“Nothing better than a pan de yuca fresh out of the oven,” I tell her. She glances at the sign above her, which says the exact same thing.
“Clearly,” she says, pulling oven mitts off her coarse, calloused hands.
I hand her a twenty mil note and ask for four pan de yuca. I think about what Valencia is saying as the woman slowly grabs a set of tongs and drops them, one by one, into a paper bag. She hands them to me, counts out my change, and though I still don’t know what to say as I head to the table and sit down, when Valencia opens her mouth to say more I raise one finger, halting her. Then I break into the crust of the pan de yuca, letting out the steam.
“This is a good life,” I tell her. “If you enjoy the small things.”
I tear off a piece, the gooey strands of yuca inside the crust pulling and then breaking, and I put the piece in my mouth. I close my eyes. There is nothing better than a pan de yuca fresh from the oven. I chew, then open my eyes.
“You actually want to participate in this clinic?”
She nods her head. “My professor says the spot is still there for me.”
I take another bite of my pan de yuca. She starts talking about a revelation she had during Lent.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” she says. “The ARN work is mostly administrative. And we did works for the poor at Santa Clara, but it was always easy. The faces of the people I met quickly faded.”
Santa Clara is an Opus Dei school. My wife’s idea, but I didn’t mind. Opus Dei teaches you to find God in the dignity of daily work, whether it’s the work of a poor day laborer or the work of a student, sharpening the tools of the mind. A fine lesson. But like so many young people, and like Che himself, she wants a more heroic role. Never mind that I’ve warned her, more than once, that a desire for heroism leads to most of the suffering in the world.
“This would be hard,” she says. “And it would bring me face to face with victims but also with—”
“Murderers. Kidnappers.”
“Yes, exactly,” she says. “And child soldiers. Rural poor. Didn’t you say, during the paramilitary demobilization, that most of the paracos were confused kids caught up in the violence and we shouldn’t judge them by the cruelty their worst leaders spurred them to do?”
I did say that. But the paramilitaries frequently fought on our side, and my concerns have never been about individual justice, but about the progress of the state.
“I know Mom thinks the peace treaty is unjust because it lets them off too easy,” she says. “But even if that’s true”—she trails off a bit—“even if that’s true, if, ideologically, Mom is right, there’s still another way to think about it.”
I feel a bit of trepidation about where she’s going, but say nothing.
“As Christians, we’re called to mercy.” She delivers that pat phrase with an affirmative nod of her head.
“What?”
“Mercy is always an injustice.”
“What?”
“If it weren’t, then it wouldn’t be mercy. It would just be justice.”
“Is this,” I say, stammering, surprised, “is this a religious thing?”
She laughs, a delicate, gentle laugh. My daughter has never laughed at me before.
“Christ spent time among the fallen.” She smiles shyly, as if she knows how ridiculous and self-aggrandizing that sounds. “I want to spend time with the defeated and the scorned. And even, in some cases, the unworthy and the cruel.”
I sit back in my seat. This is not the turn I expected. I can say no. Obviously, I can say no. She won’t go if I don’t allow her. Her mother will want to say no as well. But I’ve led enough soldiers to know that there are times when a young mind must be given strict commands, and there are times a young mind must be held in the hand like a little bird. And if she’s spouting religious cant, then this must be handled carefully.
I can say it will be dangerous. That I have learned things about the region her professor can’t know. I could tell her about Representative de Salva, about Jefferson Paúl López Quesada, or about my meeting with that loathsome lawyer in the exquisite dining room of a five-star hotel, where we were served wine that cost more than the monthly salary of most Colombians, and the lawyer, fat, his face flushed from a life of decadence, waved his chunky fingers and belched greasy words into the air, making promises I ignored and divulging information I held tight. But that would heighten the appeal for her.
As with Che, it is best to fight with the truth. Deception is always shaky footing. And though she had started by telling me about the dangers of idealism, it is clear she is motivated by something else, something worse, something I have lied to her about my whole life. The first step, then, is to come clean.
“God. Jesus Christ,” I say. “We send you to church because that’s what a young woman is supposed to do. Are you really telling me you believe in all that shit?”
7
MASON 2007
It started with the fireworm, a five-kilometer-long convoy in Helmand, everything we had in one beastly formation, the only American force in the district, civilization descending into the wilderness, lighting up the first few Taliban brave enough to fire on us, chalking up the first couple of deaths to the deployment tally before hitting the turnoff for Highway 611, turning due east, off-roading into the desert, heading parallel to Sangin and then, exactly at noon, flooding the town, taking it without a fight.
With a base of operations established, the colonel adopted a strategy of sending out small teams,
