by Phil Klay
This was not how she wanted to start things. But before she could respond, he grabbed a Semana magazine and started reading. There’s an old reporter’s interviewing trick—most people can’t deal with silence, so if you just refuse to fill the silence with sound, if you just look at your source like you’re listening but let the empty moments follow one after another, sometimes sources will start talking just to kill the awkwardness. And when they’re doing that, they’re less careful, and they tell you things they wouldn’t otherwise. Lisette had used the trick many times before. But there, in the silence as he sat and ate, she felt the emptiness she had inflicted on so many sources, and like those sources, almost without willing it, she began to fill it with sound.
“You know John Sack?” she said. “Vietnam reporter? M Company?”
Diego shrugged.
“He said the best journalist to cover Vietnam was Michael Herr, because Herr went crazy. Herr allowed himself to go crazy. The only one to actually donate his sanity to the cause of journalism. Vietnam wasn’t about putting the pieces together and making sense of it all. Vietnam didn’t make sense. So you couldn’t just write the facts. You had to write the experience of getting pushed past sanity.”
That amused Diego. “Okay. You gonna go nutty on me?”
“I don’t know. Herr wrote the Vietnam crazy. What kind of crazy fits this war?”
“Which war?”
“All of them. Here. Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Horn of Africa. Philippines. Everywhere. I mean, what kind of crazy do I need to be to get it right?”
Diego started laughing. “It’s not crazy you’re looking for.”
“No?”
“What, you think we’re out there, smoking dope and burning gook villages? That’s a whole different era.”
“You sound nostalgic.”
“I mean, look, what we do is boring at this point. Now it’s all . . . long meetings, lessons learned. Here’s what we know about the complementary effects of suppression and local development. Here’s six different models of how insurgencies respond to the targeting of midlevel leadership. And even when I am out in the field . . . man. The thrill is gone. I’m in my second decade of this shit, Liz.”
“And yet, you keep doing it.”
“Look, maybe America hasn’t been paying attention, but we’ve gotten pretty good at fighting these bullshitty wars. Just look at the stats. Numbers of police trained. Number of independent indig operations. Violence up, violence down. Things are getting better. The numbers don’t lie.”
Liz laughed. Diego liked occasionally throwing statistics at her when he wanted to confuse her or blunt some criticism she had of the war and his role in it. Statistics take the raw material of war, human beings, and turn them into numbers on a spreadsheet. And for Diego, no matter how fucked up the war, those numbers always seemed to be in the black. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because you’re out of your fucking mind.”
He let out a disapproving sigh. “You’re eating breakfast a half hour outside of a town that used to be the murder capital of the world.”
“I’m willing to be sold on Colombia.”
“Go through the mission set of every unit operating in Afghanistan right now, tell me a single one that doesn’t make sense.”
But it wasn’t the missions. Liz had been doing this long enough to know that. She’d gotten excited about enough units and their local successes to know that deep in her bones. The missions—chase down Taliban leaders here, train ANP there—did make sense. It was the war as a whole that was insane, a rational insanity that dissected the problem in a thousand different ways, attacked it logically with a thousand different mission sets, a million white papers, a billion “lessons learned” reports, and nothing even approaching coherent strategy. Insanity overseeing a thousand tight logical circles. Sure, it wasn’t the exhausted, drug-addled insanity of Vietnam. Not pot and heroin and LSD insanity, but the insanity of a generation raised on iPhones and Adderall. A glittering, mechanical insanity that executes each task with machinelike precision, eyes on the mission amid the accumulating human waste.
There was more silence, and then Diego got up and scrapped the remnants of egg on his plate into the trash.
“Crazy would be thinking we can just throw up our hands and do nothing.”
* * *
• • •
Sunday came and Abel made his way to the bakery, where a short former guerrillera at the counter waved and smiled at him. They all knew him there. They all liked him there. He was, supposedly, a success story. An ex-combatant who ran a successful business. No matter that once they’d been enemies, the guerrilla on one side and the paramilitaries on the other. Now they were on the same side—ex-combatants trying to succeed in a world that held people like them in contempt. Luisa wasn’t there yet so he ordered two pandebonos and chatted with the girl. Ana Paula, or Ana Sofia, he thought that was her name.
“Look,” she said, holding up her hand to reveal fingernails painted not in a single color, but in swirls of red, pink, and blue. “Mirabel did it for me.” She nodded to the back, where Mirabel was checking the ovens.
“Beautiful,” he said, unsure whether she was flirting with him or not. He felt like he should say something else. After an awkward pause, he went with, “She should do mine,” and held up his hand. That got a delighted little laugh, and Abel blushed. He wondered how many little guerrilleras like this had been killed by Jefferson. And how many paras like him had been killed by little guerrilleras. Probably not that many. Both sides had mainly killed civilians.
Luisa walked in and the guerrillera snapped to attention, trying to look businesslike.
“Let’s sit outside,” Luisa said.
So Abel took his pandebonos, followed Luisa outside, and watched as she wedged herself into one of the low plastic chairs they put out in the street for customers to sit in. She looked bulky and absurd, with the little chair and little plastic table in front, and Abel hunched down awkwardly into a chair himself, feeling like a child.
“Yes, he’s returned,” Luisa said. “I was waiting for it. I’d heard his group had moved across the border a year and a half ago.”
Of course she’d known. Luisa knew what happened in the area better than anyone.
She reached across the little plastic table and grabbed one of the pandebonos.
“It doesn’t change anything for us.” She bit into the bread.
Abel licked his lips. “It changes things for me.”
“I see.” Luisa swallowed and looked down the street, scowling. “I drove by your shop two days ago and it was shuttered. Are you hiding?”
“No.”
She became still, and then swung her gaze from the street to his face. Which is when he felt it, the shame. He’d felt it many times in front of Luisa, shame was an old friend, no matter that she’d forgiven him. And again he thought that perhaps he should tell her what he’d left out of his confession. Perhaps he should tell her how Jefferson could have had her killed or raped or, more likely, both, and that he’d protected her. He worried, in his soul, that his confession to her was not a true confession because he’d held that back, held it back from the scorn he knew she’d feel if he told her. But that was the one thing precious to him from his time in the paramilitaries, and he didn’t want to give it up.
“He wants you to work for him again?”
Abel nodded.
“And?”
He hung his head. Luisa reached across the table and took the other bread roll from him, then sat there scowling, a pandebono absurdly in each hand. With almost comical aggression, she took a bite.
“You know how it is,” he said. “Money or bullets. I had no choice.”
“Or,” she said.
“What?”
“Money or bull
ets. The word or means a choice.”
Was she being serious? He laughed nervously. “Well . . . it’s not a very good choice.”
“Yes.” She stared at him intently.
“Who told you God gives us easy choices?” she said.
“I . . .”
“For ten years, you have been a good man. Before that, you weren’t even a man. You were his . . . thing. Die a good man and see Christ, or become his thing. How is this even a choice?”
He couldn’t believe it, to hear her talk like that.
“I won’t be doing anything illegal for him, just . . .”
“You’ll be doing what you did before. Whispering in people’s ears. Handing out money. I have more sympathy for his sicarios. That’s honest evil.”
Her eyes were withering. And for a moment, as the shame tightened its grip, as he forced air in and out of his throat, as he felt his soul wanting to crawl out of his filthy skin, it did seem like a simple choice.
“If you want my blessing,” she said, “you can’t have it.”
But that wasn’t it. What he wanted was worse. “What I want,” he said, getting control of himself, “is to talk to you about the election for mayor.”
She looked surprised, and then disgusted. “Ah. Already working.”
Yes. And she was a force in the town. One that needed to be negotiated around. One that needed to be kept only minimally hostile.
“Tell your boss this. We’re bringing in some people from the foundation’s headquarters in Bogotá to conduct interviews. A lawyer and some students. They’re taking statements about crimes that have happened here.”
“And you don’t want Jefferson to interfere.”
“No.”
“Then keep his name out of it.”
“Obviously.”
“And in return?”
“You know what you get in return.”
She tossed him his pandebono.
“That’s fine,” he said. He just needed her to stay neutral. Which she would, because she was smart, and because that was mostly how she’d played it with every other group that had established dominance in the town.
She leaned forward, put her palms flat down on the little plastic table, and pushed herself up and out of her chair. She looked at him sadly, curiously.
“You could have run away. Fled to Cúcuta.”
He had thought of that. Losing everything he’d built. Losing the community where he was known. Again. “I have a life here.”
“Not anymore.”
The shame was ebbing. Relief was coming in. He’d told her, and she’d reacted as he’d expected. But to have it done with lifted the weight somewhat. He stood and nodded at her as he prepared to leave.
“One other thing I want,” Luisa said.
“Yes.”
“When we’re doing the interviews. I want you to come and tell us and the registrar what happened to you as a boy.”
He sat down again. She stood over him.
“Why?”
“That’s my condition. Tell your master.”
And she left, leaving him in the little plastic chair, holding a pandebono she’d taken a bite out of. He bit from the other end, and then thought about the mysteries of saints and the relics they leave behind—hair and fingernails and bones and blood. So he bit into where she’d bit, and chewed the bread that still had a touch of her saliva on it. Perhaps it’d give him courage.
Courage for what, though? Not for death, like Luisa wanted. But perhaps money or bullets weren’t the only options. He thought of the two men from army intelligence. And then he thought of the bruja, who sold fabric in a shop in the north part of La Vigia. Perhaps she had a charm, or a spell. There are secret forces in this world. Perhaps he should use them.
* * *
• • •
In the silence after she had left the finca—to go interview an uribista politician, she’d said—Diego had sat and savored the afterglow of the anger she’d provoked in him. She was fucking up his tranquillity, but that was fine. After a while, tranquillity is just another word for boring. After a while, everything is boring. War. Peace. Love. Hate. Even Liz, in Afghanistan, had gotten boring. The same old arguments, the same prickly distance whenever he’d drawn close. But there, in Colombia, she was a change.
And she needed his help. She wouldn’t ask directly, but she needed him. He liked that. So he called a few other contractors. He called an officer he’d worked with in the Colombian military. And then he’d remembered Mason. Junior medic in the Afghan deployment where Carlos and Ocho got fucked up. An odd guy he never really got along with. Took himself too seriously to deserve being taken seriously. Took the job too seriously to be really good at it. But now the SF Liaison at the embassy.
Diego dropped Mason a line, didn’t hear back until early evening. A short email. “Taking the 1628 flight into Medellín this Sunday for a quick trip to Cuarto Brigada. Could meet at the Mall Indiana in Las Palmas, grab a tea or something.”
Tea. This fucking guy. And when Liz returned to the finca, her expression guarded, unsure of how they’d left things, he silently handed her a beer, stared out at the darkening view, and told her, “I asked around for you. Got a friend in MILGROUP at the embassy. Might have something interesting.” And she smiled, and sipped her beer with him, and they shared a comfortable silence.
Over the next couple of days he kept it safe. Made a show of playing tour guide—bringing out that weird Colombian fruit you eat by breaking a small hole in the shell and sucking out the insides. Pointing out the varieties of hummingbird that would flit down the mountainside. And in the evenings he’d read, and she’d read, and the space between them would fill with the warmth of their past. And then, Sunday evening, he went out to the Mall Indiana.
Since the coffee shops had already closed, he parked himself at an Italian restaurant, ordered a whiskey, and waited until Mason arrived and, true to his word, ordered tea.
At first, they just caught up. Diego talked about life as a contractor and Mason talked about his family, how the two-year accompanied tour was affecting his wife’s career, how his two daughters were doing. He even pulled up photos on his phone. Inez, the older one, was, holy shit, almost a teenager already. The younger one, Flor, a little black girl from Georgia they had adopted after the stillbirth, was now a very cute seven-year-old. Diego made the right noises as Mason flipped through the photos, and eventually Mason turned to talk of his career, the choices he’d made, and how his aversion to Middle East deployments had hurt his reputation.
“You know I’m not a coward,” Mason said. “I like a good fight as much as the next guy. But, man, I watched Ocho put two fucking tourniquets on his own bloody stumps in a war we both knew we weren’t winning. And I thought, what am I doing here? At least in Colombia, I feel like I can make a difference.”
Bingo.
“Still?” Diego asked. “There much left to do, after the peace treaty gets signed?”
“If anything,” he said, “the peace is only going to make us busier.” He stared at his tea. “Actually, I’m starting to worry the Colombians are going to repeat our mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
Mason started talking about a raid he’d watched play out from an operations center in Tolemaida, where Colombian special forces had gone in and killed some drug dealer. Mason’s objections seemed to be the usual ones people had against high-value targeting—that it substituted a tactic for a strategy. You’d kill a bad guy and think you were making progress in the war when, as long as the underlying conditions on the ground remained the same, you hadn’t changed anything at all. Or maybe even made things worse by further destabilizing the area.
“I think the army wants to muscle in on a police operation against the Urabeños.”
“The drug gang?”
“Yeah.” This raid
Mason had seen was, he now thought, a “proof of concept” to show how effective the army could be. But then, when Diego tried to get details, Mason got quiet and waved him off.
“What about you?” Mason asked. “How are you doing?”
Diego slugged back more of his whiskey, forcing the liquid down. He knew how to play this. “So listen,” he said, putting on a very serious, Mason-style face. “I think I may have betrayed the U.S. mission in Colombia.”
Mason slowly blinked once, then again.
“Two primary missions, every time we came here. Right? One, to train up Colombian troops. And two? You know what our other, probably even more important mission was.”
Mason didn’t say anything.
“To fuck as many Colombian women as humanly possible.”
Mason let out an exasperated sigh. Same old Diego, he was probably thinking. Underestimating Diego, as usual.
“But me, I’m fucking an American. Actually, it’s worse. I’m fucking a journalist.”
Mason didn’t react.
“Met her in Afghanistan, you know? But you know what? She was useful over there. You remember that leadership beef between Mansoor and Dadullah?”
This had been a struggle between two factions of the Taliban in 2015.
“We first get the rumors, and I’m like, I don’t know. Is this for real? What’s happening? But you know how it is in Afghanistan, we’re always stretched for resources. So I’m hanging with my girlfriend and I think, Hey. She’s smart. She’s learning the language. Why not get her to figure it out? So I tell her, Look, deep background only, but maybe you want to get your ass to Zabul. I hear there’s a civil war in the Taliban. She packs her bags and gets there right as the whole thing blows up for real, and pretty soon she’s putting shit out on the wire—”
“News stories? Open source?”
“Yeah. And we got nothing in Zabul except a little SigInt, but she IDs a Haqqani guy nobody even knew about who was trying to broker a truce, three days later we nail this guy by his cell phone . . . I forget whether it was a drone strike or . . . shit, no. A fucking SEAL team took him out. SEALs for sure. Fuckers killed civilians, too.”