Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

^{CHAPTER TWO} SOUTHCOM ^{COLOMBIA, WINTER 2003 WITH NOTES ON EL SALVADOR}

“How do you infiltrate and police the world, if such a thing were even possible?” I asked.

“You produce a product and let him loose,” retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Sidney Shachnow told me.

Back from Yemen, I had arrived at a horse farm in Southern Pines, North Carolina, a manicured landscape of calm hills, shaved lawns, freshly painted white picket fences, and carefully tended private roads less than an hour from the ratty sprawlsville that dominated Fort Bragg, home of U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Gen. Shachnow owned horses. Yet, with his spartan tastes and rugged, growly voice—his accent a blend of darkest Eastern Europe and working-class Boston—he didn’t seem to fit with this fantasy landscape. Gen. Shachnow had spent his life fitting into places he shouldn’t have. Sid Shachnow, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, was a veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam. With forty years of active military service, he was one of the deans of the Army Special Forces’ old boys network.

Born in 1933 in Lithuania, Shachnow spent three years of his boyhood in a Nazi concentration camp, and then supported his family in Allied-occupied Germany by selling contraband on the black market. He had watched his mother being raped by a drunken Lithuanian partisan—a fact that slipped out during one of our conversations, when he also told me about his attempt to get his family’s property back in Lithuania.¹ “The number of Jews in Vietnam and in the world of Special Forces where I spent my life, well, you could fit them in a small car,” he said, shrugging.

We talked no more of it. Being Jewish was nothing he wore on his sleeve. He had married a Catholic girl and his Jewish family had virtually disowned him; the marriage, still strong, was at the half-century point. Besides, the world of liberal Jews was not one with which he could always be comfortable. “The shots of the last helicopters leaving Vietnam still nauseate me,” he said. “I remember getting Broadway tickets while on leave from the service, with a note written on them saying, ‘Don’t wear your uniform to the theater.’”

The layers of Shachnow’s personality were like armored breastplates. Every aspect of his lined face and short, wiry body seemed hard and chiseled. Awards, citations, and decorations lined the walls of his home and the guest quarters. I imagined Ligustinus, the Roman centurion who had served in Spain, Macedonia, and Greece. Ligustinus had spent nearly half his life in the army and was rewarded for bravery thirty-four times.²

Shachnow had enlisted in the Army out of high school, and rose to sergeant first class before attending Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He had survived concentration camp guards, got married with no money to a girl of another faith, raised a family of four daughters, gone from private to two-star general, and lived in a magnificent home, all because of decisions he had made on instinct and impulse. He implied that if the U.S. was going to monitor and regulate the world with a minimal number of troops and without large-scale wars, then it would require the ability to replicate soldier personalities like himself.

“An SF [Special Forces] guy has to be a lethal killer one moment and a humanitarian the next. He has to know how to get strangers who speak another language to do things for him. He has to go from knowing enough Russian to knowing enough Georgian and Arabic in a few weeks, depending upon the deployment. We need people who are cultural quick studies.”

Shachnow was not talking about area expertise; that took too many years to develop and, in any case, was not always practical for Special Operations Forces (SOF), a bureaucratic category which included Army Special Forces (the so-called Green Berets), Rangers, and psy-ops (psychological operations); Navy Special Boat Units and SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land commando teams); Air Force para-rescue units, and so forth. Special Operations Forces did not have the luxury of knowing in which part of the world they would have to intervene. Rather, Shachnow was talking about a knack, about a way of dealing with people, about implanting charisma almost. The right men would find things out and act on the information they gathered, simply by knowing how to behave in a given situation.[9]

“The Special Forces who dropped in to help [the warlord Abdul Rashid] Dostum, the guys who grew beards, got on horses, and dressed up like Afghans, were not ordered to do so by Gen. Tommy Franks. It was a decision they made in the field.

“That’s why I joined SF,” Shachnow continued. “In Vietnam, when I commanded my own infantry battalion, there was someone to pitch my tent, blow up my air bag, make me coffee, and drive my jeep. If you’re the ego-trip sort of guy you like that. In SF you pitch your own tent and blow up your own air bag. I joined Special Forces because it forced me to think; it kept me from getting bored.”

Shachnow introduced me to the world of Army Special Forces, where I would start my odyssey with the American military. Later I would move on to other branches of the armed services, in no particular order, often shuttling back and forth. Comparison is the heart of all serious scholarship, and thus my keenest perceptions about SF would come only after many trips with non-SF units.

U.S. Army Special Forces traced their origins to the World War II–era Office of Strategic Services (OSS), specifically the Jedburgh teams who were dropped behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France, and Detachment 101, which operated in Burma.³ Jedburgh is an area of Scotland where local Scots had conducted guerrilla war against British invaders in the twelfth century. The Jedburgh concept meant placing small teams in hostile terrain, to train and organize much larger groups of guerrillas in unconventional warfare so that the teams became force multipliers.⁴

The OSS, disbanded after World War II, gave birth to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 and to the 10th Special Forces Group in 1952, based at Fort Bragg, which had responsibility for operating behind enemy lines in Europe in the event of war with the Warsaw Pact nations. President John F. Kennedy, whose respect for unconventional warfare dated to his experiences as a PT boat commander in the Pacific in World War II, expanded the role of Army Special Forces, particularly in Southeast Asia, and awarded them an official headgear, the green beret.⁵ But the term “Green Berets” is rarely used by Special Forces troops themselves. They prefer simply “SF.”

SF’s real signature was not sartorial but organizational: its emphasis on twelve-man teams.

In places like Yemen, the right men, men like Shachnow, had the best chance of finding the right hinge—the fragile axis upon which political developments in a given country can turn. The Spartans turned the tide of battle in Sicily by dispatching only a small mission, headed by Gylippus. His arrival in 414 B.C. kept Sparta’s allies, the Syracusans, from surrendering to the Athenians. It broke the Athenian land blockade of Syracuse, rallied other Sicilian city-states behind Syracuse, and was crucial to the defeat of the Athenian fleet the following year.

The notion that vast historical forces could be tipped by the right individuals exerting pressure in the right spot has always offered an attractive antidote to fatalism. As such, it was reprised by President Kennedy, who, in the second decade of the Cold War, believed that relatively small-scale unconventional, covert operations could be an alternative to massive nuclear retaliation. Kennedy also believed that the nature of war itself was changing. As he told the 1962 graduating class of West Point: “This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by [conventional] combat…. It requires… a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.”⁶

Kennedy could have been describing the world of the early twenty-first century. Though his vision of unconventional war was to bear mixed results in Vietnam, his larger analysis would prove clairvoyant.[10]

Special Forces was particularly active in Colombia, the country that Coast Guard Capt. Bob Innes in Yemen had described to me in grisly detail. Thus Colombia was where I wanted to go. It was the third biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. American interests there were hard to overestimate.

Colombia is the third most populous country in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico, and half as close to the United States as Europe. It has

vast untapped oil reserves; America was already getting more oil from this region of South America than from the Arab world. Colombian narco-terrorists had forged strategic links with radical Islamists: proof that while the frontier of Indian Country used to begin eight miles west of Fort Leavenworth—where the Santa Fe and Oregon trails separated—it now circumscribed the earth, and was not confined to the Middle East.

While the world’s last totalitarian, Cold War regimes in Iraq and North Korea were grabbing headlines that winter, the future of military conflict was better gauged in Colombia, which represented a severer form of social breakdown than Yemen or almost anyplace else in the Middle East. The effort in Iraq, with its large-scale mobilization of troops and immense concentration of risk, could not be indicative of how the U.S. would act in the future. It was in Colombia where I was introduced to the tactics that the U.S. would employ to manage an unruly world.

Colombian guerrilla groups had forsaken controlling twentieth-century ideologies in favor of decentralized baronies and franchises, built on terrorism, narco-trafficking, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and extortion of oil pipeline revenues from local governments. With hundreds of millions of dollars annually from cocaine-related profits, and with documented links to the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatists—who advised them on kidnapping and car bomb tactics—the Colombian guerrillas were an exotic variant of al-Qaeda, in the sense that they had no stake in any legitimate world order.

While Yemen boasted the largest per capita number of small arms in the world, Colombia led the world in kidnapping: three thousand in 2002 alone. Colombia produced 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. More so than Yemen, Colombia was less a country than a series of fortified city-states, perched eight thousand feet up in the Andean Cordilleras, surrounded by ungovernable, fast-buck tropical lowlands. In those sweaty forest tracts, loyalty to the elected government in Bogotá was, as one Army officer at Fort Bragg told me, “about twentieth on the inhabitants’ list of priorities.”

Even as U.S. leaders denied that America had imperial intentions, Colombia—so remote from public consciousness, and yet the recipient of so much American aid—illustrated the imperial reality of America’s global situation. In Colombia, cocaine armies had constituted an intractable insurgency long before al-Qaeda did. To better understand the so-called War on Terrorism, it was worth beginning with the so-called War on Drugs.

Thus, I flew to Miami, the headquarters of U.S. Southern Command.

SOUTHCOM traced its origins to 1903, when the first U.S. Marines arrived in Panama to protect a railroad connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It had responsibility for Central and South America, and the Caribbean.[11] Only in 1997 did SOUTHCOM move its headquarters from the outskirts of Panama City to Miami. The many decades in Panama, the large number of Latinos in the U.S. military, and the fact that so many non-Latino troops in SOUTHCOM spoke Spanish made it the most insular, old-fashioned, and colonial of all the area commands.

The flags flying at the Miami headquarters called to mind the Spanish-American War of 1898 and lesser, constabulary escapades south of the border. The ethnic Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexicans in SOUTHCOM’s ranks were the American equivalent of the field-savvy Hindustani- and Pushto-speaking Anglo-Indians who had served Britain’s Indian army so well. Officers and enlisted men spent entire careers in SOUTHCOM, to a degree uncommon in other theaters, moving from El Salvador to Honduras, then to Panama, to Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and so on: “the cucaracha circuit,” as it was affectionately known. The battalion coins for the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group, the group assigned to Latin America, were engraved in Spanish rather than in English: “Fuerzas Especiales” rather than “Special Forces.” Seventh Group was the only SF group that approximated the standards of the original 10th Group in terms of linguistic and area expertise.⁷

SOUTHCOM’s identity was further defined by a feeling of inferiority. With Europe the principal Cold War battleground, and Asia the secondary front because of the threat posed by “Red” China and North Korea, the American military in Latin America had for decades been given short shrift, even as it had a vast area to defend. The answer to this predicament was aggressive intelligence operations and Special Forces’ training of local armies, combined with coercive diplomacy.

The results were not always pretty: witness the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in the aftermath of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. Yet for a relatively small investment in money and manpower, the U.S. neutralized an aggressive Soviet and Cuban campaign at its back door, helping to pave the way for the democratic transitions and market liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1967 in Bolivia, Special Forces helped hunt down and kill the hemispheric agitator Ernesto “Che” Guevara.[12] In the 1980s in El Salvador, 55 Special Forces trainers accomplished arguably more than 550,000 troops in Vietnam: teaching the Salvadoran military to slow down a communist insurgency, even as it transformed itself from a 12,000-man, ill-disciplined constabulary force to a more professional 60,000-man army.[13] El Salvador showed that you didn’t need many people to fight these small wars, but the ones you deployed should be the best.⁸

“Economy of Force” was what Maj. Gen. Geoffrey C. Lambert at Fort Bragg and SOUTHCOM hands in Miami called the strategy of the Cold War decades—their way of talking about the right hinge. Actually, Economy of Force was a strategy practiced by all the great empires of antiquity, which had prevailing but not unlimited amounts of military power, so that necessity required them to be both light and lethal, leading to a reliance on mobile strike forces and client states, which was particularly the case with Rome.⁹

In Latin America, an Economy of Force strategy had produced friendly regimes that in almost every case were better than what the Cubans and Russians had in mind. Even in Chile, despite the human rights iniquities of dictator Augusto Pinochet following Allende’s overthrow, the military regime there subsequently lowered infant mortality from 79 to 11 per 1,000 births, and reduced the poverty rate from 30 percent of the population to 11 percent.¹⁰ Such melding of the political reality south of the border did not run the risk of quagmires, for throughout the Cold War there were relatively few official Americans on the ground in any one Latin American country.

SOUTHCOM’s Economy of Force concept now offered a beautiful logic for the seemingly intractable world of the turn of the twenty-first century, in which everyone (humanitarian interventionists included) admitted that nation-building, whether it was in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Colombia, was fraught with danger, difficulty, uncertainty, and great expense.

Don’t try to fix the whole society. Rather, identify a few key pivotal elements in it, and try to fix them. For example, because a national army is essentially unreformable without wholesale social and cultural change, work to improve only its elite units, using men from America’s own military elite as trainers. That had been the motor for change in El Salvador, where political violence per month was reduced from 610 murders in 1980 to 23 in 1987.¹¹ It was the strategy in Colombia, too.

The exterior of the American Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, was a replica of the one I had seen in Sana’a, Yemen. Both were “Inman buildings,” a reference to Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, who in 1985 chaired an advisory panel that set tougher security standards for U.S. embassies. There were the fleet of armored cars whose drivers always altered their routes, the bomb-blast walls, the hundred-foot setbacks, sliding electronic gates, and active vehicle restraints (AVRs), also known as Delta barriers, that popped up from below the ground.

The Bogotá embassy compound was a world of acronyms, a particular feature of America’s entire national security community at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Acronyms formed the private language that only the initiated understood, like the Latin and Greek once spoken by the upper echelons of the British Empire. Inside the embassy was the NAS (narcotics affairs section), which ran the CD (counter-drug) program. Adjacent to the main building, in a one-level prefabricated unit, made of two sheets of aluminum separated by foam, was the TOC, or tactical operations center, for the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Special Forces Group. The TOC was also known as the FOB, the forward operating base for the 3rd Battalion.[14]

The 3rd Battalion, like all Special Forces battalions, was divided into

three companies that were in turn divided into six twelve-man detachments, many of which were strewn across Colombia. The FOB was manned by one of these detachments, ODA-773: Operational Detachment Alpha-773. The Alpha signified that this was a front-line SF team, even if it currently functioned in a support role.

In a corner office of the FOB sat the 3rd Battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. Kevin A. “Duke” Christie, the effective leader of all Green Berets in Colombia. Like Coast Guard Capt. Innes in Yemen, he was a New York City fireman’s kid, though from Queens rather than Brooklyn. Duke Christie had joined Army ROTC at Florida State University. The first time he was shot at was by urban guerrillas in Lima, Peru, in the 1980s. He served afterwards in Bosnia and Pakistan, trained paratroopers in Kenya, spoke French and German, and was forgetting his Russian, even as his Spanish was coming along. Gangly and muscular, with sharp features and short, corn-colored hair combed upward in 1950s style, Duke Christie was one of those personable guys you could begin your first conversation with in mid-sentence, though when I first met him at SOUTHCOM headquarters in Miami he had been somewhat subdued. One of the best officers in his command, Capt. Adam Kocheran, a West Point graduate about to enter medical school, with a pregnant wife, had just been killed by a claymore mine in a training exercise in Puerto Rico.

The battle update brief for Friday, February 7, 2003, prepared for Duke by his staff, began at 8 a.m. at the FOB in Bogotá. Around a three-sided arrangement of Formica tables with fans whirring sat Maj. Albert Quiros, Capts. Bill Pittman and Luciano Gonzales, Chief Warrant Officer III Pat Gleason, and other officers. All were in BDUs (battle dress utilities, green camouflage uniforms for U.S. troops in the tropics, tan for those in the desert Middle East). The first subject was a “Nairobi scenario,” a reference to the 1998 al-Qaeda bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

“The threat level at the embassy from narco-terrorists has increased significantly,” noted Maj. Quiros dourly. “Where?” Duke asked. “At this embassy, and at your hotel,” Maj. Quiros replied, looking at me in a manner both genial and threatening. A diagram of the embassy grounds was taped on a stretched camouflage poncho that served as a wall partition. Maj. Quiros outlined which officers would control what “fields of fire” in case the embassy was attacked, who would keep the “comms” (communications) going, and who would stay behind here in the “cheesebox” to blow up the safe boxes that held stacks of classified documents.

The brief continued. A congressional delegation would be arriving. Along with the congressmen and their staffers, it would include a few Marine escorts, meaning that some U.S. troops would have to be moved out of Colombia temporarily to preserve the “force cap.” The force cap was a congressionally mandated limit on the number of uniformed U.S. troops that could be in-country at any one time to prevent mission creep. In El Salvador, with a population of five million in the 1980s, it had been fifty-five Special Forces trainers. In Colombia, whose population approached forty million, it was four hundred troops, including roughly seventy Special Forces trainers. The force caps were arbitrary, based more on political trade-offs in Washington than on any substantive analysis of what was required to get the job done. They simply reflected the fear of another Vietnam, even though the difference between having a few hundred elite troops in a country and hundreds of thousands of draftees was vast. Nevertheless, in an imperfect world, force caps were the ultimate guarantors of an Economy of Force strategy.

There was a discussion about the ammunition problem. Imperialism was less about conquest than about the training of local armies. Reliance on American techniques and weapons systems, and the relationships established between American officers and their third world protégés, helped give the U.S. the access it needed around the globe. And when Army Special Forces agreed to train a third world army, it also supplied the ammunition and equipment used in the training.

Arranging transport for the “palletized ammo” from Fort Bragg on C-130s and C-27s was turning out to be a chore. (The military shipped everything in aluminum pallets.) “It’s a bleak world out there as far as available aircraft are concerned,” reported Chief Warrant Officer Gleason in a flat Nebraskan accent.

Pat Gleason, like many noncommissioned sergeants and warrant officers I would meet in the course of my travels, was quietly amazing. From his laptop he ran the equivalent of a small travel agency and moving company, shuttling troops and equipment between the eastern United States, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. His Green Beret specialty was HALO (high altitude, low opening). He could jump out of a plane at night at 25,000 feet, opening the parachute at 3,500 feet. He spoke fluent Spanish and had served all over the Americas. With only one year at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, he had a knowledge of South America (of the mores of the Chilean military, of political attitudes in rural Bolivia, and so on) that was nevertheless encyclopedic. Duke called him the team’s “collective, historical memory.”

There was, too, the issue of the new communications gear. Signals Capt. Bill Pittman, a West Point graduate from Georgia, said it was time “to raise the bullshit flag” about the plan to replace the old PSE-5 Delta “commo” system with a flyweight triband multi-channel package that bundled voice, data, secret, and nonsecret communications. The former system required a network of cumbersome outdoor antennae. The latter ran everything from secure telephones to unclassified PowerPoint briefings off a single eight-foot satellite dish. But it was complicated to operate and repair. Pittman worried that the operator-trainers wouldn’t stay long enough in Bogotá to transfer their knowledge, and the new system would end up as a broken toy that everyone stared at and didn’t know how to use properly.

All in all, it was a typical morning brief, thousands of which were held by the American military around the world every day.

I had dinner with Capt. Pittman the following night in Bogotá’s glitzy Zona Rosa district, a few blocks from my hotel. It was a night I won’t forget. Admiring the clean streets, bicycle paths, and sidewalk ramps for the handicapped from the restaurant window, and refreshing my palate with sorbet between courses, I might have been in any upscale American suburb. Compared to Caracas, Venezuela, where I had been some years before, Bogotá was low-key and dressed-down. The wealthy lived in apartments rather than in villas. It all seemed so thoroughly American. Then I saw that Pittman was distracted.

“What was that?” he said to the waiter, noticing the window shake. The waiter shrugged, unknowing.

We returned to our conversation. Pittman mentioned that Colombia was a bit reminiscent of the Pacific theater in World War II: jungly, disease-ridden, and chillingly violent in its hinterlands, and yet somewhat relegated by American policymakers because of larger events elsewhere. I told him that Bogotá reminded me of Santa Monica and Tel Aviv. Five minutes after Pittman had noticed the window shake his cell phone rang. It was the FOB informing him that five minutes before a big car bomb had exploded a few blocks from our restaurant and my hotel.

The concussion blast inside the exclusive El Nogal club, a haven for the Bogotá elite—accomplished with 440 pounds of fertilizer-based explosive—killed 32 people and wounded 260. Locals compared it to the 1995 Oklahoma City blast. It was the work of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. Americans were not among the casualties, but the car bomb and a smaller blast the next day occurred near the American Embassy and hotels frequented by Americans.

The FARC’s origins dated to the communist agitation of the 1920s in rural Colombia, which came in the wake of the Russian Revolution, though in Colombia there had always been more banditry than Marxist philosophy, so that the fall of the Berlin Wall had little effect here. Indeed, it was difficult to know what the war was about anymore.

Lured by billions in annual cocaine-related profits, these leftist guerrillas, as well as rightist paramilitaries formed by local landowners in response to guerrilla outrages, drifted easily from a unifying ideology to localized anarchy, in which franchises arose built on murder and extortion. By the 1990s, Colombia’s homicide rates had tripled from already high levels, making Colombia more dangerous than even Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama.¹² The tradition of an amoral paganistic Christianity, combined with the struggle over drug revenues, fed the sickening violence. Colombia demonstrated that the most basic human right is not freedom of speech but personal security.¹³

The FARC, with its seventeen thousand or so fighters, no longer represented the shaggy-haired university idealists of the Cold War era, but a criminal army built on the forced recruitment of teenage boys and girls, in which desertion led to the slaughter of one’s family. FARC leader Mañuel Marulanda, perhaps the world’s oldest living guerrilla, might still have harbored ideals. But with an income variously estimated at $500 million annually in protection money from the cocaine business, the FARC was Karl Marx at the top and Adam Smith all the way down the command chain.

To wit, the FARC frequently set up roadblocks that would last for days, checking the names of drivers and passengers against a computer database to see if their bank accounts made them worthy of kidnapping. In Colombia, ideology was dead, as were historical grievances. Ethnic conflict had never been an issue. It was all about money.

Because Colombian society was sick, so was its military. While U.S. Army Special Forces couldn’t reform the whole Colombian army, it could improve some of the host country’s elite units, which could then project power into the FARC-controlled badlands. The training of foreign armies provided the Green Berets’ basic function.[15] And they didn’t just train the commandos from foreign armies; they trained the trainers themselves—the foreign lieutenants and sergeants who, in turn, would pass on Special Forces techniques to their own subordinates.

To see the training up close, I had to travel about the country to various bases. Thus, Lt. Col. Duke Christie and I left Bogotá one afternoon in an armored pickup truck. Duke carried his M-4 assault rifle and 9mm Beretta pistol. The precautions seemed absurd. The journey from Bogotá southwest to Tolemaida took only two hours over a well-traveled route that was generally safe from roadblocks and kidnappings (few other routes in the country could claim that distinction). It was partly a “force protection” issue. For a journalist to be kidnapped or harmed in another way while under the protection of the Special Forces would have been a public embarrassment. But as I would increasingly discover in the course of my travels, force protection was a debilitating obsession with the U.S. military.

Bogotá, at 8,560 feet, is one of the coolest spots in Colombia. Yet it wasn’t long before our car was careening down a choppy sea of ragged, bluish green slopes, smothered in vines and strewn with cedars, tamarinds, and bananas, with evergreens gradually giving way to palms and bougainvillea. The bosky realm was suggestive of the coastal forests of Portugal, another climatic fault zone, except that this landscape was wilder and more chaotic. After the refreshing clarity of the higher altitudes, the air now had the somber closeness of a fish tank.

As it got dark, we turned into Colombia’s National Training Center at

Tolemaida. For the Colombian military, Tolemaida combined the functions of Fort Bragg, with its Army Special Forces; Fort Rucker, Alabama, with its aviation units; and Fort Benning, Georgia, with its Officer Candidate School, noncommissioned officer school, mechanized infantry school, and school for Army Rangers (which in Colombia were called Lanceros). Decades of democracy notwithstanding, the military was still the most respected institution in Colombia, more so than the Catholic Church, according to polls. Tolemaida was a manifestation of that fact. The level of maintenance was high: trimmed lawns, whitewashed sidewalks, speed bumps, nice supermarkets, and playgrounds for the children of Colombian military families.

Just as the Indian and Pakistani armies copied the dress and mannerisms of the British, Colombian army uniforms were modeled after American ones, with Colombia’s special forces wearing the same green berets and red flashes as U.S. elite units. The lone, original sartorial touch was the black kerchiefs that Colombian soldiers wore around their necks in South American cowboy style.

The assault rifles—the workhorse of late-twentieth-century armies—were also different. Rather than the American M-16 or its variations (such as Duke Christie’s M-4), the Colombians packed Israeli-manufactured Galils. The Galil was modeled after the Soviet Kalashnikov, yet it was compatible with the American 5.56mm bullet, instead of the Russian 7.62mm. The Israelis had developed the Galil in order to benefit from the Soviet rifle’s firing dependability and convenient folding-stock design, while still relying on American ammunition.

After driving at high speed for another quarter hour through the sprawling Tolemaida base, we pulled up at an isolated barracks, the temporary home of ODA-781, a U.S. Army Special Forces A-team.

Opening the steel door of the air-conditioned armored pickup, I gasped from the humid, knee-buckling heat of Colombia’s equatorial lowlands. Capt. Chris Murray, ODA-781’s commander, was there to greet us. Capt. Murray had a velvety voice and smile that mothers everywhere fall in love with, even as his uniform hid a muscle mass straight out of a bodybuilding magazine. Chris Murray, thirty-five, was an African-American who had joined the Army after graduating from high school in Rockaway Beach, a working-class area of Queens, where I, too, had grown up. Murray was a commissioned officer thanks to attending Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning.

Murray led me inside to my quarters, a corner bunk at the end of a long, corrugated iron shed where the heat was relieved here and there by loud whining fans. Duke smiled, as happy as I would ever see him. “The barracks,” he exclaimed, “the last remaining thoroughly unrepentant masculine environment in the Western world!”

Militaries are the ultimate reflections of national cultural achievement, or the lack thereof. Here was America’s brawn, organizational know-how, and technological advancement, condensed as though in a museum case on foreign soil. Atop bunks and storage bins, on long foldout tables, and on metal shelves under fluorescent lights, I saw piles of black boots, Listerine, shaving cream, and pictures of loved ones alongside ammunition cases, bandoleers, speed loaders for jamming ammo, and magazines for 9mm and 5.56mm bullets. There were boxing gloves, a trapeze-like arrangement of mosquito nets, torches, briefing books, and laptops. CDs and floppy disks lay alongside blasting caps, communications gear, night vision goggles, signal flares, chem-bio masks, M-3 medical kits, flak vests, machetes, M-203 grenade launchers, 60mm and 80mm mortars, and bipods for heavy guns. There were two black suitcases, each containing a water purification system. There were all sorts of web gear, MREs (meals ready to eat), and Peltors (earphones that filtered out gun sounds but not voices on the firing range).

There were stacks of Beretta pistols, first used by the Army during the invasion of Grenada in 1983, when the Beretta replaced the Colt .45, which had been in service since Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 1916 expedition into Mexico against Pancho Villa. The Beretta uses a smaller bullet than the Colt, but it has less recoil, carries more rounds, and as a last-ditch weapon is easier to handle. There were also the new modular integrated communications helmets, snugger fitting and lighter than the previous models, yet with a tighter Kevlar weave that provided better protection against bullets. Most importantly, there were the squad automatic weapons, which for Army Special Forces were M-249 “Minimis” from the Belgian design, and M-4s with collapsible stocks and shorter barrels for urban combat.

What made the M-4 an improvement over other assault rifles was its modular rail system, on which one could add several accessories—grenade launcher, shotgun barrel, optical site, and carrying handle—making for a truly custom-designed weapon. Unlike the rest of the Army, Special Forces abjured uniformity. Everybody’s rifle and web gear were slightly different. You packed what worked for you in the field, not what the regulations demanded. A few years back, someone had noticed that the Israelis manufactured a nifty collapsible litter for bearing the wounded. Special Forces officers started ordering them over the Internet; nobody waited for the Army to go through the procurement process. The litters were now known simply as “Israelis.”

Hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the barracks, between the two long lines of bunks, was a large American flag. Salsa music blasted from speakers as everyone peeled off their uniforms and headed for the showers. I realized I would be the only one without at least one tattoo on my body.

The members of this A-team hailed from Georgia, South Carolina, Arizona, New Jersey, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, with several from Ohio. All spoke Spanish. Sgt. First Class Ivan Castro, putting on a pair of shorts, gave me his life story without prompting. “Yeah, my family is from Puerto Rico. I was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, St. Mary’s Hospital. My wife is a speech pathologist. When I go back to Puerto Rico to visit my relatives I like it for a day or so, then I hate it. I can’t wait to leave. All the dirt and crime,” he said, looking down in a self-reflective way at his tattoos.

Sgt. Castro was a “bravo,” that is, a weapons specialist. A-teams were usually commanded by a captain, with the rest of the detachment all noncommissioned officers, either sergeants or chief warrant officers, each with an occupational specialty. “Charlie” meant the engineer, “delta” the medic, “echo” the communications expert, and “foxtrot” the intelligence officer. Between the commanding captain and the noncoms was an “18 Zulu,” the operations or team sergeant, who held the rank of master sergeant. He was the heart and soul of the detachment.

Capt. Murray’s 18 Zulu was Master Sgt. Mike Fields of Akron, Ohio. Fields, a stocky guy of average height, with close-cropped red hair verging early on gray, was terse and self-contained. He seemed hard to get to know, and he was. As soon as everyone had showered and changed, he conducted a briefing about “deconflicting the range issue.” He ran through a detailed accounting of eighteen thousand rounds of ammo in addition to blasting caps. Then he outlined the problem: the team needed three rifle ranges for the next day’s training of Colombian troops, but only one range was available, so he had decided that communications training, which didn’t require a range, would be held alongside rifle training. “That way,” Fields said, “we don’t have people wasting time, loitering.” Capt. Murray smiled throughout. The fact that his team sergeant seemed to be the real leader of this A-team was an obvious truth that Murray was not only comfortable with but proud of.

Murray, the ambitious working-class African-American from Queens, was an officer, an aristocrat of sorts, who handled the bilateral relations with his Colombian counterparts at the Tolemaida base. Each member of ODA-781 trained the Colombians on his own occupational specialty: weapons, intelligence, demolition, and so forth. They all reported to Fields. It was in Colombia where I began to see that the genius of the American military was less technological than social, a reflection of American society whose telling feature was the relative absence of class envy. Chris Murray hadn’t been completely satisfied as a noncommissioned officer, so he went to Officer Candidate School. Mike Fields, on the other hand, seemed born to his job as a noncom. As I evaluated more A-teams in Colombia, I continually saw master sergeants with affection for their captains, and captains who positively idolized their team sergeants. American democracy spawned rich and poor, but the basis for its revolutionary dynamism was the great middle. The American military was the clearest example of that. As I would see in my travels, few militaries in history had produced such impressive middle ranks.

Rather than dine on MREs in the barracks, a bunch of us piled into Capt. Murray’s armored car and drove out of the base into the nearby town of Tolemaida. On a ratty sidewalk stall I had one of the best steaks in my life. Salsa music blasted a few feet from us. Here was a simulacrum of pleasure after a twelve-hour training day. Under a scrap iron shed lit by fluorescent lights, in sour heat and humidity, sweating Colombian girls, their shoulders and bellies exposed, squeezed between the tables and chairs serving us the steaks and fries. Disco lights jumped inside a nearby dance hall. A motorcycle roared by with a family of four on it. A little girl with braids played with a doll a few feet from me, separated by a locked iron grille at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

“Let’s go,” said Lt. Col. Christie quietly. “It’s GBNT [Green Beret nap time].” It was only 9 p.m. when we settled the bill; I was the only one who had ordered a beer. Back at the barracks, it being “Mefloquine Monday,” everyone took their weekly malaria pill before going to sleep.

The day began at 5:45 a.m. with a five-mile run followed by weight lifting. By 9 a.m. the heat and humidity were unbearable. Duke and I spent much of the day on a series of firing ranges—shadeless except for a few thorn and cashew trees—with Master Sgt. Mike Fields and Sgt. Ivan Castro, each of whom had a detachment of Colombian soldiers to work with.

The Colombian anti-guerrilla commandos under training were hardened volunteers; it would have been a waste of time and resources for Green Berets to train draftees. These Colombians were short, extremely muscular, very dark complexioned, and flat featured. Some were black. They bore the blood of slaves and indigenous Indians, unlike the tall and light-skinned inhabitants of Bogotá’s fashionable Zona Rosa. Colombia’s wealthy could buy their way out of the military, and in any case did not consider the military a path of social advancement. America’s all-volunteer military appeared more typical of the society it was supposed to defend, though it really wasn’t. Discount the exceptions. In fact, SOUTHCOM had few Jews, and the only soldiers from the Northeast were working-class African-Americans, ethnic Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans.[16]

Despite the heat Sgts. Fields and Castro were in full kit, loaded down with weapons, magazines, flares, Chemlites, map cases, and other survival items, as though out on a mission. They looked movie-quality impressive, and that was the point. Because the military at ground level is a world of practice and technique, not of theory, the techniques of the trainers would be accepted only if the trainers themselves looked, acted, and performed the part perfectly.

Carving up the bull’s-eye from 100 meters away with an M-4 to prove the benefits of adjusting (zeroing) one’s scope, or repeatedly changing magazines in under three seconds, might seem like showing off. But if you couldn’t prove your expertise with an assault rifle, no one would trust your advice about weaponry. The world of the military is not like the world of social science, in which one can be an academic superstar without having a day’s experience inside the crucible of government, with its humbling crises. In the high testosterone world of the military, teaching demands proof on a daily basis that you are the best. Adolescent it may be, but at least it is honest.

Ivan Castro was a former drill instructor, and it showed. He paced back and forth in full kit in the pulverizing sun, towering above his Colombian protégés, who were kneeling beside hills made by leaf-cutter ants. Castro’s subject was how to sit in a “360-degree cigar formation” while on reconnaissance, in order to rest in the field without being surprised by the enemy. “How do you sit and rest on recon?” he asked didactically in choppy Puerto Rican Spanish. “You take your hats off to listen. You don’t talk to the guy next to you. If you talk to anyone, it is to God. You lean against your pack, but you don’t nap. Each of you has a field of fire that together covers 360. Practice your SOPs [standard operating procedures], especially your hand signals. And remember SLLS [Smell. Look. Listen. Silence].”

Throughout the long hot afternoon and into the evening, he would teach them the Australian technique of peeling back in retreat, without allowing for a gap in fire, after making contact with the enemy. It was harder than it looked: to keep the fire up, then to keep the fire up even in the dark, then in the dark in a tangled thicket, then in the dark in a tangled thicket with smoke bombs exploding all around you. You see them. They see you. You kill them. You peel back. Because the real event would elicit such fear and confusion, your only hope was grueling repetition, so that it became instinct. Castro worked twelve hours in the heat that day, speaking in a steady, nurturing tone, working individually with each soldier until the unit performed the drill perfectly.

“All I can give is 110 percent; nothing in life is better than what I’ve been doing today,” Castro shouted at me, his hearing impaired by earplugs. Soldiers talked in clichés. It is the emotion and look in their faces—sweaty and gummed with dust—that matters more than the words. After all, a cliché is something that only the elite recognizes as such.

Laughing now, Castro gave me another acronym: “Proper Planning, Good Recon, Control, Security, Common Sense—PUERTO RICANS SUCK COCK.”

I spent another part of the day with the team sergeant, Mike Fields. Besides being ODA-781’s effective managing director, he taught several classes. In the morning he ran a tape drill in Spanish for an AMOUT (advanced military operation in urban terrain). Since the firing range lacked buildings to practice on, Fields used tape on the ground to simulate the various structures that the Colombian anti-guerrilla team would infiltrate. He went over basics that drew on the U.S. Army’s Ranger Handbook: isolating a building and covering all of its sides before entering; entering the building from the highest point; securing one building before moving on to the next; shining a flashlight in the enemy’s face to momentarily shock him and make him easier to kill.¹⁴

I learned that a really good sniper will take his bullets from the same box, since gunpowder grain is not always measured out evenly; that the green-tipped 5.56mm bullet that the Americans used in Somalia and Afghanistan, while it pierced Kevlar, caused less damage inside the body, so it took two or three shots to “take a bad guy down.”

Fields was full of compacted technical knowledge. He never wasted a word or body movement, and he had even nerves. The year before he had been thrown from a helicopter and bounced off a third-story building. He broke a pelvic bone, was laid up for forty-five days, then spent ninety days on crutches. He looked bored when I asked him about it, but perked up when I asked him to explain how he had machine-tooled an M-16 scope onto a Galil. Fields’s schedule was so jam-packed that the only time I could get him alone to talk was to meet him for breakfast the next day at 6 a.m. at the Colombian army canteen.

When we met for breakfast Fields seemed nervous talking to me. He said that he had his name mentioned in a newsmagazine once, and while nice words were written about him, it was something he didn’t especially appreciate. He seemed utterly without ego, channeling all his psychic energy into the technical task at hand. One shouldn’t expect soldiers to be interesting, I thought. War is work, and like all work it is for the literal minded. Fields was the opposite of the foreign correspondents who love to tell bar stories. His stories were probably much better, but he was bored by them. The only thing that interested him was the next task.

Fields also spoke in clichés that he didn’t recognize as such. Like many in this A-team, he was in his mid-thirties, married, his family back at Fort Bragg. He had attended junior college in Texas, then spent a year at Akron University in his hometown before quitting. “School wasn’t for me. I needed direction. I joined the Army.” The next sixteen years he spent in Sinai, South Korea, and then Honduras, Guatemala, “El Sal,” and other places on the cucaracha circuit.

“A twelve-hour day is, I guess, a short one,” he said flatly. “I’m away from my family six months a year. I have responsibility for all the enlisted men. I write the ratings for each guy except the chief warrant officer and the captain. I write the training schedules, control the budget. I make sure we have trucks, logistics, ranges. I answer for everything that does and does not happen. But my primary job is training COLAR [the Colombian army]. Ultimately, nothing else matters except getting a few of their special units to the point where they are capable of taking out the FARC leadership. I’m a trainer.”

“How good is the Colombian army?” I asked.

He looked at me hard, then down at his eggs and plantains. The Colombian army was the only Latin military that had fought beside the U.S. in the Korean War, and Fields and his team deeply respected that. “But their noncommissioned officer class is weak,” he said. “Their corporals and sergeants don’t take the initiative when their officers are around.” Colombian society had a rigid social hierarchy and that hurt the army. Without strong noncoms, it was hard to have well-functioning small units. And without that, it was hard to hunt down narco-terrorists.

I left Fields as he jumped into a discussion about stringing a wire for a Barker-Williams antenna. It was part of the process of relocating the commo gear. I’ll explain:

The evening before, following the long day on the firing range with Fields and Castro, the team had learned that it suddenly had to move barracks immediately: all of the equipment, everything. And they had to move into a few “crackerboxes” which offered a lot less room than the old barracks. It was no way to treat the Americans. A Colombian colonel whose unit was not being trained by ODA-781 had made the decision.

Morale could not have been good at that moment. Yet nobody complained; nor was there the slightest display of annoyance, as everyone returned from the range and methodically began the moving process. Unloading communications gear from a truck, someone said he hoped that the World Trade Center wouldn’t be replaced by “some weepy memorial. Build something bigger even, taller; that’s what America’s all about.” By midnight the bathrooms had been cleaned, the weapons, the office equipment, and other things all unpacked in their new places, and the fans installed to cut some of the equatorial heat.

All of these guys, most of whom had kids and were of the same caliber as Mike Fields, brought home no more than $4,000 a month after taxes. Unlike in civilian life, salaries were determined completely by rank, so everyone knew what everyone else was making and it was not impolite to ask. It was not rare for noncommissioned officers to be on food stamps.[17] If a member of ODA-781 was killed in combat or in a training accident, his family received $200,000 in servicemen’s group life insurance. That was all. “Governed by necessity, the best-disciplined army is so good that it requires neither rewards nor punishments,” writes Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, paraphrasing ancient Chinese philosophy. The best-disciplined army behaves “as if it were a single personality.”¹⁵ That was ODA-781 all right. In a few hours they all would get up to run five miles, after which Fields would meet me for breakfast.

Espinal, half an hour by car away from Tolemaida, is a gridwork of corrugated iron huts and modular living units resembling shipping containers. It is the home of the Carabineros, the police units of Colombia’s Defense Ministry, and of their counter-narcotics jungle fighters, known as junglas. In many developing countries the police have a full-fledged war-fighting capability. It sounds sinister, conjuring up the very image of a South American police state. But there were times in the 1990s when Colombia’s police enjoyed a more liberal reputation than its civilian government, tainted as it was by drug-financed campaign contributions.

In any case, chameleon-type units that merged army and police functions were the wave of the future in a world of unconventional, low-intensity conflict. The junglas—the police equivalent of the Lanceros—were particularly well regarded. They had better noncommissioned officers than Colombia’s army, and were able to do certain types of assaults better than the army could, such as rappelling from helicopters. Officially, the junglas were merely a counter-drug force. But because the U.S. was now fighting terrorism with drug war money, it had become the job of another Special Forces A-team, ODA-784, to train the junglas.

ODA-784 was commanded by Capt. Jim O’Brien of Portland, Maine. Jim O’Brien, a West Point graduate in his late twenties, was broad-chested with a shock of red hair and a big eager smile. He positively oozed enthusiasm. He looked like the all-American kid on a milk carton. “I’ve been waiting to command an SF team since I was eight,” he told me. “This was all I ever wanted to do. Though, I have to admit, I thought that I had reached the height of my ambition when I became the scout leader of a recon platoon in Germany.”

O’Brien’s formative experience had been in the former Yugoslavia. By his mid-twenties, he was the veritable mayor of a small Kosovo town, settling disputes over land and other matters. Yugoslavia prepared O’Brien well for Colombia. Both were places where politics and criminality were inextricable, where ideological goals provided a mask for murder and racketeering, where one or two men could strike fear into a whole town, and where the landscapes were heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

Capt. O’Brien showed me ODA-784’s hootch. Here was another salsafied 7th Group A-team, with Latin music blasting out of speakers amid guns, laptops, communications gear, and topographical maps. There were also the tattoos: of Chinese dragons, wives’ names, barbed-wire patterns. In Lima, Peru, the whole team had bonded by getting tattoos from the same parlor. The team sergeant, Timothy Norris of Longview, Texas, who had been with George Bush the Elder on the latter’s seventy-fifth birthday parachute jump, told me the first thing that A-team medics do upon arrival at a new deployment is to inspect the tattoo parlors, to make sure the equipment is sterilized.

ODA-784 trained the junglas at a nearby finca (plantation). It was an immense amphitheater of rolling fields sectioned by copses, with a glorious monotony of sawtooth mountain peaks and sandpaper hills in the foreground. You might have been in Greece or Turkey. But amid the poignant weather-stained walls of an abandoned church were African bees, boa constrictors, and caimans. I saw a group of about a hundred junglas sitting in a field taking notes, getting a human rights lecture from one of their officers. Members of O’Brien’s A-team looked on. They had trained this particular officer on the subject.

In the Special Forces community, human rights was considered an aspect of psy-ops. In the 1980s in El Salvador, Col. J. S. Roach, a member of the U.S. Army’s operational planning team, had pounded home the point that violating human rights never makes sense from a “pragmatic perspective,” because it causes you to lose civilian support, without which you cannot root out insurgents. “Human rights wasn’t a separate one hour block at the beginning of the day. You had to couch it in the training so that it wasn’t just a moralistic approach.”¹⁶ Human rights abuses didn’t come to an end in El Salvador. Still, third world military men were more likely to listen to American officers who briefed them about human rights as a tool of counterinsurgency than to civilians who talked abstractly about universal principles of justice.

“This whole scene may look inspiring to you, but don’t be fooled,” one Green Beret told me. “These soldiers know that the FARC and other groups will rape their sisters, torture their fathers, and the international community will do nothing. They see how people are kidnapped daily and held in awful conditions for years. But if any of these guys now taking notes were to accidentally shoot a guerrilla, without first trying to apprehend him peaceably, by Colombian law he would be liable for prosecution.”

Colombia was Latin America’s oldest democracy, even as its government could not protect its citizens from armed insurgents. The Colombian parliament treated the struggle against the FARC, the leftist ELN (Ejército de Liberación National), and the rightist paramilitaries not as a war but as a police action, meaning that every death had to be investigated by the civilian authorities, even if it occurred in the midst of a battle or commando raid.

Lt. Col. Duke Christie and Capt. Jim O’Brien were neither lawyers nor professors; they were Special Forces trainers. They knew what kind of motivation worked to get young men to risk their lives, and what kind didn’t. And in Colombia, human rights was a theory drawn up by a fair-skinned elite in Bogotá who had been influenced, in turn, by their cosmopolitan friends in Western capitals, with the contradictions paid for in blood by the darker-skinned, broad-faced Indian castes sitting beside me, taking notes in the hot sun. Laws in Colombia were often not a sign of the country’s democratic vibrancy, but of its impotence: of the need of Bogotá’s elite to cover its backside with legalities.

In the barracks of both American and Colombian soldiers, a book was passed around, in Spanish and in English translation: In Hell by “Johnnie.” There was no publisher’s identification. It was the anonymous memoir of a FARC assassin who had escaped the organization. The author describes the forced recruitment of teenage boys and girls into guerrilla ranks, and their executions after they tried to desert and were caught. There is an account of a young girl defecating and menstruating while crying for her mother as a noose is tied around her neck. The executions are carried out by other young recruits, who, under the watchful eyes of older commanders, are made to cut off the limbs of the dead bodies and drink the blood.

Another story, not in the book, but very similar to those in it, I heard from an official American briefer: about a policemen who fought to the last against the FARC as they assaulted a village near Espinal. The FARC tore up this man’s testicles with fishing wire, then cut off his head and played soccer with it. Afterwards they went to the man’s home, shot his children, gang-raped his wife, and tied her in a sheet that they set afire with gasoline. “Given what will happen to these policemen if they fight as we teach them to, yet still end up being caught, it’s tough lecturing them about how they should respect human rights,” said one Green Beret.

Green Berets in Colombia believed that promoting human rights meant one thing: loosening their own ROEs (rules of engagement). Current ROEs state that Special Forces teams can only train and advise Colombian troops, but cannot join them on the battlefield. Yet Green Berets talked frequently about “going beyond the base perimeters and advising from forward positions.” Some suggested that they provide cover fire from the air for Colombian ground troops, as well as fight alongside the men they trained. The roots of such bravado were several:

• The professional ambition of Green Berets was to give battle, not merely to train others to do so. If their attitude was less aggressive than it was, they would not have volunteered for their jobs in the first place.

• They were selfless, a trait associated with a narrow field of vision. Like Master Sgt. Mike Fields, they lived for the particular technical task at hand, and were willing to die, provided there would be someone behind them to pick up the task where they had left off. Their favorite reading material was the Ranger Handbook.

• They hated routine. In Bosnia, the general staff was so timid of casualties that troops “couldn’t even take a crap at night inside the base perimeter without putting on full armor.” But as Duke explained, “If you’re never off duty, you’re never on duty,” because even heightened alert, as in Bosnia, gets dull. New and loosened ROEs for Colombia would break the routine.

• They were too young to have an active memory of Vietnam, so they were unburdened by it. They quietly disparaged older generals who were hesitant about loosening the ROEs, for fear of getting too deeply involved in a distant war. They knew that loosening the ROEs for Colombia, or adding a few more Green Berets, did not constitute sending half a million regular soldiers into harm’s way, as in Vietnam.

• Because their only experience with power had been with the American version of it in the last days of the Cold War, and in the post–Cold War and post–September 11 eras, they saw American power as incorruptible. They could not understand why American power was not applied more often and more vigorously. The motto of Special Forces was “De Oppresso Liber,” To Liberate the Oppressed.

• As captains, chief warrant officers, and sergeants, they thought tactically, not strategically. Tactically, it made sense to loosen the ROEs. Strategically, it might have caused political and legal problems with the host country, overshadowing the tactical benefits.

The best example of how military tactical thinking in Colombia differed from diplomatic and legal thinking had to do with the murderous right-wing paramilitaries. The paramilitaries were narco-terrorists, the same as the leftist FARC and ELN. Numbering some ten thousand, they controlled 40 percent of the coca-growing regions and killed people with electric saws at roadblocks. But tactically speaking, it made sense for the Colombian government to align itself with the right against the left; then, after the left had been defeated, or forced to negotiate, to roll the paramilitaries into the regular army, where they could be professionalized. The strategy had worked to a degree in El Salvador. “The paramilitaries are bad guys, but they’re good bad guys,” one Green Beret explained. “That’s why Espinal is safe. It’s why you can go to the restaurants and stay at a local hotel rather than be restricted to the base: because the town is run by the AUC [Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia],” the paramilitaries.

The war against the guerrillas was in its thirty-eighth year. Colombia’s agony went on and on. If aligning with one group of thugs to defeat another group of thugs would end the bloodshed and kidnappings sooner, how was that not virtuous? Diplomats and generals thought too often in abstractions; noncoms and middle-ranking officers saw truths on the ground.

Back in Bogotá, I learned that a single-prop Cessna 208 Caravan with four American contractors and one Colombian aboard had developed engine trouble over southern Colombia. It had been forced to crash-land in a FARC area, where at least two of the five passengers had been shot dead. The plane was on a surveillance mission for the State Department’s counter-drug program, mapping out coca fields for future spraying and eradication. It was equipped with sensitive electronic equipment. A Special Forces A-team stationed at Larandia, a Colombian army base fifteen minutes by helicopter from the crash site, had been put on alert; so had another A-team in the vicinity which specialized in search-and-rescue operations. The American major who commanded the two detachments in southern Colombia—and who, by coincidence, happened to be in Bogotá for the day—agreed to take me down there with him the next morning, February 14.

At a secluded section of the airport in Bogotá, I met quite a rogues’ gallery. There would be eight of us on the ninety-minute flight south to Larandia: FBI; ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), a private defense contractor, a fellow from the intelligence community, a Special Forces medic, and my new traveling companion, Special Forces Maj. John Paul “J. P.” Roberts. All except for the medic were in civilian clothes; everyone except me and the contractor was packing either an M-4 or a 9mm pistol. The medic brought along extra body bags. The ATF guy, a long-haired Navy veteran who had fought in Desert Storm and had a Beretta strapped under his shoulder, told me that it would be his job to inspect the downed plane: to assess whether the crew had been able to destroy the equipment with thermite grenades before they were captured and killed.

As we waited to board, there was much anger regarding the FARC and the feeble policy against it. “They’re a bunch of sadistic, crazed, chickenshit motherfuckers,” one of my fellow passengers told me. “It’s what you get when you marry Colombian energy and ambition to ideology and coke profits.” “You can’t give in; the only sane policy is to kill these guys,” said another.

“That fucker Pastrana!” yet another exclaimed, referring to former Colombian president Andres Pastrana, who had compromised with the FARC and ELN, giving them safe havens that they had used to build criminal mini-states, from where they conquered more territory. For example, there was the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” a two-lane highway laid by the FARC under the cover of a jungle canopy in the coca-growing breadbasket of Putumayo near Ecuador, lined with military bases, discos, schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and so forth for the guerrilla troops and their families.

The propellers of our CASA 212, owned by Evergreen Corporation, another U.S. government contractor, whirred up and we all inserted earplugs. I eyed the small oxygen tank next to me. We’d be flying close to sixteen thousand feet and the cabin was unpressurized. We bumped upward through gnarled and heavily bearded peaks the shimmering, spellbinding green of moss and emeralds. As we edged south, the chaos of hillsides became so unreal in their greenery that I thought of the serrated backsides of iguanas. Colombia was like the earth on the third day of Creation, primitive and untamed, bubbling and spewing smoke, with dense forests and jungle quiltworks. The bird and insect life was the most prodigious in the hemisphere, save for Brazil.

Colombia is the size of the entire southeastern quadrant of the U.S. God could not have designed a better landscape for anarchy and guerrilla outlaws, or a more malignant one for strong, central government: a “Paradise of snakes,” as Joseph Conrad puts it.¹⁷ Whereas Mexico and Chile had been mastered by central valleys surrounding their capitals, and whereas the capital cities of Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina had become commanding nodes of economic power in their respective countries, Colombia, since pre-Columbian times, “has had no naturally centralizing topographic feature.”¹⁸ The capital, Bogotá, was never able to dominate such cities as Medellín, Cali, and Cartagena, separated from each other by wilderness badlands and towering cordilleras, as the Andes split apart at their northern extremity.

From its inception, Colombia was always too big and too small. The Spanish conquest reified topographical divisions, with different groups of conquistadors coming north from Peru and south from Panama, and establishing themselves on different sides of the cordilleras. The urban concentrations in the cool and easily defended highlands had little need of each other; nor did the inhabitants of these cities in the mountains have the possibility or incentive to develop the seemingly impenetrable jungle lowlands split by the tributaries of the Amazon and Orinoco. As late as 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could still write, “The larger part of this territory is unexplored, except along the principal rivers, and is inhabited by scattered tribes of Indians.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Bogotá was harder to reach than just about any other capital city in the world.

In fact, Colombia was little more than a network of city-states, despite the creation by Gen. Simon Bolívar in the early nineteenth century of Gran Colombia, designed to include Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and later Panama. Bolívar’s vast commonwealth was simply ungovernable, and decades were lost in a grand guignol of revolts straight out of Conrad’s novel Nostromo (which, by the way, deals with an imaginary republic, Costaguana, located somewhere near the joint of Central and South America). Colombia was a world of slaves and Indians exploited by Spanish colonizers, whose priests were as fanatical and bloodthirsty as modern-day Iranian ayatollahs. Church-state conflicts were the cause of eight civil wars, not to mention smaller rebellions.

But Colombia was also the most self-sufficient country in the hemisphere, with storied quantities of coffee, cattle, gold, emeralds, and oil. Gold and coffee created obscene concentrations of wealth, as later would drugs. The early-twentieth-century “Republic of Coffee,” as Colombia was then known, would mutate into a veritable late-twentieth-century Republic of Cocaine.

Eventually, the lowland forests were cleared and precious wood plundered, as well as rubber in the Amazon basin after the spread of automobiles had created a demand.¹⁹ The upshot was the rise of a violent frontier society that, through crime and migration, threatened the urban civilization in the highlands. Two hundred thousand people died between 1945 and 1964 in a nationwide bloodletting among peasants, set against each other by liberal and conservative hierarchs.²⁰ The nightmarish spectacle was “so empty of meaning” that it was called simply La Violencia.²¹

Coast Guard Capt. Bob Innes in Yemen had not been exaggerating when he told me that this part of Latin America was more dangerous than the Middle East. Even after the gruesome murder of journalist Daniel Pearl by al-Qaeda, you had to wonder if it might be worse, given the record of amputations and other tortures here, to be captured by the FARC. In Yemen you could travel in anarchic areas under tribal escort; in Colombia there was often no safety except in full kit, inside a Humvee with a mounted machine gun. Because Colombian guerrillas stole uniforms of government soldiers and police, it was not always clear who was manning the roadblocks. A larger percentage of Colombia than Yemen was considered by the American military to be Injun Country.

The task that the U.S. appeared to have in both Yemen and Colombia was similar. And it was similarly impossible: to make countries out of places that were never meant to be countries.

Yet the U.S. could not, at this moment in history, fail to rise to the challenge that Colombia presented. Not only was Colombia so much closer to the U.S. than the Middle East, but cocaine and other illegal drugs even in the post–September 11 era arguably constituted a greater risk to American society than Islamic extremism, barring a truly catastrophic terrorist attack. Moreover, a newly elected Colombian president was offering the U.S. a tantalizing window of opportunity for progress against the insurgents. Alvaro Uribe appeared willing to prosecute a full-scale war, and deploy large numbers of specialized police units in the most violent towns of Colombia. He was a dynamic workaholic who had filled his cabinet with people like himself. He was physically as well as politically brave, visiting remote regions of the country in spite of death threats. Uribe’s ascension, combined with the real danger of an alliance between Colombian and Middle Eastern terrorists, meant that the U.S. had to go all the way here.

Plan Colombia signified the ultimate U.S. interagency strategy for healing a troubled foreign country: hundreds of millions of American taxpayers’ dollars annually for a gamut of programs, from Special Forces to Counter Drugs, Judicial Training, Human Rights Monitoring, Child Soldier Rehabilitation, Maritime Enforcement, Alternative Crop Development, Environmental Support, and so on. The armed passengers beside me aboard the CASA 212 were evidence of the sharp, rough-and-tumble edge of several Washington bureaucracies.

The U.S. goal was not to completely pacify Colombia. That would have been too ambitious. The goal was to break up the leadership networks of the guerrilla groups through assassination and other means, thereby reducing them to an even lower level of banditry. “We aim to balkanize them and kill their centers of gravity,” one American military official said. That was the way that the Khmer Rouge had ultimately been dealt with, though here the model wasn’t Cambodia in the 1990s, but El Salvador in the 1980s.

El Salvador was the inverse of Vietnam, where, instead of applying Economy of Force through the exclusive use of Special Operations teams, President Lyndon Johnson had dispatched more than half a million troops. “El Salvador” was, too, a code phrase within Army Special Operations Command for the kind of qualified success possible in the messy world of nation-fixing—a success so slim it barely went noticed, or could be labeled as such. Richard W. Stewart, the historian for the Special Ops community, writes thus about the role of Special Forces in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, during the country’s civil war:

The 1991 report submitted by the General Accounting Office to Senator Edward Kennedy did not differ substantially from that assessment. It said there had been “a significant decrease in political violence against civilians during the past 10 years…. U.S. military trainers… have exposed the Salvadoran military personnel to internationally recognized human rights standards and democratic principles.”²³

Despite detailed media coverage of specific human rights atrocities, the basic trend in human rights over the course of the decade was positive, especially when one considers the small number of Special Forces trainers deployed in the field.[18]

Nobody kidded himself that Colombia would be another El Salvador, where the fall of the Berlin Wall helped reduce support for a strongly ideological guerrilla movement. Moreover, the U.S. military had been in El Salvador for more than a decade, long enough to develop a learning curve. Perhaps, I thought, as I adjusted my oxygen mask in the plane, the crash of the day before would constitute a spike in the learning curve in Colombia, for it highlighted all the contradictions of America’s involvement here.

“If Washington decides to pull out of Colombia just because a bunch of us get killed, then we shouldn’t be here in the first place,” Duke Christie had told me. One of the rationalizations for the strict rules of engagement was that everyone up the command chain in the Pentagon wasn’t sure he could justify American deaths in Colombia. The politicians and higher-ups thought that this demonstrated their deep concern for American soldiers’ lives; the Green Berets thought it demonstrated political cowardice.

Meanwhile, every day American pilots crisscrossed Colombian guerrilla country in flimsy planes, conducting spraying and surveillance operations, and ferrying American troops from base to base. The inevitable had finally happened. Yet from the way people talked—and the concerns Duke and his fellow officers had about being pulled out of Colombia altogether—the policy suddenly seemed up for grabs.

The hatch door opened as we gave up altitude, revealing stagnant curvilinear rivers, oily green fields, and broadleaf foliage, with parasitic orchids in the mango canopy. As the CASA 212 set down near wire-mesh, sand-filled barriers (HESCO baskets), the sound of jungle parrots began the moment the propellers went silent. It was early morning and depressingly hot, hotter than Tolemaida and Espinal. We were 2 degrees latitude north of the equator. A UH-60 “Lima” model Black Hawk and two UH-1N Hueys hovered by us. The Hueys, the besieged nature of the base, and the landscape itself recalled the Vietnam of a third of a century earlier. I noticed that the airfield was covered in pierced steel plank, collapsible metal sheets for laying instant runway on loose tropical soil; the plank seal indicated that it had been manufactured in 1967, and had been used for the first time in Vietnam.

“Yeah, every Tuesday this base is about to be overrun,” someone half joked. Maj. J. P. Roberts barked about getting “the host nation’s commo freeks [frequencies],” and the need “to unfuck the time line” of yesterday’s crash, the capture of the crew, the recon follow-ups, and so on. Maj. Roberts was short, clean-cut, compact, and poker-faced. He seemed to have a somewhat cold and surly nature. In his late thirties from western Pennsylvania, he had a twin brother who was also an Army Special Forces major. As a major, his B-team at Larandia commanded several A-teams here.

There is a term in the U.S. military, “iron majors,” though it might really apply to all middle-level officers, from noncommissioned master sergeants and chief warrant officers to lieutenant colonels. In a sense, majors ran the military, regardless of who the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff happened to be. Up through the rank of captain, an officer still hasn’t closed the door on other career options, but becoming a major means you’ve “bought into the corporation,” Maj. Roger D. Carstens had explained to me back at Fort Bragg. “We’re the ones who are up at 4 a.m. answering the general’s e-mails, making sure all the systems are go.”

But it was only when you got outside the United States that you realized the power and responsibility wielded by not only majors, but captains and master sergeants, too, to say nothing of a lieutenant colonel like Duke Christie. While policy specialists argued general principles like nation-building in Washington and New York seminars, these young middle-level officers were the true agents of the imperium.

A plane had gone down, at least one American body needed to be recovered, and several Americans on official government business were missing inside a hornet’s nest of narco-terrorists. SOUTHCOM commander Army Gen. James T. Hill was flying in from Miami; SOUTHCOM’s Special Operations commander, Army Brig. Gen. Remo Butler, was flying in from Puerto Rico; Ambassador to Colombia Anne Patterson likely rated the incident her top priority; and yet Maj. Roberts would be shaping decisions on the ground. He had slept only two hours the night before and would be making judgment calls during the course of the day that would effect his entire career. More so than civilian life, the military was about being your best under the worst of circumstances.

The barracks for ODB-780, where Maj. Roberts had his office, featured the usual clutter of drying towels and mosquito nets among piles of mortar base plates, mounted guns, bore sights, aiming sticks, and multi-band inter-team radios. Fans whined, creating pockets of relative comfort. I laid down my pack and filled my canteen with purified water. A young, enthusiastic noncom launched into an explanation about the heat ribbing on the M-60mm dropfire mortar beside me.

Maj. Roberts emerged only to disappear into a classified briefing with ODA-785 and -776: the two A-teams that, along with the FBI, ATF, a search-and-rescue unit of DynCorp (another private defense contractor), and shadowy civilian others, would be headed in two helicopters to the site of the crash and the place where the bodies had been found.

Compared to these civilians, the Green Berets looked positively innocent; the civilians were grizzled old Special Forces veterans of Vietnam, now working for private contractors and government agencies at the rough edge of the counter-drug program. Some had long hair and looked like country music stars. Another had a shaved head. Each had his weapon of choice: a Beretta, an Austrian-manufactured Glock pistol, an M-4 rifle. This was the world of the contractors.

The Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and others had learned that there were many intelligence-related details more efficiently handled by private firms, which did not incur quite the degree of oversight by the media and Congress. The Americans aboard the plane that had gone down were technically civilians doing contract work for the U.S. government. But their work was classified, and in a slightly earlier era their jobs might well have been handled directly by the CIA. The men were examples of the privatization of war and clandestine operations.

Maj. Roberts, in the midst of a crisis, had no time for me. I wasn’t supposed to be here. The next day, a Washington Post reporter would be turned away at the entrance to the base. Information that would be public knowledge in weeks, or days even, was still classified. I noticed a television turned to CNN in the corner of the barracks. There was an “orange” terror alert. President Bush had given a pep talk to sailors embarking for the Persian Gulf, Liberian rebels were closing in on the capital of Monrovia, rebels in the Ivory Coast were threatening to take the capital of Abidjan, twenty-nine people had died in political riots in Bolivia, and the government of Austria was blocking the transit of American troops from Germany to Italy, en route to Kuwait and Iraq. At the mention of the last news item, a noncom came over and cursed the screen, the media, and Hollywood.

Outside in the glaring sun two other noncoms were sitting with their feet propped up on ammunition cases. One had served previously in the 5th Special Forces Group, with responsibility for the Middle East.

“How was 5 Group?” I asked.

“It sucked.”

“Why?”

“Because it sucked. It just did. The Paks, the Kuwaitis, the Gypos [Egyptians] are all equally worthless. Not up to COLAR standards, Muslim armies have even worse noncoms and middle management than South American armies.”

The other noncom, Mike Davila, an 18 Delta medic, was a Mexican-American from near Brownsville, Texas. His voice was as soft and friendly as his body was huge. Chewing on a piece of shelf-stabilized bread from an MRE, he told me that the year before he had been on a small Special Forces mission in eastern Peru, near the Brazilian border. He had seen riots where people had burned down a college. It was at a time when the world media was reporting that democracy and stability had returned to Peru. “I’ve noticed that poor people naturally follow the ones with an education, and that the ones with an education are often corrupt,” Davila said. “You can’t always equate education with good character.”

Hungry myself—I still hadn’t eaten breakfast—I wandered across a dirt field to a canteen-restaurant, where under a scrap metal shed a waitress in a tank top and tight jeans brought me coffee and eggs with hot pepper sauce. There was another restaurant on the base, by a lake filled with piranha. It, too, featured waitresses who dressed and flirted almost like strippers and had the saddest stories of guerrilla atrocities to tell. I would hear one grizzled civilian contractor remark, “If my daughter ever dressed like that, I’d string her up.”

The helicopters filled with the two A-teams departed for the crash site as news arrived that a bomb had gone off in the town of Neiva, ninety miles to the north, with eighteen dead and thirty-seven wounded on the day before President Uribe was supposed to visit. It had been meant for him and was detonated by mistake.

I got a lift to the airfield. In the hangar an American flag had been hung in preparation for the arrival of the bodies. Amid the jigs and jack stands, I waited, along with a medic and some of the contractors, for the helicopters to return. The conversation drifted. I learned that the way you get a cow to jump out of a plane was simply to prod it, while a donkey required a halter; cows and donkeys had been regularly dumped out of planes to provide food for pro-American insurgents throughout the Cold War.

After an hour the helicopter that had gone to retrieve the bodies finally landed. The medic and one of the contractors pulled on purple gloves and went out to help the DynCorp rescue team load the two body bags onto “Israelis” and carry them, ducking under the rotors and out of the man-made wind into the hangar. Only one of the dead was American; the other was the lone Colombian crew member.

The medic broke open the first body bag. A 7.62mm AK-47 assault rifle bullet shot at the skull from such close range causes a hydrostatic explosive effect, which made the victim momentarily difficult for even a friend to identify. It was an execution. The dead contractor, Thomas Janis, fifty-six, of Montgomery, Alabama, had been the recipient of a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam. He had a son and a step-grandson in Kuwait, both waiting to be deployed to Iraq. It emerged later that rather than run into the trees for cover, as he had instructed the others, he stayed behind to destroy the sensitive equipment on board; that’s where the FARC found him. Talk about making sacrifices for your country!

The other body was that of Luis Alcides Cruz, a noncommissioned Colombian intelligence officer based here in Caquetá Province. His body did not look as bad as Janis’s, though he might have suffered more. His neck was dislocated and a rifle bullet had gone through his back.

The previous morning, the Cessna, in the midst of mapping coca fields for eradication, had developed catastrophic engine trouble. The pilot, Thomas Janis, brilliantly glided the plane down to a belly flop at the edge of a ridge. Though only a few minutes’ flying time from Larandia, the small mapping team was in the midst of FARC territory. Janis and Cruz, to judge by the medic’s examination, had not been injured in the crash. There might have been a shoot-out with guerrillas, who saw the plane come down and rushed to the scene. The two men had been murdered and their bodies dumped in the first wooded area north of the crash site. The bullet in the back indicated that Cruz may have been trying to run away. The other three, all Americans, were taken hostage.

When news of the crash reached Bogotá, Lt. Col. Christie immediately mobilized the two ODAs in southern Colombia and ordered them to helicopter fields. But the rules of engagement did not permit A-teams to go on such a mission in enemy territory. Duke knew this. Yet, as he later told me, “Since we had an SF capability so close by, I wanted to give my superiors the option of changing the ROEs for this extraordinary circumstance.” Indeed, one of the teams, ODA-776, had been specifically trained for this type of search-and-rescue mission.

But twenty-four hours would go by before the two ODAs would get permission from the higher-ups to board the helicopters. In a hostage situation, akin to a kidnapping, the first twenty-four hours are crucial, particularly the first night following the abduction. It may be the only time when a rescue squad can effectively keep the perpetrators from moving their prey out of the vicinity. All the satellite and other high-tech surveillance that the Americans would subsequently bring to bear on the crisis would never make up for that original twenty-four-hour delay. The middle-level officers had been ready to move, but then “Washington” took over.

When I returned to ODB-780’s barracks that evening, thirty-six hours had gone by since the three had been taken hostage. Maj. Roberts observed reflectively, “By now you’ve got dehydration, heat exhaustion setting in, bug bites, it gets harder and harder for them. All the FARC needs is one terrain feature between it and its pursuers, and they’re safe in this environment.”

Roberts had just finished a huddle with his chief warrant officer, Terry Baltimore, a smooth and charismatic ball of fire who gave the demoralized B-team a pep talk.

“I know,” Baltimore began, “we were all packed, organized, up all night, and ready to assist the A-team secure the crash site. But the decision to disengage us, to keep us out of the op, and have the A-team wait until today to enter the field was taken above our pay level. I’m sulking with the best of them. But now we have to help the host nation plan to capture as many FARC as possible, so that we can interrogate them and find out where the three AMCITS [American citizens] are.

“COLAR is running the show,” he went on, “but it has done no force-to-force ratio analysis. The host nation had the initiative last night, but lost it and we did not go in until today. The host nation needs us to come up with options, to help them map out where the roadblocks should be, so that we can establish traffic patterns that can, in turn, help us determine where the FARC is concentrating its troops, and where the AMCITS might be. If we don’t start templating, we’ll miss the whole fucking puzzle.”

It was getting late and I needed a place to sleep. I was about to see if a bed was available in the B-team barracks when a big, friendly Green Beret came over and asked if I wanted to stay over in his hootch. “It’s more comfortable than here, if the air-conditioning works.” He was Capt. Mike “Mick” Braun of Wolcott, Connecticut. He had served in Bosnia and now led ODA-785, one of the A-teams that after a twenty-four-hour delay had finally got to the crash site. ODA-785’s specialty was combat diving, not out of place here; southern Colombia had more navigable river mileage than usable roads. Capt. Braun’s hootch had twelve guys packed on bunks in a small room, filled with drying towels and a jumble of charging computers and intra-squad radios. But the air-conditioning worked, and after opening my sleeping bag, I quickly fell unconscious.

Morning brought acquaintance with Capt. Braun’s two sidekicks, both sergeants first class: Juan Perez, a tall, mustachioed Cuban-American from Los Angeles who had a cigar in his mouth before his first cup of coffee; and Bo Wynn, an avid deer hunter originally from Tampa, Florida, who had tattoos of boats and barbed wire on his chest and gladly explained to me the workings of a Remington 7.62mm M-24 sniper rifle.

“We lost the initiative after we were made to stand down the first night,” a frustrated Sgt. Perez told me as I opened my eyes from a night’s sleep and grabbed my notebook. “We’re so afraid of getting our guys killed that we let ’em get captured.”

They told me the whole sad story of the previous two days. At 9:10 a.m. on February 13, soon after the Cessna Caravan had gone down, they got their “get ready” orders from Duke Christie’s forward operating base in Bogotá. They called their team in from training and quickly packed their webs, to be reinventoried at the B-team barracks: canteens, rehydration packets, bandages, compasses, flares, Chemlites, maps, intra-squad radios, GPS (Global Positioning System) units, 9mm and 5.56mm magazines, knives, Berettas, M-4s with grenade launchers, and 40mm grenades. Sgt. Bo Wynn would also carry a quickie saw for breaking down doors. At 10:10 a.m. they were at the airfield. They waited four hours in the hot sun for the execute order to board the helicopters. It never came. Then they were told to “stand down.”

Sgts. Perez and Wynn called it demoralizing and humiliating to be prevented from entering a combat zone in front of the very Colombian battalions they had been training.

At 7 p.m. that night the bureaucratic process restarted, with a “warning order” for the next day, followed by a “plan” at 9 p.m., a “written order” at 12:30 a.m. February 14, an “op order” at 5 a.m., and an “up-top intel update” at 6:10. This was all before Maj. Roberts’s classified brief that morning which I had been barred from attending. Finally, at 10:45 a.m. they were boarding the helicopter to go to the crash site, where they established a 360-degree security perimeter while the ATF team inspected the equipment on board the Cessna, which, it turned out, had been sufficiently destroyed by the crew members before their capture. Photos of the “crime scene” also had to be taken for use by the FBI and Colombian prosecutor’s office. Everyone thought that the designation of a war zone as a civilian “crime scene” was quixotic. For years such legal fictions had tied the Colombian government in knots in its war against narco-terrorists.

“What was the terrain like?” I asked.

“Pothole heaven,” Sgt. Perez said. “You move only in a zigzag, sixty-degree inclines all over, no shade. Great guerrilla country. But here is what the higher-ups miss, for the same reason it’s great anti-guerrilla country. A half dozen SF guys, fluent in Spanish, traveling load-lite, living off the land, with good comms and helicopter locations for infil and exfil, and we’d find out a lot more in a few days than a whole battalion clunking around.”

Braun, Perez, and Wynn were three well-spoken men with tattoos, guns, and serious reading material all over their hootch: Braun had been dipping into the complete works of James Fenimore Cooper. Wynn, though frustrated by the timid military-diplomatic policy of the previous days, nevertheless told me that “everyone has his place and I accept mine. I’m just happy being a sergeant. What do I know?” His tone was truly humble.

I was beginning to love these guys. They had amassed so much technical knowledge about so many things at such a young age. They could perform minor surgery on the spot. Yet each had such a reduced sense of self compared to everyone I knew in the media and public policy worlds. In the barracks, egotism was expressed purely in terms of team pride.[19] Here hierarchy and authority were looked upon as supreme virtues, giving each officer and noncom a role and a function in a noble cause. Everybody had read Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, and related more to the World War II paratroopers in the story than to their contemporaries in civilian life.²⁴

By mid-morning, the mood at the base had subtly shifted from an emergency to a long-haul operation. I hitched a ride back to Bogotá with Brig. Gen. Remo Butler on the Casa 212. Brig. Gen. Butler, an African-American, was a huge, gregarious, delightfully profane man. “I helped approve your trip down here,” he told me, “but I had no idea who you were!” Thank God for the majors on his staff, I thought.

I had an embarrassing moment on the flight back. In Larandia, before taking off, I had drunk a lot of water because of the heat, and suddenly at fourteen thousand feet with my body fast cooling I desperately needed to urinate. There were no facilities.

I spoke to the pilot. He said, “No problem, I’ll open the hatch, piss out the back.”

“Are you kidding? I’ll get sucked out.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies, man. This plane isn’t pressurized; you won’t get sucked out. I’ll open the hatch.”

I wasn’t brave enough. I took a discarded mineral water container and used that, capped it, and flung it out. The pilot counted a few seconds and said, “It must be frozen by now at this altitude.” A projectile of frozen piss falling over FARC country. Gen. Butler laughed.

A few days later I was back at fifteen thousand feet in the unpressurized Casa. Duke and I were headed northeast to Arauca Province, on Colombia’s border with Venezuela. Arauca, the size of New Hampshire, was the most violent region of Colombia, the heart of Injun Country. America’s imperial destiny was to grapple with countries that weren’t really countries. No place in Colombia, and few places in the world, illustrated that as much as Arauca, where the Green Berets had several teams deployed.

In Arauca Province three generations of people had grown up loyal to the insurgents. Kidnappings and car bombings occurred on a daily basis. There were twelve thousand hectares of coca fields set to be targeted by the counter-drug program. Big oil was here: Occidental Petroleum had a pipeline from Arauca northwest to the Caribbean, which was frequently attacked by terrorists. Arauca boasted a strategic location abutting Venezuela, where the radical-populist (yet democratically elected) president, the ex–Army general Hugo Chavez, was providing Colombian guerrillas with rear bases. Control of Arauca gave the Colombian guerrillas a corridor for exporting narcotics to Venezuela, in exchange for weapons and munitions that, in turn, were smuggled into the region by Arab gangs based in the Venezuelan port of Maracaibo.²⁵ There were credible reports that Hamas and Hezbollah had established havens on the Venezuelan island of Margarita near Caracas.²⁶ Venezuelan authorities were providing thousands of local identity cards to Syrians, Egyptians, and Pakistanis.²⁷

A supporter of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Venezuelan president Chavez had fingerprints all over the narco-terrorist operation in South America. U.S. intelligence found that the small GPS systems carried by FARC gunrunners constantly indicated positions inside Venezuela. With help from Venezuela, the ELN narco-terrorists had learned how to sabotage the oil pipeline with satchel bombs.

The stakes for the U.S. were high. It was getting 34 percent of its oil imports from Venezuela, more than from the entire Middle East. The economic threat posed by Chavez was, to a degree, more important and more insidious than that posed by radical regimes in the Arab world. Chavez had an interest in FARC and ELN attacks on Colombian oil installations, since it made the U.S. even more dependent on Venezuelan oil.

In late 2002 the Bush administration had dispatched several Special Forces A-teams to the border towns of Arauca and Saravena, where President Uribe was building new police stations to be patrolled by forty-six-man units, also trained by American Special Forces. Uribe had targeted the whole province as a “rehabilitation” zone, to be pacified and governed directly from Bogotá. Arauca symbolized how the counter-drug war had, following September 11, been transformed into a regional war for governance. And it wasn’t just the Venezuelan border area that required help; the FARC was also importing arms and precursor chemicals, and exporting drugs, over the Brazilian and Peruvian borders.

Descending through the clouds I saw a pool-table-flat lesion of broadleaf thickets, scrap iron settlements, and gravy-brown rivers. There was something frightening and uncharted about Arauca. As a young traveler in the 1970s in Cairo, I had met an American couple my own age who had recently arrived in the Middle East by cargo ship from South America. They had hitchhiked and taken buses all the way down through Central America into Colombia, and then continued by road into Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, before boarding a ship in Buenos Aires. It had been grueling and adventurous, but not suicidal, as such a trip would be today along significant parts of the same route. I myself had just been in Yemen, which was far more dangerous to travel through now than it was when I first visited there in the mid-1980s. For those who rarely ventured beyond the cocoon of the post-industrial Western democracies, the world was liberalizing and becoming more convenient. But many parts of the planet had become more dangerous and out of reach.

Just over the treetops now, shacks and sagging clotheslines gave way to rutted roads in dry, reddish savanna. Maj. William “Bill” White, commander of five Special Forces detachments in the towns of Arauca and Saravena, met us at plane-side flanked by Green Berets in Kevlar and full kit, inside a Humvee that was fitted with a mounted MK-19 40mm grenade launcher.[20]

As I stepped off the tarmac, two Colombian soldiers, badly wounded in a car bomb detonated the hour before in nearby Arauquita, in which the explosive device was coated with human feces to cause further infection, were being carried off a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter on stretchers. They were taken to an infirmary where one of Maj. White’s Special Forces medics was waiting to treat them. Half of their bodies were caked with blood. The day before in Arauca, White informed me, the Colombian police had managed to deactivate two other bombs. The day before that there had been an assassination attempt on a local politician. The day before that an electricity tower was bombed, knocking out power in the region. Going back more days in Arauca Province there had been the usual drumroll of roadside kidnappings, street-corner bicycle bombs, grenade strikes on police stations, and mortar attacks against Colombian soldiers with propane cylinders packed with nails, broken glass, and feces. White had prepared a list of violent incidents over the past thirty days in the province. It was single-spaced and ran more than two pages.

Maj. Bill White, thirty-seven, was an Army brat who had grown up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, next to Fort Bragg. His sense of humor was as dry and pale as his complexion. “I don’t look a day over forty,” he quipped.

The journey from the airstrip to the army base was only a few hundred yards along a public road. So were the Kevlar, Humvee, and mounted gun really necessary? I asked. “Yes,” White said, staring intently at the road. The tension here was noticeably higher than at Larandia.

Near the Green Beret compound we passed two young men being led away in handcuffs. They were the ELN operatives accused of setting off the car bomb in Arauquita by remote control with a cell phone. They smirked like real punks. Next in my line of sight came the Colombian army barracks, with its concrete trench used for washing clothes and mess kits, and for pissing and shitting. A medic described the Colombian troops inside as “nice little soldiers full of parasites, fungus, and jock itch.”

The Green Beret compound was hidden behind three layers of black sandbag walls and concertina wire. An entire shipping container was used to store ammo. Special Forces was ready for a siege. Maj. White brought

me to a baking-hot corner of the barracks where he had a laptop and blank wall arranged for a PowerPoint briefing. “I keep it real hot in here,” he joked; “that way you’ll ask fewer questions and we’ll get through this thing faster.” I thanked him for his consideration. I had seen the same PowerPoint briefing about Arauca twice already, at Fort Bragg and at SOUTHCOM in Miami.

Still, he had some new information for me. The day before in Arauca forty people had been killed in action during a shoot-out between left- and right-wing paramilitaries. The FARC was moving back and forth across the border with help from the Venezuelan national guard. The oil spills from ELN satchel bombs had caused an ecological disaster, an issue that might have been better publicized in the U.S., because, as one Green Beret deadpanned, “You can bet that people back home will get more upset about despoiling the environment than about Colombians being shot and tortured.”

Disgust about Colombian democracy and human rights laws, which made it particularly hard to prosecute car bombers and other narcoterrorists, was greater here than at the other Green Beret compounds. “The FARC has an intelligence operation one block from the police station in Arauca town,” Maj. White explained, “but the intelligence gathered by the police against the FARC is still insufficient for a court-ordered phone tap. Meanwhile, the mayor’s been killed, the airfield’s been bombed, and the governor’s personal assistant has been assassinated. My Colombian counterpart whose troops we’re training,” White continued, “doesn’t want to know more than two hours in advance about our plans for visiting the airfield or the town, since he doesn’t trust his own staff not to leak it to the FARC. Come on, let’s go see the town.”

“Yeah,” I responded. All the briefings in the world were not as revealing as the indefinable essences gleaned from visual contact.

Under vast skies and pummeling mid-afternoon heat, the armored car and Humvee equipped with a mounted gun rolled through the town of Arauca, a desultory, low-level gridwork of scrap iron and red-tiled roofs, blotched walls, cafés with molded plastic chairs, and awnings made of the same plastic material used for garbage bags. The few decent-looking dwellings had iron grates over the doors and windows. Weeds, garbage, and rusted shacks mixed with flowers, agaves, and sagging banana leaves. Sidewalks disappeared into scraggly bush. I saw half-naked people with unreadable expressions wearing thongs and baseball caps.

Every parked car and bicycle looked deadly. The steel armored doors, Kevlar, and weaponry offered some protection. But they were also a pretense. The enemy was invisible and could incinerate us at any moment. The only defense in this terrorist environment was offense, which the restrictive rules of engagement forbade. After a truck had unexpectedly pulled out into the street, slowing our convoy, causing us to scan the rooftops and parked vehicles, and causing me to sweat more than usual in the fetid climate, Duke Christie remarked, “If five firemen get killed fighting a fire, what do you do? Let the building burn? I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system.” Translation: he and his men were willing to take quite a few casualties in Colombia to defeat the narco-terrorists; it was the politicians who were afraid of casualties, not the American military.

Lifting his eyes on this ratty hellhole of a town, Maj. White asked rhetorically, “Where has all the oil money gone? Tell me. You see any signs of development here?”

Occidental Petroleum received 8 percent of the annual oil profits from the Arauca region, leaving 92 percent in Colombian hands. That 92 percent, assuming honest administration, should have been $30 million annually. Even in 2001, when the pipeline was shut down for two hundred days because of sabotage, there still should have been enough millions in profits “to build a brand-new town,” White calculated in his dry and laconic way.

For generations, the wealthy urban sophisticates in the highlands had barely been aware of this malarial outback. “If you lived here, you’d be ELN or FARC, too,” another Special Forces officer remarked. “That is, if they didn’t rape, murder, and extort money from you, and from the local authorities. The truth,” he went on, “is that everyone here is just scared. Everyone thinks the government will eventually give up and leave the area back in the hands of the rebels.”

Our convoy reached the Arauca River at the edge of town, one of those unhappy, bile-colored, sluggish rivers so common in the third world. The collapsed mud banks were partially supported by sandbags. Venezuela lay on the other side a hundred feet away, where there were more weeds, clotheslines, and scrap iron hutments. Officially there was a border here; in fact, there was none. The narco-terrorists crossed easily, back and forth, getting help from Chavez.

Later I spoke with an American intelligence officer in the area. He worried that “the Colombian military was following America’s Vietnam strategy: building up troop levels while avoiding risk. The Colombian army, police, air force all think Black Hawk helicopters are the answer to everything,” he went on; “that’s the way we used to think. They’re not sufficiently improving their noncommissioned officer class, while their generals are content to play it safe. Thus, little happens. In Peru, [Alberto] Fujimori told his generals that they couldn’t retire until the war with the Shining Path [terrorists] was won. Here Uribe talks tough, but you don’t see the follow-through in the field with aggressive, small unit tactics like you did in Peru.”

I concluded that the deployment of Special Forces to train host country troops in Arauca was more of a political statement by the Bush administration in support of President Uribe than it was a substantive attempt to break the back of decades of guerrilla control in this scraggly back-of-beyond.

I found a bunk beside two Army civil affairs specialists who were here to jump-start various education and health programs: Maj. Mike Oliver of Derby, Connecticut, and Capt. Carl Brosky of Plant City, Florida. Brosky had served in Bosnia and Rwanda. He had dark hair and a permanent introspective manner. He told me about families digging up the graves of loved ones in Bosnia following the Dayton Peace Accords and moving them to places where they wouldn’t be mutilated by people from a hostile ethnic group returning to the area. In Rwanda he had been in charge of water purification for a refugee encampment. He spoke softly about how he had watched a family of five come to the yard outside his office to die, because they knew that a truck would properly transport their bodies to a gravesite. They were on the verge of death by starvation, he said, and “they knew—just knew—they were all going to die. When the town was covered by mud from a volcano it was the best thing that ever happened to it.” Like other soldiers I had met who spoke the truth, he did not mean it cynically. He just didn’t know how to dissemble for the sake of making a proper impression on a stranger. His blunt honesty left him with stores of idealism for the work he was doing.

He and Maj. Oliver had books strewn all over their bunks. They said that civil affairs in the U.S. military really had its origins during the Mexican War with Gen. Winfield Scott. I started reading a book they gave me on the subject, but was so tired I fell asleep on the pages.

After years of drifting through lonely hotel rooms, I found barracks life a pleasure. You could leave your valuables about and not worry about locking your room, since everything was safe with these guys. They were not rambunctious young recruits. They were married, had families, and some of their wild years were behind them: you had to have served in the regular Army before you could even apply for Special Operations. Camaraderie was a constant. Like a family, someone was always willing to help you or lend you what you needed. If you wanted company, there was always somebody to talk to. If you were bored, there was always a DVD to watch on one of the laptops. If you wanted to be left alone to read or write, people always gave you your space.

The town of Saravena was even more violent than Arauca; thus the most violent in the country. The very extremity of the situation granted further insights into what the Green Berets could and could not accomplish.

It lies only seventy miles to the west, along the border. But as this was Injun Country, we flew. A half hour later I was on the tarmac in Saravena, greeted by Capt. Gil Ferguson of Jackson, Mississippi. The first thing he did was point out to me the remains of the terminal building blown up by guerrillas the previous summer with four cylinder bombs. A 40-pound empty propane gas cylinder, he explained, would be slipped inside a 120-pound one to serve as the mortar launcher. The 40-pound cylinder would then be stuffed with standard explosives—in addition to bits of nails, screws, scrap metal, broken glass, and human feces—and fired out of the 120-pound cylinder with a gunpowder charge. The rampa, as Colombians called it, could hit a target three thousand meters away. The broken glass was forbidden by the Geneva Convention.

Saravena was so violent that the Green Berets never left the base here. “I’ve been here for months and I have never seen the town of Saravena,” Capt. Ferguson said. The sandbags at the compound were piled higher than at Arauca; the strands of concertina wire were laid thicker. It was dustier and hotter here, too. Amplifying the claustrophobic atmosphere, the three dozen Green Berets and support staff were not even permitted under the rules of engagement to patrol the area beyond the base, known to be friendly to the insurgents and within the range of the rampas—for which the compound’s corrugated roof provided little protection.

“The ELN and the FARC are too smart to fight us,” Master Sgt. Jose Cabrera told me, shaking his head. “If they want to kill us, they’ll just use cylinder bombs.”

“It’s like Iwo Jima,” Duke Christie observed, “no place to hide,” referring to the February 1945 battle on a bare volcanic island in the western Pacific where U.S. Marines were rained upon by Japanese shells.

Following the destruction of the Marine barracks in 1983 in Beirut, and of military apartments at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, U.S. generals and civilian politicians needed a saying, I thought: Thou Shalt Not Be Sitting Ducks. American troops, particularly elite units, should never be concentrated in any place where they could not patrol the immediate environs aggressively. Yet that was the situation here. The current rules of engagement which limited the Green Berets to training details only might have placated the U.S. Congress and made for smooth bilateral relations with Colombia, but they were dumb tactics. And they were morally wrong, since they denied the troops the means of self-defense.

The first night here Duke spent several hours listening to complaints about the restricted rules. He allowed everybody to talk, letting himself get beaten up. Morale at Saravena was genuinely bad. The boredom was reflected in the long evening hours spent weight lifting; everybody joked that it was like prison. Saravena was the classic case of a deployment for the sake of political symbolism, in which the military logic had not been properly thought through.

“If they would just loosen the ROEs, give us the assets and some helicopter platforms, this whole guerrilla siege of Arauca Province would be over in six months,” Capt. Ferguson said. He wanted to do what he had been trained to do: fight, go into battle with the Colombian forces he was training. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, Gil Ferguson had switched over to the Army the moment he learned that he couldn’t be a fighter pilot. Once in the Army he gravitated to Special Forces. From Mississippi, he adored the New York City lingo of television’s Law & Order. His crony was his team sergeant, Master Sgt. Cabrera, a native of the Dominican Republic via New York City.

Jose Cabrera, forty-two, in the Army for twenty-two years, was the ultimate sergeant: the nucleus of the United States military and why it was so good. Cabrera had a refrigerator-thick build. He was street-smart, ambitious, intellectually curious, and proactive to the extent that he had practically developed his own little native intelligence service for Saravena run from inside the barracks. Trained as a combat diver, he was a veteran of America’s war against the Cali drug cartel, and also of Just Cause, the 1989 invasion of Panama to oust dictator Mañuel Noriega. Based in Cali in the 1980s, he worked in photographic intelligence. In Just Cause, his job was to interrogate pro-Noriega lawyers and policemen. He had also served in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Because of Sgt. Cabrera and others like him, SOUTHCOM was a model of the kind of linguistic and area expertise that all the area commands required in an age of imperial responsibilities.

Over a dinner of ham, fried rice, and Gatorade at the Colombian officers’ club, Cabrera summed up the local situation: “murder, extortion, blowing up power lines, and yet there is no opposition, no sign of a communal spirit. People struggle only to survive or to reach the next rung, where they can skim too. There are better places to grow coca,” he went on; “the ELN is here in such numbers only because of the oil.” Oil had not brought development but terrorism.

Cabrera brought me daily casualty reports from the internecine guerrilla fighting between the FARC and ELN, which in his mind was good news: let the narco-terrorists kill each other. He told me about a new class of improvised claymores: glass and nails stuck in melted tar; barbed wire wrapped around dynamite; bolts and nails sunk in fertilizer inside a milk can. Then he told me about how the ELN had hired a top lawyer to get their Venezuelan explosives expert released early from prison.

One day Cabrera introduced me to four members of a Colombian army motorcycle platoon that investigated car and bicycle bombs. They were solid little men in their early twenties. Their faces were the hue of the soil, with the broad features and impassive expressions of indigenous Indians. Sitting on camp chairs amid the sandbagged walls of the Special Forces compound, they explained that they were volunteers from Bogotá and Tolima, because nobody local could do their job without endangering their families. The week before there had been five of them. Now one was dead. They had arrived at the scene of a car bomb. After they moved the crowd away and cordoned off the area, a second bomb had gone off, sending one of them ten meters in the air. He lost his torso and died on the spot.

While these four soldiers were risking their lives daily, other Colombian soldiers were secretly helping the terrorists. I learned of an incident a few days earlier. A Colombian army unit was notified that it would be dispatched to arrest several guerrilla leaders at a meeting in Saravena. Some of the Colombian privates then made calls from their cell phones. When the unit arrived at the site, the tables and chairs for the meeting were set up but no one was there. Having presumably got word of the raid, the guerrillas had fled.

“We’ve told the Colombians,” Ferguson said, clearly exasperated, “that we’re not going to get anywhere in this war, despite the training we’re giving their counter-guerrilla battalions, if they can’t even confiscate cell phones from their privates. But they haven’t done it.”

I thought of what the intelligence operative had told me in Arauca: Uribe’s tough anti-guerrilla rhetoric had little follow-through in the field.

The following day I observed training. The purpose was to stage an ambush. But before that could be done, a security perimeter and rally point near the ambush site had to be established.

Sgt. Dave Ogle of Spokane, Washington, was standing knee-deep in bramble so thickly matted and dense that visibility was only a few feet. Members of the Colombian army’s 30th Counter-Guerrilla Battalion were walking single file ahead of him. Setting up a 360-degree security perimeter is easy in an open field, but it took skill in this endless thicket. Having gotten his Colombian troops in a massive circle, each soldier lying on the ground, facing out from the center, covering twenty degrees or so with his rifle, unable to see each other yet aware where all the others were, Ogle next had them practice finding an objective rally point, a place which was “out of sight, sound, and small arms range of the objective area.”²⁸

The plan was to ambush a pickup truck on a nearby dirt road. The day before, the Colombian army had accomplished the task smoothly. This time Ogle and the other sergeants added a surprise: a Green Beret was hidden under an old blanket in the back of the pickup. As soon as the Colombians jumped out of the bush to surround the pickup, the Green Beret shot the squad leader, who dropped his M-60 machine gun. But none of the other Colombians assumed command; nor did any of them think to retrieve the M-60 from the dead man.

“Both the assumption of command and the gun died along with the commander,” Sgt. Ogle remonstrated afterwards in Spanish. He ended in an upbeat manner, though, with the necessary clichés: “Do your best. Do what’s right. Do what you’re supposed to do.”

He and the other sergeants stayed out with the trainees through the worst of the muggy midday heat. At dusk we plodded back to the barracks, where under the fluorescent lights, Sgt. First Class Javier Martinez of Oxnard, California, who had wanted to join the Army since he was six, mentioned that the hardest field maneuver to teach the Colombians was charging directly into an ambush. “Directly assaulting an ambush line is counterintuitive,” he explained. “It demands a lot of self-confidence in your team and in your commanding officer. But the technique was used successfully in Vietnam. You can find it in the Ranger Handbook.”²⁹

“Yeah,” someone responded. “But how do we get these guys to believe us, if we’re not allowed to go out on patrol with them against the FARC and ELN? Every time they go out on an op without us, we lose face.” Only if they were attacked could the Green Berets violate the rules of engagement.

Suddenly we heard gunfire. I turned my head. Capt. Ferguson frowned and said, “It’s just night practice at the range. We should be so lucky.”

Policing the world meant producing a product and letting it loose, Maj. Gen. Sid Shachnow had told me back in North Carolina. That product had been produced all right, but it hadn’t been let loose in Colombia. The American contractors taken hostage from that downed plane in southern Colombia were still being held captive two years later—a situation that might have been avoided had the two A-teams gotten permission to deploy to the crash site twenty-four hours earlier. As in Vietnam in the early 1960s, the effect of Special Operations Forces was blunted by the unwillingness of policymakers to utilize them more effectively as a policy instrument.[21] It was partly because of such timidity that the Johnson administration had been left with no other options than to escalate the war in Vietnam with conventional troops, or get out completely.

In Colombia, though, as the months rolled on, some forward steps were made. President Uribe reclaimed rebel areas, thanks to the training provided by Green Berets. The level of violence dropped somewhat, and Uribe, who had lost none of his political courage, went on to become the most popular leader in modern Colombian history. Imperial progress was slow and imperceptible. It could not be measured in news cycles, and was always subject to reversal.

The problem for the U.S. military, even at the tactical level of infantry, was that its capabilities were simply too potent for the restrained diplomacy born of an age of media intrusion. Thus the challenge was to go unnoticed. The next place I went, I saw what one man could do when given absolute freedom, and when nobody was looking.