I left my Huey, saying little but walking among the men, clapping them on their shoulders, showing my appreciation for what they’d been through without trying to intrude. A young lieutenant with haunted eyes delivered his report on the battle, his quavering voice slowly steadying as he slipped into the dry language of the military, taking the jumbled memories of chaos he’d just experienced and squeezing them into the precise categories of official reports. I felt like a priest, taking his confession.
When I returned to Saravena, I was energized. The dead stares of the people, their empty eyes as they looked upon us the way you’d look at the corpses of animals, it meant nothing. We’d had a force-on-force engagement, at a time and place chosen by the enemy, and had won. Within the hour, though, I heard an explosion. Reporting came on through the radio—gas canisters turned to bombs in a road by one of the schools where we brought our Soldier for the Day clowns. Casualties.
• • •
A difficult period began. The enemy perfected its methods against us, and we perfected our hatred against the population that shielded them. More bombs in gas canisters, violence against us perpetrated by ghosts. I began taking sleeping pills. First one, then two, then three or four, and still I could not sleep. Beyond the difficulties of our mission, there were troubles for my family, whispers bubbling against my father, sensational reports in the news.
The day my father was fired by Álvaro Uribe, I’d spent the morning on a patrol through a town that had only further hardened its hearts against us, and then I had signed off on a report that listed three eleno dead, though I secretly suspected it was at most one eleno dead, and two civilians suspected of aiding the guerrilla. That afternoon a bomb went off and took the hand of Edgardo Ramos, our first clown, and I’d sat with him, waiting for medical evacuation, holding his one remaining hand while he smiled and laughed his way through the pain and told me, “But I still haven’t paid off my father’s cow!” I got the news about my father in the evening, and then read through the press reports and the official, emotionless language of the release announcing the firing.
The newspapers told a story of how military recruiters had combed through the Soacha barrio, looking for the mentally disabled and the desperate, told them they had good-paying work for them, flew them to Norte de Santander, shot them, and claimed the bodies were guerrillas to inflate body count and earn promotions.
My father was not directly implicated, but it had happened in units under his command. Someone would have to pay, and not someone too high up. Certainly not the politically powerful minister of defense, who would go on to be president of the country in a few years. No, someone lower down, less connected, but still guilty of negligence if not actively turning a blind eye. Someone like my father.
One of the men implicated, Carlos Viterbo, was now on trial. I’d known Carlos. He was a large, lusty fellow, a lover of women and alcohol, a terrible but enthusiastic dancer, the sort who spouted the usual motivations for joining the officer corps of the Colombian army and who you generally assumed would be a decent officer and, at the very least, a midway decent man. There was no odor of corruption about him. But as I read I knew in my heart that he’d done it, and in my exhaustion and rage at the town of Saravena I almost understood. And as for my father—given the report I’d signed that morning, the deaths I’d chosen not to look too closely at, I understood all too well.
The newspapers suggested this was only the beginning of these revelations, that such things were happening across Colombia as the military exerted intense downward pressure to meet the demands of Plan Patriota. General officers who didn’t care to investigate seemingly good news about body counts—corrupt, callous, evil men, the articles implied, men like my loving father—were even now permitting mass murder.
Neither the articles nor the press release admitted to any mitigating factors, to the difficulty of maintaining discipline in an army that was expanding, relying heavily on sometimes poorly motivated conscripts, fighting a brutal war in which growing hatred of civilian populations is inevitable, and where we were operating in new places and under pressures that the army had never successfully navigated in the past. Why bother? Mitigating factors fail to explain when you cross the border to murders of this kind. The only explanation left is the sin all men are born with, a sin that marks us forever as loathsome creatures, fit for death. It is why an army needs iron discipline, to stamp out the kind of freelance killings that reduce our effectiveness as a fighting force and diminish our prestige in the eyes of the public. My father had the bad luck to be in command of one of the units that got caught. But how could I hold him responsible? I loved him, and besides, this is war.
It was all too much to absorb, so as I scanned the articles the words I read were like coins tossed into an empty well. No emotions, but practical concerns flashed in and out of my consciousness. My father’s salary. His pension. My mother’s hard-won place in a society that looks on newcomers with contempt. My career, the easy path to generalship I’d anticipated. The increased scrutiny I could now expect to fall on me and on my piece of the ugly war in Saravena. And far beneath all these practical worries was a different kind of concern, one about the love I had for my father, about the man he was, and the knowledge that he would never be that proud, unbroken man ever again.
I retired to my quarters
