Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^SIX THE GURKHA STANDARD Nepal, Summer 2005

The defining truism of realism from Thucydides onward has been that liberty is impossible without authority—something often conferred by uniformed men with guns. Take Algeria, where political and economic freedom was beginning to sprout, but only on the heels of a military defeat of Islamic insurgents. Likewise in Nepal, where a military defeat of a Marxist-styled Maoist guerrilla movement was, by itself, certainly not the solution to the anarchy in the Nepalese countryside; yet, at the same time, no solution was ultimately possible without at least some sort of setback for the Maoists on the battlefield. Nepal was not far removed from other places where I had seen the American military grapple with a country that was not a country.

Here was a place on the brink of collapse, even as its 27.7 million people were squeezed between the two rising economic and demographic behemoths of the age, China and India. Nepal had been a buffer territory of the British Empire much like Afghanistan, left backward and isolated, while India, which Afghanistan and Nepal had been fated to protect, reaped the rewards of colonial development. The monarchy had been the glue holding together Nepal’s dozen ethnic groups, with their forty-eight languages and dialects. But this Hindu monarchy, which had ruled the country for over two hundred years, had been undermined when, in 2001, a mentally unstable crown prince, distraught at not being allowed to marry his beloved, killed nine members of the royal dynasty before he himself committed suicide. Then there was the country’s political parties, bases for feudal politicians unable to rise above tribal and caste loyalties. Like the Scottish Highlands as described by Samuel Johnson in 1775, “To this general distemper…was added the peculiar form of the country, broken by mountains into many subdivisions scarcely accessible but to the natives, and guarded by passes, or perplexed with intricacies, through which national justice could not find its way.”¹

This depressing state of affairs was abetted by the Maoist rebellion, ignited in the mid-1990s in the heavily forested mountains of western Nepal. The upshot of fifty years of communist influence in the region, it was triggered by an earlier ban on hashish, the main cash crop for farmers.[81] The Maoist revolt had led to the deaths of many thousands. It reached a peak in the period between 2001 and 2003, before surging upward once again just prior to my arrival.

Some of the killings had been especially gruesome. Called “mutilation atrocities,” they featured breaking most of the victim’s bones, followed by gouging out his eyes, cutting off his tongue, ears, and nose, sawing him in half, and finally burning the remains. Nothing in Nepalese history or culture accounted for such barbarism, which was always inflicted by a small number of young Maoist men and women on a single victim.² The remoteness of the terrain, the Maoists’ lack of a real governing apparatus, and the fact that their ranks were filled with unsocialized youth from the lowest castes brainwashed by elderly ideologues brought to mind elements of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, the Peruvian Shining Path, and the Colombian narco-terrorists.

The Nepalese government no longer controlled the countryside, where 85 percent of the population lived. The police barely functioned beyond the capital of Kathmandu. Nepal had never constituted a coherent bureaucratic state. Colonialism, however derided, often bequeathed a strong bureaucratic tradition. Thus, it was no accident that Nepal, Afghanistan, and Yemen—all beset by various levels of anarchy—had never truly been colonized.

No political resolution to the crisis was possible without Indian acceptance. On the one hand, the authorities in New Delhi were nervous about an insurgency that threatened to evolve into another Kashmir on their weakly policed northern border, especially as the bulk of Nepal’s population lived in the lowlands beside India. Could, for example, Bihar, India’s poorest and most chaotic state, absorb large numbers of refugees from a collapsed Nepal next door? On the other hand, the Indians were not averse to a weak and henceforth dependent Nepal. Moreover, there were congeries of leftist groups within the byzantine Indian party system that sympathized with the Maoists, whom, because of the porous border, they were in a position to assist.[82]

The Chinese strategy was quiet patience, in the hope that, as in the case of Uzbekistan, human rights violations would make it increasingly harder for Western democracies to help Nepal militarily. That would allow Beijing to move in, sell arms, and gain influence without regard to their new client state’s moral improvement.

The Chinese bet was a good one. Days before my arrival, the Bush administration had canceled an Army Special Forces training mission to Nepal—of the kind that I had observed in Algeria—because of the king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah’s failure to move quickly in reinstituting democracy, something that in nuts-and-bolts terms meant returning power to the same political parties representing feudal castes and Indian moneymen that had brought the country to its knees in the 1990s. Of course, it would be hard to exaggerate just how inept and autocratic the king’s rule was. But it was also possible that had he not grabbed power away from the party system in 2002, the state might have already collapsed.

The situation bore resemblance to El Salvador twenty years before, where murderous right-wing forces that, nevertheless, represented a legitimate state were pitted against murderous left-wing ones that represented the geopolitical ambitions of the Soviet Union and Cuba. While the media of the day tended to record the atrocities of one side, the U.S. government’s only choice was to try to work with the other.

Alas, Nepal was another poor country fighting a dirty struggle against an enemy that did not play by the rules. The Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) had no previous experience in fighting a war, let alone a counterinsurgency. Its human rights violations were considerable, including many unaccounted-for disappearances. Still, it had a human rights lawyer in many divisions and a colonel under house arrest, as well as several majors under investigation, for alleged human rights abuses. But because it had at least some transparent bureaucratic structure that could be held accountable, the Royal Nepalese Army was an easy target for the United Nations and various human rights groups.

It was the same old story. Because the U.S. military had to operate in a world of power, to be effective it occasionally had to appear as the bad guy.

Army Maj. Larry Smith of Savannah, Illinois, whom I had met at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had lured me to Nepal—something that was easy to do given the country’s fascinating situation. When I had encountered Larry at Fort Leavenworth he wore a uniform; when I saw him again in Kathmandu he had on jeans, cowboy boots, and a flowing white kurta—an outfit he called “Texan-Hindustani”—and was surrounded by an extensive home library that included many Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu grammars.

Larry smoked a lot of cigarettes. He had grown up on a family farm in Illinois along the Mississippi River, near Ulysses S. Grant’s hometown of Galena. At sixteen, he spent a year as an exchange student in western Germany and learned German fluently. Now forty, he had been married for twenty-two years to a beautiful New Delhi–born Indian woman whom he had met at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois. They had a twelve-year-old daughter and a twenty-one-year-old son. The son was also in the Army, about to enter the Special Forces Qualification (Q) Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

After community college, Larry enrolled at Rockford College, near where he grew up. In October 1983, after hearing about the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, as he told me, “I got up and walked out of a class on French literature, went straight to the local recruiter’s office, and joined the Army as a buck private. I have nothing against French literature. But at the time, it didn’t mean much to me.”

Over the next five years, while working as a military policeman in Alabama and Germany, he rose to sergeant. Then he enrolled in the ROTC program at Illinois State University in Normal, graduating as a second lieutenant. Tours at Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Lewis, Washington; Fort Polk, Louisiana; and Fort Carson, Colorado, followed in succession, as he rose to the command of a military intelligence company. Next, he decided he wanted to be a foreign area officer for the Indian subcontinent. That led to a year of studying Hindi at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and a year of graduate school in subcontinental Asian studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

From Texas, Larry and his wife moved to southern India, where he spent a year at an Indian Army staff college. His impressions of it were mixed. Despite the extensive battlefield experience of his fellow students in Kashmir and along the Indian-Pakistani border, the Indian military, in his opinion, put “tremendous emphasis on form over substance, with an unwillingness to self-critique.” After-action reviews of the 1962 Indian-Chinese border war were still classified, and Indian generals expressed criticisms of military tactics and policy only in the most oblique terms, making for an academic straitjacket. There was, too, the usual problem of a third-world army—weak noncommissioned officers “who were essentially privates with seniority.” At Indian Army messes, enlisted men served tea to the officers. Larry, an officer who had once been a noncom, remarked that if he were still enlisted and an officer ordered him to bring tea, he’d spit in the cup. He said, “You want real democracy in a country like Nepal? Then empower the NCOs in the Royal Nepalese Army. That’s where democracy starts.”

Larry’s was a typical Army résumé: years and years of training before the job even commenced. He was just starting to feel his way around Kathmandu when I arrived.

I found Kathmandu a ragged, jungly, hilly confection of moldering walls set amidst stage-prop bluish mountains, which in August were half swallowed by monsoon clouds that had the look and texture of dirty sponges. As crowded and polluted with motorbikes, automobiles, and rickshaws as it was, Kathmandu never quite gave up the atmosphere of a small town that had simply grown too big. Durbar Square, notwithstanding its rambling clutter of Hindu and Buddhist temples, appeared small and intimate, unmanageable in its number of gods but quite manageable in its absence of yawning space.

Durbar Square had been an off-duty hangout for Peace Corps volunteers. The Peace Corps, from its start under President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s, evoked a rugged tradition of service requiring both discipline and idealism. Unlike the hippie movement, it had lost little of its legitimacy over the chasm of the decades. It was still much respected, and accounted for many of the new crop of American ambassadors. As one embassy staffer told me, “Nepal is important to the United States because, among other things, it represents one of our oldest Peace Corps legacies.”

That legacy seemed to demand rescue. For the most part, the Peace Corps volunteers were gone from Nepal, as the countryside beyond Kathmandu, courtesy of the Maoists, had become too dangerous to operate in. There was a hard lesson here, especially for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a lesson that I had also caught indications of in Niger—a place where civilian aid workers, including Peace Corps volunteers, were mainly restricted to the area of the capital city. If civilian aid was to have any kind of future in countries like these, it would have to be at least partially militarized.

My first night in Kathmandu, Larry took me to a gathering of a U.S. Air Force medical aid team dispatched by PACOM in Honolulu. The aim of the nine-man mission, explained Capt. Jason Deese of Linden, Michigan, who had relief experience in twenty other Asian countries, was to train Nepalese first responders and paramedics in the event of anything from a bomb blast to an earthquake (Nepal was on a major seismic fault line). Tech. Sgt. David Eubanks of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, a member of the National Guard, worried that while at his level, “the Nepalese suck up knowledge,” the problem was that the higher-ups were feckless. “Government agencies,” he said, “are not talking to each other here. And without synergy you can’t have an adequate disaster response.” Sgt. Eubanks mentioned that the caste system had created an unbridgeable wall between officers and noncoms in the local military.

Larry and his colleagues in the military wing of the embassy did not kid themselves that they could reform the Royal Nepalese Army. Rather, they were investing their hopes in one Ranger battalion of 897 men. This battalion, consisting of four rifle companies, was modeled after the U.S. Army Rangers based out of Fort Benning, Georgia. One evening in Larry’s house, over a dinner of wine and Indian curry dishes, I met two of the battalion’s officers, including thirty-year-old Capt. Anup Phayal, who had played a role in establishing the unit two years earlier.

Capt. Phayal and his superior, thirty-two-year-old Maj. Subash Thapa, were smartly dressed in pressed slacks and polo shirts. Their engaging manner and knowledge of literature and policy studies reminded me of the foreign students one encountered nowadays at Ivy League universities. Like the late King Hussein of Jordan, both had gone to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Capt. Phayal was also a graduate of Ranger School at Fort Benning; Maj. Thapa of the Q Course at Fort Bragg.

Both Capt. Phayal and Maj. Thapa were from military families. Capt. Phayal had grown up listening to his grandfather’s stories of being a British Gurkha in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. Maj. Thapa, on both his mother’s and father’s side, boasted eight generations of army officers. These two young men, who discussed with me Camus’s The Rebel, and who had arrived at the house on late-model motorcycles and wearing light body armor, were, by taste and education, a subcaste of global cosmopolitans to which the attendees at Davos and other international conferences had doubtlessly been little exposed.

Capt. Phayal said, “The Nepalese army must set an example for society by breaking down class divisions. What I’m particularly proud of,” he added, echoing Larry, “is the strong role of NCOs in our particular battalion.”

As for the state of affairs with the Maoists, Capt. Phayal stated, “Terrain-wise, Nepal is twenty times Afghanistan. We fight in a vertical jungle landscape. We see the enemy [the Maoists] on an adjacent hilltop and it takes us three days of rucking to reach him, by which time he is long gone. We need a few helicopters, that’s all. Nothing fancy, Russian Mi-24s will do.

“There are large tracts where the Maoists have ruled for five years,” he continued, “yet they’ve done even less in terms of improving the lives of the people than our own government.” Then there was their cruelty, which, rather than being a result of bad discipline, was intrinsic to their operating procedures. “I’m convinced that morally it’s a black-and-white situation,” he said.

Though Capt. Phayal looked younger than his thirty years, as a company commander he was a veteran of several combat sorties in the western hills, and had been wounded in the thigh.

Because of the incompetence of the Royal Nepalese Army in its dealing with the media, it had taken much pleading on my part to gain access to the Nepalese Rangers’ training camp. The Ranger battalion was doing its training at Surya Binayak, in the oily dark, heavily wooded foothills east of Kathmandu. I left the teeming sprawl of the capital behind and drove up a maze of careening mountain roads into a realm of pristine air graced by pines and oaks and studded with small Hindu temples, amidst fields as perfect as any golf course.

The camp was spotless, right down to the new trees and plants that the members of the battalion had been tending, punctuated by dazzling red hibiscus in brass pots. Maj. Thapa and Capt. Phayal, along with some other officers, greeted me in a shed. They wore woodland camouflage fatigues, emblazoned with crossed Gurkha swords, suns, and half-moons—traditional Nepalese symbols denoting rank. The briefing they delivered was standard Pentagon PowerPoint: a swift overview of little substance, but with one significant exception.

The most frustrating weakness of third-world armies confronting counterinsurgencies was here being admitted and dealt with. From Colombia onward, I had encountered host-country militaries that, because they lacked confidence and because their morale was questionable, were only comfortable engaging the enemy in large numbers, at the company level (150 men roughly) or above. But here in Nepal, the nine-man squad or “section” was the preferred point of contact. Moreover, this concept was being farmed out within the RNA, as these Rangers, the recipients of previous U.S. Army Special Forces JCETs, were, in turn, providing squad-level training in similar twenty-one-day cycles to other infantry units. As Maj. Thapa noted, “We train to fight at the squad level, with squad leaders. The company level is the highest at which we’ll ever fight. We don’t want panicky, trigger-happy soldiers.”

I walked up and down hills, watching live-fire, movement-to-contact drills with Colt Commandos (short-barreled M-16s). The squads were subdivided into teams of five and four, led, respectively, by a sergeant and corporal. The teams burst out of 360-degree cigar-shaped formations, charging up steep hills in the intense heat and humidity, using the buddy system of alternating fire to prevent what the Rangers (employing an American term) called “blue-on-blue” (friendly fire) incidents. The fire was controlled, one shot being used to draw enemy fire before further bursts were ordered. The grading of each squad was often done by noncoms. In the midst of thick vines, I came across two privates lying prone in opposite directions, their rifles cocked in guard positions. Their Mongol-like faces were lathered in grime, sweat, and green camouflage stick. They resembled Buddha statues, barely breathing.

As exemplary as the performance of these enlistees was, they were, nevertheless, simple boys intimidated by authority. Rarely were they the advice-giving, middle-level managers of Western militaries—and these were the best enlistees the RNA could produce. You could give these boys lectures on human rights, as well as on civil affairs and disaster relief, as the officers of this battalion were dutifully doing, and that would result in a heightened concern for human rights. But a situation with few or no violations, as Western governments and international authorities were demanding, was simply unachievable until the society itself evolved to a level that would take it years to reach.

Capt. Phayal told me that “only our officers have linguistic access to Western literature and military field manuals. Thus, they inhabit different mental universes than the enlistees. And yet,” he went on, “it takes so little to make my men happy and motivated.”

So far, the battalion had suffered twelve killed and fifty-three wounded in action. Twenty-one-year-old 1st Lt. Ashok Khadka told me of one engagement the previous April in which he had been wounded by shrapnel in the neck.

The firefight “happened as it always does,” he told me, “when you are most uncomfortable: before we ate, before we had drunk sufficient water, with full battle order of twenty kilograms [forty-four pounds] on our backs. Bursts of fire came from spot height [the top of the hill]. We charged uphill. IEDs went off. I was on the point [lead] squad. A rifleman and the SAW [the man bearing the squad automatic weapon, a Belgian M-249 light-medium machine gun, in this case] were both wounded. Two platoons eventually relieved us, and we took the hill, but only with air support.”

“The worst aspect is that even with night-vision goggles we don’t know the terrain like the enemy,” another officer told me. Continuing with the same admirable honesty, a third officer said, “We distributed chocolate to the kids in a village and they refused to take it. The Maoists had convinced them that it was poison.” A fourth officer: “A wounded, dying Maoist told his comrade, ‘Don’t waste a bullet on me, use it to kill the enemy. Kill me with a knife, or choke me before you retreat.’ ”

Capt. Phayal summed up: “While men join the RNA with the goal of serving overseas in a U.N. peacekeeping mission, with all the extra income that brings in to their families, the Maoists have a mystical willingness to die. We’re an all-volunteer battalion. But ultimately, all we can do is train and bond with each other, train and bond.”

I did not kid myself that the Maoists didn’t have real allure. Like the Eritrean guerrillas about whom I had reported in the 1980s—and who eventually triumphed—the Maoists had taken a cluster of ideals and launched them into a full-fledged cult. With culthood came discipline and dynamism, two attributes the RNA, except for specialized units like the Rangers, lacked. The Maoists were known to have good communications, and to attack from three sides in human waves. A journalist wanting to visit with them had an easier time gaining access than a journalist wishing to visit with the RNA. Like all post-modern movements, the Maoists were media savvy. In modern warfare, information was another form of battle maneuver. The free economy, coupled with destructive party politics in the 1990s, had exacerbated social inequalities in Nepal from which the Maoists drew sustenance. Their uprising was another rebuke to globalization.

American officials knew that the RNA could not by itself restore stability to Nepal simply because the government had no presence in the villages. So the villagers, faced with threats from the Maoists, were easily intimidated. The RNA, with more training and equipment, might liberate the countryside, but only the presence of civilian authorities building such things as schools, roads, and medical clinics could hold it. Nepal was the Philippines and so many other places all over again. The popular uprising that would occur the following year, which successfully forced the king to restore democracy, could not by itself be a solution to the anarchy in the countryside. It was a good start, though, one that ultimately could be consolidated only with a Western-oriented military, a military that would keep up the pressure on the Maoists, so they would participate in good faith in the democratic process, rather than manipulate it in order to grab power.

I could not think about Nepalese fighters—whether the RNA or the Maoists—without thinking about the fierce and fabled legacy of the Gurkhas.[83] Throughout my travels, I had been experiencing and ruminating upon the challenge of training indigenous troops, and using them to project American power in a more efficient way than I had seen in Iraq in 2004.³ The story of the Gurkhas shows how the British were past masters at this.

The term “Gurkha” stems from a British mispronunciation of the town of Gorkha in western Nepal, from where the first units of these warriors were initially raised among Gurungs and Magars—Nepalese tribes of Mongolian origin.[84] Rather than an ethnic group of their own, the Gurkhas represent what, since the early eighteenth century, British officers have considered the fighting classes of Nepal that emerged out of the feudal anarchy endemic to a poor mountainous country.

The British first encountered them during the 1814–16 war between Nepal and the Bengal Presidency of the East India Company. Impressed by the cheerful disposition of these Nepalese even when they were wounded, the British bonded with their erstwhile adversaries. The relationship was solidified during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when Gurkha recruits to the Indian Army did not revolt, and in fact came to the aid of British civilians.

Afterward, the Gurkhas fought for the British in the Sudan during the Mahdist uprising, in China during the Boxer Rebellion, in Mesopotamia during World War I, and in Burma during World War II, to name but some places. There were tens of thousands of Gurkha casualties in the two world wars. In addition, the British Army had used Gurkhas in the Falklands, the Balkans, and Iraq. The Gurkha tradition of discipline and professionalism, because it had seeped culturally into the RNA in a few instances, was key to why Nepal currently had both battalions and companies of peacekeepers in Burundi, Congo, Haiti, and Liberia.

Gurkha enlistees in the British military tended to come not only from the same tribes, but also from the same clans and families. In the 1970s, in a single battalion, the 6th Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles, forty-six sets of brothers were serving at the same time. In the history of Great Britain, both imperial and post-imperial, the Gurkhas have been its most valued mercenaries—a profession at times unfairly sullied.⁴ As the poet A. E. Housman writes,

“The toughness of Gurkha skulls is legendary,” writes historian Byron Farwell. In 1931 on the North-West Frontier, when a mess mule kicked a Gurkha havildar [sergeant] in the head with his iron-shod hooves, “the havildar complained of a headache and that evening wore a piece of sticking plaster on his forehead. The mule went lame.”⁶ The wild and woolly “Pathan” warriors of Afghanistan feared only two things: the Prophet Mohammed and a Gurkha with a kukri (short curved knife). Farwell writes that “no living thing is faster than a Gurkha leaping downhill.” But such toughness should not be confused with harshness. Among Gurkhas, the bullying and intimidation common to many Western armies was absent.⁷

Retired Cpl. Balbasdar Basnet was the most memorable of the old Gurkha pensioners I interviewed in Kathmandu—men who were veterans of the World War II Burma campaign, of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, and of the British counterinsurgency in Malaysia in the 1960s. He was in his seventies, with a raspy voice that fought against time. He had joined the Gurkha Rifles of the British Army when he was sixteen. He had teeth only on the right side of his mouth, and a shriveled, nut-brown face capped by a topi. There was something indisputably antique about this gentleman warrior, who told me his life story in a room under a black-and-white photograph of Queen Elizabeth II.

Cpl. Balbasdar, despite age and a back brace, had a sinewy musculature, with large, capable hands. He was from a village so impoverished that he had never had tea before joining the army.

“How was basic training as a youth?” I asked.

“Oh, I enjoyed it so much, it was good living,” he told me, smiling.

After basic training, he had served for eight months on the North-West Frontier of British India, guarding the border against “Pathans.” (He used the old British term for what today we call Pushtuns.) From there he went to Bombay, and by ship to northwest Malaya for three months of jungle training, just as World War II was gathering force. Finally he was fighting the Japanese in close combat.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“No, I was thinking only to do and die,” he answered, still smiling.

For fifteen days, he and other Gurkhas marched in the jungle, retreating from a larger force of Japanese. He was taken prisoner early in the war, and for four years subsisted on beatings and two hundred grams of rice per day, moved around from labor camps in Malaya, Java, Sumatra, and New Guinea, wearing nothing more than a loincloth. Hiroshima liberated him from his sufferings, he told me. Suddenly he was being fed and clothed, and a few weeks later New Zealand troops arrived to formally release him. He was proud to have served Her Majesty, he said.

The more prosperous the society, the harder it was to produce men like this, I thought. We were a softer, less fatalistic culture than the one he represented and, overall at least, morally the better for it. But good deeds, whether in Sierra Leone or the Balkans, still required such men.

Comparing these old Gurkhas with contemporary American infantry soldiers and marines, I found the difference great, yet at the same time bridgeable, for I had met many in the combat arms community whose fighting spirit, coupled with their humble backgrounds and their ability to suffer, narrowed the psychological space with these antique warriors. The real difference had to do with the civilian constraints under which they operated. No matter how much the combat arms community of the American military with its warrior ethos believed in its worldwide mission, the American governing class, unlike that of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Europe, had less stomach for it. Nepal was a telling example of what this meant for the American military.

The notion persisted among the left and some isolationists that our military training missions were somehow still propping up dictators, but Colombia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Kenya, Niger, Thailand, Algeria, and every other place I had visited (and would visit) with the military had one thing in common: they were internationally recognized democracies, however imperfect. And we weren’t pushing military aid on them; they were requesting it of us. If they were not democracies, Congress would not have permitted these missions in the first place.

But Nepal was no longer in this category, ever since 2002 when the king had suspended the political party process. Nevertheless, Maj. Larry Smith, along with others, believed that the suspension of aid to the Royal Nepalese Army (because of its own human rights violations and the suspension of democracy in Nepal) would only further empower the Maoists, and that would make a stable democracy in Nepal only more elusive. The U.S. State Department and Congress did not agree, and elements of the Bush administration were on their side. It was an honest policy dispute, the bottom line of which was that my journey to Nepal coincided with a halt to U.S. military aid, even as the Chinese were offering the Royal Nepalese Army an extra million dollars in assistance, an amount that went a long way here. The Nepalese defense minister had just been invited to Beijing, to be followed by the king. This American empire, to say the least, was a weak and hesitant one compared to that of the British and almost all others before it.

Larry Smith, who had come to Nepal hoping to replicate the work of Tom Wilhelm in Mongolia, was worried that he might soon be out of a job.⁸ A year later, after riots curtailed the king’s power and put the country back on the road to democracy, military aid would be resumed, and Larry would be back in business: getting the promised thousands of sets of body armor out of mothballs, filling slots at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., for Nepalese officers, and helping the Nepalese Rangers get funding for an NCO academy. But for now all that lay in the future.

Meanwhile, in the midst of this bad turn of events for him, when military aid had been stopped, Larry and I made a visit to Pokhara, to the west of Kathmandu, to meet a British Gurkha legend. The flight took only half an hour. We couldn’t go by car or bus because the ground in between was either controlled or threatened by the Maoists.

Pokhara lay in a dank and humid valley, in the shadow of the glittering snows and granite of the Annapurna Range of the Himalayas. This time of year, though, it was snuggled in monsoon clouds and choked by greenery so dark that it was as if the whole landscape had been filtered through tar. Water buffalo meandered amid black mildewed walls that were almost completely covered with moss, further obscured by dripping banana leaves. Government paramilitaries sleepily guarded their installations, which were topped by concertina wire. While the town was considered secure, atmospherically it conjured up signs of state collapse.

Eighty-year-old retired British army Col. John Philip Cross greeted us outside his compound in Pokhara, wearing a topi, dark glasses, a smart cravat, pressed shorts, and high woolen socks pulled up nearly to his knees. His knees, I noticed, were tanned and powerful. He had covered ten thousand miles on foot through the Nepalese hills over the years, and still hiked twelve miles a day, though he could barely see because of cataracts. He had enlisted in the army on April 2, 1943. On “D-day plus two,” June 8, 1944, he boarded a troopship for Bombay. Except for short visits to England, he hadn’t been back from Asia since.

His first memorable experience in the army had been a briefing on sex from a medical officer prior to sailing, which frankly shocked him. The officer, without a trace of a smile, said: “Don’t forget, a woman for children, a boy for pleasure, but for real ecstasy, a goat.”⁹ At the tail end of World War II, Col. Cross was assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 1st Gurkha Rifles based at Dharamsala.[85] Thus, his lifework commenced.

From there it was on to Burma to fight and disarm Japanese soldiers; to Cochin China (Vietnam) to fight the Viet Minh; and to Laos, where, as the last British defense attaché before the king fell, he became the de facto eyes and ears of the U.S. Embassy tracking the communist Pathet Lao (for the British ambassador, he sneered, “was a fellow traveler”). Next he went to western Nepal to become a recruiting officer for the Gurkhas. Future years would find him parachuting into Borneo to fight a communist insurgency, and in the Malay Peninsula to train Americans in jungle warfare. “A certain BBC reporter—God rot his soul—accused me of teaching torture.” All in all, he had spent a total of ten years in the jungle, often carrying the equivalent of his own weight on his back, which he called “a delightful way of life.” He spoke French and nine Asian languages.

Col. Cross was a confirmed bachelor, because of “hot blood and cold feet,” he explained. His library of battered books, medals, and kukri knives, each object charged by a memory, was decayed by heat and humidity, for he had no air-conditioning. He slept on a spartan bed in the next room. Here was another antique man of empire—a man who, in his youth, had befriended old British officers who had joined the Gurkha service before Kipling wrote Kim.

Writing books on irregular warfare and Himalayan history that deserved to be read even if they weren’t, he was a minor and far more eccentric offshoot of a British imperial species that had reached perfect culmination in the person of the former soldier and literary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.[86] Both were inveterate walkers: Fermor across Europe, Col. Cross across Nepal.

“Late-nineteenth-century warfare never stopped,” intoned Col. Cross, “though it was masked for a time by the Cold War emphasis on atomic bombs. And in this type of warfare that you Americans must now master, only two things count: the mystic dimension of service and the sanctity of an oath. It’s about the giving ‘of one’s best when the audience is of the smallest.’¹⁰ It’s not about sugar-coated bullets and dispensing condoms in PXes. You can’t fight properly,” he went on, “until you know that you are going to die anyway. That’s extreme, but that’s the gold standard.

“Now take your Gurkha,” he continued, motioning to Buddhiman Gurung, his muscular Gurkha retainer and beloved, adopted son, who had been with him for the past twenty-eight years. “He’s a hungry peasant with a knife who is out for the main chance. There are none finer. I placed these western hillsmen in the Singapore police and they never failed me. The Mongoloid doesn’t die easily. Plainsmen will never defeat such people in hill battles without field artillery—Clausewitz had said as much.”

This was bad news for the Royal Nepalese Army, though Col. Cross was careful not to make explicit political statements, given his circumstances: the Maoists were in the nearby mountains, and government forces down the street. The fact was that the Maoists came from the same sturdy hill tribes that for decades he had recruited, while many of the Royal Nepalese Army’s forces were plainsmen who couldn’t employ artillery, since even a handful of civilian casualties would ignite protests from international organizations. Moreover, the Maoists were fortified by “the mystic dimension of service and the sanctity of an oath,” whereas RNA recruits joined for a salary and a career. The Ranger battalion that I had visited, while a stellar exception, was compromised by domestic and international politics. Laos in Col. Cross’s day had been similar: another landlocked country with a king and a communist insurgency.

When I asked him about Iraq, all he said was: “You don’t join the army to wipe your enemy’s ass. You join to kill, or for you yourself to be killed, and above all to have a good sense of humor about it.”

Col. Cross could be brutal, perverse almost—in this he was totally unlike Fermor. He was near blindness, living in the threatened backwater of the only country he could call his own. Yet there was an undeniable logic, however cruel, to some of his truths. War was still about killing people. While this might be a truism to civilian observers, it certainly was not to those who actually practiced for it, and particularly not to their trainers. For example, to say publicly that marines liked killing people did not go over well, but it was something marines said among themselves all the time.

About special forces the colonel said, “They’re introverts at heart, happy to be by themselves, shit-hot on the outside during operations, but pathetic cuckoos on the inside.” That was SF all right.

The United States was never going to produce troops like the Gurkhas or officers like Col. Cross, nor should it. It would have to get the most out of what, by the traditional standards of warfare, were indirect half measures, under the guidance of enlightened, liberal-minded officers who, when it was necessary, could nevertheless kill with the best of them. Those on the political extremes imagined an imperial bully and global busybody, but the reality of the American military in so many places was how restricted it was. Only at sea, from what I had seen so far, were we still relatively unfettered by global and domestic politics.