not UN, not Israeli!”

  We looked around the building again and the PLO soldiers were climbing out of the ditches, peering up the road. All the firing had stopped. Later it would be reported, without details, as a minor incident involving a dispute with a local commander of Christian Lebanese troops. But on this road, in the soft rain, it was men shooting at each other with real guns and real bullets. The man in civilian clothes ran up the road, out of sight. A young girl in a yellow dress came out of the bushes across the way, peeling an orange. We never made it to the command post of the United Nations.

  III.

  SAIDA, LEBANON

  The tents were dark blue and wet with the rain and they were pitched in a grove of date palms between the road and the sea. Children ran from tent to tent in the rain. A chicken-wire fence surrounded the enclave, and a PLO soldier stood at the gate, with a Kalashnikov assault rifle under his poncho.

  “We are happy you are here,” said Labib Androuous, a Lebanese Catholic who was supervising the camp for the civil defense section of the government. “Welcome. Do you want a cigaret?”

  Androuous was in his late 30s, with graying, black hair, and he nodded at the PLO soldier and took me into the camp. There were children everywhere, and women in shawls and long gowns, and teenage boys with wrinkled suit jackets that did not match their trousers. These were only a fraction of the estimated 265,000 refugees driven out of southern Lebanon during the brief, savage little war that was fought here last week.

  “There are about 1,400 people in this camp,” Androuous said. “We have 145 tents and every tent has a number. We know from the number how many people there are in each family, and how much food they need for each meal. They get lunch meat and cheese, some sugar, some rice. We have also set up small gas fires for each tent, so that people can cook. And we have even given them eating equipment, knives and forks.”

  He was obviously proud of the camp’s organization, and moved easily through the milling crowds of women, old men and children.

  “Everybody here is Muslim,” he said. “Everybody. They are all Lebanese, not Palestinian.” His eyes moved uneasily to the PLO guard at the gate. “All of them are very poor. Most of them are farmers. They are without guns. Nobody here has guns.”

  The rain had turned to a fine drizzle. One of the teenage boys came over with two small plastic cups of dense black coffee. He asked in Arabic where the visitor lived. In New York, he was told. New York? His eyes brightened, and he yelled to some friends that this stranger was from New York.

  “It’s like telling him you are from the moon,” Androuous said, smiling and sipping the coffee. A group of teenagers crowded around. In New York were the buildings very high, like in the movies? Yes, they were very high. Is it cold there? In the winter, yes, with a lot of snow. Did I know Elvis Presley? No, I said, and besides, he’s dead. They nodded gravely as the words were translated. To the left, sheltered under a giant palm tree, a group of women watched in silence. An old man without teeth stood alone, staring at the new arrival.

  “Where are the men?” I asked, looking around at the old people, the women, the teenagers and the children.

  “Many of them stayed behind,” Androuous said. “These people are farmers.…When the invasion started, they had to leave. But they could not take the animals. So the fathers stayed behind with the animals. A cow can be the most rich thing in a family. For a week, many of them have not heard from the fathers, and now they are anxious to go back.”

  He paused, and looked at a line of women waiting at a supply tent where blankets were being issued.

  “Of course,” he said, “some of them have nothing to go back to.”

  That was the growing reality of Lebanon. Every day as new refugees came down from the mountains, and reporters moved into the towns they left behind, it had become clearer that the Israeli intention was to wipe some towns off the face of the earth. Their people would then be moved far from the Israeli border. The strategy has hurt, but not destroyed the PLO, and has certainly left a lot of innocent human beings with “nothing to go back to.”

  One such woman sat in a corner of a tent with a 4-month-old infant loosely cradled in her arms. She had cinnamon-colored skin, and high cheekbones, and hard white teeth. She was 28, but looked 10 years older. She sat there, making a low keening sound, like women in the west of Ireland when they are overwhelmed by grief.

  “She is from Abassiyeh,” he said, as if that explained everything. Abassiyeh was a hill town behind Tyre, overlooking the coastal plain and the sea. Before the invasion, it contained about 8,000 people. But all reports indicate that it has been completely leveled by Israeli artillery bombardment. The town was bombed one final time from the air, a few hours before the cease fire.

  “When the first bombs fell,” Androuous explained, “her husband told her to go out of their house, to take the children and go into the country and hide in the fields. He was packing their belongings. She was already outside when the shelling from the boats started. She looked back and there was no more house. She tried to go back, but the house was exploded.”

  The woman was still squatting there alone, beyond communication, when we walked down to the sea. Over to the left was the stone shell of the old Hotel Saida, long abandoned, but now filled with refugees. At the base of the front steps a group of small boys took turns riding a green tricycle. A mound of orange peels, empty meat cans, and flattened milk cartons was growing at the water’s edge.

  “We have a doctor now and a nurse,” Androuous said. “Some of these people have never seen a doctor. Not once in their life. They are simple people. They are not involved in politics. They want to be left alone with their land.”

  Another woman, fat and bulky, came up to Androuous talking quietly in Arabic. He listened gravely, nodding his head, his arms folded across his chest. Then he spoke to her for a while and she went away.

 
“She wanted to leave right now,” he said. “With her four children. I told her it would be better to wait a day, until it was safer. Who knows? Maybe her town is gone, too. She wanted to know if the Israelis were leaving, or if they would stay for a long time.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said I didn’t know. I said the United Nations troops were here now, and we would know soon if it would be safe.”

  The sea was pounding hard against the empty beach, drowning the din of the camp. He walked me back to the gate and shook my hand and wished me a good journey. The road was heavy with traffic. Iraqi trucks moved along slowly, their cargoes covered with wet yellow tarpaulins, presumably weapons for the PLO. A truck full of refugees came from the other direction and slowed to look at the camp.

  The driver exchanged some words with the PLO guard, shook his head and moved north. Androuous walked through the crowd, nodding, listening, doing his work. Just past him I could see the woman with the cinnamon-colored skin, cradling her baby, squatting in her tent. She was still crying, for everything.

  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS,

  March 24, 25, and 26, 1978

  NICARAGUA

  I.

  The phone rings suddenly in the darkness of pre-dawn Managua. Can I be ready in 20 minutes for a trip up north with some of the Sandinista commandantes? An hour and a half later, I’m in a small bus with a group of journalists. The announcer on Radio Sandino is exhorting us to defend the revolution, while a young woman hands out sandwiches, cookies and Pepsi-Cola.

  Ahead of us, two escort jeeps bristle with automatic weapons. Off the road, a small boy tends a chestnut horse, but doesn’t look at the convoy. The radio announcer gives way to Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing.”

  Then we notice who is driving the Range Rover, directly behind us, with Nicaragua Libre license plate MAY S 177. It’s Daniel Ortega. He is the 38-year-old “coordinator” of the nine-man junta that has ruled Nicaragua since July 19, 1979. He’s driving almost casually, talking to others, gesturing languidly with a free hand.

  “Anybody want another sandwich?” the young woman asks.

  Forty-five minutes later, the bus stops abruptly. We’ve gone a hundred feet past an unmarked dirt road, and the driver has to back up. So do the two jeeps. Standing at the junction with the dirt road are Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, who runs the nation’s agrarian reform program, Joaquin Cuadra, chief of staff of the Sandinista army, and junta member Rafael Cordova Rivas. Ortega is moustached, wearing glasses, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a permanently disappointed way.

  “They look like they’re about to take over a college dorm,” someone says, and of course we all laugh with the shock of recognition. The Sandinista commandantes are obviously serious men, survivors of combat, prisons or torture. But most of them are children of the ’60s; they’re the first successful revolutionaries in the world who grew up listening to rock ’n’ roll. In an important way, the overthrow of the 45-year-old Somoza dynasty wasn’t a victory of the Stalinoid cementheads of the Kremlin; it was the only true victory of the New Left.

  We see more of this loose, casual ’60s style as the convoy moves up the dirt road and we come over a rise, glimpse three Soviet-built MI-8 helicopters in a field, and rows of barracks with soldiers lounging in the shade. A sign says: “The People of Sandino Are a Victorious Army,” but from a barracks radio I can also hear a Spanish version of “The Great Pretender.” Ortega strolls over to some officers and soldiers, and starts to chat. Wheelock stretches, smothers a yawn, removes his hat and ruffles his hair. Cuadra says something and Wheelock guffaws. This is not the way Charles de Gaulle arrived at an army base.

  Then we are hurrying across a field to the helicopters, bound for a “Cara al Pueblo” - literally “Face to the People” — a kind of Sandinista town meeting. A man in civilian clothes, with the grave flat face of an ex-pug, slides behind the mounted AK-47 at the open door. We lift off.

  For people my age, I suppose every green countryside seen from a helicopter will always look like Vietnam. On this morning, over this land, the resemblance was uncanny. Down there you could see deep thick jungle, miles of dense valleys winding through mountains. You don’t take that kind of country with gunboats or air strikes or rhetoric; you can only take it with infantry.

  This was not yet Vietnam, of course; but almost every Nicaraguan I met here fully believes that Ronald Reagan will be reelected and then use some pretext to mount a full-scale invasion. So all over the countryside, in places where Augusto C. Sandino fought the United States Marines from 1926 to 1933, and where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) fought Somoza’s National Guard from 1961 to 1979, the Sandinistas are stashing arms: machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mortars. Managua might someday soon be carpet-bombed into dust, but the Sandinistas are preparing to fight a guerrilla war in the countryside for the rest of the century.

  On this slate-gray morning, we land in a lumpy cow pasture outside a small town called Matiguas. Ortega, Wheelock and the others have landed first, and they wait for us to join them. A line of kids appears behind a barbed wire fence separating the field from a gravel road. Ortega leads the way to the fence, starts talking to the kids. “Are you going to school? How are the teachers? What are you learning?”

  Then an aide separates the strands of barbed wire, and Ortega and the rest of us duck through, and the first rain begins to fall. More kids arrive, as Ortega strolls to a small plaza, where trucks and soldiers are waiting. A young girl approaches Ortega with a covered basket of tortillas. He takes some, chats with the girl, the rain pouring down harder, cameras whirring, flashbulbs popping. It is clear now what Daniel Ortega is doing: he will be the FSLN candidate for president in the eventual election, and this morning he is running for office.

  We pile into cars and trucks, and then there is a wild jolting 45-minute ride along the gravel road, nothing truly visible through the gray walls of tropical rain, and a sudden lurching halt. Campesinos wait on horses, along with more Sandinista soldiers, civilian officials, rural bureaucrats. And then two white horses are brought forward, and Ortega and Wheelock mount them.

  There’s a moment of hesitation: Wheelock and Ortega look like city boys playing cowboy for a day, the SDS off to a rodeo, and then they start to move. For one absurd moment, it’s as if Sandino’s army had been resurrected, or we’ve entered a scene from “Viva Zapata.” Here they come, the horses’ hooves clattering on stone, and below them in the distance are the people of Rio Blanco.

  I can hear their cheers through the rain. It’s a shameless act of theatrical hokum, but it works. Wheelock looks down at a lowly foot soldier from the American press and struggles to suppress a smile. It’s as if he’s saying: Could Fritz Mondale do this? Or the world’s master of the manufactured moment, Ronald Reagan?

  After that entrance, everything else is anticlimax. Ortega makes a speech, but the wind blows his words around, and the rain falls harder, while the crowd hurries back and forth from the speakers’ stand to a nearby shelter.

  From the audience, the questions are no airy abstractions. Where is the promised school bus? Why does it take so long to get our milk to market? When will you fix these terrible roads? Soldiers want to know why mail takes so long to be delivered, and why, if they can’t have leave to go home, their girlfriends can’t come to visit?

  Ortega and the others give answers, and then it’s over, and on to the next campaign stop. The rain never ends, but the commandantes, who lived with rain and worse during the years in the mountains, look as if they infinitely prefer it to the weatherless offices of Managua.

  It would be a mistake, of course, to think that the Sandinista leadership is made up of kids on a lark. Ortega was in Somoza’s prisons from 1967 to 1974, was jailed numerous times before that, and fought as a guerrilla during the last three years of the revolutionary war. His brother Humberto was also a jungle fighter (and is now minister of defense). His brother Camilo was killed in February 1978, when he was th
e only FSLN member to join the rebellious Indians in the town of Masaya. Daniel Ortega looks young, but he’s not playing at being a revolutionary; he is one.

  He is also, of course, a Marxist. Unfortunately, to call someone a Marxist these days is to say very little that is precise; the present governments of France and China, Greece and Albania (among others) could be described as Marxist, since their leaders were certainly shaped by the theories of Karl Marx.

  But Ortega and the other FSLN leaders have repeatedly said that for them Marxism is only one tool among many; the core of their revolution is Sandinismo. This vague doctrine boils down to an absolute insistence on the sovereignty of Nicaragua. Sandino himself said it this way in 1928: “What motivates us is the desire that the Yankees not have a pretext for continuing to tread upon the soil of our Fatherland, and [the desire] to prove to the civilized world that we Nicaraguans ourselves are capable of solving the problems of a free and sovereign nation.”

  During the revolution, Ortega was a leader of the Terceristas — or Third Force — the segment of the FSLN that was least dogmatic, most broadly based. He is believed to be among the more moderate, pragmatic members of the leadership. But at a casual airport press conference after the trip to Rio Blanco, he said that Nicaragua must have combat airplanes to defend its airspace against reconnaissance flights that are giving logistical aid to the contras. He would get the planes from France, he said, or from the Soviet Union, or from whoever else would sell them to Nicaragua. But he would get them.

  After that discussion, the few reporters walked out through the airport lounges, where Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing about Marrakesh. Two weeks later, Daniel Ortega was in Moscow.