Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  Then, tens of thousands of feet above the target building, the pilot did nothing more complicated than push a little button. A series of small charges on a rack mounted underneath his plane ignited, blowing away the hooks holding his bomb in place. It wobbled out into the air. Awkward, ungainly, a baby bird the size of a car, detached from its parent and plummeting through space. Or almost detached. A thin wire trailed behind it, still connected to the jet, unspooling and unspooling until there was no more wire left and it tore itself from its mother. Only then did it open its eyes.

  A sensor on the nose locked onto the sparkling building. Four fins at its tail extended outward. It adjusted the angle of its fins. Added lift, stability. No longer plummeting, it flew.

  So many things had to happen for these men to arrive at their deaths. Start with the invention of the internal combustion engine. Follow with the development of Europe and the Americas and the rest of the world creating a ravenous appetite for oil, which created oil rigs and refineries and massive wealth for desert princes. Then global supply chains, trade agreements, secure shipping routes, and the law of the sea. Negotiated arms sales, too. Add in the vast edifice of Western science. Computing and radio technology. The space race and the microchip. Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex. And other, subtler developments. American-pioneered methods of high-value targeting. The post-9/11 explosion of private military contractors. It took all of the massively complex, interconnected modern world to bring these men their deaths. It was a shame they were incapable of appreciating it.

  Juan Pablo opened his eyes. On the screen before him lay the same building, now with more figures in the street nearby, exiting the funeral. A flash whited out half of the screen. When it disappeared, the building was altered.

  “Hell, yeah,” someone said. They called for permission for another strike. Time passed. Permission was granted. Figures emerged out of the back of the building, running. Another flash whited out the screen, and when the flash disappeared some of the figures were motionless.

  Juan Pablo didn’t know who they had killed, or how the survivors would react to what had happened. He knew he felt satisfied by the day’s work. He was a highly paid mercenary, using skills he had learned from the Colombian military, from American Special Forces, and from his own long experience in ugly, dirty war zones, to fight an ugly, dirty war against a primitive enemy. Perhaps this was the future of war, and if so, good. In a war like this, it did not matter how many fanatics swarmed to your side. It did not matter if you stirred the passions of the people by demonizing the government or the capitalists or the Liberals or the Conservatives or the Catholics or the Protestants or the Muslims or the Jews. What mattered was the global, interconnected system that generated the wealth and the technology that ultimately would determine the fate of this war, and the wars to come. That system was civilization. It was progress.

  Hundreds of miles away, just outside the courtyard of the ruined and blasted building, a boy stared up into the sky. His mind, though full of pain and terror, willed itself to prayer. And he whispered of the day of reckoning, and of the paradise that is the truth, and of the hell that is the truth. And then he was gone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the efforts of so many people. First, there are those who read through many drafts of these chapters, providing edits, feedback, and ideas—Christopher Robinson, Lauren Holmes, Matt Gallagher, Elliot Ackerman, Lea Carpenter, and especially my wife, Jessica, who in addition to reading countless drafts helped with research, assisted during interviews in Colombia (occasionally while nursing a newborn), and provided sanity checks during the crazy-making process of writing a novel. Then there is my agent, Eric Simonoff, who stuck by me for six years of writing without ever applying the least pressure on me to hurry up, and whose opinion I greatly valued as the work neared completion. Finally, there is my editor at Penguin Press, Scott Moyers, and his assistant editor, Mia Council, who helped refine the novel into a tighter, better-structured, and far clearer whole. And I should add Jane Cavolina, my incredible copyeditor.

  The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Princeton University’s Lewis Center of the Arts Hodder Fellowship provided me the time and resources to write and research, and I’m humbled by their generous faith in my work. Also, the brilliant and intellectually omnivorous John Ptacek provided invaluable research assistance through Hunter College’s Hertog Fellowship program.

  Various scholars and experts gave their time as I was trying to find my footing in tackling this subject. I’m grateful for the advice and expertise of Ethan Kapstein, Jacob Shapiro, Stephen Kalin, Robert Karl, Quil Lawrence, Gavin Kovite, Molly Kovite, Roy Godson, Deni Béchard, Abbey Steele, and Brian Castner. Jacob Siegel, my old friend and podcast cohost at Manifesto!, also helped me argue out a lot of the ideas I wanted to engage with in the novel.

  While in Colombia, I often stayed with Juan Antonio Restrepo and Ana Isabel Velásquez. Along with Blanca Nora Cardona and Luis Gilberto Velásquez, they looked after me, fed me and my ravenous children, and showered our family with love, while Juan and Isa’s daughter Sara Restrepo put in amazing work as a research assistant, particularly in arranging interviews with a wide range of people from judges to academics to ex-military to politicians.

  I’d like to thank my parents, Marie-Therese and William Klay, and my four brothers, who in addition to being caring and supportive also helped at various points, connecting me to people who proved pivotal to the book. And I’d like to thank my mother-in-law, Adriana Velásquez, who was a wealth of information on Colombian Spanish and on Medellín, in particular.

  I’m also indebted to those who gave their time for interviews, especially Paul Angelo, Hernán Hincapié, Luis Fernando Delgado Llano, Fabio Valencia Cossio, Juan Gomez Martinez, Pablo Hernandez, Pablo Emilio Angarita Cañas, Shawn Walker, Matt Wilson, Andrew Slater, Jason Everman, Joe Reagan, Jhon Jairo Díez, Dr. Samuel Muñoz, Ángel David Marín, Gloria Lia Velásquez, and others. I relied on a variety of books and articles and essays from journalists, fiction writers, poets, and scholars for this novel. Among these individuals and works are:

  Elliot Ackerman; Lynsey Addario’s It’s What I Do; the Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library; Matthieu Aikins’s “Last Tango in Kabul”; Fatima Abo Alasrar; Shuaib Almosawa; Lieutenant Colonel Charles Armstrong’s “Ambushes—Still Viable as a Combat Tactic” (Juan Pablo quotes the opening lines defining an ambush); Deni Béchard; Carlos G. Berrios; Adrian Bonenberger’s Afghan Post; Virginia Bouvier’s Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War; Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo and “Jihadists in Paradise”; Deborah Campell’s A Disappearance in Damascus (there is one direct quote from this book in which, with the author’s permission, I repurpose a line from her translator, Ahlam); Brian Castner’s All the Ways We Kill and Die; Kate Clark; Jesús Abad Colorado; Iona Craig; Jorge Delgado; Jhon Jairo Díez’s “Violencia Homicidia y Fuerza Pública: Medellín 1987–1993”; Agusto Bahamón Dussán’s Mi Guerra en Medellín; Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Marcos Palacios, and Ana María Gómez López’s The Colombia Reader; Vanda Felbab-Brown; Jim Grant’s “One Tribe at a Time”; Natalia Herrera; Pat Hoy II’s “Soldiers and Scholars”; Ethan Kapstein’s Seeds of Stability (from which one line is quoted by Juan Pablo, with the permission of the author); Robert A. Karl’s Forgotten Peace; Juanita León’s País de Plomo; Kevin Maurer’s Gentlemen Bastards and Lions of Kandahar (coauthored with Rusty Bradley); Emily Mayhew’s A Heavy Reckoning; Christopher Mitchell and Sara Ramírez’s “Local Peace Communities in Colombia”; Luke Mogelson; Alfredo Molano’s Desterrados; David Morris; Mark Moyar, Hector Pagan, and Wil R. Griego’s Persistent Engagement in Colombia (as well as Adam Isacson’s annotations to that text); P. J. O’Rourke’s Driving Like Crazy; John Otis’s Law of the Jungle; Marjorie Pennington’s Bringing Home the War; María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo’s My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary; Mark Phillips’s “How to Fell a Tree”; Douglas Por
ch; Dana Priest’s “Covert Action in Colombia”; RAND Corporation’s “Building Special Operations Partnerships in Afghanistan and Beyond”; Sune Engel Rasmussen’s “Kabul’s Drivers Get Their Feelings Across with Windshield Stickers”; John Renehan’s “The Devil You Know”; Linda Robinson’s One Hundred Victories; Edwin Cruz Rodríguez’s “La Protesta Campesina en el Catatumbo”; María Teresa Rondersos’s Guerras Recicladas; Aram Roston’s “A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers to Kill Its Political Enemies. This Could Be the Future of War”; Noah Rothman; Paul Staniland; Abbey Steele’s Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War; Jeffrey Stern’s “From Arizona to Yemen: The Journey of an American Bomb”; Winifred Tate’s Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats; Michael Taussig’s, Law in a Lawless Land; Heidi Vogt’s “When a Bomb Goes Off in Afghanistan”; Jeremy Waldron’s “Named and Targeted”; and Bing West.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Phil Klay is a veteran of the US Marine Corps. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay series. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University.

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