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.
East of Wendover, North of Salton Sea
Lost and Found
Four Weeks in Bogotá (y Todovía Tengo mi Cabeza).
Bogotá sits on a high plain at 8,660 feet, her more than eight million inhabitants mashed up against the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range and sprawling west to the very limits of the Savannah of Bogotá. The city is huge – one of the twenty-five biggest in the world and the fastest growing in Latin America – and I can see much of it from my fourth floor studio apartment in the Chapinero Alto neighborhood. I have come here both to try to learn Spanish and to spend a few months transitioning from twenty-two years of government service into a new life in the civilian world; Bogotá serving as an air lock, keeping the figurative bad air from my past where it belongs and letting me breath something new and untainted. Unfortunately, the literal air at more than a mile and half high is thin and, along Septima (7th Avenue), one of Bogotá’s main north-south arteries, throat-achingly dirty. The city has a small army of exhaust-spewing buses and a huge one of tiny yellow Hyundai taxis that yield to no one, and they seem to be on the road twenty-four hours a day.
Every American guide book and website profess to Bogotá’s decreased crime rate since the 1990’s, but also warn of a continued reputation for violence. As such I’ve restricted my travel to the neighborhoods between la Candelaria – Bogotá’s original pueblo and city center – and the tower-apartmented neighborhoods of the north side of town, where the young and upwardly mobile reside. Regardless, I came to Colombia prepared for the worst, and my threat mitigation involves carrying small amounts of cash; making little eye contact; growing an intimidating beard complete with a Louisiana-shaped bald spot; and adopting a feigned accent where I speak Spanish quickly, hoping to thwart would-be muggers by leading them to believe I am not a gringo but rather an immigrant from some far off land where the Spanish is so pure and golden it is spoken at a pace unintelligible to mere Colombianos. I mentally prepare for my attackers both with imaginary action (where I swiftly disarm them, knocking them out with an elbow to the face and then gently lowering them to the ground, teaching them a lesson in both the power of violence and kindness) and imaginary words (“You want my wallet? Well guess what. I don’t carry a wallet. I carry a money clip. So go fuck off”). But the truth is that I have never felt threatened or uncomfortable, and Rollos (a native of Bogotá [i]) are disarmingly kind and patient.
I spend my first days in the Hotel B3 in the Virrey neighborhood, and over the weekend the neighboring eponymous park fills with runners, leashless dogs of all sizes, a small troupe of teenage acrobats treating a slack line like it’s a trampoline, athletes using the two or three open-air gyms, and the thick, sweet tinge of marijuana. I have never smoked it, but even I can tell what the good stuff smells like. I try to run the footpath, but the altitude sears my lungs, so I instead spend the mornings drinking coffee with the crowd and listening to a gypsy band compete for our attention with an impressively muscular and immaculately dressed transvestite playing a wicked Spanish guitar.
My home for the rest of the month is in the hilly, middle-class, bohemian and gay (both in emotion and sexual orientation) neighborhood of Chapinero Alto, a collection of older two-storey row houses and newer apartment buildings. This city is crowded but peppered with parks, and every inch of space is used. Two blocks from my apartment is Parque Portugal (which I quickly label “Parque Marijuana,” or, after my Spanish improves, “Parque Lleno de Mierda de Perro”) and it is never empty. The benches along the solo winding path host musicians, beer-drinkers, and the ubiquitous necking college students intertwined so tightly they look like a Picasso. A concrete court seems to be used for basketball only early on Sunday mornings; the remainder of the time it is used for fútbol sala by kids and dads; by grimy construction workers on lunch break, uniformly attired in boots, denim jeans and t-shirts, orange safety-helmets lined up neatly on a slope; or by a four-on-four night league where the shoe of choice is a dirty Chuck Taylor and the athletes are so skilled it seems to me that the small, deflated ball might be glued to their feet. Colombianos might be Catholic but their religion is fútbol, and a Colombia national team jersey is the single most popular article of clothing, particularly on game days, when the city is riotous with the yellow uniform (and if fútbol is their religion, tejo is their vice, a Colobmian cultural version of bowling. Except with gunpowder and far more beer and other drunk people standing near your target. Did I mention gunpowder?).
On Sundays the main roads of Bogotá shut down to vehicle traffic for ciclovia, and hundreds of thousands of residents walk, run, and ride (relatively) smog-free. It has been going on since 1974, started as a way to open more roads for pedestrians and bicyclists, and if you take Septima from north to south, you can end up downtown in a modern-day bazaar replete with carnival games, junk vendors, food stands, chalk artists, llama rides, jugglers, cuy races, and street performers with skill levels from drunk to painful to huckster to needs work to spectacularly talented. Keep walking and end up in la Candelaria, home to the federal government, countless hostels, world-class graffiti, and the labyrinthine Botero Museum, a world so fat and joyous that even the graphic shooting of Pablo Escobar looks like it might have been kind of fun.
Four weeks is not enough for Bogotá; I want to know the city. After a lifetime of being a mere intruder into foreign territories, I want to feel like a local. I want a bartender to know me by name, I want to give secret directions to cab drivers that show my local knowledge, I want to sing with the nonstop chants and pounding drumbeats at a Milenarios game; to know the feeling of joy when the streets erupt after Colombia scores against Peru. I want to know the hangover cure for aguardiente, or where to find the best arepas for breakfast. Nor is four weeks enough to learn Spanish, and I think the rotating Andres-Manuel-Rafael trio of security guards in my apartment building has learned more of my language than I of theirs. I want to tell them how lovely are the days in Bogota, with their counterintuitive morning heat and afternoon chill. I want to tell the taxi drivers that the music is actually Aerosmith, not Guns and Roses, and that regardless, neither are my compañeros. I want to flesh out, in Spanish, this “American” thing, where apparently every Colombian calls themselves – nee, every resident of every country in North, Central and South America – an “American.” Though I may be a North American, and “gringo”, when non-epithetical, is fine by me, I am certainly not a United Statesian, and after four weeks of struggling to read signs, patiently waiting for a turn at the gym, asking for directions and generally feeling like an immigrant where you don’t speak the language but learn enough to know that you sound like a child, which frustratingly compels you to speak even less; after all of this I feel confident that I can adequately express what it means to be American.
[i] As opposed to “Costeños” from Cartagena, or “Paisas” from Medellin.
Cambodia in Pictures
Third Beach to Hoh River
We sit on giant driftwood bleachers in the morning sun, peanut butter and rice cakes in hand and the protruding cliff face of Taylor Point rising in the distance a mile in front of us, up from the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Third Beach, space and fog lazily obscuring the sea stacks of Giants Graveyard. I am on the Pacific Northwest Trail at the western edge of the Olympic National Park at my older sister’s urging, and though she intends a three-day hike from Third Beach to the Hoh River to be bonding for her and her oldest son, it is quiet therapy for me, an opportunity to perhaps accomplish something visceral and palpable after fifteen months of spinning my cubicled professional wheels.
We drove up from Reno the day prior, my sister, oldest niece, and oldest nephew, leaving hours too late but not feeling particularly pressed, as I have embraced my pending retirement. Or am trying to. Shifting, on a dime, from twenty years of Army service and a largely feigned laissez faire commitment to schedule to actually living The Attitude of Meh is no simple task. I’ve started the transition by not shaving, committing (or not. Whatever!) to developing a personal beard style I call “Spanish Moss,” which looks exactly like you think it might. So we leave a few hours late? Not to worry. We turn a ten-hour drive into a twelve-hour one and, still well shy of our start point, are consoled with an extended trip to a Portland-area Wal-Mart to pick up last minute supplies. We overnight at the Lewis and Clark State Park near Winlock, Washington, hours short of our target but exposed to a view of the indomitable Mount St. Helens to the north. The volcano looms large both in front of us and in my older sister’s and my memory. Though it is recently active, it most spectacularly erupted in May of 1980, exactly a month before my sister’s eleventh birthday and a year before our mother’s third divorce and our repatriation to Nevada. We lived in northwest Washington when the mountain blew, winds carrying volcanic ash the 250 miles north to our small town of Sedro Woolley and depositing it on our family’s cream-colored Ford Galaxy 500. The car had a big back seat and a wide, gently sloping rear window with an apartment-sized shelf above the seat that served naturally as a bed, fort, or escape pod for any road trip of longer than an hour.
We sit around the campfire, old-growth Douglas Firs towering over us, my sister and my niece and nephew, the latter two now far more adult than child so they can share in the jokes as we talk about our lives as kids. Wistful and meandering is the conversation chain that flows around family and a campfire; a late morning start and a long drive turning from a discussion on volcanoes and ash to a Galaxy 500 and rear windows and road trips to remember that time a storm blew your bedroom windows out in the middle of the night and there was glass all over your bed and mom and dad couldn’t find you? Though nature can be powerful, the supernatural is inexplicable and whether through the banality of chance or the magic of fortune, a storm neither sucked me out of second-floor windows nor peppered me with glass shards, as I was snug asleep at the foot of my sister’s bed in the next room, a place I frequently went as a child, driven there by nightmares.
We get up early the next morning and pack like professionals, driving three more hours through the Scrabbler’s-delight towns of Hoquiam and Quinault and Queets; stopping for coffee at one of the Northwest’s ubiquitous drive-thru coffee bars; then north along the 101 and certainly one of the prettiest stretches of road in America. We just make our pre-arranged pick-up time at the Oil City Road trailhead. Though most people hike from the Hoh River north, we’re doing it in the reverse, and Seth from Forks has agreed to pick us up here and drop us off an hour north at the Third Beach trailhead. Seth is a college student in Boise, but lives here in Forks, and though he appears to be about twenty, the interior of his truck, with its coffee mugs and backpacks and work gloves and climbing gear, gives the impression that he’s already living a full life. He shares his local knowledge, elating my sister with the good news that the coastal black bears are timid (“the inland bears are another story”); titillating her with the insider information that the town of Forks, though the literary locus for Twilight, was simply copied and reproduced en masse in British Columbia for the film because it “was cheaper and Kristen Stewart would have been bored out of her mind if she had to live here for three months” (she would have been); and entertaining all of us by calling Aberdeen, home of Kurt Cobain, may he rest in peace, “Methlaberdeen.”
Seth drops us at the start of a canopied trail leading a mile and a half from a parking lot down through the Hoh River Rainforest, and after passively-aggressively-unsuccessfully suggesting that my sister, niece, and nephew remove their rain gear (“it’s not raining, and you’ll get hypothermia”), we head for the beach. Google reviews of this hike promise ankle-deep mud; knee-deep and fast-water river crossings; boulder-scrambling that requires properly timing the tide; and a trail that is “more obstacle course than hike.” So, after a peanut butter and rice cake fueling, and a second passive-aggressive-unsuccessful rain gear removal suggestion, we begin. I have nominally prepped for the hike, my only concern with negotiating boulders around a blind corner, so I naturally assume that the first stop – Taylor Point – is where we must cross boulders only during the outgoing tide. It is not. It is, rather, the impetus for the first of our two “group discussions.”
Not having children is both boon and bane. I am free to come and go as I please, and am not burdened with the demands of responsibility for a living, breathing, DNA-sharing thing. I need not exert the inefficiencies of, to be blunt, caring. This, of course, is theory; in practice I would be perpetually panic-stricken if I were a parent. A scraped-knee would likely induce in me barely concealable tears and a minor case of hyperventilation. My niece and nephew are now 17 and 19, but it is hard to look at them in any manner other than as objects to be hurled wide-eyed and giggling into the air or as face-painted children ready for an “Uncle Jay Day”, something I surely looked forward to more than they did. So as I venture fifty yards or so onto the boulders around Taylor Point, and realize that I cannot see anything but cliffs and more rocks and an incoming tide and that this might cause some problems for my traveling companions, I, as my older sister might say, lose my shit. I look back at my sister gingerly negotiating the boulders and my niece absorbed in her vain search for tide pool creatures, and say “turn around.” My sister freezes, pauses, looks at me, then asks, “turn around?”
I do not like feeling anything but fully in control, and though I am confident that no wave foreseeable could possibly shake me from my perch, even the potential danger of some harm coming to those I see – even erroneously – as ones in need of protection is uncomfortable. So when my sister asks, “turn around?”, it triggers in me something instinctual.
“TURN THE FUCK AROUND.” This is a gross, and, in hindsight, hilarious overreaction, but the self-imposed burdens of leadership are significant and spontaneous, and turnthefuckaround seemed like a pretty good thing to say. My sister moves, quickly. My niece is cooly unconcerned, and my nephew chooses this moment to remove his raingear. But we scramble back across the boulders, our final few steps retracing the original, which were then on dry sand and are now in shin-deep water. The debrief is fairly quick. We agree that in return for moving quickly when there is a hint of urgency in my voice, I won’t swear anymore, which is a fairly reasonable concession on their part. The raingear, however, stays on.
The most dangerous stretches of the Third Beach to Hoh River trail are conspicuously marked by large, black and red circular discs affixed prominently on trees and next to an entry/exit point diverting you away from the beach, and danger, and into the rain forests of the Olympic National Park. They should not be ignored, at any cost, and heeding their warning, after climbing up or down wooden rung-missing ladders and rope assisted inclines, rewards you with silent marches on trails peppered with Pacific banana slugs, looking unmistakably like giant turds; through permanently damp, waist-high skunk cabbage, deer fern, and pick-your-berry (Salmon? Huckle? Black twin?); under soaring Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock. There are obstacles to be negotiated at every turn, cooperation required, and like a corporate sponsored team-building event, we are positively lifted by the time we make it to Toleak Point. Everything seems to converge here. Sea otters, permanently content on their backs, float with the current; Bald eagles projectile-shit from tree branches like expectorant, a county fair participant readying to launch a watermelon seed in reverse; sea lions cruise the channels between rock outcroppings, hunting fish and barking commands to each other like bloodhounds on a chase. It is easy to imagine life here hundreds of years ago, single plumes of campfire smoke rising from the tree line, soft-lit Thomas Kinkade landscapes unobstructed by the noise and tools and trappings of electricity and progress. We find a camping spot, luxuriant, just above the beach and the driftwood piles marking high tide. We hang rope to dry our gear and quickly make the camp ours, pitching our tents and taking forty-five minutes of collective effort and patience to start a fire. My niece and nephew are, literally, without complaint, and I am a bit ashamed that I find it moving. If we can’t start a fire, no biggie, but we did, and that’s pretty cool too.
We’re set up early enough to scour the beach, walking over a thick blanket of dried, shredded paper-like seaweed and finding, among other things, Styrofoam coolers, rope, nets, buoys, bags, and all things plastic. The ocean is an artist, a driftwood sculptor and a gem polisher, but she occasionally does her best Andres Serrano impression, vomiting on her shores the effluence of man far and near. My nephew finds a bleached skull, sans the jawbone but a radiator-like screen in the nasal cavity intact, and we spend twenty minutes debating what this belonged to. Is it a coyote or a wolf? An adolescent saber-toothed cat? A dog? Sea Lion seems badass – it’s a lion of the sea, after all – but I realize that Google will settle this debate and then, as quickly as we gained it, the knowledge will be gone. No need to retain it, the answer is always just a search engine away. I wonder what Google, for all its power, has done to the imagination of a boy.
We spend the night at Toleak Point and head out early the next morning, traversing beach, then rain forest, then beach again. We startle a raccoon and trace the solo steps of a deer, joined briefly by a larger, second set, then solo again as one set of tracks disappears in the woods to the left and another in the ocean to the right. Other than a slight mist the night prior, the weather holds out for three days. Freshwater creeks are shallow but adequate, and with our water filter we could have safely left all water bottles and Camelbacks at home and survived just fine. The warnings of mud and a fast river crossing are false, as the drought has reached the coast as well.
At Jackson Beach we climb down the vertical face using fifty feet of rope ladder, eat the remainder of our dehydrated food (Jamaican Jerk Chicken and Pad Thai) and have our second group discussion. This one concerns whether we stay our last night here, risking setting up camp at what may or may not be the high-water mark, or wait for the tide to go out and skirt the point, crossing what turns out to be the much-anticipated boulder field. The latter wins, and my sister and I kill time talking about life after the Army. I watch my niece and nephew walking in the sun and think about how one experiences life and risk and adversity and beauty relevant to our age. This trip as a twenty-year-old, in possession of a healthy ego and an unearned sense of optimism, would have been a significantly different experience than that of a forty-four-year-old in transition. Articulating the risk of hypothermia from wearing raingear when it’s not raining, for example, is such a pedantic thing to say, but life is easier when someone is there to protect you, no?
The tide starts to go out, so we pack up and start our trip around the last corner, hesitant, not knowing what is on the other side or how far we have to go. But it opens up after a few hundred yards, the beach covered in giant driftwood logs like dropped matchsticks and the flats reflecting the setting sun and the most extraordinary view.
Exercise Day in Goma
The ruckus started far too early, particularly for a Sunday: shouting, pounding of feet, the four-in-the-morning din of remarkably motivated and cooperative (or conscripted) voices calling what sounded like military cadence. Such a Sunday morning racket on any military base in America, though unforgivable, would be no cause for alarm, but given Goma’s recent history of genocide, refugee thoroughfare, rebel hotbed, and volcanic eruption, it was moderately discomforting. The 12’ brick walls separating the street-facing rooms in the Hotel Ihusi from the road proved more echo chamber than noise buffer, so there was no avoiding it: there would be no more sleep this morning.
The Hotel Ihusi sits on the north shore of Lake Kivu; Rwanda to the east and the expanse of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west; the idyllic, mountain range-surrounded lake to the south and smack in the middle of what has been, more than once over the last two decades, pure hell. The roads in Goma are shit. But with the sister-city of Gisenyi just a few hundred meters to the right, and with it an international border with Rwanda (currently passively patrolled by the Uruguayan army), the road in front of the hotel is paved from the border to the airport about fifteen kilometers to the north, and this morning it appears that every male in Goma is running on it. Or doing push-ups. Or knee bends, or arm swings in a circle or break dancing moves or those Russian dancer jumping squat kicks that I thought only my college roommate Dave was capable of mimicking (unimportantly, he did the break dancing as well, usually shirtless and sometimes with a red paisley bandana on his head. Such were the early 90’s). The parade that was exercise day in Goma continued until well after sunrise, and every conceivable getup strolled by, velour track suits and dirty jeans with thread-bare t-shirts and tight bicycle shorts and button down long sleeve shirts with khakis and Arsenal soccer jerseys and flip flops and a man in a toga, and all this is promising, because despite genocide, refugee highways, rebellions and volcanoes, who exercises? Those who believe they have a tomorrow.
A significant percentage of those who have entered Goma over the last twenty years have likely done so on foot, their possessions on their backs unless even that space was dispossessed by a child incapable of walking, what family they still had to their front and rear. A chartered UN flight, despite leg-numbing vibrations from the twin propellers and an approach that seemed dangerously, dangerously close to hitting the shacks lining both sides of the airport runway, is a bit more sedate means to enter the Congo. After a safe landing and a quick bag check, I’m picked up by our advance party, here to teach criminal law and the Law of Armed Conflict to the DRC Armed Forces, and we drive into town. A brief deviation: In 1862 the Nevada mountain town of Virginia City had fewer than 4,000 residents; a year later, as word spread of the legendarily bountiful Comstock Lode, the population nearly quadrupled to more than 15,000. Though the term was not yet in use (and anyway, may have originated with a river tool used for gathering timber rather than the more accepted population explosion), Virginia City was the quintessential boomtown – a community that experiences rapid growth, both economically and demographically.
The problem with the impressions of outsiders is that they’re almost always wrong. Or at least uneducated and tainted by our own histories, or confirmation bias, that thing we do when we bend what we see in front of us to fit what we expect to see in front of us, but Main Street Goma conjures pictures of 1860’s Virginia City, so familiar to all northern Nevadans, with a freshly paved road and clapboard storefronts and an infusion of cash, industriousness, and opportunity. The Goma on the drive from the airport – to be fair, just one main road in a city that covers 30 square miles – is pure energy. Everyone is moving: moto taxis saturate the city, all drivers male and passengers female, riding exclusively side-saddle; the store fronts open for business; every conceivable product hawked from head-top baskets (fish, live chickens, fabric, mattresses), sold from the back of a cart (steel rebar, engines, concrete, mattresses), or transported via the marvelous chikudu, a wooden kick scooter progenitor apparently hewn solely from industrial strength materials, a Minotaur incarnate.
Goma, like Virginia City, has experienced a population explosion. The comparison is a bit hollow; the population of Virginia City quadrupled in a year due to those seeking their fortune, while Goma gained nearly a million Rwandan refugees in four days. In three months in 1994, the Hutu majority in neighboring Rwanda killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus; in July, after Tutsi rebels organized, they chased the same amount of Hutus – many of them the very same people who had just committed the mass atrocities – across the border and into the DRC, bursting Goma at the seams. The reasons for the genocide are too complex for even Occam’s razor to dissect (one man’s refugee is another’s genocidaire), but the fallout, along with inflation, corruption, a never-ending war, and a 2002 volcanic eruption that decimated nearly half the town, is that Goma hasn’t experienced much peace and quiet in the last twenty years. But it’s trying.
Today the Ihusi is just one of two hotels in a city of more than a million people where “westerners” ostensibly feel safe (as of this writing, the U.S. State Department “strongly recommends you avoid all travel to the city of Goma. . .”), and they can charge $70 to $200 – cash only, please – for one night’s stay in a country where the average annual income is $120. And people pay it. Pilots on a layover, American military, French NGOs. The Congolese are here too; a provincial governor for whom a line quickly forms to pay respect, women in bright Liputa prints, the non-hotel staff Congolese separated from everyone else not only by our obvious whiteness but by the relative grating of English or German or even French when it’s compared to the melodic lilt of Lingala. Like a musical could break out at any moment. Also, the Congolese consider fashion a national pastime. They have contests. And a club, the sapeurs, that has spawned a lexicon and a cultural phenomenon, and they dress like every day is go-to-Church Sunday. No cargo pockets here, thank you, and shorts are for little boys. The poverty of Africans juxtaposed with the care in which they take in dress is alarming, and the Congolese are downright rakish. To be fair, the Ihusi is fantastic. There’s a lakeside breakfast and a crystal clear swimming pool, clipped-wing, crazy-eyed Grey Crested cranes prowling the grounds, and decent beer and red clay tennis courts with an instructor, if you wish, and a wood-paneled room the hotel passes off as a gym where I met an Indian Special Forces officer who, despite a grin and his head wobbling culturally in agreement, seemed awfully pissed off that I stood him up at happy hour at le Chateau. But it’s a mirage, this Ihusi, and who knows what it portends for Goma. The city is still broke, aid money still runs the show (in 2014, only Afghanistan and Israel received more foreign aid than the DRC), corruption is still rampant, and the country’s borders were still set by King Leopold.
Outside the lobby of the Hotel Ihusi there’s this statue, a wood carving about four feet high of a tribal woman with bulging, blood shot eyes and protruding ribs and ears and a receding hair line and sharpened teeth bared in joy or wickedness. My initial instinct is that, though I find it captivating, it is what Congolese know tourists will buy, a caricature of the savage myth cultivated by Leopold and H.M. Stanley and every other colonialist, old school and neo alike, who have used Africa as a till. Racist. Like a Nazi propaganda poster or a black lawn jockey, things that never had a time or a place but rather needed human beingness to catch up to them. But then I think that even though exercise day in Goma means something, it is also worth noting that the foundation of just about every building and road in the city is volcanic rock, forged by violence.
