by Phil Klay
The newspapers told a story of how military recruiters had combed through the Soacha barrio, looking for the mentally disabled and the desperate, told them they had good-paying work for them, flew them to Norte de Santander, shot them, and claimed the bodies were guerrillas to inflate body count and earn promotions.
My father was not directly implicated, but it had happened in units under his command. Someone would have to pay, and not someone too high up. Certainly not the politically powerful minister of defense, who would go on to be president of the country in a few years. No, someone lower down, less connected, but still guilty of negligence if not actively turning a blind eye. Someone like my father.
One of the men implicated, Carlos Viterbo, was now on trial. I’d known Carlos. He was a large, lusty fellow, a lover of women and alcohol, a terrible but enthusiastic dancer, the sort who spouted the usual motivations for joining the officer corps of the Colombian army and who you generally assumed would be a decent officer and, at the very least, a midway decent man. There was no odor of corruption about him. But as I read I knew in my heart that he’d done it, and in my exhaustion and rage at the town of Saravena I almost understood. And as for my father—given the report I’d signed that morning, the deaths I’d chosen not to look too closely at, I understood all too well.
The newspapers suggested this was only the beginning of these revelations, that such things were happening across Colombia as the military exerted intense downward pressure to meet the demands of Plan Patriota. General officers who didn’t care to investigate seemingly good news about body counts—corrupt, callous, evil men, the articles implied, men like my loving father—were even now permitting mass murder.
Neither the articles nor the press release admitted to any mitigating factors, to the difficulty of maintaining discipline in an army that was expanding, relying heavily on sometimes poorly motivated conscripts, fighting a brutal war in which growing hatred of civilian populations is inevitable, and where we were operating in new places and under pressures that the army had never successfully navigated in the past. Why bother? Mitigating factors fail to explain when you cross the border to murders of this kind. The only explanation left is the sin all men are born with, a sin that marks us forever as loathsome creatures, fit for death. It is why an army needs iron discipline, to stamp out the kind of freelance killings that reduce our effectiveness as a fighting force and diminish our prestige in the eyes of the public. My father had the bad luck to be in command of one of the units that got caught. But how could I hold him responsible? I loved him, and besides, this is war.
It was all too much to absorb, so as I scanned the articles the words I read were like coins tossed into an empty well. No emotions, but practical concerns flashed in and out of my consciousness. My father’s salary. His pension. My mother’s hard-won place in a society that looks on newcomers with contempt. My career, the easy path to generalship I’d anticipated. The increased scrutiny I could now expect to fall on me and on my piece of the ugly war in Saravena. And far beneath all these practical worries was a different kind of concern, one about the love I had for my father, about the man he was, and the knowledge that he would never be that proud, unbroken man ever again.
I retired to my quarters with exhaustion written across my face. When I reached my door, I stopped, too tired to open it, too tired to begin again my never-ending struggle with sleep. I thought of the ambush, months before, and the little rituals of the men, the way they cared for each other, and the hope that it brought me, and I realized it was not enough. Such things can sustain a soldier for a time, especially if the troops still have some degree of faith in the fight. But that faith was withering. More and more, we hoped to survive, and to make our enemies suffer. A combat deployment is not like a prayer, sufficient unto itself. The effort and the pain of combat is only worth it if you succeed. Otherwise, it is no more than a net increase in the suffering of the world. What I’d brought men like Edgardo Ramos to hadn’t been worth the price of his father’s cow.
I turned the knob and opened the door. The first thing I saw, sitting on my bed, was a bright, multicolored wig. Beside it, tubes of face paint, and a note from my colonel. Tomorrow was my turn to be the clown.
* * *
• • •
When I returned from Saravena, I had difficulties. I’d be in the middle of a meeting, or drafting a report, and a memory from Saravena would strike, some fragmented image, the packed dirt of a jungle trail or the way the exterior of a shop had caught the sunlight. Stupid things like that. And there was an unease, this sense that I was a little thing in a cold universe that was out of my control, and threatening. I don’t want to exaggerate these difficulties. I know soldiers who have had terrible problems, years where they could only sleep with alcohol, and spent their waking hours with every muscle tensed, always on guard. My difficulties were minor. Manageable. But nevertheless, it was irritating. It interfered with work, and with my relaxation at home.
Sofia told me I was more impatient than before, more hostile, and I trusted her sense of the matter. She demanded I go to confession. To please her, I went, and the old priest interrupted before I even got halfway through what I wanted to say. “But these aren’t sins!” he said. Everything I’d done had been for my country, he pointed out. And even though I agreed, I felt rage coming up my throat.
“Good,” I said, “because even if I believed in God, I’d never believe an old fool like you could forgive me.”
It was a disproportionate response, further evidence that something was wrong. I wrote down everything that happened on my deployment in a list, and then burned it. I wrote it out again over the course of a week, this time telling the stories of my deployment not as something I experienced, but as something “we” experienced, the strong, unbeatable “we,” who cannot be destroyed. My mood turned unbearably black, and Sophia demanded I return to confession.
“I don’t care if you believe or not,” she said. “You’re definitely a sinner, and I’m only going to forgive you if God does.”
This time, I didn’t go for an old, conservative priest, I found myself a nice young Jesuit. Perhaps I went to him because it was the Jesuits who had introduced me to God in the first place. Perhaps because Jesuits tend to be leftists, and maybe I’d get some fool with a tattoo of Camilo Torres and a heart shaped like a hammer and sickle. The sort who would refuse to forgive me.
That’s not what happened. Like Pope Gregory and the emperor, they’re not allowed to withhold forgiveness, even if they want to. The Jesuit listened, and then gave me as penance the command to contact the families of every man injured or killed under my command.
“What kind of officer do you think I am?” I said, genuinely offended. “Of course I’ve contacted the families.”
“At the time,” he said. “It’s been almost a year. How are they doing now?”
He forgave me, and over the next month I went about the awful penance he’d demanded, reaching out to the families and reopening the scars of their loss.
One night during this time, Valencia had a terrible nightmare. She was seven years old, and asked to sleep with us, which I never allowed. “She cannot become weak,” I’d tell Sofia, who agreed. This time, however, I said yes.
Our wide-eyed daughter, holding her stuffed rabbit, started crawling up onto the bed. Unwilling to let go of her rabbit, she clutched the sheets with one hand, trying to pull herself up ineffectually until I grabbed her by the armpits, hauled her over my body and into the space between Sofia and me. Briefly, before she turned from me to Sofia, I looked into her eyes, and I could see that she truly was recovering from terror. A yearning as sharp as desire stung me. I wanted to comfort her.
People say a lot of stupidities about fatherhood, as if it were some magical, sacred thing, when in truth it is the least magical, least sacred, and most purely animal thing about us. Holding a baby, changing her, clutching her to your skin. And
even before that, watching your wife go through pregnancy, and then labor, this intensely physical act that is entirely out of your control and that, as a man, you can only watch in terror. We have this illusion that we are rational creatures separate from creation, that we can control and shape nature, the way a dike shapes the course of a river. It is a comforting illusion. Then the dike breaks, and you have a bloody screaming child that you bring home, thinking, We are animals, because what you witnessed was not so different from a calving. It gives you a new appreciation for calvings. And then you have a wife whose breasts refuse to give enough milk so during the times you’re home, and not in the jungle, you end up feeding your daughter with a bottle. Most of love is communicated without words or thoughts but with touch, the slow synchronization of breathing and heartbeats, things happening below the level of the mind, at the level of your body that feels a part of you and yet, somehow, different. As a military man, I only had this in scraps with Valencia, so the love between us was strong but glued together with abstractions about duty and family that filled in the places when I was in the jungle, physically distant from her and so, in some sense, not fully her father.
For this reason, it didn’t surprise me that after I lay Valencia down she wriggled over to her mother. She was so small, our little girl. Sofia kissed her forehead and closed her eyes. But then Valencia reached back, grabbed my hand, and pulled it so that my arm wrapped around her, and she hugged her small arms around my big one like a koala hanging on a tree trunk. It was the first time since I had been back that she had reached for me out of the basic physical needs of a child for love, and not out of a sense of duty, the hugs and kisses a daughter owes a father even if she doesn’t know him so well. I felt her calm herself, an easing of the body. My own body echoed hers, and we both feel asleep, the most blissful sleep I’d experienced in months.
Naturally, stupidly, I thought I was cured. My child’s love has restored my trust in the world! It was a romantic notion, but it was soon made clear to me that the night had only been a strange confluence of psychological states. Still, it had revealed relief was possible, and I learned that I found that relief most readily with her. I came to think of the effect Valencia had on me as being like that sense of God I’d had as a child, of eternity wounding the material world, wounding the boundaries of my own brain and body, and making me part of a larger story, in the one case the cosmic drama of the universe outside of time, a cosmic drama I no longer believed in, and in the other case the narrower drama of a family, moving forward inside of time. It was a love grounded in the world, in one person whose fate, unlike the fate of an unruly city or country, you can guide with a firm hand.
At Valencia’s baptism, I had declared my willingness to train her in the Catholic faith. At the baptism of Juana Peréz’s son, I had heard an infant scream as the sign of the cross was made on his skull. On both occasions, I had imagined I was witnessing a sacred mystery. My world is so much more circumscribed now, that faith drained. And yet, in my daughter, there is still a movement to the future. All the unresolved failures of my own life can have an answer in her.
III
If I must die, I would like my body to be mixed in with the clay of the forts like a living mortar, spread by God between the stones of the new city.
—Álvaro Ulcué Chocué
1
Nine months before the dinner party, before they’d smoked cigars and discussed the Mil Jesúses and the intelligence they were giving the Colombian military, Mason had been invited to watch Juan Pablo kill a man. He’d just arrived in country and though the raid seemed unimportant—the Colombians were taking out a midlevel narco who by all rights should have been the police’s business and not the army’s—Mason decided to go. He wanted to be collegial.
And so, he’d flown to Tolemaida Air Base and there had shaken hands with Juan Pablo for the first time. He’d received a quick overview on the man they were tracking—El Alemán, a criminal associated both with the Urabeños and with a splinter faction of the ELN—and was then brought into the operations center. There, on the screen, a video feed from a U.S.-supplied ScanEagle drone eight hundred miles away tracked the progress of a medium-size white truck.
“What’s in the truck?” Mason had asked.
And with the utmost seriousness, Juan Pablo had replied, “A giant teddy bear.”
The bear, he learned, was two meters tall. It was pink. It had a white heart in the center of its chest. It had been tied with a pink bow and placed inside a giant pink box that was then tied with another, larger bow that was, of course, pink.
“We got a tip,” Juan Pablo said. Today was El Alemán’s girlfriend’s birthday. Which meant a party, and a special-ordered present that, once the military had been tipped off, was easy to track. Months later, Mason would realize the tip had undoubtedly come from the Jesúses, and that Juan Pablo had undoubtedly been the conduit. Not knowing that, or the chain of events the raid would set in motion, Mason had merely accepted the information and, with more than a little boredom, watched the slow and painstaking process by which targets are eliminated in modern warfare.
Mason watched the truck navigate mountain roads. He watched the truck arrive at a luxurious finca with a high exterior wall and three separate structures. He watched the debate break out among those in the operations center whether to have a team fly to the X and fast-rope down into the compound, or leave the helicopters on the far side of the mountain and walk to the objective. Hours later, he watched the arrival of El Alemán himself, who came not from the road but from a path in the mountains, riding a mule.
El Alemán had gold chains and emeralds glittering across his chest. They’d later find a 30-million-peso watch on his right wrist and a 40-million-peso watch on his left. He was not nearly as fat as his last known photo, so at first the Colombians were not sure it was him. He’d gotten a gastric balloon, they knew that. They were expecting a skinnier man. But this guy, clip-clopping in, complaining about the pain in his ass to his nearest security guard, was maybe forty kilos lighter. A gastric balloon, yes, and also weeks trudging through the mountains, negotiating with the ELN to secure new coca routes to Venezuela.
Later that evening, El Alemán’s girlfriend and other guests arrived. The drones watched their arrival. They watched the dancing and the eating and the drinking. They watched the ceremony of the bear, the untying of one pink ribbon after the next. They watched as the party moved into the early hours of morning, and they watched as El Alemán’s girlfriend danced with the bear for El Alemán’s amusement, grinding into the fuzzy white heart. They watched as the party wound down, and people went to sleep, and people left the party. One of the drones peeled off to follow a partygoer, an unknown figure who seemed to be, alongside El Alemán, a locus of attention. And then they watched as El Alemán retired with his girlfriend to a room in the northern corner of the finca.
During this, Juan Pablo sat in the back corner of the operations center at Tolemaida, observing but letting his principals run their op, not interfering. The mark of a good officer, Mason thought. The only times Mason had seen him on a radio or phone was when he was talking to higher, running interference on whatever pressures or demands were coming from the full colonels and generals. Juan Pablo trusted his men and trusted their training.
“Wait until the sniper team is ready,” a Colombian major said into a headset, his eyes fixed on the screens. “Wait.”
Three squads of eight soldiers were deployed, one that would breach the finca, another held in reserve, and the remaining squad split into teams of four, positioned on the northwest and southeast corners of the finca to block and isolate.
“When you’re ready.”
On the feed, Mason saw small figures racing to a side wall of the compound, the images oddly endearing, a child’s action toys brought to life. They were lifting a lightweight ladder to the side of the eastern exterior wall of the finca, and then one sped up th
e ladder, dropped down inside, and placed an explosive charge on the side door.
A voice came on the net: “Movement.”
On “Kill TV,” Mason saw two figures moving along the wall, probably guards who’d heard the assault team moving into position.
“Three, two, one.”
The explosive charges went off as the sniper team opened fire. One large flash and a cluster of smaller ones. The two figures fell down. The assault squad streamed into the finca.
On screen, it wasn’t so different from a U.S. raid, the choreography of men trained over and over to not simply execute a task, but to rapidly adapt to the changes and surprises an enemy compound can throw at you. Speed and violence of execution were key. Mason figured that, with a compound this size, forty-five seconds was a fair estimate of how long a group of U.S. special operators might take, and he began counting to himself.
One-one-hundred. Two-one-hundred. Three-one-hundred.
A machine gun opened up on the roof, a terrified urabeño with limited weapons training firing ineffectual bullets into the night, his burst serving no other purpose than to alert the snipers. They adjusted fire. The machine gun stopped. Three figures squirted out a side door, muzzle flashes lit up from the blocking squad’s position, and the three fell scattered across the ground, doll limbs all akimbo.
Eleven-one-hundred. Twelve-one-hundred.