Coming of Age in Pablo’s Kingdom
I spent the most important summers of my youth almost exclusively outdoors, in the days before the internet and cell phones and when video games existed largely as upright, quarter-gobbling monoliths. This, along with the bucolic pace of my rural town, ensured that I counted the days and hours with friends, playing baseball in the streets or endless games of basketball at the elementary school hoops, with their seven-foot tall rims and chain-link nets, the temperature and aridity of the high desert air causing our finger tips to crack and split with every dribble of a dirt-covered basketball; calling out Marco/Polo at the municipal swimming pool; or playing tennis with girlfriends at the weedy, faded-green tennis courts, trading kisses and serves equally errant. Few of us were rich by even the most generous definitions; almost all of us had working mothers and more than a few had absent dads and it seems to me, in hindsight, that we spent a lot of time unknowingly teaching each other how to negotiate life as young men.
Later, in high school and with the responsibilities of a job and a rusted-floor truck, carefree life in small-town Nevada diminished but never really ceased. On summer nights our doors remained not only unlocked but wide open to allow through the cool desert air. I had no curfew to speak of, and my life in rewind, were one to look for those moments where I could have strayed down a road less paved, could be safely boiled down to lying to Mr. Crow about the ownership of a mechanical pencil, playing cards while smoking Swisher Sweets, and one regrettable night with a bottle of Southern Comfort.
I was a freshman in high school in 1985; that year Medellin, Colombia, was well on its way to earning, and deserving, a reputation as the most dangerous city in the world, a title it wouldn´t relinquish until the nineties were well over. By comparison, today’s murder capital is San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with a rate of 171 homicides per 100,000 people – Medellin in 1991 had a murder rate more than double that. And it was essentially the work of one man, Pablo Escobar.
It is hard to tell the story of Medellin without mentioning Escobar, but Hernán Echevarria, who also grew up in the 1980’s, refuses to say his name, and calls him only “the famous criminal.” As a child, Hernán lived in Campo Valdez, a poor-but-not-the-poorest barrio of Medellin where his father moved as a young man, uneducated but dedicated, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week at a juice cart, showing Hernán by deed and word that hard work and education was the only true way out of Campo Valdez and into better worlds. “It was safe when I was a kid,” said Hernán, but the neighborhood grew worse as he grew older. Hernán had a bomb go off near him one day when walking to high school, and the driver of the motorcycle responsible for assassinating Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate in 1989, was a childhood friend. “It was a poor area, and there were few opportunities to work, so being part of the narco culture was attractive.” It was ostensibly easy money, though mysteriously gained, and some started calling these kids “los magicos” because they could make money appear. For Hernán, a man who clearly loves his city, the change in ethic was palpable, and he fears that it still exists, albeit manifested in a slightly different way. “Have you seen the mannequins?”, Hernán asks me (I have; there is no way to not see the mannequins, they are cartoonishly and anti-gravitationally well endowed and lined up outside storefronts beckoning you in). “You can sit in the café and watch the street and play the game of ‘real or not’ as the women walk by.” Hernán is adamant that this is not a show of wealth and prosperity, but something more insidious. “It is the descendant of the narco culture, about a perception of what it means to be beautiful and glamorous, and it’s not just for the women. It used to be okay that men could be ugly,” he continued. “We have a saying that means ‘men are like bears, the uglier the tastier,’ but I don’t think this is true anymore.”
Regardless of whether it is narco culture or just newly found materialism, being Colombian, and in particular a Paisa – someone from Medellin and the surrounding area – means interminably and frustratingly answering for the Escobar years, something they see as akin to asking a German to explain Hitler or a Russian to explain Stalin, as if it is their fault for producing such a monster and their duty to explain why and how it happened. For Diego (last name withheld), the questions are a bit more difficult to answer. The second youngest of thirteen children, he was close to his younger sister but a small child when his older brothers were in their late teens and early twenties; when Diego was playing a version of freeze tag in the streets, his brothers – at least one and as many as four – were forming the gang that would become Pablo Escobar’s most feared and prolific assassins. Diego’s last name is Italian and unusual in Colombia, and when the police started referring to the gang simply by his last name, life became, to say the least, difficult.
“My last year of high school was awful,” Diego says. “When a teacher would call out my last name, the entire room would go quiet. When grades were posted, my name would always be circled or underlined with some comment written next to it.” Diego was regularly followed (he believes it was usually the police), and one day, tired of seeing the same car tailing him for weeks, he dropped his books in the street and, crying uncontrollably, faced the car with his arms spread wide. “Kill me now!” he shouted. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now! I am just a student so leave me alone!”
The tailings stopped, but not the violence. Diego heard explosions around the city seemingly daily, and came home from school one day to see the windows of nearly every house on his block shattered, the effects of the bombing of a business near the family home. He saw a young man murdered literally in front of his eyes, and believes he lost at least ten friends to the violence, some of them personally involved and some of them not. “The police were powerless,” Diego says, “either from corruption or out of fear. Escobar put a price on every police officer’s head. At stop signs, other cars would stop a hundred feet away from the cops in case a bomb went off or if the gangs started shooting at them.”
The misery, of course, was particularly personal to Diego. One brother was murdered in Bogota in the late 80’s; another died in 1991, along with sixteen other people, in the bombing of the Macarena bullfighting stadium in Medellin. A third brother committed suicide, and two others were killed, probably by police, in targeted raids on the same day in different parts of the city. “My father died of a heart attack,” he says, “but I am convinced my mother died of a broken heart.” After the death of a husband and five sons, Diego says his mother essentially shut-down. “My best memories of my mother are of her singing and cooking. Her voice was my alarm clock, and she never let any of us, no matter how early, leave the house without making breakfast.” But she quit cooking, then quit singing, then seeing – Diego says she closed her eyes one day and refused to open them – and then, finally, quit talking. The last words Diego heard his mother say was in response to his asking why she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open her eyes: I don’t want to see the world.
I asked Diego if he, or his parents, knew what his brothers were doing. “I knew when I was older, and was able to read and understand more, and I think my parents knew. We just never talked about it.” Sometimes we don’t ask the questions to which we don’t want to hear the answers.
But for as much as Diego and Medellin would like to leave all that nonsense behind, those who came of age in Pablo’s kingdom are generationally intertwined with cartels, cocaine, political terrorism, murderers, and, perhaps most importantly, helping the rest of the world to see Medellin’s citizenry for who they are – generous, optimistic, and kind, with an acknowledged but well-intentioned self-importance and sense of pride in belonging to something bigger than themselves. Which are all things not Pablo.
Perhaps. To a small extent, I can sympathize with Hernán’s plight. Being a Nevadan means having to regularly explain that the state is more than just Las Vegas, more than just gambling and legal prostitution (we have more mountain ranges than any other state save Alaska, damn it). Humans are naturally inclined to embrace the good while deflecting the bad when pride is at stake, but this seems a bit disingenuous. Maybe we do have to account for where we’re from. Because for all the demurring of narco culture and Pablo Escobar, Hernán also shares a telling Colombian proverb, one he says everyone knows and labels the “eleventh and twelfth commandments”: The first (or eleventh) is that “when someone offers papaya, take it.” Easy to mistake this sentiment as something similar to “never look a gift horse in the mouth” or the more pedestrian “don’t pass up an opportunity,” until you hear the twelfth amendment: Never offer papaya. Essentially, don’t present me with an opportunity – even one at your expense – because if you do, I’m going to pounce on it. This might be the culture of industriousness and optimism, but it also contributes to a culture of conflict and a history of violence that has played out, ironically, almost entirely within Colombia’s own borders.
Hernán tells another story, his recollection of an uninformed childhood discussion over the reasoning behind Escobar’s declared war against the government. Escobar was angry at Colombia’s extradition policy with the United States, which aimed to prosecute the drug cartel’s leadership in the U.S. judicial system. Escobar said “a grave in Colombia is better than prison in the U.S.,” and one of Hernán’s friends said that his father supported Pablo, likening the extradition policy to a bad kid getting disciplined not by his own father, but by his neighbor’s. “I can understand this,” says Hernán. “But I don’t think we were very good fathers.” And here is an element both Hernán and Diego raise, the importance of not forgetting. Both say the current generation, who embrace narco culture but do not fully understand the havoc Escobar and his cronies wreaked upon lives in this city, run the risk of living through the same hell through which Diego and Hernán lived.
So how do you do this? How do you simultaneously ask the rest of the world to stop picking at the scab that is cocaine and Pablo Escobar and see instead the beauty that is Colombia and Medellin? How do you convince people to move on, but to not forget? This is the same message the city is trying to share through social urbanism or, as Hernán calls it, “democratic architecture.” Medellin installed a grand public library, a beautiful cubist building, on the top of the hill in a dangerous neighborhood, and outdoor escalators grace the steep hillside in the depressingly named “District 13” where, before the escalators, residents had to walk up and down more than 300 steps to get to the city center and home again. The idea is not only to make life easier for the city’s most destitute, but to let them know that the government cares about them and that they should care about themselves as well. Whether the projects have improved the quality of life of the residents isn’t clear – we saw the escalators used only by a jubilant dog and a smiling little girl taking out the trash – but that the residents take pride in their community is: both neighborhoods are clean and active and colorful, District 13 particularly so. Locally-painted murals grace the walls of the homes that press in around the stairs, and house plants are in abundance.
Medellin is also mall-crazy, and has a smoothly running metro system that is the pride of the city. There is not a piece of garbage or stain of graffiti to be found in any station or on any train. The city turned the dirtiest, druggiest, prostitutiest area of downtown into a public library with a neighboring bamboo garden and monumental park of towering lights; there is free Wi-Fi in every public space; and favorite son Fernando Botero donated a new sculpture of his peace dove to sit next to – but not replace (move on but don’t forget) – the original Pajaro de Paz that was blown up in 1995. This is not reinvention necessarily, but reinforcing pride and focusing the positive. And maybe it works. Medellin, once the murder capital of the world, was named 2015’s “City of Innovation.”
Diego today is single and lives with two of his sisters in Laureles, an upscale area of Medellin. For a living he teaches Spanish and English to businesses around the city, and a few days a week he volunteers in the Ocho de Marzo barrio, where he gives free Portuguese lessons to children who live in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Medellin, one where you can be killed for wandering across the “invisible frontier” and into the territory of the la Sierra barrio. People ask Diego why Portuguese, why not English, but for him it doesn’t matter what he teaches. “It’s the message that is important,” he says. “I’m telling them they don’t have to be what other people expect them to be. They can be something different and better. They can be someone.”
Antioquia in Pictures: Medellin & Guatape
Eating the Dead, Dancing with the Living
Cassiani de Cassiani’s face is beaded with sweat but his smile remains steady through the regular wipings of his forehead. Whichever of Colombia’s 314 ecosystems we presently occupy on this dirt road sixty kilometers south of Cartagena is tyrannical. We are standing on the main street of San Basilio de Palenque, the first freed-slave city in the Americas and the last one still in existence, and my shirt is soaked. The heat and humidity is causing me to hallucinate. A man limps towards us, alone, a dwarf and a cripple wearing a cocked baseball hat and a basketball jersey and his face smeared white, the constant base beats of Palenque music coming from the gathering of local men sitting on a porch down the road behind him seemingly urging him forward. He pays us no mind, slurring loudly but in an unrecognizable language as he walks past. This village has done its best to resist outside influences for the last four hundred years, and today will be no different.
Most of the following is probably true: Sometime in the late 1500’s, Benkos Biohó, an African island king, was seized by a Portuguese slave dealer off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, sold to a middle-man with the last name of Palacios, then deposited on the fortified walls of Cartagena and sold to a Spaniard. Benkos quickly decided to forge his own path, organizing an escape with ten other slaves and making his way to the swamps and low mountains west of the Magdalena River and south of Cartagena. He founded the Village of the Cimmarróns, organized an army, helped to free other slaves, and repelled the forces of the King of Spain, making the Hollywood transition from a minor island monarch to a major pain in the ass for the Spanish one. But the best tales of heroism end with martyrdom, and Benkos Biohó, liberator of slaves, King of Handguns, and idol for generations, was duped into peace by the governor of Cartagena. In 1621, after walking ignorantly carefree through the city streets, Benkos was caught, hung and quartered. Today his statue stands in the San Basilio de Palenque main square, his back to Cartagena and his unshackled arms stretching out towards the west coast of Africa.
But his memory is strong, and San Basilio today is an economically depressed but culturally enriched town of about 3,000, most of them direct descendants of slaves brought to Colombia from Angola and Congo. Benkos selected the area for its defensibility and others found it by following maps woven into women’s hair; we drive the sixty kilometers in a rental car, stopping for two legitimate toll booths and, after an unplanned diversion into a roadside village, three illegitimate ones, set up by entrepreneurial youths stringing ribbon across the road. Eventually a large brown sign on the side of the highway directs travelers to San Basilio, along a long dirt road that ends in the village itself. We park in the main square and next to a church with a stained glass window depicting not only a historically inaccurate and ironically white Jesus, but one who looks as if he’s been conjured up by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Of two men lounging under a gazebo and out of the sun, Cassiani de Cassiani is the quicker to his feet and far more amiable, and though he speaks only Spanish and Palenquero (a Creole mix of Bantu, Spanish, and maybe some Portuguese), he assures us he has an English-speaking friend. We hire Cassiani as our guide for the day, and after picking up Alberto, whose “English” consists of a few recognizable words ineffectually mixed in with other sounds, Cassiani takes us on a walking tour and oral history of San Basilio.
Aside from the aforementioned Benkos Biohó and the foundations of the Palenque, Cassiani shows us the creek where the women still wash clothes and talk; shares that polygamy is practiced and that he has three wives; tells us of the importance of music in both current affairs (he is dancing or singing more often than he is not) and the role it played in defending the city in the early years; and describes the intense and lengthy funeral ritual of the Palenque. The women play an elaborate role in the ceremony, called Lumbalú, to include mandatory crying, singing, and – here’s where the translation gets tricky – eating. Of the dead. Though this generally isn’t much of a shock for me – I have long been attracted to the sky burial practices of some Tibetan Buddhists and my recent discovery of the Zoroastrian’s Tower of Silence (#161 of 422 things to do in Mumbai!) has only added to my long list of places to see – the casual nature with which Cassiani and Alberto assert that they may have dined on their gammy is a bit disconcerting.
“Do you mean cannibalism?,” I ask.
“No, (something in Spanish and/or Palenquero).” Both Cassiani and Alberto are animated in their denial that they are cannibals, and I quickly realize that this might be an awfully inconsiderate accusation to make towards someone you’ve just met, in their own homes, who are being so kind as to show you around their village. I try to clarify.
“Tu comes los muertos, o tu comes con los meurtos?”
I will admit my Spanish is, to be overly generous, flawed, but we leave our initial meeting with Cassiani under the distinct impression that, at one time at least, eating mami- and papi-bits was a way to both honor and communicate with dead family members. Internet research does not support that the Palenque are cannibals or ever adopted the practice, but nor does it say they are not cannibals. And though “cannibal” seems a bit harsh, the word itself actually comes from the Spanish word caribal, in that the Spanish believed that the Caribs of the West Indies perhaps, occasionally, ate one another.
We make our last stop of the day at the home of Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, just on the east side of a barrio-dividing line none of us can see and at the site of the future police station (San Basilio does not now nor has it ever had a police force, and disputes are resolved by village elders). Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, master of the tabla, apparent novice on the marimbula, and Palenque goodwill ambassador, sits in his back yard, shirtless but with an impressive silver award hanging around his neck and a smile as bright. He lists the countries he’s been to, all of which invited him to play and to sing, and then does the same for us. It is mesmerizing, in part because we are witnessing something so foreign, in part because we have been rewarded for taking a chance without preparation, and in part, no doubt, simply because we are here.
Cartagena in Pictures
Bogota in Pictures
Cheez Doodles
A Picture May be “Worth a Thousand Words”, but it’s Rarely Clear in the Fog of War
Please see the original posted at Small Wars Journal, October 13, 2015; by Jay Morse and Prof. Geoff Corn.
It is a tragic inevitability of war that innocent civilians often pay a price for the chaos of battle, and the unfortunate loss of life resulting from Saturday’s destruction of a hospital in Kunduz should sadden us all. There may have been a time in history when massive civilian casualties were considered a tolerable consequence of armed conflict, but international law today demands a respect for human life that is fundamentally incompatible with any concept of “total war.” We should be neither surprised nor dismayed that the international response to this tragedy has been so intense. However, we should also be careful not to confuse sympathy for the victims of this incident with an assumption that the attack was in violation of international law. Human error and the proverbial “fog of war” will always create a risk of unintended consequences, and the law that regulates war also recognizes that no military force can ever guarantee error-free warfare.
Our military is without question the most professional and well-equipped force in the world. However, while both our weapons systems and our laws have progressed, the reality is that even the very best amongst the profession of arms can only hope to mitigate the risk of civilian casualties on today’s battlefield. It is unrealistic to expect a force to guarantee attack execution perfection, and the unfortunate casualties resulting from the destruction of the hospital in Afghanistan serves as powerful reminder of this certainty.
It is important to pause and mourn the loss of life, as it is important to conduct a thorough investigation in an effort to prevent similar events from happening in the future. But it is just as important to ensure that American pilots are not automatically branded as “war criminals” without understanding the law and how it applies. Some of the international reaction to Kunduz symbolizes the risk that emotion will adversely affect proper legal critique of military operations. Assessing compliance with the requirements of the international laws of war, or humanitarian law, is distorted by the tendency to engage in “consequence based” analysis: civilians died, therefore, as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) President Meinie Nicolai asserts, the attack constitutes a “grave violation of international humanitarian law.” Her statement is both premature and legally misleading. Tragic images of civilian suffering naturally paints a legally troubling picture, but a force’s compliance with international law must be judged upon an accurate understanding of the law, focused on the pre-attack situation – not on post-attack effects.
There should be no debate as to what law applied to regulate the Kunduz attack decisions. While international humanitarian law was developed primarily to regulate war between states, there are core rules that regulate all conflicts, including those against non-state organized armed groups, such as the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. Forces engaged in these hybrid conflicts are bound by certain fundamental international legal obligations: to limit deliberate attacks only to “military objectives” (a legitimate military target); to take all feasible precautions to mitigate the risk to civilians resulting from those attacks; and to forego any attack on a lawful military target when the anticipated civilian casualties would significantly outweigh the anticipated military advantage to be gained from the attack (the so-called “proportionality” rule). In addition to these general obligations, one rule seems particularly relevant to the bombing in Kunduz: the extensive protection afforded to hospitals.
Though no object in the battle-space enjoys more legal protection, a hospital is not completely immune from being lawfully attacked, despite an MSF spokesperson’s assertion that “bombing a fully functioning hospital can never be justified.” International law prohibits attacking hospitals so long as they are not being used by the enemy in a manner inconsistent with their exclusive medical and humanitarian function. Even when a commander has intelligence indicating misuse, humanitarian law requires that the commander, normally through an intermediary like the International Committee of the Red Cross, issue a demand to the enemy that he terminate his misuse of the hospital before any attack may be lawfully conducted. The only exception to this requirement is when friendly forces are actually under fire from a hospital and have no alternative other than to respond with force.
Any attack on a hospital will automatically trigger intense scrutiny by U.S. commanders, but it is invalid to immediately draw a conclusion that the law must have been violated simply because a hospital was hit. Too many variables need to be assessed. If the hospital was intentionally targeted, an investigation must determine whether notice of the hospital’s status was conveyed to U.S. forces; if the notice was properly integrated into the planning process; if there were indications that the hospital was being used improperly; if a warning was issued by U.S. forces; and whether the hospital was the actual intended target or was rather the result of an attack on another target nearby. If the attack was directed against a nearby target, then an investigation should determine if U.S. forces took feasible precautions to mitigate the risk to the hospital. The commander should have assessed whether attacking a nearby target would risk damaging the hospital; what was the anticipated level of damage; and how it compared to the anticipated benefit of the attack. Finally, and probably most likely in the bombing at Kunduz, an investigation should determine whether the attack on the hospital was the result of human or technical error, and if so, whether that error was reasonable under the circumstances.
Answering these complex questions requires a thorough investigation that recreates the situation that confronted the U.S. commanders and pilots who executed this mission. Nonetheless, President Meinie Nicolai almost immediately condemned the attack as a “grave violation” of international humanitarian law. Her reaction – that because a hospital was attacked, it must be a violation of international law – is an unfortunate outgrowth of the incorrect assumption that modern professional militaries are capable of executing error-free operations. This assumption is completely at odds with the reality of warfare, no matter how “precision” our weapons. Furthermore, even President Nicolai’s assertion that the U.S. committed a “grave violation” – the most serious category of war crimes – is legally impossible, as a grave breach may occur only during an international armed conflict – a conflict between states. Whether President Nicolai is misinformed or simply misspoke, her statements illuminate the gross misunderstanding the public has of the laws as they apply to armed conflict.
Nations have attempted to set rules for war for surely as long as there has been warfare itself, and continuing efforts to both improve and implement the law are essential to advancing the aspirations that always motivated these rules: to strike a balance between the need to allow states to wage war while limiting, as much as possible, the inevitable human suffering produced by conflict. Condemnation of attacks based purely on results not only distorts this balance, but applies the law erroneously and sets a dangerous precedence. Of course, none of this means mean that U.S. military personnel operate with impunity, and President Obama’s order to conduct a thorough investigation is correct (though certainly redundant). There is a robust and clear body of law that proscribes actions while simultaneously giving military personnel a structure to determine not only what is a legitimate target, but also, just as importantly, when and how you can attack that target. If an investigation concludes that the law was violated, accountability for that violation is essential. And not to assuage international public opinion, but to reinforce the essential link between complying with international humanitarian law and legitimately claiming status as a professional armed force. The reality is that armed forces of the United States are regularly trained on whom and what constitutes a legitimate target. The personnel involved in the targeting process not only understand the law, but also the strategic and political implications of attacking a typically civilian facility such as a hospital. Only a comprehensive investigation will reveal whether the attack was the result of human or technical error, or perhaps even (though highly unlikely) malicious intent; only this determination will indicate whether there was in fact a violation of the law.
The bombing of the hospital in Kunduz certainly aggravates the tragedies of more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, and will only make US efforts to stem ISIS and a resurgent Taliban that much more difficult. But the fact remains that war today is, as it has always been, a brutal endeavor, and no matter how precise our weapons or thorough our analysis, human error will lead to tragedy. This doesn’t make it a war crime.
Jay Morse is retired US Army lieutenant colonel and is a partner in the law firm of Corn, Jensen & Morse. He can be reached at jaymorse.org or jay.morse@cornjensenmorse.com.
Geoffrey Corn is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel and is a Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas. He can be reached at gcorn@stcl.edu.
Ride Along with KCFD
Fire Station, Kern County, 1:39 am. The fluorescent light above my single bed flashes on, accompanied by an audible alarm that has obviously been finely-calibrated to wake the sleeping without producing a minor heart attack; a Goldilocks of sirens. The headboard speaker streams the dispatcher’s voice, relaying the relevant station number. I quickly sit up in bed. Tom[*], my shift captain, has assured me that I will hear people running if the call is for a fire, shuffling if it is for something else. I hear nothing. I slip on pants, shoes and a shirt, grab my notebook, and unwisely make a stop in the bathroom on the way to the apparatus bay (the garage). I climb into my designated spot in the cab of the engine to find everyone – fireman, engineer, and captain – waiting for me. There is no shame like letting down a team, doubly so when you are the new guy and trebly when you are allowed to even be there in the first place purely out of their generosity. As I place my headset over my ears, Tom hangs his back up and, smiling, runs his hand across his throat to signal the universal sign for “canceled.” I have dodged my punishment of buying ice cream – penance for missing a call – but the message is received. On just the second call of my shift, my goal of staying out of the way has crystallized: Do not be a liability.
I am on a two-day ride-along with the Kern County Fire Department in the Bakersfield metro area, California’s ninth biggest city and perhaps its most maligned: the city has been labeled the most polluted, one of the worst places to live, and the least literate city in America (which means no one is going to read this blog). It is hot, dusty, far-flung and suffers from both high rates of poverty and crime, so Kern County is as good a place as any to spend thirty-six hours with one of America’s most respected and, in retrospect, inaccurately named professionals: firefighters.
The station fronts a wide street in the Bakersfield suburbs and is one of the county’s newest, a modest and comfortable building that sleeps ten firefighters and a battalion chief. There is a workout room, a large dining room table, and a kitchen big enough to cook meals for everyone. The station operates in three shifts – A, B, and C – with each shift working three rotations of forty-eight hours on and forty-eight hours off, followed by eight days of recovery. Each shift has two crews of three men: a fireman, an engineer, and a shift captain, with corresponding rank and responsibilities indicated, as one firefighter tells me, by the fact that “the captain is always furthest from the poop”. One crew operates the “engine,” a Pierce Quantum pumper, and the other operates the “truck,” a Pierce Dash 100’ aerial platform, the actualization of your first-grade what do you want to be when you grow up homework assignment. Except this one costs a million dollars.
The truck crew responds to fires and car crashes, the engine crew to those and everything else as well. Each bedroom has a toggle switch on the wall that alerts the relevant crew when an emergency call comes in, and there is an alarm and a loud speaker in the main area of the station as well. When the crews aren’t in bed asleep, studying, or doing maintenance, they are together watching television or cooking, playing games for dish-duty, or generally acting how I imagine brothers act if they have to be around each other for forty-eight hours. I quickly gather that the single most important quality required to be a successful firefighter is an ability to get along well with others.
8:20 p.m., possible structure fire. Both shifts – the engine and the truck crews – are fully engrossed in the Dodger game, but at the sound of the alarm everyone is up and moving. Tom goes first to a fax machine and then to a map on the wall where the station’s section of metro-Bakersfield is divided by number and quadrant, with street names visible and a little red dot for every fire hydrant in the area. Tom and his engineer (the driver), a man with an infectious smile, a mop of curly, flaming red hair, and ironically surnamed “Hernandez,” match the address on the report to the closest cross streets on the map, and they head for the trucks. Though Tom suspects this call is just an air conditioning unit on the blink, potential fires require all hands, and both truck and engine are out the giant bay doors, lights flashing and sirens blaring, in less than two minutes. We reach the house minutes later to find a pajamaed family gathered on the driveway. Tom gets information from the matriarch, and one crew checks the outside of the house while the other checks the inside, but it’s all anti-climactic. Nelson, a hulk of a man but also the fireman – thusly closest to the poop – is selected to squeeze himself into a tiny crawl space about the size of a pizza box and up into the attic where he sees no evidence of fire. The A/C unit motor is indeed burned out (which is surely a legitimate emergency in Bakersfield), so they cut the power to the unit and return to the station, the entire process, from alarm back to the Dodger game, lasting less than fifteen minutes.
It is easy to glorify firefighters. Their mission and very existence is to end the danger in your life. They rescue stranded cats from trees, smile placidly while your elementary school-aged children wipe their snot-covered hands all over their spotless equipment, help old ladies cross the street. Occasionally, to the shame of prematurely big-bellied men and the delight of their wives, they might pose shirtless for calendars, probably while petting a sickeningly cute puppy. No one calls the firefighters on their neighbors, you never see secret video of them beating up minorities, and their first words to you are never “can I see some identification?” In the battle for the citizenry’s hearts and minds between cops and firefighters, it is not a fair fight.
They have much in common with the military. Aside from the clear responsibility to get along well with others, a firefighter needs to be personally responsible while being subservient to the team. He[†] must both appreciate the importance of a command structure and understand his place within the organization (there is irony in the fact that our democracy’s most respected institutions are decidedly non-democratic). He must maintain his composure under adversity and discomfort. He must always be ready – no long showers or a leisurely perusal of The Atlantic while sitting on the can. There is similarity in the friendly ribbing of one another, commonly used to address deficiencies without creating those awkward confrontational moments of publicly embarrassing a guy by telling him he is completely jacked up (for example, “Vino, are you dressed for a barbeque?,” or “Loudon, nice of you to join us this morning. Did you sleep OK?”). And there are long stretches of the mundane, followed by bursts of activity and trauma, the stress dealt with later in the familiar manner of minimizing reality or making light of the grotesque. As an outsider, it is uncomfortable to hear a soldier talk nonchalantly about shooting someone, or to hear a firefighter talk about seeing a kid injured in a traffic accident (at least one firefighter casually spoke of being called to a scene to find his pregnant wife and three-year old child as the victims). The truth is that a firefighter on duty can have a lot of idle time, but he is always there when you need him. And a lot of people seem to need him.
6:30 a.m., medical assist, elderly woman confused. REM cycles should not be interrupted, and after the 2 a.m. false alarm and subsequent difficulty returning to sleep, this alarm has me confused as well. I almost get clipped by an oncoming school bus as I step out of the engine. Calls at this time of the morning are often dead bodies, found when a spouse wakes up to discover the other spouse has died during the night. Instead, two generations of women are there to meet the crew as they walk through the door of the house. Though it is 6:35 a.m., everyone looks as if they’ve been up and ready for hours. Or all night. An elderly woman, the grandmother and the third generation, is reclined on an armchair, purse on her lap and with an oxygen bottle next to her piping air into her nose. Her daughter, granddaughter and one other woman hover nearby. Every few minutes, the granddaughter cracks open the garage door to ask indecipherable questions into the dark. The fireman, Vino, a big man but steady and soft spoken, takes a knee in front of the grandmother and attaches a pulse oximeter to her finger tip. He asks his standard battery of questions: what year is it, who is the president, how old are you. The elderly woman answers “forty-five.” Her daughter, face funereal and clenched arms folded high on her chest, whispers, “sixty-five.”
This is a common theme throughout the sixteen or so emergency calls over the thirty-six hour period. Multiple generations in a modest home, usually clean and well-kept, though some are nicer than others and a few are downright slovenly. An elderly parent is confused, or silent, or simply displaying abnormal behavior. The adult child scolds the parent for not answering the fireman’s questions, or answers the questions for the fireman before the adult gets a chance to, or simply waits patiently in the background until a fireman asks “what hospital do you want to go to?” An ambulance shows up, an EMT straps the patient down, gives a silent head-nod to the captain assenting to patient transfer, and the firemen leave. But I want answers. I want to know why the family is up and ready to go at 6:30 am; why grandma, fully dressed, has her purse in her lap, clutched with both hands. I want to know what wizard and keeper of family secrets lurks in a pitch-black garage and refuses to show his face, or why martini glasses are scattered on the counter. I want to ask about the nimbussed picture of Jesus Christ on the wall that looks more than passingly like skinny Matthew McConaughey. But the firemen don’t care. Not only is it not their job, it is not their place to care, or to judge. Their job is to administer aid, wait for the ambulance, transfer the patient, go home. Repeat.
9:12 a.m., medical assist, woman complaining of stomach pain. The engine arrives at the home four minutes after the alarm sounded at the station, and as we approach Tom says “we’ve been here before.” Repeat customers tend to be either old or drug users, and this woman appears to be both. She lives in her garage on a filthy pull-out couch, with old food on makeshift counters and dirty dishes piled up in a sink. Her son is indifferent, and answers most of the questions for his mom, who is in the fetal position on the bed and groaning softly. She is able to tell Tom her birth year, and he glances over at me with raised eyebrows, acknowledgement of the effects of drugs. The woman is 45, the same age as both Tom and me. She looks like she could be 70. There are scars and pockmarks on her arms and back near her armpits, but Tom hesitates when I ask if she is a drug user. She could be suffering from some sort of withdrawal, and the 911 call might be for legitimate pain. But it might also be for a free trip to the hospital, or an attempt to get more drugs.
“There’s no consequence to overdosing or to calling 911,” Tom says. “So why change your behavior?” Easy to judge Tom as callous. He joined to fight fires and to save people, though those types of calls seem to be in the minority. Of sixteen calls, just two are for fires and both are essentially false alarms. Of the remaining fourteen, there are elderly who are confused and disoriented with signs of stroke, but more often than not it appeared that a 911 call was unnecessary – or at least the presence of firefighters was gratuitous. The firefighters are on the scene within seconds and typically leave as soon as the ambulance and paramedics show up and take over. They never stayed longer than fifteen minutes at any site. A trip to the emergency room in an ambulance won’t get the patient in to see a doctor any quicker than driving there themselves, and EMTs who responded were uniformly quick to point out that there was a two-hour wait at the hospitals of choice. The fact is that of 40,000 calls in Kern County in 2012, just 3300 were for fires – that’s less than 8%.
Is this a bad thing? Worthy of discussion? Or simply the normal cost of doing business in a well-functioning and caring public-welfare system, a sign of progress rather than decline. Technology has made life easier in vastly more ways than it has made it more difficult. It is reflexive – and perhaps correct – to say that it has also made us less resourceful and less capable of taking care of ourselves. Why remember directions when my GPS gets me home? Why know calculus when my computer calculates for me? Why read about the Kennedy assassination when I can just watch a movie? Why, for that matter, drive to the hospital when my insurance company tells me to call 911? But there is always an adverse, and that doesn’t change. In one of the last scenes in No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell visits Ellis, an elderly friend of his father and a wheelchair-bound sage. Ed Tom is looking for sympathy, someone to tell him that he’s right to be disappointed in his inability to stem the downward spiral of America, but Ellis is having none of it: “What you got ain’t nothin’ new.”
12:14 p.m., medical assist, elderly man fell in the shower. The address is nearby, and we arrive two minutes after the alarm. An on-site nurse meets us at the door with a curt “Bill fell in the shower again.” Bill is seventy-one and has dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and we find him sitting awkwardly on his tiled bathroom floor, naked and disoriented, one leg folded under him. His face is bloody, with a bump the size of a half-grapefruit on one side of his head and a blood-red week old bruise on the opposite side of his face. Maria, his caregiver, says this is the third time he’s fallen in recent weeks, and points to a hole in the wall near the toilet as evidence. Louden calmly suggests that perhaps the tile is a bit slippery, and a non-slip mat might be a good investment. Nelson – again, closest to the poop, though this time it is for real – asks Maria if she has some towels to clean the blood and feces from Bill’s face and legs. But all the towels are in the wash, and Maria doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to retrieve them, so Louden calmly asks if he might pull them from the washing machine himself. Nelson asks Bill his age (“I AM FORTY-TWO!”), if he might be able to stand on his own (“WHAT?”), and if he wants to go to the hospital (“HELL NO!”). Maria shakes her head and says, “Bill does what Bill wants to do.”
There is despair, either real or perceived, in every 911 call. People might not always call for genuine emergencies, but neither do they call to make conversation. Emergency calls are made because people panic, because they don’t know what else to do, because there is nothing else they can do. Maybe they call because it is easy. Sometimes this appears to be the most obvious answer, but the firefighters are uniformly kind and respectful. Both crews interact with the elderly and the infirm; with likely drug users; with insensitive parents and children. They never raise their voices, never show frustration or impatience, are never condescending. The most common sentence is we’re going to get you fixed up. Vino politely asks a twenty-eight year old why she took a bottle of pills; Tom asks after an old man who was the catalyst for an earlier 911 call; Nelson literally picks up an old man covered in shit and deposits him in his wheel chair so he can be safely moved into the shower and washed off. Perhaps it was to ensure he showed up at the hospital relatively clean. Perhaps it was to give him some dignity.
5:50 p.m., medical assist, elderly male not responding. As we return from a false alarm at Lowe’s home improvement store, the dispatcher reports a potential stroke victim. The man is eighty-four years old, and though he seems aware of his surroundings, he is completely non-responsive and refuses to answer any questions. He sits in his boxers, tall in a chair, as his daughter speaks to him sternly; clearly there’s a history of him not doing what she wants him to do. The scolding is out of love and frustration. Joe, the old man, has an air of defiance, a man who knows his days are numbered but would prefer to do his best to not give one shit about it. His daughter says he built all the cars in the garage, and there are trophies testifying to his proficiency. The EMTs arrive and take over, asking Joe to smile – a simple test to screen for a cerebrovascular accident – but Joe is stone-faced. The EMT, a black kid and by far the youngest of the techs over the last two days, shows the first impatience I’ve seen from any of the first responders, and he elevates slightly his aggressiveness with each “smile for me Joe. CAN YOU SMILE BIG FOR ME?” Though his youth might explain his impatience, it might also have something to do with the confederate flag draped over a table at the entrance to the house.
Is there a “too old”? There is no denying that medical advances have helped the human condition, both in quantity and quality. In 1900, the life expectancy of an American was forty-seven years; in 2000 it was seventy-seven. Though the increase has as much to do with shrinking infant mortality rates (a decrease from 100 deaths per 1,000 live births to 6.9) as it does with quality care of the elderly, using a length-of-life metric to measure the luminosity of our society’s enlightenment avoids the philosophical question of what life is worth preserving. One-hundred-year-old Don Pellman can run one hundred meters in twenty-seven seconds, long jump six feet and pole vault three, but Socrates (or perhaps a generous Plato) will have you believe that only the examined life is worth living.
Perhaps age should have nothing to do with it. Maybe Joe had a legitimate stroke. Or maybe his rheumatic hands could no longer turn a wrench, and his loving daughter and stacks of trophies are testament enough to his presence here on our earth.
A neighbor shuffles up the driveway and peers into the living room; she is an older woman with thick glasses and a German accent. She wears slippers and a house robe with some sort of medical device in her pocket, and asks Tom if everything is OK. He tells her that she should talk to one of the family members, but that he thinks Joe will be all right.
She slowly looks at Tom, then at Joe, then back at Tom again. “It’s tough,” she says, “being old.”
[*] All names have been changed.
[†] Of 465 firefighters in the Kern County Fire Department, two are female.