Saravena was a guerrilla town where the people hated us so much they’d walk up to soldiers in the street, look for the youngest, most scared-looking conscript, sniff loudly, and say, “I smell formaldehyde.” It was an ugly fight, where the hatred of the people provoked the hatred of our soldiers, who would sometimes take the kind of actions young, scared, hateful, and hated soldiers will do.
Counterinsurgency was in fashion then. My colonel had attended a 2004 Southern Command conference where the American military had pushed population support and development as the critical element of success, something that had amused my father. “The Americans always have a new shiny idea,” he said. “I trained with American veterans of Vietnam at the School of the Americas, and all their tactics were based around zones of annihilation and the logic of attrition. Now we’re supposed to do counterinsurgency? That’s not what they’re doing in Iraq. I think they just want to see if we fail before they change strategies.”
Our colonel came up with the idea of targeting the hearts and minds not of the adults, who were inflexible in their loathing of us, but of their children. And so he created the “Soldier for a Day” program, in which a soldier would put on clown makeup and a clown wig, to go along with his uniform and rifle, and entertain children at the local schools.
Initial runs were not a success. I assigned the first duty to a young soldier, Edgardo Ramos, with a round face and a cheerful manner and a way of always making his fellows laugh in training. When we entered the school, some of the children’s faces turned pale. He did some jokes, pretended to walk into a wall, told them about where he was from and why he was here.
“I was out with my father’s cow and the military caught me!” he said. “They said, ‘You’re going into the military!’ and I said, ‘What do I do with this cow? It belongs to my father.’ And they said, ‘You better sell it!’ Can you imagine how mad my father was? I send him money every month but every month he asks me, ‘What happened to that cow?’”
I thought it was the greatest waste of time I’d ever encountered. After the class, one of the teachers asked to speak to me.
“Privately?” I said.
She looked nervous. “No, no,” but then pulled me around a corner from where Edgardo was doing his best to ease the tension in the room.
“This is not good for the children,” the teacher said. And then she launched into a story about how the paramilitaries had tried to infiltrate the town a couple months ago, and how they had killed some of the guerilla in a bombing attack, and how after that the guerrilla had tightened their grip on the town, controlling who came in and who came out. “Anyone new,” she said, “they killed.”
I nodded my head, confused by why she was telling me this, but listening because I imagined she might give me useful intelligence.
“It was right after the first round of killings that the Peruvians came,” she said.
They were a group of clowns on a humanitarian mission, Clowns Without Borders, idealists who thought that even children in war zones, especially children in war zones, deserved laughter. They entered town with painted faces and big smiles, and were almost immediately lined up, shot in the head, and left in the street as a warning.
“The only other time these children have seen clowns,” the teacher told me, “they were corpses. It was terrifying. Even living clowns frighten me. Even real clowns, not your . . . I don’t know what you are doing, or what to call it . . . but it will give them nightmares.”
Afterward, I spoke to my colonel about the Soldier for a Day program. Knowing about my father, he normally was solicitous of my opinions, but the dead-clowns story only made him more enthusiastic.
“It’s the guerrilla that terrified them, not us!” he said. “Whenever they see clowns, they’ll think of the terror of the guerrilla murderers, and the laughter and jokes of our clowns, laughter and jokes which cannot be stopped because our clowns carry guns.”
He ordered me to continue the program, and suggested that I put my own name on the roster. “Lead by example,” he said. “Practice some funny faces.”
There was no way, I told myself, I would play the clown, but we did keep running the program, sometimes even succeeding in making children laugh, or at the very least getting them to marvel at the guns our clowns carried, and to wonder how they, too, could acquire such guns and carry them in the service of the state.
A little later, one of my platoons was ambushed by a large force of guerrilla four kilometers outside of town. It was the most aggressive force-on-force engagement the guerrilla had tried, and it didn’t end well for them. Since this was during a brief window in which I had access to air assets, I got in an old Huey to fly out and direct the battle, although everything had ended by the time I arrived. The men, as trained, had driven through the heart of the ambush and routed the guerrilla, miraculously not losing any soldiers and killing a few of the enemy.
As we flew down, I could see the men moving about, conducting the rituals of men after battles—treating their wounded, stacking ammunition, hauling trash, and talking among themselves, telling the story of the combat to each other so that, with the telling and retelling, they could come to some group version of what happened, and what it meant to them. Looking at them from above, from the outside, I felt sharp, almost painful pangs of pride. They had succeeded in the task we had set for them, gone out
