Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  We crossed the Coco River into Nicaragua after midnight in a downpour unlike any I’d ever seen up to that time. The area where we crossed the river was muddy, and it was difficult to traverse the bank down into the raging waters, but that place was chosen as a crossing because it was shallower there and there were big rocks we could stand on and sometimes hold on to with one hand as we made the crossing.

  From there it was a two-mile hike through mud and slop to a Contra camp hidden deep in the jungle.

  Paul was with me all along, and as we walked he talked to me about the land and the geography and told me what the Contras were trying to accomplish on the border.

  That area of Nicaragua was still mostly in rebel hands. Mostly. It was the ancient lands of the Meskitu, and the locals didn’t like the Sandinistas at all. They’d been isolated from the rest of the country for most of their existence, so their culture was more influenced by the American presence (banana plantations and fruit packaging plants) that had dominated the coastal region of Northeastern Nicaragua since the colonial days. Most of the Meskitu I met spoke good English, traded in American dollars, and wanted nothing to do with Sandinista communism. The other branches of the Contras—the former Somozistas, National Guardsmen, and political operators who were wanting to basically make Nicaragua an American vassal state—had recruited heavily among the Meskitu Indians. The Meskitu, for their part, just wanted the communists gone so they could work the plantations and make money.

  Thousands upon thousands of the Meskitu had fled into Honduras after the Sandinistas took over, so the Contras had friends on both sides of the Coco River. The Sandinistas, however, considered the area to be in open counter-revolutionary rebellion against the communist state, and they used regular violence and tyranny to try to win back the northeast.

  Paul pitched us a small tent under the canopy that night, but don’t let the words “tent” and “canopy” fool you into thinking anything was dry. We slept that night (as much as anyone can sleep) in several inches of water, and when the sun came up and the rain stopped, the damp didn’t go away. It just morphed into humidity, bugs, and misery for a desert dweller like me.

  * * *

  Paul briefed me that morning on what we’d be trying to accomplish in the days to come.

  “We’ll be hiking a lot,” Paul said. “Moving through the jungles and checking in on villages and farms, so I hope you’re up for a lot of exercise.”

  “I’m in pretty good shape,” I said. “But not this kind of shape. I move furniture, so I’m used to long hours of drudgery and physical labor. I don’t know how well I’ll do with wet feet and boots that don’t fit though.”

  “I’ll get you some dry socks, but they won’t stay that way. Take your wet socks and strap them to your pack so they’ll dry in the sun. We’ll stop for ten minutes out of every hour, so take that time to check your feet and change your socks.”

  “Okay, so what else? What are we trying to accomplish here?”

  “The jefes—the chiefs, the bosses—will be interviewing locals, trying to gain intel on Sandinista movements and activities in the area. You and I won’t have much to do with that. You just need to watch and learn.”

  “I can do that.”

  “And watch for the enemy.”

  I cut my eyes to Paul as he handed me a cigarette. How he kept them dry, I can’t say, but that guy always had dry cigarettes.

  “And how do I watch for the enemy?”

  “Usually you’ll know if something’s up. The villagers will try to warn us, or you’ll see they’re acting funny. But sometimes we just walk right into Sandinista units patrolling the area. If that happens, well, things’ll get interesting.”

  I wasn’t completely ignorant of the idea that we might end up in a fight. I wasn’t looking forward to one, and Paul had assured me that at this moment in the war, the Sandinistas weren’t really active in the area, but a fight was always possible.

  “Right,” I said.

  “We’re combatants in a war zone, Matt.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  Paul took a long drag on his cigarette and then threw the butt down into the mud.

  “Listen, Matt. If things go wrong here. If something happens to me, the men here will get you back over the river. Make your way to Catacamas and tell our people there that you need to get hold of Lillian. Lillian Telles. Tell her what happened, and she’ll arrange to get you back home.”

  Lillian. That was a name I didn’t expect to hear. Not here. My mind immediately fled back to that night at the pool party. To the feelings I’d had for her, and how drastically my life had changed since then.

  When was that? A year ago. A lifetime ago.

  Here I was, nineteen years old, holding a rifle and standing in the deep mud of a Nicaraguan jungle road. If it could be called a road. It was more of a mud pit. Anyway, my life had taken a jagged turn, and it seemed that the mud under my feet might be pulling me under. And here was Paul, asking me to tell his girlfriend if something bad happened to him.

  “I’ll do it, Paul, but nothing is going to happen to you. You’ve done this before, right?”

  “Right. Dozens of times. Easy.”

  “So we get through this. Learn what we can, then go back to Lubbock and drink beer.”

  “That’s the plan, man.”

  * * *

  A week later, I was getting used to living in mud and filth. It rained every day, usually at around 2:30 p.m., and often it would start up again just before midnight and rain buckets for a few hours. When the sun was out, we walked. The humidity was so bad then that even if your clothes might have dried out if you could hang them on a tree, your sweat would soak them right through again.

  It’s strange how adaptable humans can be. How quickly the mind will accept any situation, however uncomfortable, as the new reality. After that week I sincerely began to believe I would never go home again. I almost felt like I belonged in the jungle with the Contras. Like we were a family. My old life at home seemed strange whenever I would think about it, almost artificial. As if I’d lived my whole life in a TV show or a cartoon or a soap opera.

  Then I got jungle foot rot really bad. It got to the point where I couldn’t walk before I finally said something about it. Paul and the unit understood—it happened to almost everyone at some point—and they left me at a hut in a village near the Coco for a few days.

  I was left on a dry bed reading some old Spanish-language magazines and Sandinista propaganda literature that someone had left on a bedside table. Several times a day, some women would come and apply cures and salves to my feet, which had me back up and walking around before long. And during those few days of rest, I had the opportunity to talk to some locals.

  One of the women who came regularly to check on me in my thatched hut was an older lady named Mariela. She was probably only in her fifties, but she seemed really old to me then. She was working up her own salve (I learned that each woman had their own mix), blending the concoction in a bowl made from palm leaves, so I took the time to ask her a few questions.

  “How hard has it been, the war?” I asked.

  Mariela didn’t look up, but she answered me in English.

  “It has been very hard. My husband is dead, and all my hijos. That was two years ago. The government is not here often, but when the army comes in force, they often burn the houses or buildings of people they suspect of colaboración with the FDN. If they suspect you, they may beat you or burn your home or business. But if they know you are colaborador, they will shoot you, or you will just disappear.”

  “So you could be killed for helping me?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. They think you are a periodista blanco”—a white journalist—“so they may not harm me for helping you. I don’t care anyway. They will kill us all eventually.”

  I was taken aback. So the government knew I was in the country? How could they know?

  “Mariela,” I said, “does the army know I’m here?”
/>
  “Yo no sé.”

  “You said they think I’m a blanco journalist. Why would you say that?”

  “I am guessing. Everyone has to think something or the other about who you are. Especulación. So we assume that the government does too. The army hears most things after the FDN moves through. People talk. There are Sandinista spies everywhere.”

  “So you think the army thinks I’m a journalist?”

  “You are too young to work for the CIA or the Yankee military. At least that is what the villagers say. So you are a periodista, we think. Who knows what the army thinks. You are growing a beard, so maybe they think you are older. That would not be good.”

  “I see.”

  “It is good if they think you are periodista,” Mariela said. “Not that they will not kill you anyway. But they are less likely to.”

  * * *

  When I joined back up with Paul and the unit, I told him what Mariela had said to me.

  “They exaggerate the strength of the army. At least, they exaggerate the willingness and ability of the army to work effectively in the northeast. To hear the villagers tell it, the army could just crush the FDN and kill us all whenever they want to. But if they could, why don’t they?”

  I shrugged. How could I know?

  “She also said the Contras are losing support in the area.”

  Paul smiled. “She did, did she?”

  “Yeah. She said the government is negotiating autonomy for the Meskitu, and that half of Stedman Fagoth’s MISURA forces have already disarmed.”

  “Ha!” Paul tossed his head back in a laugh. “That’s a good one. You have to remember, Matt, these people live on rumors. That’s all they have. They don’t read the papers and they don’t have televisions. They just repeat the last thing they’ve heard.”

  “Is any of it true?” I asked.

  “There are always these political moves back and forward, like waves on a beach. The FDN isn’t a monolith like the U.S. military. It’s made up of political factions with different leaders and ideologies. The only reason the groups work together is because of the money and weapons that come here via the U.S. Otherwise there would be a dozen factions, all fighting one another. The way it is, groups align, break up, and realign. But as long as the money keeps coming from up north, the freedom fight will continue.”

  “And you don’t think the army can destroy the revolution whenever they want to?”

  “We are the counter-revolution, Matt. And no, I don’t think they’ll ever destroy all of us. They can’t. Eventually they’ll collapse, or be forced to negotiate a peace we can all live with.”

  * * *

  The attack came just before dusk. We were moving up a muddy road four kilometers west of Waspam. Paul had warned me that we were operating near areas the Sandinistas had declared “pacified,” and that the army would be particularly on the lookout for us, especially after what we’d done the day before.

  In a small village west and south of there, on the previous day, I’d watched as the Contra unit I was with blew up three grain elevators.

  Questionable military target, I know. But I wasn’t making decisions.

  Paul explained that the corn had been robbed from Meskitu farmers and would have been trucked back to Managua, where they would have distributed it to communist leaders and Sandinista supporters. The starving people of Managua would never have seen any of it. So they blew it all up.

  Six army guards were killed as well. I was an observer, stationed a quarter mile west of the village to watch for army movements coming up the road. There weren’t any.

  I felt it when the bombs went off, an impact that shook the whole earth. The fire raged so hot that when we attempted to pass through the village to continue our movement east, we had to move southward to keep from receiving burns from the fires. The village was mostly in ruins. The villagers looked at us through hollow eyes. Even their friends were killing them.

  Some things are hard to think about, even now.

  I don’t know if that corn was being stolen by the Sandinistas or not, but I know those villagers weren’t in on it, and it was their corn.

  The next day we were slogging through the mud again. Like every other day. It was late, way past the hour when we’d usually head into the jungle to make camp. To this day I don’t know why we were still marching that late at night. We didn’t ask questions back then. At least, not often.

  In my mind, I’d gone native. I’d almost forgotten I was a Texan and that I had an apartment back home and had recently started dating a girl I knew from my high school in Odessa. I’d put it all out of my mind. Like it was a different life. Maybe on another planet. Maybe it was someone else’s life altogether. It felt foreign to me.

  I remembered Lillian saying to me “maybe in another life,” and now I thought maybe I knew what she’d been talking about.

  My girlfriend thought I was on a Mexican beach somewhere, somewhere safe and warm. I most certainly was not on a Mexican beach. But she didn’t know that.

  When the first shots rang out I didn’t even flinch, because I didn’t know what was happening. Flashes caught my attention to the south of the road, and I saw men around me dropping into the mud, so I went down too. Bullets thumped into the mud around me like drumbeats. I didn’t know then that a bunch of our men had been killed where they stood. I thought we were all just lying there, waiting for the enemy to stop firing.

  Paul reached over and grabbed my shoulder and he pulled on me and we started to crawl off the road. We made our way into a low ditch and found several other of our men were already there.

  “They’re flanking us, cutting off the road to the south,” one of the men said over the rattle of gunfire and the sound of shots thudding into the mud over our heads and snapping into the jungle behind us.

  “Follow me,” Paul said, and before I could even prepare myself, he was up and dashing into the heavy tangle of vines and overgrowth. Into the jungle.

  I was up and running after him, expecting bullets to hit me in my back any second. Cane thumped into me and tore at my face and it was at that moment when fear finally rushed over me like a wave. I thought I was dead. That I’d die right there in that forest. That I’d be left to rot there and my family would never know what had happened to me.

  But I ran on. In only seconds we were in the absolute darkness of the jungle to the north of the muddy road. The jungle was thick and seemed almost impenetrable, and for the first quarter of a mile I had to keep my hand on the back of the man in front of me as we tried to keep up a good pace, even though we could see almost nothing. Paul was leading us, I think, but I had no way of knowing. Blindly, I held on to the man in front of me and ran.

  The jungle here continued for another mile, hugging the Coco River as it snaked its way to the sea. That mile took us almost an hour to traverse.

  The army was unable to follow up its attack, and they were usually unwilling to follow Contra units into thick jungle. Especially at night. Of course, we didn’t know the army wasn’t coming after us. We thought we’d be hit again any second.

  The worst part was that only twelve of us rallied at the river. That meant that fifteen men had been killed or captured. The captured men wouldn’t live long, so we had to reckon them dead. We’d lost more than half our force.

  One of the Contras, a Meskitu named Sandoval, tied a rope around his waist and swam through the heavy current and dangerous rapids to the other side of the river. He tied off the line, then the rest of us pulled ourselves over via the rope.

  That was the last time I ever set foot on Nicaraguan soil, except for a brief and unofficial visit in 2005, long after the Contra war was over.

  We’d left behind our packs, our food, and most of our weapons, but we were in Honduras again and there were friendlies everywhere. We spent the next two days in a Meskitu camp. That’s where I first learned that Paul had been wounded. A bullet had passed through his calf at the beginning of the ambush, but with the darkness and
then us all caked with mud up to our waists, I never knew it, and Paul never said. How he ran through that jungle and then, once we made it into Honduras, walked almost normally, all with a bullet wound in his leg, I’ll never know. I think we all limped a little by that time. Foot sores and spider bites made us all move like old men, regardless of our age.

  We eventually made our way back to Puerto Lempira, and there we caught a transport flight (operated by an Octopus front company) to Catacamas. Paul got more treatment there while I was housed with a Honduran family who treated me like a hero and one of their own. I have to say that the food I was given in Catacamas upon our return there was some of the best I’ve ever eaten in my life. My wartime experience was short, but there was something about making it through a battle where most of your friends had been killed that made food taste different, more vibrant, than before.

  While I was in Catacamas, I saw and spoke to that Marine Lieutenant Colonel I’d met that first night in Tegucigalpa. Oliver North. He was in Catacamas for some reason I’d never know, and he stopped by and talked to the surviving men from my unit on his way through the village.

  I think I said hi to him and nodded my head at something he said. I can’t remember. The next time I saw his face after that night was when he was all over the television that November. Oliver North and his bosses in the administration had been caught selling arms illegally to our enemies in Iran, and then using the proceeds to fund the Contra effort. I can’t say I was surprised.

  When I finally landed back at Lubbock International Airport, I realized that I’d only been gone for three weeks. To this day, it doesn’t seem real, that an adventure that seemed like a lifetime to me had lasted less than a month. My whole world had changed. I’d never look at things the same way again.