I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  Details were rarely discussed, for the men had been indoctrinated early in the principle of ‘need to know’. If you didn’t need to know, you didn’t ask and you certainly didn’t speculate about the larger political and geostrategic picture into which your work fitted. ‘People would go on loan to Stonehouse from our section, work, come back and never talk about it. We didn’t know what went on there and we didn’t ask,’ says Zazz. However much of a strain the men found it, thoughts and opinions on professional duties were supposed to go the same way as the paperwork: placed in a ‘burn bag’ and reduced to ashes at the end of a shift.

  They were global snoopers, keepers–or rather takers–of the world’s dirty secrets. Some confidences weighed more heavily than others. One piece of eavesdropping no one of Zazz’s generation would ever forget was the moment on June 7, 1967, when Kagnew picked up the panic-stricken radio communications from the USS Liberty, a spy ship sent into the waters off Israel’s coast as Tel Aviv launched its six-day war on Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Determined to secure victory before any international power could intervene, the Israelis sent fighters and torpedo boats to disable the Liberty’s communications equipment, killing 34 servicemen in the process. Kagnew men listened aghast to the explosions, the cries, the unanswered appeals for help from their colleagues as the Liberty was strafed, napalmed and torpedoed by America’s closest ally. ‘We were in contact with the guys on the Liberty and had it on our speakers. It was the first time I’d ever wept in front of another man,’ recalls Zazz.

  With work-related talk ruled out on the base, perhaps it was inevitable that trivia should take over. Aware of the need to keep relations sweet with its Ethiopian hosts, the army did its utmost to keep personnel amused on post, developing a near-obsession with providing an ever more sophisticated range of leisure facilities and recreational diversions. ‘Kagnew,’ as one EPLF cadre later remarked, ‘was like a medieval town–everything there but behind closed walls.’ At Tract E, the main base and barracks near the old Italian cemetery, the ASA had done its best to reproduce small-town America. White small-town America, that is, because if black GIs featured disproportionately amongst the troops dying in Vietnam, they were rarities in safe Asmara, a fact attributed to the racial sensitivity displayed by an Emperor who did not appreciate being too closely associated with ‘subjugated’ blacks. The army’s Kagnew leaflet was clearly designed to lure candidates wary of what was classified as a ‘hardship’ posting. It read rather like a brochure advertising holidays in the sun. ‘Basically, you will find Kagnew Station similar to any small community back in the States,’ new arrivals were, rather improbably, promised. On top of a school for dependants, dry-cleaning plant and chapel, Kagnew, it boasted, had a 346-seat motion picture hall with the latest sound equipment, a 10-lane bowling alley, gym, swimming pool, court facilities and a library, its own post office, veterinary service and craft shop. For those from less privileged backgrounds here, suddenly, was a wealth of opportunity. You could play in a band, disc-jockey for the Kagnew radio station, shoot skeet, edit a newspaper or fool around reading the news for the in-house television channel. If all that seemed too energetic, you could go to the club, play the slot machines and wallow in cheap beer. Either way, the message ran, there was really no need to venture beyond the clock tower and main gate separating Kagnew’s walled-in world of bungalows, clipped lawns and tarmac driveways from the great outside. ‘The army really encouraged you to drink and gamble,’ says Dave Strand, who worked as an analyst. ‘They wanted you to stay on post, get drunk, put your money in the slot machine and not go downtown and get into trouble.’ Some complied, sitting out 18-month tours without venturing off base. But for the most part, he recalls, ‘people drank and gambled, but they STILL went downtown and got into trouble’.

  This was the 1960s, after all, decade of free love, the Rolling Stones and LSD, the time of Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix and Hunter Thompson. It was the pre-AIDS era, when promiscuity might bring moral opprobrium but did not carry a possible death sentence. These were bright boys with attitude, cash and lots of time on their hands and even up on ‘the mountain’, as it was known, word filtered through of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Many had been to college and they brought the wild fraternity party spirit over with them from the States. With an overwhelmingly male population, just out of its teens, you could almost taste the tang of testosterone in the air.

  There were girls for the taking and no one would lift an eyebrow if a serviceman dated a teenage ‘café latte’, fair-skinned evidence of misbehaviour by a previous, Italian generation of visitors. ‘Sweater girls’, as the women from the Italian-built textile factory were known, would be bussed in to dance with Kagnew personnel when bands played at the clubs on the base. Otherwise the men went hunting. After dipping their hands into the box of condoms kept at sign-out, they would be off to the Fiore, Blue Nile or The Green Doors to pick up prostitutes, order rounds of Melottis and knock back shots of liquorice-flavoured zibib–something of an acquired taste. For some, the Kagnew Station tour would be spent in a blurred alcoholic daze, in which a few exploits: racing through town standing upright in a stolen garry cart, throwing up over a bargirl’s balcony, catching bed bugs, releasing a pig in Asmara’s mosque, or waking up in someone’s rented apartment to find naked girls strewn across the sofas–stood out with particular clarity. Alcohol wasn’t the only way of losing your mind. A kilo of grass cost just $20. Mike Metras, a Swahili-speaker who was twice sent to Asmara, comes across as one of the more sober servicemen. But even he remembers, with a fond laugh, helping four colleagues one evening to roll 600 joints for a Valentine’s Day party. ‘I sat back and watched the effect.’

  Like all communities that pride themselves on their wild iconoclasm, Kagnew had its own brand of rigid conformism. Daily life was dictated by two sets of rules: the army’s, to be taken with a hefty dose of salt; and the servicemen’s, far more rigid in its way. If you wanted to enjoy your time at Kagnew, it paid to be conversant with both. So you could forget about joining the Top 5 Club, where they played country and western, if you weren’t between grades E-5 and E-9. The rock and roll of the Oasis Club was the place for low-lifes like you. Things could get nasty if you ignored that basic fact. And if you went to the Oasis, you should never make the mistake of sitting just anywhere, or moving around as the fancy took you. Seats at tables had to be earned–strictly taboo until a personal invitation was issued–and once you had forged those friendships, won your spot, you stuck with it.

  But above all, you had to learn the lingo, as peculiar to Kagnew as a taste for IW Harper’s bourbon, the on-base tipple of choice. You would never hear it used anywhere else in your life, and what it lacked in subtlety it made up in directness. New arrivals were ‘Normans’, ‘nugs’ or ‘newks’; military dependants were ‘brown baggers’; ‘ditty boppers’ the servicemen responsible for morse intercept. Men who had signed up for more than one term were ‘lifers’. Anyone who got an unhealthy kick out of applying military regulations was a ‘puke’. ‘Not all lifers were pukes,’ according to Zazz, ‘but all pukes were lifers.’ At the end of a ‘trick’, or shift, the aim was to end up ‘downtown’, where you could spend your ‘gon zip’ (money) in the ‘bosch’ (market) or pick up a ‘bar whore’ and ‘get scrufty’ (get laid–according to Zazz–‘whether you had to pay for it or not’). Otherwise, you could join the list of ‘Mama’s sons’: servicemen who’d been initiated in the delights of fellatio by Mama Kathy, a local madame. Weekends could be spent at Massawa in a hotel known appreciatively as ‘the Four Floors of Whores’, or in Keren, where the army ran another hostel. If someone gave you a hard time, you’d give them the ‘on my root’ or ‘on my bag’ sign, an obscene Kagnew invention which consisted of raising both arms in a V shape, then swinging forearms and hands down to point graphically crotchwards. ‘It was a smooth, very coordinated movement,’ recalls Zazz. ‘People did it to each other if they met in the street. When you left, it was traditional to line up on the step
s of the plane and do it in synchrony, and the guys who’d come to see you off would do it back.’

  Within a few days of arrival, Zazz had worked out which crowd he wanted to hang out with. It was the group that proudly labelled itself the ‘Gross Guys’ and its survival philosophy was neatly encapsulated by one veteran as follows: ‘Stay drunk, fuck all the whores in Asmara, create havoc wherever you are, stay drunk, fuck all the whores again, get drunk again, stay clean for your last month, get drunk and leave drunk.’5 The Gross Guys’ leader in debauchery–undeclared but recognized by all–was Lawrence D McKay, baptized ‘Spook’ by the favourite prostitute who deemed him ‘sebuke’, Tigrinya for ‘good’. Unlike his followers, Spook was a lifer, a man who had discovered that his particular talents were better tolerated inside the army than they ever would be in civilian life. ‘He was a conman, a loan shark, a gambler and a card sharp,’ recalls Zazz with indulgent affection. ‘He drank about a bottle of bourbon a day. The ASA had corrupted him, because that was exactly what he wanted.’ His followers hailed Kagnew’s version of Sergeant Bilko as ‘the King of Gross’, or ‘His Grossness’. But Spook was more modest. ‘I ain’t perverted,’ he used to say, ‘I just know what I like.’

  What he liked was Rosie Big Tits, known as RBT for short, a bar whore who would unashamedly service any man, or men, willing to shell out. He liked fleecing servicemen who fancied themselves hot-shit poker players, logging his winnings in a black book for collection on payday. And he liked daring his friends to see how far they would go in setting new standards of unacceptable behaviour. One time at the Oasis Club, a serviceman tried to impress Spook by pulling out his penis and filling a shot glass with urine. ‘There, is that gross enough for you?’ he asked, slamming it down on the table. He wasn’t even in the same league. Spook picked up the shot glass and downed it. Spook entered the realm of legend with the ‘Triple Crown’, a personal best most men felt no desire to equal. Stage one involved performing oral sex on RBT, stage two involved cunnilingus on a fellow bar whore straight after she’d had sex with someone else. Stage three, which prompted Spook’s competitor to abandon the contest, involved walking up to a garry-cart horse, lifting its tail, and running his tongue around the rim of its anus. Zazz was to be one of the last new entrants to the Gross Guys and he won his spurs in the heat of a Massawa bar, where the flies were so fat and lazy you could catch them in your hand, shake them like dice and slap them down on the table. ‘There was a bar whore in her 40s sitting at our table, old, skinny and ugly, and I’m just 21 years old. I crawled between her legs and went down on her right there in the bar while it was in operation.’

  At some stage in their training, no doubt, the men had been lectured on the importance of cultural sensitivity in a strait-laced local culture, the desirability of winning hearts and minds. No matter. For many, the greatest fun was to be had ‘twitching’ the Eritreans who worked as cleaners, waiters and odd-job men at the base. The GIs had quickly noted how fastidious the locals were about bodily functions–nothing was more revolting to them than an audible fart–and the aim was to stage a jape so disgusting it would send the ‘Ethie’ concerned into physical spasm as he tried to ward off evil spirits. A simple raspberry, blown with split-second accuracy, would have a startled Ethie drop what he was carrying. Hours of amusement were to be had driving around Asmara, purring up behind Eritrean cyclists and blowing mouth farts so loud the riders fell off or careered into walls. No one ever discovered the identity of the ‘phantom shitter’, who left his deposits on officers’ desks and inside shoes waiting to be shined. But Zazz gloried in the day a fellow Gross Guy hit on the wheeze of smearing peanut butter inside his underwear and then, in front of the white-faced houseboy, dipping his finger in the lumpy brown mess and licking it off with moans of appreciation. A slightly more elaborate version of this trick involved sucking red tomato ketchup with gusto from a sanitary napkin.

  What is it about Anglo-Saxon males and their bottoms? A Frenchman or a Spaniard does not seem to feel the same compulsion to bare his bum, a gesture psychoanalysts would no doubt interpret as blending primeval defiance with homo-erotic bonding. Like generations of fraternity fellows before and after them, the Kagnew men delighted in exposing their buttocks to the world. One night Zazz and his friends climbed several of the 100-foot metal pyramids holding up Kagnew’s rhombic antennae so they could lower their pants in unison, setting a new record for high-altitude mooning. One of them fell off and broke his arm. An even more dangerous exploit was performed on a much-frequented river crossing on the main road to Massawa–baptised ‘Moon River Bridge’–in the middle of the afternoon. Zazz and colleagues captured the moment for posterity on film: a three-tier, seven-man, simultaneous moon. You can recognize Zazz in the photograph because he’s the one with the cigarette clenched in the hand parting two white cheeks for the lens. ‘We were young, we were stupid, we were drunk,’ he guffaws, marvelling now that no one was killed staging the prank.

  How typical were the Gross Guys of Kagnew Station? When Zazz set up a commemorative website on which their exploits held explicit pride of place, it attracted a death threat from an irate Eritrean and a few complaints from ex-servicemen who insisted the sexual shenanigans and alcoholic excesses described applied to a mere 10 per cent. Zazz scoffs at what he regards as false memory syndrome. Sure, Kagnew men prided themselves on their professionalism and productivity–reporting for duty under the influence was not regarded as cool–but if they worked hard, they played harder. ‘Those guys came back and they didn’t tell their wives what they’d got up to in their youth. Now they don’t like to admit it. I’ve got nothing to hide. All my children know what I did. In my tenure, I’d put the percentage who had a wild time in Kagnew as being closer to 50 or 60 per cent.’

  Would the Kagnew men have behaved like this back home? Of course not, but the whole point was that they weren’t back home. As with a Club 18–30 holiday, the frenetic debauchery of Kagnew Station was based on the sheer anonymity of alien surroundings, a city where there was no high school teacher to shock, no neighbour to appal and none of the rules that ordinarily hemmed life in for young American males. ‘If you were to take any bunch of kids and tell them: “You know all that stuff you weren’t allowed to do back home because you weren’t old enough, the drinking and fornication? Well, here it’s OK,” what’s going to be the result?’ asks Bob Dymond, a former serviceman. ‘That’s what they do. Take any army in the world and it’s the same.’

  Indelicato, who was pressurized into joining ASA by a father scarred by the butchery of the Normandy landings, sees something else behind all the foolishness, floppy haircuts and sloppy salutes: an unvoiced frustration felt by youths who had balked at a discredited Vietnam campaign but were uneasily aware, as they lit their own farts and chased Eritrean houseboys down corridors, that their contemporaries in the Far East were experiencing all the desperate intensity of real war. Kagnew boys were only issued with guns and live ammunition during the rare alarms over possible anti-American rebel activity. The biggest piece of weaponry the base boasted was its salute cannon. ‘We weren’t soldiers, we were technicians. Essentially, we were REMFs–“Rear-Echelon Motherfuckers” and for some people, there was a stigma attached to that and you had to have a healthy psyche to cope. A lot of the high jinks were displacement activities. In Vietnam, our energy would have gone on other activities. We had no way of spending it apart from drinking and whoring.’

  What strikes one, talking to veterans, is not the gallumphing obviousness of their crudity, but how little Eritrea and its subtleties featured in what, for many, were to constitute the most vivid episodes of otherwise humdrum lives. Forging the intense friendships of youth, they barely registered the outside world. Today, former servicemen profess to have developed real fondness for the Eritrean workers who cleaned and catered for them, while disliking the Ethiopian soldiers who, claims one Kagnew man, ‘walked around like the lords of all creation’. Yet with the impatience for detail that characterizes
the American tourist abroad, they sweepingly referred to all as ‘Ethies’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that national identity in Eritrea was a touchy subject. The official alternative, equally revealing in its implications, was ‘foreign national’. ‘I always find it interesting that we would apply this term to people living in the country where we were guests,’ remarks Dymond, who was to distinguish himself from his Kagnew friends by marrying an Eritrean-born Italian, an experience that opened up a world of understanding. For Zazz, the moment where he registered that the head waiter at the Oasis Club was a rounded human being encountering prejudice from a system propped up by Kagnew had the force of a religious revelation. ‘We got talking and he explained that everyone in his village had pooled their money and paid for him to go to university to qualify as a civil engineer. I said, “So why aren’t you working as an engineer?” and he said, “Haile Selassie won’t let me. I’m a Moslem and I’m an Eritrean.” All of a sudden I wasn’t talking to a waiter, I was talking to an educated man. The government was treating people horribly. It was dead wrong.’

  Looking back, US diplomats who served in Asmara like to dwell on the good works performed by Kagnew men, the orphanages opened, courses taught at Asmara University, Eritrean hospitals funded. Kagnew undoubtedly had its charitable side, but only the obtuse could fail to register that the attitude of Eritreans and Italian settlers towards the Kagnew men was not always one of gratitude, let alone indulgent amusement. The moral chasm between 1960s and 1970s America and the Eritrea of the day–puritanical, conservative, God-fearing–was too wide to be easily bridged. GIs who went horse-riding in the countryside came to anticipate a stoning by village children. In a strait-laced Eritrean family, a daughter who dared date a serviceman was regarded as bringing shame on the household. And there were plenty of young Eritrean males who enjoyed nothing better than loitering in Asmara’s bars in the hope of a scrap with the GIs, arrogant despoilers of their women, supporters of a loathed Ethiopian occupation force. Eritrean historian Alemseged Tesfai remembers trying to rescue an Eritrean friend, a Kagnew worker who picked a fight at the Bar Mocambo. ‘An American soldier had grabbed an Eritrean girl who was belly dancing and my friend went across the floor and nutted him, and all the GIs piled in. My friend was beside himself, totally out of control. When the military police arrived, the Italian owner said the Kagnew men had started it, though my friend was to blame, because he knew the Americans would be able to pay for the damage while we could not. There was a lot of bitterness there.’6