Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  “One day, five paras walk onto my bus without paying, they take out guns and wave them at the crowd. Their leader starts walking the aisles while one of his men keeps a pistol resting on my shoulder. He starts telling me I’m pretty, and that pretty girls should do what they’re told, and stay calm. Now, listen. Do you think I was scared?”

  “No.”

  “Idiot. Of course I was scared. But I was angry, too. This was my bus, my passengers. The leader walks the aisles, and he’s got a piece of paper in his hand, and he reads out two names. ‘Albeiro García Camargo. Ciro Muñez.’ I will never forget the names. And Albeiro and Ciro get up. I knew them by sight. They had taken my bus every day for months. Polite. I never had a conversation with either of them. I didn’t know their names until that day. And they didn’t say anything as they stood up, walked down the aisle, walked past me, and left the bus. The leader of the paras was the last to leave, and he handed me a twenty-thousand note, and smiled a beautiful, horrible smile at me. Two days later the police found Albeiro and Ciro, their bodies wrapped in barbed wire in the trunk of a car. They had difficulty getting them out. It was incredible, people said, how small the space where they fit two grown men.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Back then, I was angry at the paras. But I’m older now. I think of them, and I think, young boys with guns. Even their leader was no more than a child. You know what makes me angry now? Thinking about the list. Let’s talk about the list. Who gave them the list? Who told them who to kill?”

  Usually, it would have been power brokers in the town. Businessmen, mayors, or even police and local army units pointing out the subversives, the guerrillas, the union leaders, criminals, leftists, drug addicts, and undesirables. And that’s what I tell her.

  “Yes.” She looks away for a second, seemingly lost in thought, then faces me again with a blank expression on her face. “Over the past decade, we killed sixty-five leaders in the FARC and seven leaders in the ELN. Last year the whole world was informed by The Washington Post that we did this with the help of the Americans. They help us make our list. But with a treaty coming, I look at our list and I think to myself, if this is breakfast, what will we be served for lunch?”

  Ah. I see. Agamemnon is lunch. Deadly strikes like the El Alemán raid, many of them likely to happen in her department. She knows it, and so do I. Does she want to stop the military taking over Agamemnon? That would be bad for the country. Without the Americans providing us aid, the military won’t be able to maintain its air assault capabilities. Without air assault capabilities, we don’t have the ability to project power around the country. Without a war, we don’t have an excuse for American aid. So now, with the war supposedly ending, we need a new campaign. I unfold my hands and study them. This is delicate.

  “The method we used against the FARC,” I say, “brought their leadership to the negotiating table. It brought peace.”

  “Peace. Yes. But the FARC was a military force. What happens when we put the names of Colombian citizens on a list and then”—she waves her hands—“like magic, they cease to be a problem because they cease to exist.”

  “Colombian citizens?” I say. “Or gangsters? I would prefer we don’t become El Salvador, with its gangs.”

  “And I would prefer we don’t become El Salvador, with its death squads,” she says, “Or like America, with its fancy death squads.”

  “I’m sure the various gangs in Norte de Santander would be very happy to hear you say that.”

  She stares at me silently, as if daring me to take my words back. I keep my expression neutral.

  “I know the leader of Los Mil Jesúses,” she eventually says. “His real name.”

  That surprises me.

  “Jefferson Paúl López Quesada. Used to be in the paramilitaries. I knew him then. He’s a crazy man. Mischievous and evil and charming. Used to be handsome, in an ugly way. I have heard he’s gotten fat.”

  “Heard from who?”

  She dips her finger in her water glass. “All my life, we have had little groups.” She taps her finger on the wooden table, leaving a little dot of water. “FARC here.” She taps it again, next to the first dot, and keeps tapping, creating little dots of water in the space between us. “Paras here. Police here. Narcos here. Peasant union here. And they’ve learned to live with each other. They have to. Drugs growing in one place, laboratories in another, shipment routes everywhere. There’s too much money at stake not to cooperate, so they’ve learned to operate like little countries, not getting too big, not causing so much violence that the police feel like they need to go in. But of course some countries are good little countries, like Switzerland, or Chile, and they maintain order, punish the bad, build a little infrastructure, even impose taxes. And some are annoying and dysfunctional little countries, like Argentina. And then there are your Urabeños, your Saddam Husseins.” She lifts up her water glass, and starts carefully pouring a thin stream of water, forming a pool that spreads and conquers the other dots.

  She looks sadly at the table in front of us, holding her water glass over the small puddle surrounded by a few dots of water. It’s not a bad demonstration of ink-spot theory, I think, or whatever you might call the criminal gang variant of ink spot.

  “Too big. Men always want to be too big. I know I can’t stop the army from moving in. But if you’re only going to kill the leadership so Los Mil Jesúses can move into the vacuum . . .”

  She flips the water glass upside down, dumping the water on the table.

  “Shit!” I say, pushing back from the table as the water spills everywhere. There’s water on my pants. I breathe slowly to calm myself as de Salva removes the wet napkin from across her mostly dry lap. She’s acting a fool, keeping me off balance with these antics, but I know that anyone who has risen up the way she has is a very serious person. I take my napkin and begin mopping up the water, putting things back in order.

  “Please,” I say, “enough. What do you want?”

  “I can make it hard for you,” she says. “You know, I have a friend at Semana who covered the Soacha murders. Imagine if the press found out that you were linked to neoparamilitary groups. Or perhaps you don’t have to imagine. You’ve seen them go after your family before. Your daughter can have the same experience you did. Reading her father’s shame in the press. What’s your daughter’s name? Valencia?”

  My first impulse is to reach across the table and slap her face. I resist. My second impulse is to say something absurd, out of a telenovela—Say my daughter’s name again and I’ll cut that filthy tongue from your mouth—but I’m not stupid. And neither is she.

  I sigh, to let her know I have no time for threats. “You’re overplaying your hand,” I say. “This is unnecessary. This is silly.”

  She smiles. “I know, when you move in there must be winners and losers. The Urabeños will lose, and that is fine. But I want you to know you’re working with a very dangerous, unstable criminal. The kind who creates chaos. If the Urabeños are Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then Jefferson and his Mil Jesúses are ISIS. You understand?”

  I keep my face very still. “Of course,” I say. “If the army takes over Agamemnon, then clearly, I will keep you informed of any developments related to your department. And I will be very interested in any information you have that could help shape operations.”

  She settles back into her chair.

  “Good,” she says. “I don’t just want to know how you will manage the Urabeños. I want to know how you will manage Los Mil Jesúses.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When I emerge into the sunlight, it’s only a quarter to two. The meal went fast, and now I have time to think about what to tell General Cabrales, and more importantly, what not to tell him.

  I am a representative who represents, de Salva had said. And for all the times I’ve found myself in godforsaken villages and
towns where the heart of the people pumped red, socialist blood, it has never occurred to me before that representing your people and your state might be different things. To do what I do, you must accept that the true will of the people aligns with whatever the central government believes. So if the people side with the despotism promised by the FARC and reject democratic freedom, then they must be forced to be free.

  Still, if you consider Colombia a democracy, which I do, then Representative de Salva represents a problem. The state, it is true, is a Leviathan whose body is structured by institutions and laws and markets and churches, but at the cellular level the Leviathan’s body is composed of nothing more than individual people. And no Leviathan is blessed with smooth skin, an unblemished body that glides soundlessly through the waters of the world. No Leviathan truly holds the monopoly on violence, which is the only reason it exists.

  So it must be admitted that though most of the people in our Leviathan are cells in healthy organs—pumping blood, processing oxygen—some are cells in cancerous tumors, or in rotted flesh. This makes them no different from the people in any other Leviathan, whatever the pretensions of your Denmarks and your Swedens, from whom we get excellent weaponry. So what does it mean to represent a department riddled with such tumors, such rot, sitting on a fault line between paras and guerrilla and bandits who have provided the only structure the people of your department have ever known, even if that structure is the wildly expanding structure of a cancer? What would a true and honest representative of such a place look like? A representative of the maggots and the worms, of the warm lifeblood, of the clean and the putrid flesh, none of which has any desire to be devoured? I suppose it’d look like Ana Maria de Salva. That’s what she wants me to believe. But even if it’s true, there’s nothing to be proud of in representing such a people.

  I’ll check out her information, but I will tell General Cabrales nothing. Until I know more, there’s no point. I tell myself that despite her threats she can be an asset. I tell myself that despite her threats she has given me valuable information. I tell myself there’s no reason for concern. And then, instead of heading back to work, or calling Maloof to demand he dig deeper, or calling our 2 to pass on the information about the Jesúses, I open my phone and call my daughter.

  5

  MASON 2006

  Nobody likes deploying while their wife is stuck at home with a newborn. You feel like a shitty father, of course. You’ll be overseas, getting decent sleep while your wife is holding down the fort. But there was more to it than that. A few years earlier, it was easy to drop out of college, join the army, and break only my parents’ hearts. Now I had to nail myself down, become a stable thing for this tiny creature to depend on. Be this kind of man—more husband than lover, more father than killer. Be this kind of soldier—more professional than warrior, more Christian than samurai. And as I started to find those definitions for myself, it made it easier to see the sickness infecting Special Forces, a sickness at odds with the very core of who I was becoming.

  The deployment wasn’t even a combat deployment, wasn’t to Iraq or Afghanistan but to Colombia. A training mission for the Lanceros, this high-speed commando unit which had been stood up specifically for conducting raids on communist guerrilla compounds deep in the Andean jungles. It was, as Ocho would say, a badass unit with a badass mission. But we weren’t allowed to take part in any of that. Just there to train, so no combat patrols, no raids, no possibility of any kind of action where we might get shot at and, therefore, have the right and the burden and the thrill of shooting back.

  One time Ocho caught me flipping through some baby photos Natalia had sent me, a dopey smile on my face. He said, “Don’t get soft on me, maricón.”

  “Don’t you miss your kids?” I said.

  “First one is special. I held mine forever. But then I started losing my boners.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true, man. You spend too much time holding babies and shit, your testosterone goes down. It’s science, bitch. I had to go back to the gym, do lots of legs, get my shit hard.”

  Ocho was always a wealth of medical information.

  “It’s just like this fucking deployment,” he said. “Drills, training patrols, hand-holding Lanceros who definitely don’t need it. By the end of this . . .” He shook his head.

  “We’re all going to lose our boners?”

  Ocho threw up his hands and shot me a look as if to say, Yeah, obviously.

  Perhaps we’d have felt better about the mission if it weren’t for the fact that our Iraq stories were constantly getting one-upped by the Colombians. One of the Lancero NCOs told me about guarding an oil pipeline close to the Venezuelan border. The ELN would attack all the time. They were never trying to shut it down, which would have destroyed the local economy. They’d attack it a little bit, get some publicity, some credibility to secure bribes from contractors and politicians, and some work for local people who’d be sent out to fix the minor damages they inflicted. The locals would repair the pipe, the guerrillas would let the oil flow for a bit and bring in money, and then they’d do it again.

  “You know the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez?” he asked me. “When I was there, they spilled ten times that amount. We had six miles of pipe to protect, all of it in heavy jungle. The guerrilla hid in the trees, like monkeys. Quiet jungle, and then gunshots, grenades dropping down. Sometimes they would fill hundred-pound canisters, half with chemicals and half with human shit. My men would get burns from the chemicals, and then the shit would infect the wounds. City people do not know what we went through so they can fill up their cars.”

  What do you say to that? It felt a bit like hanging out at your hometown’s local VFW and getting owned by some Vietnam vet, except these guys were our age or younger. We had nothing to compare with this. And part of the whole satisfaction of joining Special Forces is in ascending to a higher level of badassery. You start out as a civilian, then join the army and earn a little more respect. The next step is going infantry or, in my case, the Rangers, which is a step higher than that. And then there’s Special Forces, above which is only CAG and DEVGRU and probably some super-secret squirrel units only the president knows about. And if you’re SF, you’re supposedly a super-soldier. You go overseas, you work with indigs who are supposed to look up to you, to want to be you, while you share with them a camaraderie mixed with a bit of contempt. Indigs are never supposed to be that good—especially not in Afghanistan, where we didn’t even respect the non-U.S. NATO troops, where the running joke was that the acronym ISAF might as well stand for I Suck At Fighting.

  In Afghanistan, we’d be sneering at ANCOP, screaming, “Get in the fucking dirt! Low crawl or a bullet’s gonna blow out your fucking brains! You think we’re telling you to do this shit because we like seeing you in the dirt? We’re telling you this shit so you don’t fucking die!”

  In Colombia—not so much. The Colombians are good. They win the Latin American special ops competition every year. They generally didn’t have to be berated. It wasn’t that they were better than us. We had more schooling, more training, better training, for the most part. As a medic, I had skills they couldn’t touch, our weapons sergeants knew far more guns far better than them because they had far more opportunities to train on a wider variety of weapon systems. We had broader capabilities, and way cooler toys. But as soldiers, they weren’t beneath us. They’d been through some tough shit. Tougher shit, sometimes.

  Toward the end of the training, the Lanceros were heading out to Macarena to do COIN ops, a mission that wasn’t dangerous but just dangerous enough that at the last minute we got the word we weren’t allowed to go with them, which is when Ocho’s shit hit the fan.

  “They think we’re faggots,” he yelled at Jefe in Spanish. “Because we’re acting like faggots. How am I supposed to train a son of a bitch when I can’t share risk with him?”

  Jefe just raised an eye
brow.

  “Training up foreign troops to protect their citizens so we don’t have to, that’s the whole reason Special Forces was created in the first place. De oppresso liber.”

  It wasn’t Jefe at his most inspiring. The definition of foreign internal defense, straight from army manuals, plus the SF motto, was not going to convince a bunch of soldiers that they weren’t bored. “Man, Jefe,” Ocho said. “You’re more into FID than anybody I know.”

  Jefe stared Ocho down, and Ocho lowered his eyes. Jefe was the first team sergeant I’d ever had. When a team leader is good, they’re something of a father figure, and Jefe was very, very good. Humility matched by flawless technical proficiency. The kind of man an aura grows around. I’d never seen anyone try, in any way, to take even a little of the air out of his tires.

  “Yeah,” Jefe said, “that’s what’s on the fucking poster.”

  Ocho looked at me.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  I looked at Jefe, and at Ocho, not sure exactly what was going on. Technically, Jefe was right. SF wasn’t supposed to be just a smash things unit. I’d had that in Ranger Battalion. Ranger Battalion is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Ranger Battalion is supposed to be an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. It’s the reason I left. I was done being part of a crazy collection of angry individuals ready to fuck things up. I wanted to be a bit more than your average eight-hundred-pound gorilla. And SF is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla that can dance ballet.

  But I owed Ocho loyalty, too. And I wanted to defuse things.

  “I just had a kid,” I said. “An easy deployment, it’s not so bad.”

  As we headed out, Ocho turned to me. “Man, when I joined Seventh Group, Colombia was the fucking legend,” he said. “All the old heads talking ’bout chasing Pablo Escobar and fucking hot Colombian bitches.” He shrugged. “Times change.”