Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^ONE AMERICA’S AFRICAN RIFLES ^{WITH A MARINE PLATOON} African Sahel, Summer 2004

In the early summer of 2004, just as the United States was dismantling the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, sending home its proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces were in various stages of deploying to the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, one of the few battlegrounds left in the Global War on Terror for the U.S. military to enter, as it was already deployed in so many other parts of the world.

Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops have been a traditional means of projecting power at minimum risk and fanfare. This was true of Rome even in regard to adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of France and Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies.[2] As Tacitus writes, “We Romans value real power but disdain its vanities.”¹ Taking Tacitus to heart, I went to the Niger River region of the African Sahel, or “coast,” a belt of savannah and scrub on the Sahara’s southern edge, to witness a version of America’s reach that was radically different from Iraq, certainly more modest, and hopefully more successful.

Among the great rivers of Africa, after the Nile and the Congo there is the Niger, which medieval Arab geographers such as Ibn Battuta called “the Nile of the Negroes.” The Niger rises within 492 feet of the Atlantic Ocean in the jungly, mountainous borderland of Guinea and Sierra Leone and flows northeast into Mali, past the desert caravan centers of Timbuktu and Gao. Then, arcing southeast through Niger and along the Benin border, it drops down into Nigeria, breaking up into an immense delta amid the malarial swamps of the Bight of Biafra. The curvilinear journey of 2,600 miles from the sea deep into the desert, and back to the sea again, seems almost contrary to the laws of nature.

Herodotus, in the course of his travels in the fifth century B.C., heard mention of the river. In the vicinity of eastern Libya he was told about a group of young and adventurous Nasamonians, who lived in nearby Syrtis along the Mediterranean coast. These Nasamonians had packed a good supply of food and water and set off into the interior of Libya. After traveling for many days southwestward through the desert they came upon a region of sparse vegetation where they were attacked by black men “of less than middle height,” speaking an unintelligible language. These “dwarfs” carried the Nasamonians through a marshy country whereupon they sighted a “great river with crocodiles” that “flowed from west to east.”²

The Niger was no less remote to twenty-first-century Americans than it had been to the ancient Greeks. It passed through some of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. The Sahara Desert had effectively cut West Africa off from the traffic of peoples, ideas, and technology that moved between the Mediterranean and Eurasia from the classical age onward. Islam itself was weakened in the course of its arduous journey south. The Tuaregs, for example, a Berber people who began moving south from the central Sahara to the Niger River about A.D. 1000, were only nominally Muslim. They built few mosques; few of them made the haj to Mecca. Tuareg men wore veils; not Tuareg women. The word “Tuareg” itself is Arabic for “the abandoned of God.” The flowing robes and headdresses of Tuareg warriors recalled not Muslims but medieval Christian knights.³

A Tuareg empire grew up around the caravan city of Agadez, only to be conquered by the empire of Songhai. The empires of Songhai and Mali later overlapped near the middle part of the Niger River, the part with which Ibn Battuta was familiar, and where U.S. Marines had recently ensconced themselves.

These medieval imperiums had raised impressive armies and bureaucracies, with their names enduring through the ethnic identities of the inhabitants. Yet given the sleepy underdevelopment that now defined the region, such mighty kingdoms might as well have been ghosts.

By 1900, the French had conquered much of the Sahara and adjacent Sahel. But as other imperial powers had learned and were still to learn, conquest came easily; remolding a difficult terrain in one’s image was another matter. The Tuaregs, as though precursors of modern-day Islamic terrorists, faded into the landscape and waited out the occupiers.⁴ A century later it would be the region’s political and social failure that raised its stature in the eyes of the American military.

Throughout the Sahel were the ingredients that bred terrorists and their sympathizers: large populations of unemployed young men, growing political disaffection, and increasing Islamic orthodoxy.⁵ At each end of the Niger were bustling ports with questionable security, coastlines teeming with pirates, and Arab émigré communities with links to international diamond smugglers and terrorist outfits. Sahelian Africa had the two requirements essential for penetration by al-Qaeda and its offshoots: collapsing institutions and cultural access afforded by an Islamic setting.

The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which boasted links to al-Qaeda, had amassed weapons and vehicles in Mali for use in Algeria. With the help of U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft, it was pushed out of Mali into Niger and Chad, where U.S. Army Special Forces helped Chadian troops kill and capture over forty insurgents.⁶ Still, the Salafists were arguably the most dynamic Islamic force in the northern half of Africa. In Algeria they had eclipsed the Armed Islamic Group as the leading threat to the government. Too, they were active along the Libyan-Chadian border. Though founded in 1998 in Algeria, the Salafists traced their ideological roots to the reform movements in nineteenth-century Egypt that had raised the level of political consciousness among Muslims, then mired in antique and decaying colonial systems.⁷ This venerable Salafist legacy lent cachet to al-Qaeda extremism.

Big Oil also lured the United States to the region. In 2004 the U.S. was importing 15 percent of its oil from West Africa, a figure expected to rise to 25 percent within a decade.⁸ There was, too, the rising specter of the Chinese, who were investing significantly in the Sahel and whose influence the Americans wanted to limit.

Given such circumstances, the U.S. military had dispatched Army Special Forces to Mali and Mauritania, and marines to Chad and Niger. Senegal and other countries would soon be added to the pan-Sahel initiative, designed as a preventive, economy-of-force measure to avert the need for a massive deployment against terrorists as in Afghanistan.

I planned to meet up with U.S. marines in Niger, the second poorest country in the world after Sierra Leone. Yet my first impression of Niger was one of august, primordial beauty. The great river did not disappoint: a vast, smoky engraving so wide that it seemed less an actual river than a still life of the sea itself. In the middle, majestically parting the waters, stood long sandbars topped by rich green grass at the beginning of the rainy season. Thickets of coconut palms, neem, and eucalyptus lined the banks, beyond which stretched panels of cultivation that culminated in a series of low mesas. Camels plodded back from the fields at dusk, approaching the bronzed water where gurgling hippos bathed and men in shallow-draft boats fished for perch.

The capital city of Niamey, which unrolled along the river’s northern bank, was little more than a sprawling village: absent of tension compared to the teeming African slum cities by the Atlantic Ocean to the south, such as Lagos and Abidjan. Parallel to the river were tranquil streets with stoplights that actually worked, and one-story government buildings with few guards at the entrances. The loose laterite gave the entire townscape a rich orange tint, as though a camera filter had been placed before one’s eyes.

There were mud-walled houses and tulip-shaped wattle roofs. Boys stricken with polio went by on makeshift bicycles that they operated with hand pedals. Women in loud robes, buckets atop their heads, appeared almost to float by. There was an affecting, sensual intimacy to these dusty orange lanes. I thought of how the cities of coastal West Africa must have looked decades ago, before massive urban migration had shredded kinship patterns, ignited ethnic strife, and substituted the pageant of earthen colors for the prison hues of iron and concrete. Yet despite a spate of violent crime in parts of town and periodic anti-Christian riots near the Nigerian border, Niger’s relatively slow pattern of development had caused it to lack an explosive edge. The traditional class structure of nobles, artisans, and former slaves still survived, leading to unspoken understandings that braced the social mortar.

But Niamey worked better as a city than it did as the administrative center of a country so vast and empty that the Libyan border to the northeast was farther away from the Nigerien capital than the Great Lakes were from the Gulf of Mexico. Seventy-five percent of Niger’s twelve million people lived on just a sliver of territory stretching from Niamey eastward, along the Benin and Nigerian borders. Alas, Niger was little more than a demographic spillover of Nigeria, even as Niger’s governing class, composed mainly of ethnic Hausas and Songhai-Djermas, had to control a hostile desert extending to Mali, Algeria, Libya, and Chad—a desert where Tuareg bandits were providing sanctuary and logistical support to Islamic terrorists. Niamey was pleasant, even as it was a vacuum surrounded by unstable regional forces.

The U.S. military had the same impossible task here as it had in so many other places where it was deployed: against considerable odds, help make a country that existed only on the map into something real. I stress the military because in weak democracies such as Niger’s, politicians came and went, but soldiers and security men remained as silent, behind-the-scenes props—if they hadn’t metamorphosed into politicians themselves. Niger’s civilian head of state, Tandja Mamadou, was a former army lieutenant colonel. The fact that the State Department constituted the front for security assistance missions like that of the Marines did not mask European Command’s importance to Niger. The Pentagon’s humanitarian assistance projects, administered at the time by European Command (EUCOM) through a defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Niamey, accounted for almost all of the charity relief that the American people provided to the troubled north of Niger. Northern Niger was too insecure for either the Peace Corps or nongovernmental organizations to penetrate. You couldn’t establish yourself in the north without the help of the Nigerien military, with whom civilian aid workers had cultivated few, if any, contacts.

Beyond Niamey, as I traveled north along the river, dark green scrub and tall millet fields competed with eroding layers of bright orange clay and dust. Niger was losing 7,800 square miles a year to desertification, though for the moment it wasn’t apparent because of the seasonal rains.

I was inside a white Toyota pickup driven by Maj. Paul Baker of Drummond, Oklahoma, the commanding officer of a platoon-sized Marine training team, which consisted of twenty-four men, including three Navy corpsmen, drawn from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and EUCOM’s Stuttgart headquarters. At forty years old, Maj. Baker, with wire-rimmed glasses, a graying-blond high-and-tight, and a frank, uncomplicated expression stamped on his face, was a bit long in the tooth for his rank. But so were some of his lieutenants, he told me, who had started out as enlisted men and later gone to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. It would turn out to be a good platoon: the officers had been grunts (combat infantrymen) themselves.

Baker’s father had served twenty-eight years in the Army and the National Guard. His oldest brother had joined the Air Force, his middle brother the Navy. “So the only option for me was the Marines,” he said in a flat prairie accent. It wasn’t so simple. After graduating from Northwestern Oklahoma State University, Baker had tried farming. Then, in the slow burn of a job search during the Texas-Oklahoma oil bust of the 1980s, he called the local Marine recruiter. Months of back-and-forth brought news that he was unqualified to be an officer. So the next day he enlisted and was dispatched to Marine boot camp outside San Diego.

Baker rose to lance corporal and was eventually accepted at Officer Candidate School. This came after serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, and evacuating refugees from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines soon afterward. Through a friend in the Navy he met “the wife,” a Vietnamese American whose father was a Vietnam veteran and a “Brown & Root type”—a private military contractor, that is. Baker was married at Camp Lejeune five days after returning from a deployment in Norway; his son would be born seventeen hours before he left for Okinawa on another deployment. He had no complaints. “I’ve been lucky in the Corps, and this,” he went on, looking out the truck window at the thorny African scrub, “is a great opportunity for a log officer.” For a logistics officer who had not made it to Afghanistan or Iraq, commanding a training mission in two African countries where the U.S. Marines had never been constituted the high point of Maj. Paul Baker’s career.

We had entered the Nigerien military base of Tondibiah where the marines had their hootch, or encampment. Even inside the base, there were millet fields and the occasional street urchin. “It’s a dramatic improvement over Chad, where whole villages existed within the army bases,” Baker noted. Having just finished a two-month training mission in Chad, and a week into one in Niger, Baker was struck by the stark differences between the two countries. On paper, Chad was marginally better off than Niger; moreover, because of three decades of civil war, Chad might have been expected to boast a flinty army. But the Marines had found Chad dirtier, less developed, and with a military in every way inferior to Niger’s.

In Niger only two or three men in each platoon required help to write their names; in Chad most did. Whereas the Chadian military manifested little rank structure and recruits often refused orders from their officers, Nigerien officers had real presence among their men, and even the noncommissioned officers showed initiative, which was rare for a third-world military. When the Marines had arrived in Chad, the host-country troops assumed an assault was jumping out of a truck and spraying fire from the hip. Baker was proud that at the end of the course they could execute a movement-to-contact with coordinated machine gun positions.

The Marine hootch was a one-story cement structure with a corrugated roof. It was protected only by concertina wire—the HESCO baskets had yet to be filled with sand. Compared to the high, sandbagged walls and paranoia I had experienced at U.S. Army Special Forces bases in Colombia, where car bombs and makeshift mortar attacks were a daily fact of life, the atmosphere here was laid-back. An American flag waved near a small barbecue grill. Mosquito nets covered the racks and big fat lizards climbed all over the walls and did push-ups in the dirt. I had my own sink, which delivered cold water, a luxury I had never before experienced with the American military. A fan whirred loudly. It was 110 degrees under a bleached iron sky. In the empty, echoing rooms I felt I was at a fleabag hotel. The vast array of weaponry and other military paraphernalia that dominated the Special Forces barracks I had seen in Latin America and Asia were absent. In comparison, the marines traveled stripped down, like backpackers.

They had just begun training three host-country platoons, composed of soldiers who had been individually selected for showing talent and motivation. Nothing fancy here. The initial training cycle consisted of the fundamentals of good soldiery: shooting, land navigation, and basic medicine. Liberty demands authority, for without minimal order there can be no freedom for anybody. If the civilian government was going to survive and protect its borders against transnational terrorists, military professionalization was key. It started with Baker’s marines.

I spent my first days at Tondibiah on the rifle range.

The instructors were Gunnery Sgt. Eric Coughlin of Shohola, Pennsylvania; Staff Sgt. Stephen Long of Irmo, South Carolina; Staff Sgt. Bobby Rivera of the Bronx, New York; and Sgt. Chris Singley of Milledgeville, Georgia. All were in their thirties except for twenty-five-year-old Sgt. Singley. I had been with marines long enough in Djibouti and Iraq to know that these four had to be an impressive bunch. The noncommissioned ranks were the heart and soul of the Marine Corps to a greater degree than the Army, for the United States Marines were among the most powered-down command structure of any Western military, in which battlefield expertise and leadership depended upon low-ranking sergeants leading even lower-ranking corporals, who in turn led lance corporals and privates. You didn’t get to be a sergeant of any kind without advanced training, particularly a staff sergeant who commanded a platoon of two or three dozen men, to say nothing of a gunnery sergeant. To wit, Gunny Eric Coughlin was a specialist in military mountaineering, Sgt. Chris Singley in riverine operations, and Staff Sgt. Steve Long a scout sniper and former PMI (primary marksmanship instructor) at Marine boot camp in Parris Island. As for Staff Sgt. Bobby Rivera, he was a member of Force Recon—the Marine equivalent of the Navy SEALs and the Army’s famed Delta Force. Rivera was on loan from the Special Operations Training Group at Camp Lejeune for this mission.

Because training third-world armies had for decades been an Army Special Forces’ affair, this deployment to Chad and Niger constituted a rare opportunity for the Marines to show what they could do. The Corps had sent its best.

It was dark and pouring when we set out for the rifle range at 6 a.m. The pickups halted at the Nigerien barracks to collect the trainees who would ride in the back. Listening to the beautiful singing of the African troops as they stood in formation before their commander, I began my acquaintance with Staff Sgt. Steve Long, a stocky, red-haired thirty-four-year-old with piercing eyes, whom Maj. Baker had tagged for me as one of the brightest marines in the unit. “He’s wasting himself doing what he’s doing—he should be in a much higher position.”

Staff Sgt. Long’s father had been a marine, and Long joined the Corps after dropping out of community college in South Carolina and getting his last speeding ticket before losing his license. But after a decade of active duty in various combat-related roles, the next job he was offered just as 9/11 rolled around was as a recruiter. “Fuck that,” Long told me. “I’m an infantryman. I wanted to be with the grunts.” Long discovered that the best way to return to “the combat arms community” was to leave the Marines: to go off active duty and become a reservist, in which case, the War on Terror necessitated that because of his considerable experience he would immediately be called up and deployed overseas.

“I don’t have a family. I just want to do Reserve duty twelve months a year.” He got his wish. Since 9/11, Long had been in a uniform the whole time in Europe and Africa, often on training missions. “I just hope GWOT [the Global War on Terrorism] goes on for a long time. I’m still trying to get to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Nigerien troops jumped into the back of the pickups. I was impressed at how quiet and orderly they were. When we got to the range a few minutes later, they marched out onto the field and began setting up the targets. Then they lined up single file, their field caps in their hands, soon to be filled with bullets, as the rain fell on their heads. After prying open the Chinese-made sardine cans of 7.62mm ammunition for the Nigeriens’ AK-47 (Kalashnikov) rifles, Gunny Coughlin and the three other sergeants dumped the rounds into the waiting field caps. “Wait till the end of the day,” Long remarked. “They’ll actually pick up the brass cartridges on the field without being told to, and not in order to sell them. They bring their own medical equipment to the range. The Chadians weren’t like this. The Chadians couldn’t even hit the target paper while zeroing their rifles.”

The Nigeriens, I also noticed, displayed real muzzle awareness. When not shooting they kept their rifles pointed at the ground, and none of them ever once dropped them in the dirt.

The Nigerien military had participated in messy, violent peacekeeping missions in Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, the Congo, and Haiti. This Hausa-dominated military formed its own elite social class, with officers sending their young sons to cadet schools. It was a military that had proved its willingness to die in defense of U.S. interests; on several occasions Nigerien units had followed Salafist extremists in hot pursuit across the border into neighboring countries.

Waiting around, watching the host-country troops quietly load their ammunition into the magazines, I mentioned to Staff Sgt. Long that coups, being a feature of modernization, tended to happen when a military was more institutionally advanced than a civilian authority. Long broke in about the Philippine military and the inefficiency and corruption of successive civilian regimes in the Philippines. His insight was impressive. It turned out he had had a Filipina girlfriend. As Maj. Baker’s remarks about Chad and Niger had shown, marines sucked up knowledge wherever they could. Because their personal experience system was so different from that of academics and journalists like myself, their company was invigorating.

Dawn came, revealing sculptural acacias as birds made a racket in the trees and bruise-dark rain clouds raced across the sky. The rain held off the heat momentarily. I inserted my earplugs and walked out on the three-hundred-yard range with the four marines and twenty-three Nigerien soldiers. It was good to be on a rifle range again, where I spent much time in 2003 and early 2004 researching Imperial Grunts. Then I had followed a crawl, walk, and run approach with the U.S. military: observing Army Special Forces train host-country troops in Colombia and the Philippines before accompanying them on presence patrols and armed assaults in Afghanistan; then observing marines train and pull guard duty in Djibouti before accompanying them during urban combat in Iraq. Continuing this odyssey meant not going forward but backward—back to the basics, just as soldiers and marines themselves never ceased to do. When Special Forces and Marine battalions returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Camp Pendleton, California, from Afghanistan and Iraq, they returned to the rifle range. The very circular monotony of military life—going from training to exercises to deployments and back again to training—was fundamental to any experience of it. With the training of indigenous troops at the heart of power projection, and the rifle range the heart of such training in our era, the range was truly the center of it all.

“Every time you fire, a bad guy should bleed,” Staff Sgt. Bobby Rivera yelled. “Aim for the high center torso. Any hit is good. Don’t worry about carving up the bull’s-eye. This isn’t target shooting. It’s about fighting with a gun.” Rivera had a loud, grating, intimate Bronx accent. Because Rivera was a specialist in weaponry and the related field of close quarters combat, once on the range Gunny Coughlin deferred to the ethnic–Puerto Rican staff sergeant, even though he outranked him.

Maj. Moussa Salaou Barmou translated Rivera’s commands into French and Hausa for his soldiers. Maj. Moussa had trained with the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, and with the Ivorians, Cameroonians, and Pakistanis. “I didn’t know what real combat was about until Fort Benning,” he told me. “The Americans have the money to simulate war in training, unlike most other armies. But I wish the Americans could see how the rebels settle in our border towns in the desert and marry local girls so that they become invisible, so that you don’t know who you have to fight.” Because Maj. Moussa outranked the American Marine noncoms, each made sure to address him as “sir.”

Rivera went on. The Nigeriens were only fifteen yards out from the targets—paper silhouettes of soldiers aiming their guns. “You will all fire a controlled pair followed by a hammer,” he explained. “A controlled pair is two slow shots. A hammer is two fast ones. Shooting a hammer, the rifle will recoil twice. You won’t have time to readjust, meaning with a fucked-up body position you will miss the target at least once. And that,” he screamed, “is unacceptable.”

Rivera demonstrated, repeating and yelling everything, sometimes mixing English with French in his Bronx accent: “En position. Levez la sécurité. Feu! Avancez.” Meanwhile, Coughlin, Long, and Singley worked quietly with the individual soldiers. Maj. Moussa did his part, shoving his knee behind that of one of his soldiers to ease him into a more correct body position. I remembered a young Philippine lieutenant who constantly had to be told by an American noncom to pay attention to his own troops. That wasn’t necessary here.

Rivera now made them repeat the drill from twenty-five yards out, this time while changing magazines. “Don’t bend down. Just let the magazine drop. Minimize your movements or you’re gonna fucking die.” He demonstrated shooting and changing magazines while closing the distance from twenty-five to fifteen yards. As I watched him, the impressive thing was what wasn’t there: wasted movements. “Notice,” he said, “I’m not fast. I’m just smooth. It’s not about speed, but about efficiency.”

“Même exercice,” said Rivera. Later he taught them how to unjam their AK-47 rifles while also changing magazines and closing the distance with the enemy. “This isn’t target practice,” he kept stressing at the top of his lungs. “This is about killing people.” During the entire morning Rivera checked the targets only once to see how accurately each soldier was shooting. As long as they were hitting the silhouettes or just the paper, he was happy. He wanted them to be comfortable handling a rifle on the move in combat. He knew from assaults on mud-walled compounds in Afghanistan in 2001, during the first weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom there, that survival was less a matter of a perfect shot than of getting a spare magazine quickly out of a side pocket.

Rivera liked the fact that the targets were man-shaped silhouettes rather than concentric circles. “If you’re aiming at a bull’s-eye, you’re being programmed to shoot paper. If you’re aiming at a silhouette, you’re being programmed to kill motherfuckers.⁹

“Standing is the most unstable platform for firing a rifle,” he went on. “That’s why fifty yards out is the furthest we will ever shoot standing up. At a hundred yards I’ll drop to the prone in two seconds, but then I’ll methodically put two in his chest so the motherfucker will die before he can find his iron sights. That way I’ll live. And I wanna live because back in America there are a lot of women that love me.” The Nigeriens laughed loudly as Maj. Moussa translated into French.

It was almost eleven. We had been on the range for four hours. The cordite had mixed with the rain to form a mist. “Êtes-vous fatigué comme des demoiselles?” Rivera shouted in disdain. Laughing hard, the Nigerien troops let out a resounding “Non.” Training continued another hour until the break for chow.

“There ain’t nothing I’d rather do than get shot at. But if I can’t shoot or get shot at, just being on the range is heaven,” Rivera told me as we broke out MREs (meals ready to eat).

The rain stopped and it was back over 100 degrees. Training resumed for two more hours. Still screaming, Rivera warned: “Écoutez, tomorrow we’ll do the drills with more magazine changes because you’re still fucking up. Remember, you’re not learning how to shoot, but how to fight when you’re tired and dirty. When you’re tired and dirty and hurting I want you to reach down and grab your balls. To find out what you’re made of.” Everybody laughed. This wasn’t about being mature or sensitive. This was about motivating young African soldiers. It was clear from the way that the Nigeriens smiled at Rivera and walked over to shake his hand that he knew how to do that.

While the Nigeriens scoured the range for the brass cartridges, I hung around one of the pickups with the four marines as we broke out more MREs and water bottles. We were swimming in sweat, our faces caked with dust. The marines asked about Fallujah, where I had been the previous spring. They were frustrated that they weren’t in Iraq, and each had a bureaucratic strategy for getting deployed there, or at least to Afghanistan.

“A marine,” Gunny Coughlin said, “is only happy when he’s fighting, humping with his backpack, or on liberty—spending time with his girlfriend or working under his car.” Coughlin was an unusual gunnery sergeant: less a leader of men than simply the ultimate grunt, quiet and driven, taut and wiry, a human bullet almost. He just wanted to do his job. He complained about the tan boots issued to marines, which were useless for humping because they were nothing but “laced-up flip-flops without shank support.” That led to complaints from the others about the Corps’ decision to retain the M-16 rifle and enhance it with a rail system, rather than get the shorter, lighter, easier-to-handle M-4 that the Army used. Thus, the real bitching commenced: about the media, the naïve home front, and the initial hostility of the U.S. Embassy staff in Niger toward the Marines following the friendliness of the embassy folks in Chad. In short, morale was fine. Off the range, they addressed one another by their first names rather than by last ones preceded by rank.

I rode back with the gunny. “I just love this place,” Coughlin told me happily, eyeing a line of local women walking through the savannah. “I can train, shoot, drive a Toyota pickup, and look at beautiful women.”

The next morning we started again at six. By 7:30 a.m. the sunlight was unbearable, with rotting humidity, no breeze, and no clouds. “Yeah, it’s gonna be good today,” Rivera shrieked, happily. He was like a kid sometimes, never realizing how tired he got screaming in the hot sun, until he collapsed into a deep sleep in the first chair he saw back at the hootch. He showed the Nigeriens how to handle “beaucoup enemy”:

“You sweep laterally, two bullets—a hammer—in each motherfucker. You never focus on one man, you keep the rifle moving, the weapon never drops to your side.” Twenty-four assault rifles began cracking at once. The Nigerien soldiers spent the day advancing from fifty yards at ten-yard intervals, dropping and replacing their magazines, without taking their eyes off the target. Already they were much better than the day before.

On the third day it rained again. Rivera made them practice jumping flat on their stomachs in the mud to fire in the prone position from three hundred yards. “Set your iron sights at a hundred yards to hit at three hundred yards,” Rivera advised, “because when you close the distance with the enemy to a hundred, you may have no time to readjust.”

While they were firing, Steve Long pointed to one soldier whose shots, he said, were to the left of the target. “How can you tell?” I asked. The paper silhouettes were specks from this distance. “I can follow the individual bullets downrange. It’s a trick your eye picks up after spending eight hours a day at the range for two years at Parris Island.” Walking up to inspect the silhouettes later, he turned out to be right.

In the heat of the day, standing for hours just inches behind the line of soldiers firing their rifles, I would get bored and wander to the shade of the ready bench, take out my earplugs, and sit down. Sometimes I talked with 1st Lt. Timothy Dekryger of Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Maj. Baker’s executive officer, who came out to inspect the training and enjoy the company of Bobby Rivera’s gang. First Lt. Dekryger was an original: tattoos over his body even as he was an addict of classical string quartets. His dad and uncle had been marines, and two weeks after finishing high school with a D average—having majored in “beer, girls, and hunting”—he enlisted. Before he was twenty years old, Dekryger found himself on a fleet deployment in Malaysia, staring at “sharp, tropical mountains falling straight into a blue sea as smooth as glass with vapor rising from it. I wished I could paint,” he went on. “That scene gets more intense in my mind as I get older.”

Lt. Dekryger left the Corps to study philosophy at Calvin College, a little-known gem of an institution of the Dutch Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Then he went to Officer Candidate School, becoming the commander of a tank platoon in time for Operation Iraqi Freedom. “In Iraq I had to order grunts to do things that were technically difficult and could get them killed. I found myself preparing in advance what I would say to inspire them. I realized how inadequate I was. That’s why I love and respect the Riveras of this world,” he continued in a low, intense voice. “They’re profane as hell, but they know how to motivate. If I had to leave the combat arms community and people like Rivera, I’d leave the Marine Corps.”

Dekryger showed me the book he was reading, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle by Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod. He said that he found the book inspiring. Leafing through it, and reading it carefully at night in the hootch, I discovered that it was like other books popular among marines and soldiers, but which the contemporary media, aside from the military correspondents, were barely aware of. No potboiler, Tarawa was just an old-fashioned sort of book, very much in the tradition of great war reporting as defined by Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary, Bing West in The Village, and Harold Moore and Joe Galloway in We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. These books celebrate the sacrifice and heroism of American troops in World War II and Vietnam not because it had been the authors’ intention, but because it was true and happened to be all around them.¹⁰

The November 1943 Marine assault on Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll, the most important of the Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific, claimed close to three thousand Marine casualties—including close to a thousand killed—and five thousand Japanese dead in little more than three days of fighting.[3] The Time-Life correspondent writes of a “husky boy… killed ten feet in front of the seawall pillbox which was his objective. He is still hunched forward, his rifle in his right hand. That is the picture of the Marine Corps I shall always carry: charging forward.”[4]

Sherrod, like other correspondents of the era, keeps using the words “we” and “our” when referring to the American side, for although a journalist, he was a fellow American living among the troops.¹¹ Back in Honolulu a week after the battle, he found the naïveté of the home front toward Tarawa “amazing.” The public saw the killing of so many troops in so few days as scandalous. There were rumblings in Congress about an intelligence failure, and vows that such a thing must not happen again. But as Sherrod argues, there was no easy way to win many wars (in fact, eight months later, the first day of fighting on Guam would claim nearly seven hundred marines dead, wounded, or missing). Thus, “to deprecate the Tarawa victory was almost to defame the memory of the gallant men who lost their lives achieving it.” He concludes that on Tarawa, in 1943, “there was a more realistic approach to war than there was in the United States.”¹²

At night, away from the range, Sgts. Rivera, Long, and Singley played poker under the stars amid the lizards, the plague of frogs, and the whining mosquitoes. It was too hot to sleep. Mefloquine, an anti-malaria drug that many of the marines were taking, gave some of them insomnia or bad dreams, or both. Those not playing poker read old hunting, weapons, and NASCAR magazines, or watched DVDs. Occasionally there were parties in Niamey where you could drink with the Peace Corps girls, whose jobs kept them relatively close to the capital. The educated Nigerien women, dressed to the nines at the one or two fancy nightclubs in town, wouldn’t so much as look at the marines, unlike in Chad, where such women had been all over them. It was another indication of how Chad, despite the development statistics, was a more desperate place than Niger.

Some nights a storm would erupt in the wee hours, and those of us sleeping outside would pull our fold-out cots and mosquito nets back into the concrete rooms in the pitch-darkness. The nearby river itself, simply by its beauty, offered relief from the heat and rain. Behind the hootch was a hill that offered a ten-mile-long panorama of a turn in the Niger. At sunset, when a clean wind absent of greasy dust would kick up in your face, the wide pan of water would go from a shimmering aluminum to a deep volcanic red depending upon the sun’s angle.

Every evening was story time. Stories would be told sitting on the hill overlooking the river, or over a local Flag beer behind the hootch, or riding back from Niamey late at night in the rear of a pickup. For instance, there was Sgt. Nicholas Cervantes, an ethnic Mexican Filipino from Dallas, a stocky kid in his early twenties with a handsome, square-shaped face and calm, sleepy manner. He told me about how his grandfather had escaped from the Japanese at Bataan during the time of the World War II death march, only to die in a convenience store holdup years later back in America; and how his uncle, a Vietnam veteran, refused to tell him his war stories until after Cervantes had proved himself by fighting in Iraq.

“I know where heaven is and it’s Lithuania,” went a story by another marine who had gone there on holiday. “The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view toward sex. Who says communism was bad? You’re working three levels of advantages: you’re a foreign male, you’re a rich, exotic American, and their own men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs. Ukraine’s just as good. But it’s not gonna last because of the expansion of the European Union.”

First Lt. Michael Aldrich of Lufkin, Texas, also had good stories. Mike Aldrich was a short, sinewy, Popeye sort of guy who walked with his shoulders rolled back, confidently swinging an arm as though it had a billy club attached to it. At thirty-seven he was very old for a lieutenant. Two days after finishing high school he was in Marine boot camp, but left active duty to work as a forklift operator and machinist making parts for oil pumping rigs. Called up as a reservist in 1990, he fought in the Gulf War as a scout sniper. Then he got a job in the Texas state prison system. After the Mexican mafia put a contract out on him for “clocking” one of the inmates (breaking his jaw) in self-defense, he was transferred to another penitentiary for his own safety. Instead, Aldrich joined the Lufkin police department, from which he would eventually be fired. “I was just too aggressive. I didn’t want to mark time, I wanted to bust people. But they told me that as long as cars transporting drugs north out of Mexico were not stopping in Lufkin, I should just let ’em pass through. It was so political.”

So he went back to the prison system, where he worked on death row. “The death row inmates were easy to deal with—they didn’t want to mess up their appeals by attacking a guard. I looked at their case files, though. I’ll tell you something: they deserved to die. Texas doesn’t bullshit, it executes.”

Meanwhile, Aldrich missed the Marine Corps—“the only place in my life where I have been judged completely on my own merits and mistakes.” At thirty-four, he reenlisted as a corporal. After years of bad luck, a series of breaks led to the offer of a meritorious commission just before he reached the age limit. Going to school at night to earn a degree from Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He became a liaison officer at Bethesda Naval Hospital during the Iraq war, where his job was to assure that wounded marines from Camp Lejeune were getting their convalescent benefits. “It was the most important job of my life. I met the President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I felt that I restarted my life as a Marine officer. You don’t know how depressed I was after getting fired from the Lufkin police department. But my wife has stood by me since high school. We can’t know our destiny, it’s God’s plan. I’m headed for Iraq in the spring, finally.”

The best storyteller was one of the Navy docs, “Smitty”—his nickname was tattooed in big letters across the top of his back. Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Brian Smith of St. Louis, with kinky dirty blond hair, was Long’s and Rivera’s poker buddy. Smitty was crude and nasty. He loved to smoke and drink. He had seen it all. “In a trauma situation, I’d trust Smitty more than any Navy chief or surgeon,” Steve Long told me. Smitty had no rhythm, but I often saw him dancing by himself, snapping his fingers as he walked along. He had a distinct southern accent, not unusual given that in some respects St. Louis constituted the northern tip of Dixie.

Smitty joined the Navy out of high school. Seven of his thirteen years in the Navy had been on “the green side”—with the Marines. “Hearing a marine call you ‘Doc’—something they’ve been doing since the dawn of time—well, it’s pretty cool. It does something to you,” he told me. “Marines won’t fight, train, go to the range, or do anything without a corpsman. Technically, the corpsman is a noncombatant, armed with only a nine-mil[limeter Beretta pistol] in self-defense. Bullshit. The life expectancy of corpsmen in the field in Vietnam was among the lowest of Marine units. As long as a corpsman doesn’t puss out, marines treat him like their own. That’s why I stay on the green side. The blue side [the Navy] just ain’t the same.”

Smitty’s stories about Iraq were likely exaggerated, yet they had a mythic quality about them that was truly impressive. It had much to do with the way he told them. His light green eyes flashed the richest of expressions as he talked. I thought of Faulkner, and the stories that the old men in his narratives told “while chewing tobacco until the suption is out of it.”¹³ In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Smitty had traveled six hundred miles, for forty-eight days, and saw around a thousand patients while assigned to a forward resuscitative surgical team and a much larger, eighteen-truck surgical company that included its own portable morgue—where the docs would keep their mineral-water bottles cold between the stacks of corpses. “You go inside the truck, ignore the dead guys, and just go about your business.”

The first marine who Smitty saw dead had just been pulled off a Black Hawk and “his face was pale, pale, pale. At the beginning of the war,” Smitty went on, “they brought in this marine and Iraqi soldier at the same time. They had been found wounded in the same spot, and it seemed from their injuries that they might have tried to shoot each other. Well, when the wounded marine sat up and saw a surgeon treating the Iraqi, he grabbed the doc’s nine mil and tried to shoot the Iraqi. From then on, we separated the marine from the Iraqi patients.

“The physicians wanted to treat the worse-off first. That’s the civilian mentality, and inside Navy hospitals you might as well be in the civilian world. But in a military surgical unit during a war, you got to understand, the doctors have to treat the minor injuries first, in order to get marines back into the fight. Iraqis should get treated only when the docs are not busy with marines. The surgeons caught on to this only when they started seeing dead marines come in.

“It’s the dead you remember more than the ones whose lives you saved,” Smitty observed, taking a long drag on a cigarette. “I remember this young lieutenant. Was he a first lieutenant or second lieutenant? I don’t know. Anyway, he was young and he had a wedding ring on. Shit, I thought. He probably has a wife who’s at the grocery store now, maybe a young kid in school, and I know he’s dead and they don’t. Stuff like that just does something to you. Over a decade in the Navy and this was the high point.”

Once, at a local restaurant with Rivera, Smitty spoke of an Iraqi soldier who was brought in with an entire buttock shot off. “I would’a kept fighting, even with half my ass blown off,” Rivera shouted. “No you wouldn’t,” Smitty cut in, “because the pain and trauma would have forced your blood to the wounded area, and you would have gone into shock and nausea if you hadn’t immediately blacked out. These ain’t like hunting accidents. Assault rifle bullets are designed to tumble at high velocity through the body.”

The most memorable story that Smitty told was about “the gunny who wouldn’t die.” Everybody in the hootch had heard it. Checking the facts, I learned later that it wasn’t a gunnery sergeant at all but a first sergeant: the effect of the story was the same, though.[5]

“There was this gunny,” Smitty would begin, “who came in with his head blasted through with a bullet. But he was still breathing. He just wouldn’t die. So we intubated him to help him breathe through all the muck and vomit in his mouth. Then we sent him over to the dental tent to die. In a field hospital there was nothing more we could do for him. His eyes were wide open, completely fixed and dilated. He was brain-dead. He was Cheyne-Stoking—taking rapid, shallow, rattling death breaths. All the corpsmen took turns going over to hold his hand. He remained like that for twelve hours before he finally expired.”

“He didn’t give up because he wanted to fucking get back into the fight,” Rivera shouted.

“He was fucking brain-dead,” Smitty answered solemnly.

“No, you don’t understand,” Rivera countered. “He was a Marine grunt, he wanted to get back into the fight.” Rivera’s expression was notably naïve—he truly believed this.

For three weeks the marines shared the hootch with a twelve-person humanitarian aid mission from the U.S. Air Force Reserves that had been dispatched by European Command. It included three physicians, two dentists, and an optometrist. Every morning, inside the Tondibiah army base, they treated over five hundred people from nearby villages, mainly women with babies hanging on to their backs as though by suction. The Air Force doctors provided relief for worms and other ailments, which would return in a week or two anyway because of the primitive living conditions. “It’s less a health program than a health festival,” one of the physicians told me cheerfully. “It’s kind of an exercise in futility and good intentions that still earns goodwill and gives a technical service like the Air Force the field exposure it needs.”

Like the marines, these Reserve doctors were mainly from the South and Midwest, and from working-class areas of the Northeast. They were thrilled to be in Africa, away from the pressures of their daily medical practices, and having a chance to serve their country at the same time. Humanitarian exercises eased the way for bilateral military relations.

The Air Force mission commander was Maj. Melissa Triche of Bucyrus, Ohio. Tall, angular, with a lovely face and sophisticated manner, she was, I was surprised to hear, one of six kids from a family that lacked the money to send her to college. “I enlisted in the Air National Guard for six and a half years. It paid the money for me to attend Kent State. The Guard made me,” she said with matter-of-fact gratitude. She was now in the Reserves and divorced, with an eight-year-old son back in central Ohio who was staying with his father, a C-130 navigator, while she was away. Like Staff Sgt. Steve Long, the Reserves had become her livelihood. She figured out how to work the system in order to get activated two hundred days a year. “I’m a Reserve bum. It’s been easy to do since 9/11.”

The culmination of the two-month training mission was to be platoon-level field operations for 150 host-country troops in a savannah tract two hours north of Niamey. Real-world intelligence about incursions by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat would be provided by the Marine advisors to Nigerien commanders, who would then lay out ambushes. The ambush sites would be equipped with dummies to be killed, captured, and searched by Nigerien troops. On the dummies would be documents that the Nigeriens would have to exploit for intelligence purposes. There would be various hostage and prisoner scenarios. One morning we left to do a field survey of the training site.

When you left Niamey on rutted dirt tracks, it was as if the country disappeared on you. There was no police, no sign of authority, nothing. Men with Tuareg headdresses began to appear here and there at roadblocks. The bloody apricot soil thinned out into a bumpy semi-desert, bearded with thorns and punctuated by termite hills. For hundreds of miles, north from the Atlantic Ocean to Niamey, the landscape barely changed. But beyond Niamey, still going north, there began an increasingly dry transition zone that would culminate in utter desert.

Flash floods had left the road washed out in places, with the wheels of gigantic trucks half sunk in mud, the drivers stuck on the side of the road for days. We passed through several villages, the most traditional-looking I had seen in Africa, composed exclusively of wattle and mud brick. There were goat herds and camels loaded down with firewood. Women wrapped in colorful fabrics evocative of exotic birds pounded maize. It was a vision of Africa out of a time capsule, with the stresses of modern development filtered out.

The kids in such places particularly amazed the marines. Steve Long talked about a little boy he had seen in Chad working a field with a primitive implement. When Long had offered him crackers from an MRE box, the boy collected several other kids from the village, made them line up, and gave each a piece. “That’s good-to-go,” Long said. “These kids don’t need Mommy and Daddy to do things for them, it’s like rural America a hundred years ago.”

Getting stuck in the mud, we wrapped the winch around a tree. A group of young men helped out by matting the tire area with dried leaves and branches for traction. The marines gave them MREs as gifts, explaining through sign language how to use the heaters. Like the young men I had met in villages near Tondibiah, they were without jobs and complained of nothing to do. These villages would not remain traditional for long, I realized, not with jobless youth, a soaring population, democratization, and the possibility of a small-scale oil bonanza—of the kind that had ruined Nigeria. Something would happen here, good or bad. You could almost feel the ground shifting below your feet.

The training site was an immense, wadi-scarred savannah that featured a series of volcanic plugs: steep hills littered with scree. I accompanied Maj. Baker, 1st Lt. Dekryger, and Staff Sgt. Long to the top of one, from where they surveyed the area. Even at the summit the heat did not abate. The three marines barely noticed. “What an awesome tract,” Lt. Dekryger exclaimed. “There’s nothing here to impede us.” They began picking out wadis and draws where units could be concealed and lay down supporting fire. The two-mile distance between each hill created fire lines for different platoons to operate. They went on about how lucky they were to be here even if, as they told me, it wasn’t Afghanistan or Iraq.[6]