The guy’s wife was a conservative Catholic, as in no-birth-control conservative, and since the guy didn’t want any more he let Ocho talk him into letting him do an off-the-books, tabletop vasectomy.
“It’s a really simple operation,” Ocho said when I complained. “It’s good training. And it’s good for developing trust. If he lets me all up in his balls, that means we’ve developed a true cross-cultural bond.”
Snip-snip. The operation was a success, and it did build a weird kind of camaraderie. Ocho was always better at that team-building stuff than I was.
Meanwhile, our team was decomposing. Things finally blew up into open insubordination when Jefe canceled a patrol we were supposed to take with a Colombian unit. Intel had just raised the threat level in the region, and so Jefe didn’t want to risk the chance we’d get into a firefight.
“Fucking coward,” Ocho muttered when Jefe broke the news.
The room got still.
“You want to go back and rethink that shit, Ocho?” Jefe said calmly.
“I’m not asking to go on a raid. Just one piddly-dick patrol where there’s a least a chance, a little fucking chance . . .”
“This is a no-combat mission.”
“No shit.”
Ocho turned to me.
“When I joined the army,” he said, “they taught me how to fire a machine gun. And they said, Ocho, you motherfucker, you don’t fire this shit like Rambo, holding on to the trigger until the gun overheats and you burn the barrel like some asshole. You fire in three-to-five-second bursts. So hold the trigger down only as long as it takes to say ‘Die, commie, die!’ Well you know how many commies I’ve shot since then? None! I’ve shot terrorists. I’ve shot hajjis. But not a single goddamn commie. And guess what, Jefe? There’s commies probably a half-hour helicopter ride—”
“Ocho. You sound like a fucking SEAL. Shut up.”
“I like these guys. We’re friends, Jefe. We’re boys. I want to fight with them.” It sounded so sad, the way he said it.
“Combat eventually means casualties. This is a no-casualties mission.”
“If I die, high on coke, driving two hundred miles per hour, flipping a Maserati, that’s a good death. Dying fighting commies? That’s a badass death.”
“Yeah, well, your death isn’t worth anything here.”
Ocho threw up his hands.
“Americans die in Colombia, then Congress starts looking at all the money we’re spending here and wondering if it’s worth it. And we’re winning here, you understand?”
“They’re winning here,” Ocho said. “We’re not doing shit.”
“Exactly, you fucking idiot,” Jefe said. “They’re winning. Which means it’s sustainable. Which is the point of our job. You want to die for your country, do it somewhere else. Here, your death is worthless.”
Ocho turned to me. “Mason. What do you think?”
A year ago, I’d definitely have agreed with him. A part of my heart agreed, infected by the sickness, this itching desire to leave behind the mission our whole unit was centered around—training indig forces—so we could get into combat and feel like we were really doing something, indulging fantasies of being the warriors we believed ourselves to be, even if in a failing war without anything close to a coherent strategy that could justify the lives we might lose and the lives we might take. But there was another part that was steadily becoming stronger.
“Most of Natalia’s relatives live in Medellín,” I said. “Ten years ago, we would never have visited them because it was too dangerous to be worth it. I like being able to tell my daughter people like me are why she can visit her aunts and uncles and cousins.”
Ocho gave me a look of such disappointment. I knew I’d lowered myself in the opinion of the rest of the team. “Yeah, all right,” he said, “fine. But if our next deployment is to Mexico or some shit, I expect to be fucking El Chapo in the ass.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” Jefe said.
The joke of it all is that now, looking back, I can see that the Latin American deployments were the only ones where we were building anything. But how could we know that at the time? It felt like we were just spinning our wheels, while the guys in Afghanistan were doing the real work, a serious mission with a real gunfight every once in a while. Or more than every once in a while.
6
JUAN PABLO 2015–2016
My colleagues thought it was insane that I would send my daughter to university at Nacional. Yes, it was a good university. A great university. But it was riddled with guerrilla cells. A center for knowledge somehow incapable of grasping the most obvious fact in history—that communism is a religion for brutal slaves. Why not send her to Los Andes, or Externado? Not simply her physical safety, but the safety of her soul was at risk. Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, the son of an admiral who went to Nacional and joined the guerrilla, was mentioned more than once. Even if she wasn’t fully converted, they told me, the professors there would teach her ways to hate me.
I responded confidently, arrogantly, and worse, idealistically. I told them I was sending her to Nacional because of the guerrillas. Nacional, this jewel of the nation’s public university system. Harder to get into than the schools my fellow officers were sending their children to, and much cheaper, a factor I couldn’t ignore. But still. One of our country’s best schools. And I am supposed to cede this territory? Me? A man who has fought and bled for centimeters of worthless jungle, I just give up 1,214,056 square meters of downtown Bogotá to the enemy? No. This is my country. It will be my daughter’s university. I will prepare her for the education to come, and make her invincible.
It began with a book. A true jungle fighter takes the enemy’s strengths and turns them to his advantage, so when she was applying to university I took her to campus. I came in civilian clothes, since military dress would do nothing more than make her
