by Phil Klay
* * *
• • •
Ocho was hardly the only guy who hated being in Colombia. The rest of 7th Group were cycling in and out of Afghanistan, living far from the flagpole, getting into gnarly firefights, dominating their enemy, and then going back to do it again. They’d sit with their Afghan counterpart (if there even was one), sip chai, look at a wall map, and say, “Let’s go to Mangritay. There’s always good hunting in Mangritay.” And then they’d load up the trucks, head out, stumble into a few firefights, come back, rest up, pick another spot on the map, and do the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, count the bodies. Pure war. No one was on the hook for securing a district, or a province, let alone the country. If the gunfight was a success, you were a success. Meanwhile, we were hand-holding indigs an ocean away from the real war.
If Jefe had just bitched along with everyone else, it would have been fine. But he wanted us to like the mission. He’d tell Ocho and the rest to shut up when they got on rants about how we were wasting our time, or he’d launch into speeches about Pappy Shelton, who’d trained up the Bolivian Ranger team that killed Che Guevara.
“While everybody else was in Vietnam, getting in badass gunfights and losing the war, Pappy was doing boring training work and winning the war against the most badass commie guerrilla . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ocho said. “We all know about Pappy Shelton.” He turned to the room. “His brothers are dying fighting Viet Cong, and what does that bitch do? Run to Bolivia.”
When a few guys chuckled, Jefe’s face went purple. He looked around the room, his eyes eventually resting on me. An ODA team is supposed to be one cohesive unit, one collective mind. It’s not supposed to be a place where you have to choose sides between your senior medic and your team chief.
Later that night, Jefe caught me alone, and told me in that quiet way of his, “You know I like getting it as much as anybody. But I’ve seen too many people blown up or killed in this fucking job to have any patience for that hard-guy bullshit.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was right, or going soft.
* * *
• • •
The training itself was otherwise fine, straightforward—room clearing, shooting moving targets, raids, patrolling, specialized breakouts like me and Ocho working with the medics. Which, given that it was Ocho, meant some really specialized training.
One of the Colombian medics had nine kids, and Ocho was like, “That’s nine too many.”
“You have four kids,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t care about them that much.”
The guy’s wife was a conservative Catholic, as in no-birth-control conservative, and since the guy didn’t want any more he let Ocho talk him into letting him do an off-the-books, tabletop vasectomy.
“It’s a really simple operation,” Ocho said when I complained. “It’s good training. And it’s good for developing trust. If he lets me all up in his balls, that means we’ve developed a true cross-cultural bond.”
Snip-snip. The operation was a success, and it did build a weird kind of camaraderie. Ocho was always better at that team-building stuff than I was.
Meanwhile, our team was decomposing. Things finally blew up into open insubordination when Jefe canceled a patrol we were supposed to take with a Colombian unit. Intel had just raised the threat level in the region, and so Jefe didn’t want to risk the chance we’d get into a firefight.
“Fucking coward,” Ocho muttered when Jefe broke the news.
The room got still.
“You want to go back and rethink that shit, Ocho?” Jefe said calmly.
“I’m not asking to go on a raid. Just one piddly-dick patrol where there’s a least a chance, a little fucking chance . . .”
“This is a no-combat mission.”
“No shit.”
Ocho turned to me.
“When I joined the army,” he said, “they taught me how to fire a machine gun. And they said, Ocho, you motherfucker, you don’t fire this shit like Rambo, holding on to the trigger until the gun overheats and you burn the barrel like some asshole. You fire in three-to-five-second bursts. So hold the trigger down only as long as it takes to say ‘Die, commie, die!’ Well you know how many commies I’ve shot since then? None! I’ve shot terrorists. I’ve shot hajjis. But not a single goddamn commie. And guess what, Jefe? There’s commies probably a half-hour helicopter ride—”
“Ocho. You sound like a fucking SEAL. Shut up.”
“I like these guys. We’re friends, Jefe. We’re boys. I want to fight with them.” It sounded so sad, the way he said it.
“Combat eventually means casualties. This is a no-casualties mission.”
“If I die, high on coke, driving two hundred miles per hour, flipping a Maserati, that’s a good death. Dying fighting commies? That’s a badass death.”
“Yeah, well, your death isn’t worth anything here.”
Ocho threw up his hands.
“Americans die in Colombia, then Congress starts looking at all the money we’re spending here and wondering if it’s worth it. And we’re winning here, you understand?”
“They’re winning here,” Ocho said. “We’re not doing shit.”
“Exactly, you fucking idiot,” Jefe said. “They’re winning. Which means it’s sustainable. Which is the point of our job. You want to die for your country, do it somewhere else. Here, your death is worthless.”
Ocho turned to me. “Mason. What do you think?”
A year ago, I’d definitely have agreed with him. A part of my heart agreed, infected by the sickness, this itching desire to leave behind the mission our whole unit was centered around—training indig forces—so we could get into combat and feel like we were really doing something, indulging fantasies of being the warriors we believed ourselves to be, even if in a failing war without anything close to a coherent strategy that could justify the lives we might lose and the lives we might take. But there was another part that was steadily becoming stronger.
“Most of Natalia’s relatives live in Medellín,” I said. “Ten years ago, we would never have visited them because it was too dangerous to be worth it. I like being able to tell my daughter people like me are why she can visit her aunts and uncles and cousins.”
Ocho gave me a look of such disappointment. I knew I’d lowered myself in the opinion of the rest of the team. “Yeah, all right,” he said, “fine. But if our next deployment is to Mexico or some shit, I expect to be fucking El Chapo in the ass.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” Jefe said.
The joke of it all is that now, looking back, I can see that the Latin American deployments were the only ones where we were building anything. But how could we know that at the time? It felt like we were just spinning our wheels, while the guys in Afghanistan were doing the real work, a serious mission with a real gunfight every once in a while. Or more than every once in a while.
6
JUAN PABLO 2015–2016
My colleagues thought it was insane that I would send my daughter to university at Nacional. Yes, it was a good university. A great university. But it was riddled with guerrilla cells. A center for knowledge somehow incapable of grasping the most obvious fact in history—that communism is a religion for brutal slaves. Why not send her to Los Andes, or Externado? Not simply her physical safety, but the safety of her soul was at risk. Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, the son of an admiral who went to Nacional and joined the guerrilla, was mentioned more than once. Even if she wasn’t fully converted, they told me, the professors there would teach her ways to hate me.
I responded confidently, arrogantly, and worse, idealistically. I told them I was sending her to Nacional because of the guerrillas. Nacional, this jewel of the nation’s public university system. Harder to get into than the schools my fellow officers were sending their children to, and much cheaper, a facto
r I couldn’t ignore. But still. One of our country’s best schools. And I am supposed to cede this territory? Me? A man who has fought and bled for centimeters of worthless jungle, I just give up 1,214,056 square meters of downtown Bogotá to the enemy? No. This is my country. It will be my daughter’s university. I will prepare her for the education to come, and make her invincible.
It began with a book. A true jungle fighter takes the enemy’s strengths and turns them to his advantage, so when she was applying to university I took her to campus. I came in civilian clothes, since military dress would do nothing more than make her a target. She came wearing a necklace with a cross around her neck. An odd choice, I thought at the time. Perhaps the influence of her mother.
In the center of the university is a large plaza dominated by the giant white wall of the school auditorium, upon which is painted, several stories high, the image of the Argentine communist revolutionary Che Guevara. The plaza’s proper name is Plaza Santander, named after the Colombian general, president, and “Man of the Laws,” who fought for his country’s freedom from Spain. Of course, no one calls it the Plaza Santander. All the students know it as Plaza Che, honoring a man who never fought for Colombia, or for rule of law, or for freedom.
We went straight to the plaza and we stood before the mural. There was Che’s face. Che as an icon, his hair like a halo, his eyes sorrowful like the eyes of Christ, looking not at the reality of the world but at his utopia, where none but the free suffered, and all the rest obeyed. And I laughed. I let her see me laugh. I wanted her to know I thought he was a clown, not a devil. Devils have dignity. And then I handed her the book.
“Che Guevara. Guerrilla Warfare,” she said, reading the cover, which displayed the same iconic Alberto Korda photograph the graffiti artist had used for his mural. It was my old, dog-eared copy from my student days, bound together with a copy of Che’s Cuba diaries. She looked up at the sorrowful, proud eyes above us.
“I want you to read this book,” I said. “And tell me how to win a revolution.”
She nodded gravely.
I left her there to explore the campus and went home delighted with myself. Cuban propaganda, of all things, would keep her safe.
* * *
• • •
That night, as Valencia was holed up in her room reading, I wondered what she was making of the work, with its yellow pages and its margins filled with notes I’d scribbled as a young man, naively imagining I was preparing myself for life in the army. I’d thought I was readying myself to reverse engineer Che’s tactics to crush my nation’s enemies. Flipping open the book the night before, I’d seen an old note of mine in the margin of the section on War Industry, next to where Che writes, “There are two fundamental industries, one of which is the manufacture of shoes.” There, in pencil, I’d written “Ah ha!” Who knows what I thought I’d learned.
It embarrasses me to admit it, but the book inspired me. The story it tells, through a series of dry tactical lessons, is a heroic one. Start with a small, dedicated group in the countryside. You need only thirty to fifty men—Castro had only had twelve who made it to the Sierra Maestra—but they must be devoted, incorruptible, their moral character vastly outshining the venal brutality of their enemy. They must hide in the wildest, most inaccessible places, forming a nucleus, a vanguard, a focus of revolutionary activity. With no industrial capacity, no ability to produce weapons or ammunition, the guerrilla band must take these from the enemy himself. As they strike blow after blow, slowly a few peasants will join and the movement will gain strength. The guerrilla band will become more audacious, their very audacity will inspire the people, revolutionizing them. As the people revolutionize, the guerrilleros will make more contact with the people of the zone, and the less isolated the guerrilla band will become. Soon, the true war for the state will begin, though the guerrilla’s heroism will already have won the struggle for the soul of the nation. What a difference thirty men can make as long as they are men who are pure of heart, saintly in conduct, and fearless in war. Forget the communist ideology, just think of the thirty men changing the world with their virtue. What soldier wouldn’t want to believe in such a thing?
I felt only a slight nervousness. Che’s notes, if she read them correctly, would provide the first hints of the truth behind the legend. Before his death, Che had many pursuers. The CIA. The Bolivian government. American Special Forces. But Guerrilla Warfare reveals the true killer—Che himself. A man so enchained by his own mythology that he not only spouted, but actually practiced, tactics directly at odds with the real story of what happened when Castro’s little band of guerrilleros arrived at Las Coloradas Beach in December 1956, ready to ignite the countryside in revolution.
* * *
• • •
“He’s actually quite heroic,” Valencia said. “I didn’t expect that.”
I almost choked.
“Who?” Sofia said.
We were at dinner, Sofia had made one of my favorite dishes, tilapia Veracruz. The sun was setting gently in the west, and through the window to my right I could see long, thin clouds blushing as they feathered over Monserrate. Everything was harmonious and orderly. Except my daughter’s mind.
“Che Guevara,” Valencia said.
Now it was Sofia’s turn to choke.
“Papa gave me his diaries.”
Sofia raised one manicured eyebrow. “To prepare you for school?”
“Yes.” Of course. She’d skimmed the dry tactics, but lingered on the drama of the diaries.
“How . . .” I said, trying to find my footing. “Why . . . how were they heroic?”
The book I had given her did not describe heroes, but an incompetent, hurried group of eighty men, crouched together in a leaky boat with bad engines, arriving on the island late, two days after the futile Santiago de Cuba uprising they were supposed to take part in, and arriving in the wrong place, a swampland where the unseasoned and undisciplined revolutionaries lost almost all their equipment as they trudged through saltwater swamps, developing open blisters and fungal infections on their tender feet. They were like nothing out of Guerrilla Warfare. They were filthy. They lost medical supplies and backpacks to the swamp. They let their ammunition get wet. And then, like idiots, they grabbed sugarcane from a nearby field as they marched and then tossed the cane peelings and bagasse behind them, leaving a trail a blind man could have followed.
“They make landfall, and they’re ambushed at Alegría de Pío—”
“It was not an ambush,” I said. “In an ambush, the attacking force selects the site ahead of time. They prepare the kill zone, wait for the enemy to pass . . .”
“Yes, sorry, Papá.”
“. . . and then slaughter them with immediate, heavy, and accurate fire.”
“I . . .”
“A well-executed ambush is an act of premeditated murder and terrorism against strangers. In a well-executed ambush, with the right planning and surprise, the victims aren’t killed in a fair fight.”
“I just meant that it’s truly incredible . . .”
“They don’t have the chance to fight at all. That was not what happened. Che didn’t walk into a trap. He was sitting around, eating a sausage—”
This is true. By daybreak, the men were begging for rest. Their equally lazy commanders permitted them to sleep through the morning hours, after which they looked up to the heavens and saw military aircraft circling above. Even then, they continued peacefully eating sugarcane as the planes circled. Imagine it—you’ve come to work revolution and, threatened by military aircraft seeking your death, you decide to suck on sugarcane like a child.
As the planes flew lower and slower, Che didn’t eat sugarcane. He shoved sausage into his mouth. The first shots rang out. One frightened comrade dropped a box of ammunition. A fat guerrillero tried to hide behind a single stalk of sugarcane. Another kept calling absurdly for silen
ce amid the gunfire. Che himself faced a question—grab a backpack of medicine or a case of ammunition. In his diary, Che described it as an existential choice between his life as a doctor or as a fighter. He grabbed the ammo, and was promptly shot in the chest. When another guerrillero, shot through the lungs, asked the brave Che, his doctor, for help, Che admits he did nothing for the man, telling him, “indifferently,” that he’d been shot, too.
Most were killed. The few who managed to crawl away walked until the darkness became too deep to continue, and then they huddled together like dogs and slept, starving and thirsty, a bloody feast for mosquitoes.
“But they started with eighty-two men,” my daughter continues, “and right away sixty were killed or captured. And they kept going. Even though Che was shot. Even though he thought he was going to die.”
“That impresses you? Trust me, it’s not particularly difficult to get shot through the chest if you’re a moron in a war zone.”
After dinner, I grabbed Jorge Domínguez’s history of Cuba from my shelf and dropped it on Valencia’s desk with a thud. For added measure, I brought out Che’s Bolivian diaries and then, as an afterthought, a first edition of the African diaries, the ones with the introduction from none other than Colombia’s native literary genius and political idiot, Gabriel García Márquez. Finally, I handed her a stapled-together report from 1967, one of the CIA’s Latin America documents that had been declassified in the ’90s and which, in ways that were both revelatory and infuriating, made it clear why the CIA was blindly happy to let Che’s diaries loose into the world. In its own way, it was as perfect an example of deliberate ignorance as Che’s Guerrilla Warfare. As I left the room, I told her what to read, and in what order.
She was still reading Che’s way, seeing this idiocy as their baptism, a proof of their hardiness, their ability to regroup and forge a new rebel army out of sheer will. That’s why in Guerrilla Warfare Che champions self-sufficiency of an extreme sort. The guerrilla band must live off the land, like he did, desperate and isolated but creating revolutionary momentum as a product of his own heroic struggle. But had Castro actually tried this strategy, they all would have died in Cuba.