“You know John Sack?” she said. “Vietnam reporter? M Company?”
Diego shrugged.
“He said the best journalist to cover Vietnam was Michael Herr, because Herr went crazy. Herr allowed himself to go crazy. The only one to actually donate his sanity to the cause of journalism. Vietnam wasn’t about putting the pieces together and making sense of it all. Vietnam didn’t make sense. So you couldn’t just write the facts. You had to write the experience of getting pushed past sanity.”
That amused Diego. “Okay. You gonna go nutty on me?”
“I don’t know. Herr wrote the Vietnam crazy. What kind of crazy fits this war?”
“Which war?”
“All of them. Here. Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Horn of Africa. Philippines. Everywhere. I mean, what kind of crazy do I need to be to get it right?”
Diego started laughing. “It’s not crazy you’re looking for.”
“No?”
“What, you think we’re out there, smoking dope and burning gook villages? That’s a whole different era.”
“You sound nostalgic.”
“I mean, look, what we do is boring at this point. Now it’s all . . . long meetings, lessons learned. Here’s what we know about the complementary effects of suppression and local development. Here’s six different models of how insurgencies respond to the targeting of midlevel leadership. And even when I am out in the field . . . man. The thrill is gone. I’m in my second decade of this shit, Liz.”
“And yet, you keep doing it.”
“Look, maybe America hasn’t been paying attention, but we’ve gotten pretty good at fighting these bullshitty wars. Just look at the stats. Numbers of police trained. Number of independent indig operations. Violence up, violence down. Things are getting better. The numbers don’t lie.”
Liz laughed. Diego liked occasionally throwing statistics at her when he wanted to confuse her or blunt some criticism she had of the war and his role in it. Statistics take the raw material of war, human beings, and turn them into numbers on a spreadsheet. And for Diego, no matter how fucked up the war, those numbers always seemed to be in the black. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because you’re out of your fucking mind.”
He let out a disapproving sigh. “You’re eating breakfast a half hour outside of a town that used to be the murder capital of the world.”
“I’m willing to be sold on Colombia.”
“Go through the mission set of every unit operating in Afghanistan right now, tell me a single one that doesn’t make sense.”
But it wasn’t the missions. Liz had been doing this long enough to know that. She’d gotten excited about enough units and their local successes to know that deep in her bones. The missions—chase down Taliban leaders here, train ANP there—did make sense. It was the war as a whole that was insane, a rational insanity that dissected the problem in a thousand different ways, attacked it logically with a thousand different mission sets, a million white papers, a billion “lessons learned” reports, and nothing even approaching coherent strategy. Insanity overseeing a thousand tight logical circles. Sure, it wasn’t the exhausted, drug-addled insanity of Vietnam. Not pot and heroin and LSD insanity, but the insanity of a generation raised on iPhones and Adderall. A glittering, mechanical insanity that executes each task with machinelike precision, eyes on the mission amid the accumulating human waste.
There was more silence, and then Diego got up and scrapped the remnants of egg on his plate into the trash.
“Crazy would be thinking we can just throw up our hands and do nothing.”
• • •
Sunday came and Abel made his way to the bakery, where a short former guerrillera at the counter waved and smiled at him. They all knew him there. They all liked him there. He was, supposedly, a success story. An ex-combatant who ran a successful business. No matter that once they’d been enemies, the guerrilla on one side and the paramilitaries on the other. Now they were on the same side—ex-combatants trying to succeed in a world that held people like them in contempt. Luisa wasn’t there yet so he ordered two pandebonos and chatted with the girl. Ana Paula, or Ana Sofia, he thought that was her name.
“Look,” she said, holding up her hand to reveal fingernails painted not in a single color, but in swirls of red, pink, and blue. “Mirabel did it for me.” She nodded to the back, where Mirabel was checking the ovens.
“Beautiful,” he said, unsure whether she was flirting with him or not. He felt like he should say something else. After an awkward pause, he went with, “She should do mine,” and held up his hand. That got a delighted little laugh, and Abel blushed. He wondered how many little guerrilleras like this had been killed by Jefferson. And how many paras like him had been killed by little guerrilleras. Probably not that many. Both sides had mainly killed civilians.
Luisa walked in and the guerrillera snapped to attention, trying to look businesslike.
“Let’s sit outside,” Luisa said.
So Abel took his pandebonos, followed Luisa outside, and watched as she wedged herself into one of the low plastic chairs they put out in the street for customers to sit in. She looked bulky and absurd, with the little chair and little plastic table in front, and Abel hunched down awkwardly into a chair himself, feeling like a child.
“Yes, he’s returned,” Luisa said. “I was waiting for it. I’d heard his group had moved across the border a year and a half ago.”
Of course she’d known. Luisa knew what happened in the area better than anyone.
She reached across the little plastic table and grabbed one of the
