The lieutenant’s platoon sergeant, who’d ducked out of the briefing, spit a stream of tobacco juice on the ground and said, “Check it out, Sir. A few hours ago all these people were the enemy and we was gonna kill ’em if they got in the way. I know they our friends and all now, but hell I point a twenty-two at my neighbor when he’s drunk and pissing on my lawn—never once created an international incident.”
The lieutenant wasn’t convinced, until Captain Hall half-stepped from his vehicle and yelled, “Goddammit, Lieutenant, open that fucking gate before I shoot you and open it myself!”
The crowd cheered the captain’s outburst, assuming it a passionate declaration of American-Haitian unity and solidarity.
The GIs went to work with bolt cutters, the two big chain-link gates swinging in, six soldiers with weapons leveled gesturing and yelling at the Haitians to move it back. But the crowd didn’t surge; the Haitians had drawn away, creating a path just wide enough for the vehicles. They were singing now, scatteredOui s andBonjou! andKi jan ou ye! Jersey saw mostly men, some women. A lot of children. Ragged and torn clothing, taut and too-skinny faces throughout. Those not singing all seemed to be gesturing, pointing the Americans toward something, it wasn’t clear what. Lots of jumping and waving andCome! Come with me! Come see!
Come see what?Jersey thought.
A small man with no teeth and an Adidas T-shirt jumped close to the first hummer as it inched out the gate. Jersey’s fingertip tensed across the trigger, leaning forward, but the man wasn’t attacking—he lifted his shirt. Raked across his dark chest and stomach were eight or nine lines, vicious scars, mole-tunnel trails across his tight, brown body.
See this, see me.
Ki sa yo fait.
See what has been done.
Oui.
The hummer in front of them moved and Riddle stepped light on the gas, staring at the little man. A woman appeared beside him then, thrust forward by the crowd, waving the stumps of her arms, both gone below the thick scar tissue of her elbows. She was speaking, a flow of impenetrable Creole, but words unnecessary.
See me. See this.
“Jesus,” Riddle said. Jersey blinked through sweat running into her eyes.
This is why we’re here,she thought,this is why they sent us, knowing she was almost certainly wrong, knowing it wasn’t true, wanting to believe it anyway.
“No one said dick about crowd control for amputees when I was in boat school,” Riddle muttered, his cheek twitching, staring at the woman and little man as he drove.
“You were on KP that day,” Jersey said, shifting in the seat so her back was to Riddle and her face and the barrel of the M-16 were toward the side, toward the crowd. “They covered crimes against humanity in the five minutes between marlinespike and running lights.”
“You’d think I was in the fucking Army,” he said, but then they were approaching the gate and his left hand went out the window and slapped palms with the 10th Mountain private standing guard there and they were through, into the belly of the crowd, into the city of Port-au-Prince. They passed the man and the woman, Jersey unable to take her eyes away. The woman waved her stumps and smiled. Jersey tried to smile back and hoped it worked but she wasn’t sure and then they were gone, pushing deeper into the throng of bodies and faces.
The pulse and noise and stink of the crowd and the city was all around them now. Smiles and cheers and dancing, the crowd as thick a quarter mile down the ring road of the port as it was at the main gate, the crowd so thick the soldiers could see nothing of the city, nothing of any buildings, just the road under their wheels and the press of bodies all around.How will we know when to turn? Jersey thought, and said to Riddle, “Keep it close.” Looking through the Humvee’s back window she raised a hand at Pelton and Scaboo in the hummer behind them, making sure they were still there.
They’d all been told to expect pro-Lavalas demonstrations, but this was beyond political. More a surge of life, a momentary and desperate grab for something. The convoy could barely make five miles an hour, steady but unable to break free the mass of people. After the numb fear of the spearhead arrival this morning, certain of pain and death in an invasion that never happened, Jersey wanted to smile, to laugh, joining the smiles and laughs of the crowd. A few times she almost did, her focus pulled by the warmth of the people, their joy, their celebration. But then there would be a sudden something—a shift in the crowd’s temperature, a pinprick cold spot in the ocean of bodies, two eyes poking through from deeper in the ranks, making contact with hers, a flash of steel or rock below or beside. What? Unclear. Nervous. Information unclear. Hostile.FADH, FRAPH, Ton Ton Macoute —all words with no meaning yet to hang on them, just hostile. Ill whispers on the morning wind.If it ain’t wearing Army green, shoot it.
…is it war or is it not.
Jersey kept her rifle up.
Five minutes into it, Riddle took his eyes from the road, glancing around the Humvee, and said, “Hey, Tory, there’s no tactical radio in here,” straining to be heard over the noise of the city.
Jersey turned to look in the back, then nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. Then again: “Don’t lose the convoy.” She wiped her palm on her leg; she’d overoiled the bolt of the M-16, and the CLP was dripping down, slippery on her skin. Her nostrils were filled with the smell of the stuff; that, and gunmetal and diesel and, from somewhere beyond, the smell of burning rubber.
Jersey’s head was moving, always moving; windshield, side window, back—like scanning the fields of fire from the bow of the LSV this morning. She watched the lead Humvees, watched the crowd, watched Riddle. Repeat. A sergeant’s view: the target, the terrain, her single troop. Her gaze moved over her own reflection in the side rearview; with her goggles on she couldn’t see her eyes and that was a comfort—no one else could, either.
Chapter
3
Across central and northern Haiti helicopters darted and trucks rolled, American soldiers with rifles dropping from vehicles onto bellies and knees to set security perimeters, then other soldiers with thick gloves pulling rolls of razored concertina wire from the backs of the trucks and forming circles of relative safety. This wasn’t so much an invasion as it was cellular, specific, pockets of control in places of importance. The Haitian people stepped aside. Haitian soldiers were, so far, not to be seen.
The small convoy from the Army ship rounded a bend and started up a steep hill, deeper into Port-au-Prince, the road a washboard of potholes and gravel and concrete chunks. It was like surfacing, the crowds thin enough now to see buildings lining the road, market stalls and flimsy wood storefronts mostly, packed together and painted bright reds and blues and greens and yellows, the smell of urine and frying food—meats and sweet banana—thick in the air. The crowd here put on the same show, singing, dancing, a constant demonstration of scars and wounds and missing limbs; but lighter, the press of bodies. Easier to see through. Jersey looked harder now, to find those eyes buried in there, the malicious hiding inside the innocent, but it was gone whatever it was. Just the cripples now, Macoute survivors, the cheering, singing, walking wounded.
See us, see us all. Oui—come blancs, I show you.
The Humvee in front of them had a gunner slung up in the roof hole. As the road they were pushing up widened into more of an avenue and they approached a small park, Jersey saw the gunner drop down into the Humvee. Looking around, she tightened the grip on her M-16.
“What do you think?” she said, but Riddle didn’t answer. He was trying to drive and watch all at once. The 10th Mountain soldiers in the convoy were all in commo with each other, but nobody had thought to mix in the two Humvees driven by the Waterborne soldiers. The four of them had no idea what was going on, just what they could see.
It seemed suddenly there was no one on the street. The hummers in front were stopping, pulling up next to one another alongside a large public square with a canopy of old trees and one large concrete statue of someone on a horse. A crowd of people
stood beyond the trees on the other side of the park, but Jersey couldn’t make out what they were doing or why they were there. Captain Hall’s squad of 10th Mountain soldiers were jumping from their vehicles, only the one roof gunner—back up at his .50 cal—staying. Riddle hit the brakes and reached down for his M-16. Jersey already had her door open, pushing her goggles up onto her helmet as she stepped out, Pelton in the last hummer braking next to her.
“What’s the deal?” Scaboo yelled over Pelton from the shotgun seat. “Why’d we stop?”
“Something’s over there.” Jersey pointed toward the trees, no idea why they’d stopped. They weren’t a combat patrol, just a convoy. In a foreign city.Two and two and what the fuck? Over, she thought. She’d wanted to see Haiti up close, but the idea of riding along with 10th Mountain for the trip had never been appealing to her; it was less so now. Turning around and looking back down the hill from where they came, the deep blue-green of Port-au-Prince harbor shimmered in the morning sun. The hill was too steep to see the port and the LSV at the pier, butEisenhower was out there, and a small flotilla of Army LCUs lining up for port clearance. The water was far and she couldn’t smell the seabreeze. She took it as a bad omen.
“There!” Scaboo, yelling again. Jersey turned her head to follow his arm, pointing toward an immense grandfather of a tree on the north edge of the square. A body hanging from a thick limb, a man. Hands tied behind his back, barefoot, blood-drenched shirt and no pants. The rope was heavy old hemp, running a crude noose cutting deep under his chin then over the limb and down and tied off to a smaller branch near the base. Neck broken, his head completely wrong, sprung in a loose and unfixable way.
“Oh shit,” Pelton said, Scaboo and Riddle crossing themselves. Jersey felt her gorge rise and fought it down. The man was black, Haitian, but pale and blue in the way of dead bodies hanging from trees. His bulging eyes had rolled up but more to the side and maybe looking for God and if they’d been standing twenty feet north his dead fish eyes would be staring at them.
The crowd on the other side of the park—and it was loud, a different loud, a Creole growl—had to know about the dead man, but wasn’t under or even near him. He was forgotten for now. The Haitians were fifty feet south at the center of a grass and thin-dirt clearing. The four Waterborne soldiers couldn’t see what was going on, just the backs of the 10th Mountain troops running over—they’d seen something. But behind where they’d stopped the Humvees, another mob was moving up the hill, fists in air and yelling and filling the street and closing—they knew something the soldiers didn’t.
Scaboo circled on his heels and raised his rifle to a waist position. “P,” he said to Pelton, “make sure Captain Hall knows there’s more coming.”
Pelton looked at Jersey and she nodded. She slapped Riddle’s shoulder and said, “Stay with Sergeant Sca.” Pelton reached through the window of the hummer to retrieve his M-16. He slapped the butt of the clip and followed Jersey.
“They hang him this morning, Tory?” he said from behind her.
Jersey flicked her eyes again to the body in the tree but there was no clue to rhyme or reason. Just an open mouth on his ash-gray strangled face.
See this, blancs—see me. See what has been done to me.
The ground beneath him was parched dead grass, and everything felt dead to her. Everything dead here, or close enough to touch it. She shuddered as she walked. One of the 10th Mountain soldiers turned, a sergeant, raising his hand at them to stop.
“Fuck that,” Jersey whispered, ignoring the man. She wiped the back of her free hand across her lips, fighting nausea. They crossed the few steps to the circle of soldiers on the edge of the crowd, shouldering in to see.
There were three men on the ground, bloody but alive. Over them a squad of uniformed Haitians—police or army, Jersey didn’t know. They called them FADH, she remembered; one of the whispers on the wind.If they’re in uniform, they’re FADH.
Good or bad?
Who?
FADH. Good or bad?
Yes.
It was unclear whether the three men were to be raised up in trees of their own, but one had his hands tied behind his back the same way. He groaned out loud and the soldier/cop over him brought his stick down on the man’s rib cage, a spray of blood from thethwack of contact. Jersey drew a sharp breath, felt the crowd of Haitians do the same—cries in Creole rising, pointed.Why don’t they stop it? she thought, then knew. The guns. Four of the soldier/cops had rifles and all of them with pistols.Guns, she thought,and maybe long memories. The uniformed FADH not directly over the men on the ground were scanning the crowd, sometimes yelling at a particular person, pointing. They knew who was there.
The stick man raised the baton again, high over head, and his victim cringed, trying to roll to the side, baring a mouthful of bloody teeth to the American soldiers and a small “Aiii” from his throat. But the stick man didn’t strike this time, just held it high, teasing, laughing and taunting now,boules grein andmaman and fuckoui o yes. He would glance at the Americans every few seconds, but didn’t seem put out by their presence.
“Oh, man,” the soldier next to Jersey said. He was a buck sergeant, too; young, some kind of Latin. His bloodshot eyes found hers momentarily. He opened his mouth to say something but then it all went very bad.
The stick man, baton still high, teasing, suddenly held his laugh, knees flexing and mouth tense, and with a growl his arm raised up and back to deliver a real blow—as Captain Hall’s pistol went up and Jersey saw the movement from the side of her eye so flinched but didn’t drop when thecrack! of the shot sounded, dust rising in a cloud as the bullet drove into the ground halfway between the FADH and the Americans. Crowd screaming, the sergeant to her left down on a knee, rifle to cheek, all of the squad dropping or aiming from where they stood, that quick, Jersey’s own left foot out and M-16 up before she realized it, a bead drawn quick and clean on the stick man’s chest. The stick man’s baton dropped, his hands crossed up before his face, pitiful useless defense, but the other FADH reacted the same as the American soldiers, weapons immediately up, reflexes just as quick—Jersey looking down the barrel of her rifle to see a Haitian eye looking down the barrel of his rifle andWho dies first?
For the second time this morning, lines of tense-triggered soldiers at point-blank range—but this is the enemy now,Jersey thought.I think.
There was a click, metal on metal, from the FADH—one small sound in chaos, but that’s the sound you listen for, the power echo over all else—and the sergeant next to Jersey loosed a round into the dirt—control, control, how does he keep such control?!?she thought, head spinning—but the rifled Haitians had dropped their long guns and were in various stages of duck and cover with no help from duck and nowhere to cover and Jersey saw Captain Hall leveling his pistol again and a green BDU arm reaching out and pushing it down—
“Hold! Hold your fire!” the old red-eyed colonel, the one who hadn’t wanted a female in the convoy, pushing Captain Hall’s arm down, wrestling him momentarily for control of the pistol, the young sergeant next to Jersey shifting so just for one second his M-16 was trained on the colonel’s head, taking down his captain, then down, the M-16 down, the young sergeant breathing hard—panting—all of them panting, flicking rifles and pistols and eyes and fingers back and forth and back again, everyone alive and almost dead at the same time, sweat and piss and the colonel yelling, high-pitched and almost a squeal, “Goddammit down! Weapons down! Hold your fucking fire!”
The soldiers hadn’t shot anyone but the adrenaline was too high, charging through bloodstreams, and before the colonel’s mouth was done the sergeant next to Jersey was on his feet, advancing steps on the FADH, the private on his left with him, the sergeant yelling at the uniformed Haitians as he crossed the distance, “Down! Get your weapons on the fucking ground!”
Each of the American soldiers stepped forward then, Pelton a step ahead of Jersey, all of them stopping where the young sergeant stopped, five feet from the
closest FADH, the soldier/cops placing pistols and batons on the ground and stepping back, a few with hands in the air. They were nervous, Jersey saw. Some angry but more nervous, one with a tic above his left eye making his whole face tremble, all of them glancing from Americans to the crowd to the men on the ground to one another.
The crowd had moved in closer again, furious, spitting and yelling—but they too didn’t know where this was going, nervous, unsure. They were cursing the stick man more than the others. A stone flew from the crowd and struck him in the forehead, putting him to his knees, a thick stream of blood running down his face.
Without their weapons this crowd will eat them alive,Jersey thought.
Then,Good.
On the ground ten feet in front of her one of the three half-dead Haitians crawled into the crowd, a cheer erupting, his body disappearing. The others were too injured to move, one unconscious. One of the FADH took a step forward and yelled at the Americans, his arm up, cursing angrily in Creole. Their commander. The Americans’ rules of engagement had been read out loud in the Haitian barracks this morning just as clearly as they’d been voiced on theEisenhower. He was displeased at the inconvenience, andget maman GIs—blancsstay out of our business. As one, the Americans all shifted their aim on him, the slap and click of rifles moving to one target. He was caught short by that and stopped yelling, but stood his ground, face angry—the arrogant defiance of either blind courage or sure knowledge.
Captain Hall had turned on the old colonel, the two of them pulled back a few steps behind the enlisted American soldiers. They were hissing furiously at each other, arms up and gesturing. It was obvious now to Jersey they weren’t from the same unit, that the colonel was just along for the ride; this conversation wouldn’t even be happening if Hall belonged to the colonel. The older man was waving a piece of yellow paper in his left hand—the most recent rules of engagement, a dense and impossible document. Perhaps the Haitian FADH platoon commander understood it; no one else did. The pale colonel brandished it like a weapon. “Captain, you need to check yourself before this gets out of hand.”
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