Guns and White Faces

Sally

PROLOGUE

I did not like the guy sitting across the table from me that afternoon. Even though he was there to deliver news that would presumably make me happy – elated, even – I did not like him. His dumpy frame and unkempt hair seemed incompatible with his crisply starched combat uniform. His fleshy face was covered in a light sheen of sweat that caused his fogged eyeglasses to slip down his nose repeatedly. Although he wore a toothy grin and attempted small talk, he did so through labored breaths brought on by the climb up four flights of stairs more than ten minutes before. I looked him over with veiled contempt but offered a politely pleasant smile and nodded whenever he huffed a question or two. To me, he was little more than one of the Army’s administrative milksops. A pencil pusher. More comfortable holding a manila folder than a weapon. And though his uniform displayed rank insignia two steps above my own, I did not view him as a superior. Rather, I chose to see him as a foreigner. Somebody completely unfamiliar to the grim, often times dangerous, warfighting side of the Army to which I belonged. When he had first introduced himself as Colonel Ben Talley from the XVIII Airborne Corps Staff Judge Advocate’s office, I shot a quick glance to his right shoulder to see if he wore a combat patch on his sleeve. He did not. Nevertheless, he was there to tell me that I would not be held responsible for the deaths of a number of American soldiers, so I listened.

So, as I mentioned on the phone earlier, the 15-6 investigation into the Kaligot Ambush was closed out last week, Colonel Talley said while flipping through a stack of papers in front of him. And the bottom line is that the investigating officer, General Brohm, determined that there was no negligence or dereliction of duty on your part as the company commander.

He handed me a one-page memorandum that summed up the findings of the investigation. I looked it over, scanning the short summary of how a platoon of U.S. infantrymen was attacked while moving down a narrow mountain trail in a remote province of northeastern Afghanistan the year prior. Six Americans, including the young officer leading the patrol, First Lieutenant Shawn Markey, were killed. Of course, I was much more familiar with the details of event than I wanted to be. I had been less than three miles away at the company command post when the ambush occurred and could hear the firefight from my position. I was barking directions to Lieutenant Markey over the tactical radio when the blast from a rocket propelled grenade nearly ripped him in half.

The last paragraph of the memo contained a sentence highlighted in yellow.

The Company Commander, Captain Wesley Atwell, was not deficient or negligent in his duties.

The following sentence explained how I was instrumental in the timely evacuation of the wounded soldiers to the medical aid station. The last line of the memorandum stated that the lost lives of the soldiers were both tragic and regrettable but that no further investigation into the ambush was necessary. At the bottom of the page, a garish, almost comical signature sat over the typed name and title, Joshua E. Brohm, Brigadier General.

The simplicity of the memo struck me as odd; how it offered such a neat, polished, and abrupt ending. It seemed absurd that the legal and emotional maelstrom that had been swirling around me for an entire year could be suddenly quieted by a single sheet of paper and a gaudy signature. Absurd or not, however, the finality of it was more than welcome. I took another minute to glance over the printed words, pretending to read each one carefully, and then looked up. Colonel Talley was staring at me, a creepy look of satisfaction on his round, dewy face.

He smiled again and slid a stuffed manila folder across the table to me.

This is your copy of the investigation findings with all the witness affidavits. A few redactions, but nothing you didn’t already know.

I left it alone and replied with a simple, Thanks, sir.

A string of silent, increasingly uncomfortable seconds passed. The hum of the fluorescent light overhead grew louder and made the room feel smaller. Spurred by the uneasiness of the moment, Talley fumbled with the messy stack of papers in front of him. He asked me to sign for my copy of the investigation and stood up with a slight grunt. Once I had signed, I too stood up and we exchanged brief, obligatory good-byes. He then shuffled out of the room, leaving me alone with the folder on the table and the fluorescent hum.

I sat back down and began to swivel slowly back and forth in the chair. A jumble of emotions began to churn inside me and I suddenly realized that I was holding my breath. I released it with a quick sigh and shake of my head. I stared at the folder on the table. The longer I stared, the more certain I became that I had no intention of opening it. I wanted to keep its contents and every detail, every word, closed. Shut off. Pacified. Done. I knew, however, that such thinking was naïve and foolishly optimistic.

If it were only that easy.

Just as I prepared to stand, my boss came striding into the room, firmly shutting the door behind him. Lieutenant Colonel Jerome Quarterman was an infantryman’s infantryman: tall, physically imposing, tough, and charismatic. Legend had it that he had been a championship-winning boxer in college, and he seemed to fit the part. His clean-shaven head looked like a polished 8-ball and his stride was smooth, balanced and commanding. Soldiers in our battalion liked to say that Quarterman looked like a black version of Mister Clean, minus the earring. In one hand he held the ever-present small styrofoam cup which contained either coffee or tobacco spit. On this occasion, it was coffee. He took a long gulp and sat down across from me, grinning broadly. I felt myself relax a bit and offered a slight smile back.

So? he offered with raised eyebrows. Not guilty?

Yes sir, I said, Not guilty, I suppose.

Damn right, he said, leaning back in his chair. It took long enough, didn’t it?

I nodded. He paused for a second, still smiling.

Wes, look, I’m sorry you had to go through all this shit. It’s ridiculous.

He took another sip and continued, To be honest, I don’t know why the Army does this to itself. I mean, 15-6 investigations have their place: criminal activity, fraud, detainee abuse. I get all that shit. But when we start investigating our own tactical decisions…you know, combat decisions…then we’ve got our priorities all jacked up.

He shook his head and downed the rest of his coffee. Guys are going to start being afraid to make any kind of judgment call for fear of having the inspector general crawling up their ass later.

I was not sure if he was expecting a response, but ventured one anyway.

Yes sir, but I can’t complain too much, I shrugged, I’m still alive.

Yeah, Quarterman sighed, crushing the small cup in his grip, but it’s still a bunch of bullshit.

A number of seconds passed and then he tossed the crumpled cup at the small trash bucket in the corner of the room. It missed.

You handled it well, though, he winked at me. Good on you.

Thanks, sir.

Quarterman paused for a minute, his smile rapidly fading. I was suddenly aware of how uncomfortably warm the room had become. Somewhere in the thickened air comprising the space between us, a shoe was poised to drop.

You know the dad is probably going to keep coming after you, he said in a much lower tone.

And there it was. I nodded and drummed my fingers on the table. The dead Lieutenant Markey was the son of a retired Marine Major General, but not just any general. Rodney Q. Markey made a name for himself during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the Marine Regiment he commanded led the charge toward Baghdad. The extraordinary access he provided to the embedded journalists riding along with his command group resulted in a flourish of glowing portrayals in the media. The Ram Rod, as reporters dubbed him, emerged as an overnight icon – the second coming of Chesty Puller. His jowly face and flattop haircut became the symbol of American military superiority reaffirmed, at least until the images of triumph in the ground war were quickly replaced by those of looting, Iraqi mobs, and the beginning acts of a nasty civil war. Once back on American soil, Markey was an outspoken critic of the buffoons in D.C. that, according to him, fucked up his stellar victory. Ten years later, he was still living off his former notoriety in the retired general scrapyard of northern Virginia.

Within a month of the ambush at Kaligot, the Department of the Army began to receive the elder Markey’s demands for more information on the ambush. When initial responses did not satisfy him, Markey went to the Washington DC media outlets. A massive cover up, he said. A catastrophic failure in leadership. A suicide mission. A bunch of mid-level Army officers trying to cover their own asses! he once yelled into a camera. His claims quickly worked their way up through various local reports to a number of national outlets. The coup de grace was an hour-long investigative report on ABC with a British narrator, random combat footage from Afghanistan, and punctuated by photos of a young, ambitious Second Lieutenant Shawn Markey graduating from West Point - his proud Marine father pinning his new rank insignia to his dress uniform. According to the report, many compelling questions remained. Could the ambush at Kaligot have been prevented? Was the mission necessary? Who was really to blame for the death of six American heroes? Was the U.S. Army telling the whole story?

I had been instructed (not advised) by Army legal officials, much like the portly Colonel Talley, not to respond to any reporters or to make any public statements. Any urge I had to comment on anything about my deployment to Afghanistan had to be swallowed. And swallow it I did – all of it. For an entire year, I sheltered myself in the mundane tasks of daily business. What little amount of cable TV and talk radio I had taken in before, I avoided entirely. I did my utmost to cocoon myself from any talk about Afghanistan but found the investigative tendrils nearly impossible to evade. The inquiries, investigations, and second guessing kept coming; the elder Markey wasn’t going to go away. His son was blown up on a Godforsaken goat trail in Afghanistan and there would be, there had to be, consequences. The fact that the Army was ready to close the investigation meant very little.

Lieutenant Colonel Quarterman sat up in his chair and leaned forward over the table. He looked at me with a stare that was both sympathetic and demanding.

Don’t worry about all that, Wes. The old man, the reports, none of it. You’re on the right track and everybody knows how good you are at what you do. Everybody. You’re a squared away Captain that is going to be promoted to Major in a few months.

I nodded in acknowledgment. He shrugged and continued, If there are people out there that still want to raise questions, demand answers and all that…fuck ‘em. Just fuck ‘em.

Quarterman paused for effect and then asked, How old are you?

Not really sure why it mattered, I answered, Thirty three, sir.

Good! That’s a good age. Too young to let some shit like this weigh you down. He pointed to the folder on the table. "Don’t get wrapped up in it. Seriously. Just keep moving on. As my old Sergeant Major always said - get your mind right." Quarterman chuckled, his eyes shining. I attempted to smile, but it was a feeble attempt, at best.

At that point, it seemed as if Quarterman wanted to say something else. His mouth remained half open; whatever words he had for me seemed lodged in his throat. Five seconds went by, then ten. The next second he was up, out of the chair, and striding toward the door. I stood up as he exited the room. He shot me a wink and a half-wave over his shoulder as he went. The sound of the closing door brought with it the instant, albeit slight, comfort of privacy.

I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and walked slowly over to the room’s only window. Down below, a group of young soldiers walked across a gravel parking lot, talking loudly amongst themselves although I could not make out their words. Their animated faces and body language suggested an easy conversation of little consequence. Maybe sports, maybe girls, maybe who got drunk the night before. The heat of the North Carolina afternoon did not seem to bother them, but rather, bounced off of them – their ambivalence to it making them seem sturdy, almost indestructible. As I watched them, I felt a tug of jealousy. Jealous of their buoyancy and the complete lack of worry. I too wanted to not care.

Blessed are those that just don’t give a shit.

I rubbed the back of my neck and winced a bit, disappointed in my brief dalliance with self-pity. I needed to cheer the hell up, I told myself, and be thankful that the investigation was officially over.

Embrace the finality, don’t doubt it.

Regardless of whatever anti-Army publicity crusade the family members of the dead wanted to wage in the future, I needed to steer clear of the thicket. Letting out a sigh of exasperation, I turned and hurried past the table, snatching up the folder as I went. I paused with my hand on the doorknob and turned toward the small trash can. With an underhand toss, I launched the file toward it. The folder went in with a hollow thunk.

Fuck ‘em, indeed, I said to the empty room and walked out the door.

PART I

BATA

1

Ten months later, I was digging a grave. Thankfully, it was not my own. I was actually in a good mood as I vigorously worked a shorthanded shovel against the dry, pebbly dirt. The five other men digging alongside me did not seem to mind the strained, unflattering version of a Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London that I continued to offer up with my pathetic singing voice. Two of them were U.S. Army like myself, and like myself, they stood shirtless, a film of reddish dust sticking to their hands, arms and torsos. Our baggy uniform pants were untucked from our boots and we sang, joked and laughed while we dug and wiped the sweat from our foreheads. With matted hair, dirty faces, and dog-tags dangling from our necks we fit the classic Hollywood image of the Vietnam War G.I. All that was missing were unfiltered cigarettes dangling from our lips and an Oliver Stone film crew lurking in the area.

The other three men in our group were local contractors and they struck a stark contrast with us white Army guys. Overly thin and boney with long limbs, their skin was the deep, rich black color typical of Western Africans. They wore beat up jeans and matching yellow t-shirts identifying them as workers for Forrestal, a colossal government contractor that provided the American military with an array of goods and services almost disgusting in their sheer volume and cost. These three members of the Forrestal mass were Equatorial Guineans, or EGs as we commonly called them. Each of them was no more than twenty years old and they all found the scene of three dirty, sweaty Americans digging a hole very amusing. They pointed, laughed, and chatted away in Spanish steeped in a sing-song coastal dialect and seemed completely unaware of the swarm of olive-sized flies slowly circling around their worn Yankee and Celtics ball caps.

I had yet to grow accustomed to the constant flies or the unrelenting African heat, despite having been in Equatorial Guinea (EG) for nearly six weeks. On that day, however, the flying insects were not there for us. They swarmed, hummed, and bounced off a mangled mass of hairy blood and bone laying just feet away that a few hours before had been a hyena. It had made the unfortunate choice of trying to push through the razor wire that lined the boundary of our compound in attempt to get to a group of garbage containers. Not surprisingly, it did not succeed. Instead, the hyena became thoroughly entangled and in trying to get itself free, ended up shredding its abdomen into a horrific mess. Tipped off by the loud buzzing of flies, a Forestall worker found the carcass in the morning.

It did not take long for the heat to produce a smell that made even the sturdiest of the locals wince in disgust. By noon, everyone in the immediate area of the compound agreed that the poor animal had to be dealt with. I surprised myself when I volunteered to head up the ad-hoc burial detail. Grabbing a shovel and two unwitting soldiers from the security desk, I headed out to the wire. Perhaps I felt that the act of committing a disemboweled hyena carcass to the earth was the perfect remedy for the daily tedium at the compound. We set out with the three contractors who had the unenviable job of ripping what was left of the hyena out of the wire. I picked a site in the middle of a clearing of waist-high grass located some fifty feet from the compound fence and began to dig.

After thirty minutes of digging and singing, we had produced a hole about four feet deep and three feet across and used our shovels to push and scrape the corpse into it.

I grinned at the EGs and asked, You guys want to say a few words? You know, a eulogy or something? Might be nice.

I was certain that they did not understand my attempt at humor but that did not prevent them from beaming back at me. One of them let out a curious giggle.

Good enough! I proclaimed and started to fill the grave with the loose dirt. The others joined in and within five minutes we stood back and admired our completed handiwork. As far as shallow animal graves went, it was a good one. I was fairly confident that it was deep enough to withstand the keen nose of any wily scavenger. The short stint of manual labor had indeed felt good and provided some needed variety. It had been a while since I last got my hands dirty. The other soldiers did not seem nearly as pleased but were happy with our work nonetheless. The yellow-clad EGs, as always, smiled and chatted. I could not help but admire their carefree attitude. It made the overbearing heat and austere landscape seem bearable. Many of our soldiers attributed the good nature of our hosts to a cultural child-like ignorance. I wasn’t so sure, however, that we were not underestimating them. The EGs were not simpletons, not by a long shot. At times, it seemed their overt cheerfulness was the result of knowing something that we Americans did not.

Later that evening, I climbed to the roof of the four story warehouse building that housed our task force operations center and sat on a wobbly bench covered in badly peeling blue paint, just I had had done several times before. I had made a nightly habit of watching the sun set over the vast, gray Atlantic Ocean, which was about six miles distant from the compound. The roof received enough wind to offer some, but not much, relief from the heat. An added advantage of the spot was that I was usually on my own. The multitude of cigarette butts littering the rooftop suggested that others knew of the bench as well, but at dusk, it was normally just me.

That night, I sipped on a bottle of Gatorade and reflected on the series of events that brought me to the top of an old piping manufacturer’s warehouse in western Africa. My path to Equatorial Guinea had been both quick and unexpected. After the Army saw fit to promote me to the rank of Major ten months prior, I was given a choice of three duty assignments: Eighth U.S. Army in South Korea, The 1st Infantry Division located at Fort Riley in Kansas, or Stuttgart, Germany, where the Headquarters for United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) was located. I mulled over my options for all of five minutes before getting on the phone and telling my assignment manager to send me to Germany. The best summer of my life had been spent working on a Bavarian dairy farm during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I backpacked, learned German, and drink stupid amounts of the world’s greatest beer. My Deutschland adventure was highlighted by a lusty weekend tryst with an Irish barmaid that I met on a train ride from Bamberg to Munich. It was one of those coveted, flavorful memories that men keep in their back pocket to remind themselves that sometimes life is really, really good. The prospect of recapturing some of the youthful magic from that summer was too much to turn down. Additionally, Germany had the look and feel of the Pacific Northwest, where I had spent much of my childhood. Evergreens and gray skies offered the comforts of home. It was not a tough decision to make. Within a month, I had packed up the small amount of bachelor’s living material I owned and travelled to Europe.

I was well aware that my choice of assignment was also a retreat of sorts. A retreat from the Airborne Division in North Carolina, from memories of Afghanistan, from questions about Kaligot. The small towns of southern Germany, with their surrounding rolling hills, dark timbered farmhouses and Romanesque church steeples, offered the insulation of Old Europe – a barrier that promised to keep the wretchedness of Nuristan Provence, Afghanistan out of my mind. A complete escape from all that would be nice, but even a temporary reprieve would be welcome, I had thought. Which explains why I was less than excited when, just two weeks after arriving in Germany, I learned that I would be part of an AFRICOM Task Force heading to Equatorial Guinea for six to nine months. I never fully unpacked my duffle bags.

Task Force Bengal was made up of a battalion-sized force, some five hundred soldiers taken from a Stryker Brigade Combat Team based in southern Germany. AFRICOM Headquarters supplied a command and control staff for the task force – a group of thirty noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and officers (of which I was one) tasked with planning, resourcing, and overseeing operations. The task force’s overall commander was Colonel Chuck Downs, an intelligent career Armor officer known for his meticulous attention to detail and ability to micromanage just about anything. During a prior combat tour in Iraq, Downs had been wounded when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb. He lost two fingers on his right hand and suffered a severe gash to the side of his head that left a bold, jagged scar that ran from his temple to the back of his neck. These permanent reminders of war stood in stark contrast to his mild, common man appearance. Despite his no-nonsense approach to Army business and quenchless thirst for work, Colonel Downs was a personable guy and well liked by those who served under him, including myself. He was fond of saying, When you think you are going to die, and you don’t, you learn to lighten up. I tended to agree, however, based on my own experience in Afghanistan, I was not there yet. I still had some lightening up to do.

The official mission for Task Force Bengal was to conduct support and stability operations for the local government. Unofficially, we were there because a number of American oil companies were worried because their vast drilling and refinery operations along the coast of EG were being threatened by environmental extremist groups that had become increasingly vocal and, in some cases, violent over the previous two years. A number of kidnappings had taken place, and in one instance, a mid-level executive from one of the American companies was shot in the head while driving his car through the streets of Bata, the country’s largest city, port, and business hub. The most organized and potentially dangerous of the radical ecoterrorist groups, Fuerza del Mundo, claimed responsibility for the assassination.

The local EG police and military forces were a joke. Both were irreparably disorganized and corrupt, neither was trusted to do much of anything. The level of risk that the extremists groups posed to the oil workings in Bata depended on who you listened to, although a number of American news outlets portrayed EG as a potential tinderbox on the verge of a security catastrophe. After a few weeks of diplomatic wrangling highlighted by the U.S. Secretary of State’s visit to EG, the Department of Defense announced (to little fanfare) that it would deploy a small military force to the country in order to establish and maintain a security partnership in the region. The political and military powers that be decided that an armored cavalry squadron, about four hundred soldiers, that was plussed-up with helicopter, engineer, and medical support elements would provide enough of a deterrent to scare off the environmental zealots. When all the organizing was complete, Task Force Bengal numbered just over six hundred troops with a small fleet of armored trucks and helicopters.

And it worked. From the day the first elements of the task force landed in a U.S. Air Force C-5 Galaxy cargo plane at Bata International Airport, there had not been a single incident worthy of reporting. Daily life in EG, and the oil operations, continued with a sense of normalcy. The task force’s compound was established in a cluster of old factory buildings on the fringe of a defunct industrial park which had previously housed a pipe and machine manufactory. A three-mile stretch of tree-lined dirt road connected the compound with the outer limits of Bata. The task force divided the port area and surrounding city blocks of Bata into three separate security zones and assigned a cavalry troop, numbering about one hundred soldiers, to each. They patrolled the streets on foot and in troop carrier trucks, established security check points, and made themselves visible as an overt show of force.

For the most part, the EGs paid little to no attention to our soldiers. They darted recklessly down the narrow streets on mopeds, talked on their cell phones, and hid from the sun in crumbling doorways, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the camouflage-clad troops and their rifles. The one exception was the ever-present swarm of child street entrepreneurs that pitched, cajoled, and peddled all sorts of useless junk. When the soldiers refused (they were strictly prohibited from carrying any money on patrol) the kids would quickly melt away, determined to try again the following day. Soon, the only enemies that Task Force Bengal soldiers faced were the brutal boredom and unrelenting heat that came from being located almost directly on top of the equator.

Complaints about the mission were few. Most of the soldiers and officers in the task force had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and to them, duty in EG was much more agreeable. There were no snipers, no improved explosive devices (IEDs), and no maiming or death of a close comrade every other week. There was no battering down of doors in the middle of the night in order to drag away blindfolded teenage boys in plastic handcuffs amidst the plaintive wailing of mothers and sisters. There were no lung-burning climbs up 8,000 feet of loose shale while wearing seventy pounds of combat equipment. In fact, there was very little to report. EG was turning out to be unexciting – and unexciting was good.

As I saw it, the lack of terrorist activity in EG was a welcome political development for the United States. The recent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq had both been costly and marked with dubious conclusions. And while I did not pay much attention to the glut of political soothsaying on the news or internet sites, I did agree that our mission to EQ was probably an attempt at washing out the bad taste left by previous failures. A show of force in a small, western African country with a minimal threat of violence was low hanging fruit for a military eager to get back into the win column, and from the very beginning it looked as though we were in for a good harvest. Nobody knew how long American soldiers