Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  Instead of love or resources or friends, we have duty. It’s an iron duty, a duty that doesn’t beckon us to glory or to public adulation, a duty whose voice is sometimes so faint, a calling from some other sphere, that we listen to it like the mystics do to the supposed voice of God. A calling only we know, a calling that steels us, that drives us.

  But if Mason wants to be friends, we can be friends.

  * * *

  • • •

  It is late by the time Mason leaves, and I have an early morning tomorrow, but I make myself some tea, pull out a book by an American economist on the use and misuse of land reform in twentieth-century military campaigns, and sit myself down and pretend to read it. The night went well, I suppose, but I also have a sense of something dislodged within the order of my home. A premonition that something has gone wrong. My instincts in this regard have always been very good, so I’m not surprised when Valencia pokes her head into the room.

  “Papá,” she says, and I incline my head slightly in assent, not taking my eyes off the book. She slips into the room and sits down, dressed in her nightgown. My eyes scan the page I’d randomly opened to and fix on the sentence: “In short, MacArthur had ordered the Japanese to do something that was already in the works.” I nod, as if in agreement with a point made by the author, then look up at Vale.

  “I had a very nice evening,” she says.

  “Good,” I say.

  “You said that the rules about talking of war, that they were lifted for . . . the evening.”

  “For the dinner,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says.

  This is not the right way to handle this.

  “For the evening,” I say. “It can be for the evening.”

  Valencia smiles nervously. “You talked about guerrillas, and narcos, and neoparamilitaries, and paramilitaries. And I know that the government used to work with paramilitaries, that paramilitaries were legal, and then illegal . . .”

  “Do you want to know if I ever worked with paramilitaries?” I say.

  “No . . .” she says, though of course she must want to know.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “I read a book by a journalist, Maria Teresa Ronderos . . .”

  I know which book she’s talking about. Probably the best book about the paramilitaries, which means the most thorough, which means the one that details every last ugly thing about them, and about their links to the army. This is what sending your child to university does. It teaches them to distrust. “That’s a very good book,” I say, which makes her very happy to hear. That I approve of it means, perhaps, that I agree with its criticisms, which means I must not be guilty. She smiles and nods.

  “It’s very interesting,” she says. I wait a moment, but she’s not sure how to proceed.

  “I never worked with paramilitaries,” I say. There are other questions I could answer—did I ever turn a blind eye to social cleansings, take bribes, kill civilians and claim they were guerrilla, drive peasants from their homes, work hand in hand with murderers and drug dealers. Perhaps she has not articulated these questions to herself yet. I am sure, in her heart, the answer to all of them is no. But education has placed the worm of doubt. “Your grandfather, of course, worked with paramilitaries. He trained them, back when it was legal. It was part of his job.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And intelligence sources,” I say, “are often unpleasant people. An officer needs strong character to deal with them in the correct manner.”

  “Yes,” she says again.

  I wonder how to close off this line of questioning more strongly.

  “Let me tell you a story,” I say. I put down my book on the side table. “I was in one of the very first counternarcotics battalions. We were based out of Tres Esquinas, and we had a couple of Huey helicopters, trash helicopters, but . . . helicopters. One day, a police post radioed in. This was early days, so the operation center was full of paper maps and radios and stale coffee and a lot of people milling about when the policemen came on the radio, panicked. We could hear gunfire crackling. Three hundred guerrilla, they thought. The police post had only fourteen men. And there I am, a new lieutenant in air mobile assault, with some of the best men in the Colombian army, twenty minutes away. Twenty minutes . . . by helicopter. On foot, through jungle and mountain, three days away. So what do you think I did?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” I say. “There I am, twenty minutes away by helicopter, and these fourteen police officers, fourteen brave men, are calling us over the radio, ‘Help us, help us. We need reinforcements. They are surrounding us.’ So what did I do?”

  She shakes her head. “The question is a trick, somehow,” she says.

  “After ten hours, the calls became desperate. We have only this much ammunition, we have only this many men left, we have taken this many wounded and this many killed. ‘Help us, help us. We need reinforcements.’ After fifteen hours, they were rationing bullets, taking so much care with each shot, trying to prevent the enemy from tightening the circle, only firing when it was absolutely essential, because they knew their bullets couldn’t last. After twenty hours, they knew they were going to die, they knew that the foot patrol my commanding officer sent out would never reach them in time, but over the radio they kept their honor. They told us, ‘When we run out of bullets, we’ll throw sticks and stones.’” After twenty-five hours, they stopped that talk. They told us, ‘We have only enough ammunition to hold out a few hours more, and then we’ll have to surrender. We will try to make it last as long as we can.’ After twenty-seven hours, they surrendered. And though usually the guerrillas would have taken them as prisoners, I think the FARC was angered by their bravery. I think the guerrillas were ashamed to have been held off by fourteen men, fourteen against three hundred, for so long. So they lined them up and shot them.”

  Vale nods, her eyes on mine. “Why didn’t you save them?” she says.

  “The helicopters were part of United States’ Plan Colombia, and the rules then were that we could only use helicopters for counternarcotics missions. FARC columns were moving in to surround Bogotá, peace negotiations were breaking down. We’d plan counternarcotics missions so that we’d end up in a firefight with guerrillas. It wasn’t hard to do. The FARC was fighting to gain control of the coca regions around their despeje. If we headed into the same territory and ended up fighting guerrillas because we were moving in on their drug zones, that was fair. The Americans could pretend, and we could pretend. But three hundred guerrilla attacking a police station? A mission like that was clearly military; we couldn’t pretend. And if we’d used the helicopters for a mission like that, the U.S. would have taken our helicopters back. So we all sat and listened over the radio as fourteen of the bravest police officers in Colombia slowly lost hope, and then we let them die.”

  Valencia takes that in, and I sip my tea. Ginger turmeric, good for the digestion.

  “These are the kinds of choices you have to make in a war,” I say. “In 2001, the U.S. sent us Black Hawks, a much better helicopter. And then, after 9/11, the restrictions were lifted. The narcoguerrillas became narcoterrorists, and as terrorists, the Americans decided they were fair game.”

  “Are you saying . . .”

  “What I’m saying is . . .” I sigh, putting the tea down and putting on my serious face, the face I used to use to deliver punishment when she was a girl. “What I’m saying is that there were other restrictions, too. Uribe was professionalizing the army, starting with special units like mine. No massacres, no drug trafficking, no working with terrorist groups, and the U.S. declared paramilitaries like the AUC to be terrorist groups right around that time. Also, any air mobile unit with documented links to them would have lost their helicopters. That was one of the conditions the Americans gave. So you think I would risk my unit by w
orking with the paramilitaries? We didn’t need them, like my father did. Like other units did at the time. We had helicopters.”

  I cannot read Valencia’s face. Perhaps I was too aggressive. She’s not a naughty child, she’s a young woman. She’s going to be a lawyer, she has thoughts and opinions. I can’t expect her to simply accept what I say.

  “My professor said,” she begins, then stops, reconsiders what she was about to say, and then continues, “that the original Plan Colombia, the one we asked for, was for development of the countryside. Roads, schools, and aid to get the farmers to switch from coca to wheat. But the Americans wanted it all to be military.”

  “The Americans were right,” I say, “in that, if not in many other things. You need a functioning army before you can have a functioning state.” I feel like I’m lecturing. I don’t want to lecture. I want to be honest with my daughter. I want her to know who I am and know the decisions I’ve made, and I want her to continue to think well of me after my death, after every secret has been uncovered.

  “Listen,” I say, “you want me to tell you I’ve never done anything that would cause you shame. Maybe you want me to tell you that about your grandfather, too, but you know he was fired by Uribe, and you know why.”

  “I know grandfather . . .”

  “Lived in a different time, and came up in a different army, and a different Colombia.” I stand up, put my book back on the shelf, and turn so that I’m looking down on my daughter. “Men are weak. Don’t ask if they’re good or bad. We’re all sinful. Ask if they’re better or worse than the times they lived in. Your grandfather was much better, and deserved much more than he received.”

  She nods. There’s not a hint of judgment in her face, but it must be there. What type of person would she be if it wasn’t there? She’s lived a safe life, Sofia and I have made sure of that. The decisions she’s made have nothing to do with the cold logic that rules my life, or the even colder logic that ruled her grandfather’s. Safety teaches a weaker sort of will. Maybe one day, Colombia will be so much better that my daughter will look at me and, surrounded by the thick walls of civilization, staring out through semiopaque glass into the chaos of the past, see a bad, violent man. And beyond me, deeper in the wilderness, she’ll see her grandfather, a monster, a general whose unit was implicated in some of the worst abuses the human rights mob likes to hurl at the army. I suppose that would not be the worst thing. If her generation were ever so safe that they could look on mine with disgust, that would only mean that my life’s work had been successful.

  3

  MASON 2005

  People told me I’d never understand sex until I’d done it, never understand combat until I’d been in it, never understand life itself until I was a father. But when the day arrived for each of those things, I didn’t find myself with any new wisdom. Just a girl I thought I loved. The anxious thrill of being alive. A fragile life I could hold in one hand. And no idea what to do with any of them.

  “Think about getting out,” Jefe had told me on the flight back. “Maybe not right away. It won’t matter so much, right away. But with kids this job is hard.”

  You don’t expect to hear that kind of talk from a warrant officer with over twenty years in. You really, really don’t.

  “Plenty of the guys have kids,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got kids. You’ve never even been divorced.”

  “Maria and I are old school. She pretends I’ve never fucked whores in Colombia. I pretend, too.”

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything more.

  “Jefe,” I said. He looked at me placidly.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  We stared at each other.

  “Look,” Jefe said. “The first couple of years don’t matter so much. You can catch up. The kid won’t remember. But you stick around much longer, still doing this shit when that little girl is seven, eight, twelve years old?” He paused. “My kids don’t know me. And you’re not like the rest of us old boys.”

  I stared down at my feet.

  “So you’re saying I’ve got a few years to think this over.”

  Jefe smiled.

  “Maybe,” I said, “I’ll get out when the war is over.”

  “Which war?” Jefe said.

  “Iraq,” I said. “Afghanistan’ll never end.”

  When we finally got to Bragg, Natalia was there waiting for me, a fierce five two in a black dress stretched tight over her bulging stomach, dark eyeshadow framing light brown eyes, and her hair straightened because even though I like her better curly that’s what she does for big occasions.

  “God,” I said. “Look at you, you sexy beast.”

  “Go on,” she said, pointing to her stomach. “Make a fool of yourself.”

  So I did, touching her stomach, then putting my ear to her stomach, then waiting awkwardly for something to happen until I think I felt the tiniest something and I smiled and stood up and kissed my wife again. Everything, I was sure, would work out beautifully.

  Coming back from a deployment, you’re strangers. Even if you don’t come back to a woman whose whole body has changed, who’s spent months of pregnancy alone. Dealt with the stress of you overseas, alone. Dealt with the not knowing, alone. Even as time went by, as Natalia and I got more and more used to the combat commute, me showing up months later, both of us different but still loving each other, forgiving of each other and trying to be kind, it was never a smooth transition. Usually, it takes me a month to fit myself back into her schedule. There’s a while where you’re dating your wife, and the favorite uncle to your kids. There are plus sides to that, but it takes effort. There’s a wear to it.

  We’re better than most. We talk. Natalia can talk her way through anything, but our talk in the early days of a redeployment is never really talk. It’s never aimed at anything other than filling the silence. Maybe because there’s too much at stake, because there’s no sure path through the confusion, because each deployment is different, and there’s so much you want to say but can’t express when you’re not even sure yourself what you’ve just been through, and how it’s changed you, and how to put that into words.

  When I was upset or angry, especially as a teenager, my father would take me and teach me how to change the brakes on a car, or clean a hunting rifle. One time I got in a screaming match with my mother, and after giving me a half-hearted beating—my father’s beatings were always half-hearted, mere duty—he took me to Walmart. He didn’t say a word while we wandered the aisles, just picked up a five-gallon bucket, some pickling salt, and then six heads of cabbage.

  “We’re going to make sauerkraut,” he said, as if that settled things between us. We took the supplies to the garage, which stank of oil, and there we shredded cabbage, and kneaded in the salt until our hands were raw. I suppose, for all my father’s inarticulateness, that this was his one wisdom, the knowledge of how to take my wild teenage moods and convert them to work, while he worked alongside me, ensuring that I grew up always feeling loved.

  I thought about that driving home with Natalia, home from my first Iraq deployment, one hand on the wheel and one hand on her stomach, while she kept up a constant stream of chatter and I kept quiet. Happiness traveled up my arm from the life beating under my fingers, and I wondered if I would put the lessons she’d taught me into practice, if I would open up to my own child. She’d been forcing me to talk since college. More precisely, since a month into my time at college, when she let herself into my dorm room, sat on my bed, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Why are you being so weird?” And then during the next couple of months, proceeded to make me tell her. Or would I be like my father, revealing myself best when working in silence, elbow-deep in cabbage?

  “Are you even listening to me?” Natalia asked.

  “I . . . driving is just a lot to take in right now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In Ira
q we’d drive down the center of the road, and cars would get out of our way. Every car that passes, I feel like it’s gonna cross the yellow line and crash into us.” I stared at that line as I drove, watched cars coming from the other direction, safely on the other side of the line, treating it the amazing way I’d treated it my whole life, as an almost magic barrier, not as something that could be crossed with a slight turn of my wrist, sending me and my wife and child headlong into the oncoming traffic. There we were, in a cost-efficient sedan picked out by my wife, the accountant, the sort of car that most of the pickups on the road could just roll right over without stopping. “Maybe we should buy a tank,” I said.

  Natalia rolled her eyes. “Haven’t you learned by now? I can look into your head.” I thought of the toddler with his “Pay Me!” hat and thought, No, you can’t. And then I thought of our last conversation about our baby, and wondered if there was anything she wasn’t telling me, and whether I could ask, whether it made sense to remind a pregnant woman of a reason to be worried when all we should have been thinking about was how wonderful it was to be reunited, in time for the birth, which would go fine, I was almost certain. Then she grabbed my hand on her belly, moved it lower, and said in a mock-husky voice, “Mason, do you have any idea how horny pregnancy makes you?” I swerved a bit.

  Natalia grabbed me, hard.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  “You know what the chaplain told us?” she said. “Take things slow.” She did a stern, preacherly voice. “‘Your soldier might not want to rush into anything. Just sitting in a hammock and relaxing might be paradise to him.’ Ugh. Is that what you want? To sit in a hammock?”

  We got home and had sex. It was quick and I was very nervous. She had me attend to her for a while, and then when I was ready we did it again and it was more relaxed, less mechanical, the two of us enjoying the changes in each other’s bodies.