Imperial Grunts

^{CHAPTER SEVEN} CENTCOM ^{HORN OF AFRICA, WINTER 2004 WITH NOTES ON EAST AFRICA}

Djibouti looked like the pictures sent back from space by the Mars Rover: rocky, rust-red desert with brown and gray welts—a place where the planet’s ability to support life seemed particularly tenuous. From the air, the villages resembled refuse heaps. But little Djibouti, the size of El Salvador, constituted strategic real estate in the Global War on Terrorism. Only minutes by fighter jet across the Bab el Mandeb Strait from Yemen, it was also close to al-Qaeda pockets in Sudan, Somalia, and Kenya. Terrorists lived off ungovernable areas, and there were plenty of those close to Djibouti. In the early twenty-first century, an American base in Djibouti was as advantageous as one in Central Europe during the Cold War.

Djibouti had been part of the first great Ethiopian empire, that of the Roman-era kingdom of Axum. It shared a border not only with Ethiopia, but with Eritrea and Somalia, too. The ethnic Afars of Djibouti’s north were related to the Ethiopians and Eritreans, while Djibouti’s Issa community in the south was related to the Somalis. Djibouti existed courtesy of nineteenth-century French imperialism. With the building of the Suez Canal, European powers had scrambled for ports along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The French got a foothold in the far north of the Somali coast, which became known as French Somaliland, then as the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas, and finally as the Republic of Djibouti when independence came in 1977. But the French hadn’t left; with three thousand French troops and foreign legionnaires, Djibouti was the largest French overseas outpost, rating a billet for a French one-star general. Only in recent years had French administrators left their posts inside local government ministries.

Had the French not established themselves in Djibouti in the middle of the nineteenth century, it is unlikely that the British would have backed Italian ambitions on the coast farther north, in order to counter the French, in which case modern Eritrea, a creation mainly of Italian colonialism, probably never would have come into being. Because European divisions did not always configure with ethnic ones, in recent decades Djibouti had been wracked by ethnic tensions and civil war, between the Ethiopian- and Eritrean-related Afars and the dominant, Somali-related Issas.

Those ethnic divides had an obsessive Middle Eastern quality to them, for the Horn of Africa constituted a loose and wondrous fragment of the Middle East, whose alkaline volcanic deserts were separated from those of Arabia by only a narrow band of water.¹ The line of Ethiopian emperors that ended with Haile Selassie claimed descent from the Hebrew King Solomon and the Yemeni Queen of Sheba. Here nightmarish grand guignols of conquest and regime-induced starvation were punctuated by a chilling precision common to the Middle East, but rare in the rest of Africa. The region’s Semitic and Hamitic languages traced their origins in written form to biblical antiquity. The technical and organizational abilities of the inhabitants were unsurpassed on the African continent. Take the Amhara of Ethiopia, whom Donald N. Levine in his classic study, Wax and Gold, notes are “not much given to aesthetic concerns. They are practical-minded peasants, austere religionists, and spirited warriors.”² Indeed, warfare on the Horn in the final quarter of the twentieth century featured masterfully orchestrated, set-piece battles with tanks, fighter jets, and helicopter gunships that bore closer relation to the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, and to the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, than to any other fighting in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the mid-1980s, when I first began reporting from the Horn, a famine of biblical proportions engulfed the region. The media ascribed it exclusively to drought. But the famine was substantially the result of ethnic and class conflict. In the 1980s, the nineteenth-century empire of the Ethiopian Amharas was finally cracking up, and the regime in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, fortified by Marxist ideology, was using famine as a means to pressure the rebellious Tigreans and Eritreans into submission. The ethnic divisions never healed. Fighting, which abated in 1991—after which Eritrea officially became independent—resumed from 1998 until 2000, causing tens of thousands of more deaths. Unable to export its goods through Eritrean ports, Ethiopia was dependent on Djibouti for an outlet to the sea. That further boosted Djibouti’s strategic importance, and provided it with its first economic windfall.

The second windfall came in 2002 when, with French connivance, the United States stood up the Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) in Djibouti. At first, it was located offshore on the U.S.S. Mt. Whitney. Then the Americans moved onshore to the old French foreign legion outpost of Camp Lemonier. Despite their public spat over Iraq, it had been decided at the highest levels of government in both Washington and Paris that the United States and France needed to cooperate on something real, not merely symbolic, in the War on Terrorism, in order to stabilize their bilateral relationship.

Djibouti and the whole exotic world of the Horn soon evaporated, though; within an hour after my plane had landed, I was ensconced in a crowded tent at Camp Lemonier with ten Marine corporals, lance corporals, and privates first class. For many days they would be my only reality before I ventured beyond the base. The CJTF-HOA was a Marine show to the same degree that the CJTF-180 in Afghanistan had been a Big Army one.

The oldest of the marines in my tent was less than half my age. It was a challenge. The differences between groups of men in their early twenties and those in their mid-thirties are vast. The latter are more settled down, often with growing children and divorces behind them, while the former cannot exist for long without loud soul, hip-hop, and salsa, and constant use of the f word. But in the barracks no one remains a stranger. After a day or so, the young marines stopped calling me “sir” and started addressing me by my first name. This was about the time that I had been bitten up by chiggers like everybody else.

Our tent was lost amid many at Camp Lemonier. I might have been back at Bagram, with the same HESCO barriers, sandbags, concertina wire, shower units, gravel pathways, chow hall, and guard towers built of stacked shipping containers—all constructed at breakneck speed by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR). KBR was as much a part of the American military empire and the War on Terrorism as any of the armed services. Indeed, KBR’s employees tended to be former military, and were known to take considerable risks when the occasion demanded. The architecture, the town planning, and the entire physical ambience of America’s overseas outposts at the turn of the twenty-first century were basically an invention of KBR. The average soldier never really saw Afghanistan or Djibouti. His world was the KBR instant city: “Just add water and watch it grow,” as the saying on base went.

Camp Lemonier was distinguished from Bagram in that it was much smaller, with 1,400 inhabitants as opposed to Bagram’s 5,000. The air here, rather than dry, thin, and cold as at Bagram, was sticky, humid, and hot. Unlike Bagram, nobody used Zulu time. Zulu time was a requirement of the U.S. Air Force, whose time zone reference had to be the same worldwide. But in the Horn of Africa there was much less need for close air support than in Afghanistan.

My “rack” mates belonged to the 2nd squad of the 2nd Platoon of India Company, which, in turn, was part of the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF), out of Camp Lejeune.[63] India Company, which had seen action in Kosovo in 1999 and during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in 2003, was in Djibouti as a component of Security Task Force Betio, a reference to the islet in the Tarawa atoll that the Marines had captured from the Japanese in 1943. India Company was responsible for security inside and around the perimeter of Camp Lemonier.

“It all seems complicated but it’s really very easy,” Staff Sgt. Chad Dickinson of Ilion, New York, explained to me. “In the Marines, we subscribe to KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid. That’s why everything in the Marines is done in threes: three regiments to a division, three battalions to a regiment, three companies to a battalion, three platoons to a company, three squads to a platoon, three fire teams to a squad, and three men to a fire team.[64] But the most important thing that you have to remember is that our company and our platoon are the best there is in the Marine Corps.”

Staff Sgt. Dickinson was the 2nd Platoon’s leader. His high-and-tight buzz cut revealed fiery red hair. His eyes never seemed to blink. His gaze made me think of a crushing handshake, something that first acquired meaning when I watched him berate the marine in the rack beside mine for a minor infraction. “Don’t try me, son, because you’ll be sorry,” he growled.

“Marines are extremists,” Staff Sgt. Dickinson told me. “When I am at home with my wife and it is my turn to clean the bathroom, I clean with straight bleach. The Marines take people who are mean and troublesome, and transform them into people who are just plain intense.” When I asked him to call me by my first name, he replied, “If I called you by anything other than ‘sir’ and my father found out, he’d whoop my ass.”

It was “Staff Sgt. Dickinson” to everyone, never simply “Sgt. Dickinson.” The Marines never abbreviated rank, as they did in the Army. The rule against abbreviating rank helped uphold distinctions that related to real qualitative differences in responsibility. Staff Sgt. Dickinson was in his late twenties, but the authority that he possessed over the twenty-nine marines in my tent and the two next door made him seem much older.[65]

Like so many guys I had met in Special Forces and now in the Marines, the older generations of Staff Sgt. Dickinson’s family included Vietnam veterans. Staff Sgt. Dickinson’s brother was in the Army, and his father-in-law had been a marine. When the economy in upstate New York offered little hope of a job for him, dropping out of college and heading south to enlist in the Marines seemed the natural thing to do. But marines, as I learned the first night in the barracks, were not southern to the degree of Special Forces. They were simply generic working class from all regions of the country.

Much more than Special Forces, marines were tight-lipped and uncommunicative, until it came to their jobs. Then they couldn’t stop talking. Ask them what they do, not how they feel, I had always to tell myself. Staff Sgt. “Dick” was typical. “I don’t really rule the lives of twenty-nine guys,” he told me. “I rule only three, the squad leaders. I oversee the rest. What my job really requires is curiosity—about everything that goes on in the platoon.” He then continued talking nonstop about gear surveys, and regulations governing haircuts, shaving, and physical appearance in general.

“When you go home on leave and see the guys you used to hang out with, you see them different—as slobs,” he continued. “A marine is always a marine, even in civilian clothes. You always dress neat, you tuck in your shirt. You never walk with your hands in your pockets. But in the field we can flip a switch and turn nasty. Then all our cleanliness is channeled into the cleaning of our weapons and equipment only. Semper Gumby. Always Flexible. That’s the real Marine motto.”

Staff Sgt. Dick had seen combat the first time as a corporal in the Balkans. The platoon had been trucked in overland from Greece and set up a base in a gymnasium in northern Kosovo. “We did foot patrols in alleys and were shot at by Serb gunmen, who were then killed by our snipers. We carried the bodies away in our ponchos. After Kosovo I reenlisted.”

By the time of OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) he had become a staff sergeant. Sleeping in “coffin racks” for a month “on ship” en route from Camp Lejeune made the floor of the Kuwait desert a step up in creature comfort. Seven-ton trucks got the platoon to the outskirts of An-Nasiriyah, where it experienced its first firefight with the Fedayeen Saddam. That first night in An-Nasiriyah was their worst in Iraq. Torrential rains caused Staff Sgt. Dickinson’s men to bail water as much as dig trenches. It was pitch black. The rain covered up the muzzle flashes. Their night vision goggles fogged up. Rounds buzzed over their heads and next to them. “It’s not so much scary as overwhelming. The adrenaline never stops, you go numb, and all of your training falls into place,” he explained.

For the most part, though, for the 2nd Platoon of India Company, Operation Iraqi Freedom had been a melancholy delirium of cramped and dust-ridden truck rides with piss breaks every six hours while sweating inside their MOPP suits, interspersed with anxious foot patrols.[66] Staff Sgt. Dickinson’s marines often got no more than one meal ready to eat per day, so they killed chickens and stripped dead cows that they had bought from the hajis. While the First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) had marched straight from Kuwait to Baghdad, those of II MEF, which included India Company, were left in the rear to clean up pockets of resistance. They got less publicity, but in some cases saw more combat and had the more interesting experiences.

The platoon went a month without washing until the gunnery sergeant was able to construct makeshift showers. Their socks became hardened, their bodies black with mud and dirt. They became closer to their fellow marines than they had ever been to their buddies back home. They bled, shat, and vomited together. Without radios or TVs, they discovered reading for the first time in their often poor, misbegotten lives. Every night was “story time,” when one of them would read out loud to the others: Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove from beginning to end.

Most of Staff Sgt. Dick’s men were still in their teens, yet they told their Iraq stories to me in the manner of old men talking to their grandchildren. “Iraq made me want to go home and apologize to all the people I had ever been an asshole to; it made me see myself from the outside for the first time,” said Richard Cabrera, a twenty-one-year-old corporal from Riverside, California.

Nineteen-year-old Ty Ogden of Saratoga Springs, New York, told me of how an Iraqi girl had come up and given him a flower, which he stuck in his helmet. “The Iraqis were always so nice to us,” said another nineteen-year-old tattooed lance corporal, Jeremy Kepner of Utica, New York. “In the morning they brought us fresh tea and pita bread, which we traded for MREs. When we finally got home on leave it was weird. Our old friends suddenly seemed so immature, so naive.”

En route home from Iraq, the ship docked in Lisbon, Portugal, for four days. For Lance Cpl. Kepner and most of the others, it was the first time that they had been to Europe. “After months at Camp Lejeune, Kuwait, and Iraq, Portugal blew our minds,” he reflected. “The women were so beautiful, the people so polite and well dressed—not like Americans. The buildings were old, like a castle. It made me think. I want to go to college after my enlistment is up.”

One day I was sitting atop a Humvee with Lance Cpl. Kepner, waiting to go to the rifle range. I happened to mention that I had been to Colombia the previous winter with the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group.

Kepner replied: “That was when my step-grandfather was killed there, in southern Colombia.”

It turned out that Lance Cpl. Kepner was the step-grandson of Tom Janis, the Vietnam veteran and Bronze Star recipient who had been executed by FARC guerrillas after his plane had gone down, and whose remains I had seen in the hangar that day at Larandia.

“Yes,” Kepner said. “My step-grandfather was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.”

Whereas Staff Sgt. Dickinson was the platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Chris Wagner of Hillsborough, New Jersey, a graduate of Towson University in Maryland, was the platoon’s executive officer. It was a similar division of responsibilities as that which existed between the master sergeant and the captain of a Special Forces team, which, in turn, was like that between the managing editor and the editor in chief of a newspaper. Staff Sgt. Dickinson was responsible for the minute-by-minute operation of the human machinery, while 2nd Lt. Wagner provided the platoon its basic orientation: he drafted the training schedules and so on. Second Lt. Wagner was like other lower- and middle-ranking officers I had met in the military: officers’ training (which for Marines took place at Quantico, Virginia) had, in the process of making him more articulate, also given him a vaguely aristocratic bearing. It was very subtle, and it existed only in relation to the noncommissioned officers, but it was there.

I met 2nd Lt. Wagner for the first time during a field drill at the range. Though guard duty was the oldest job in the Marine Corps, providing security for Camp Lemonier was routine stuff, so a Marine combat unit like the 2nd Platoon had to fill every available hour with training to remain in fighting trim. American soldiers had their first experience in irregular warfare fighting the Iroquois in the heavily wooded terrain of the Ohio River valley during the French and Indian War, but as 2nd Lt. Wagner remarked during the field drill: “You may not see much combat in a wooded environment again. The future is MOUT [military operations on urban terrain].” In front of us, platoon members advanced in the dirt, elbows smacking against the hard desert floor, each marine holding his M-16 in one hand “chicken wing” style, using the other hand to break the fall. For every two marines who laid down suppressing fire, one advanced. Fire without forward movement is a waste; movement without fire is suicide. The aim was to keep the fields of fire as narrow as possible, to avoid hitting civilians in this imaginary urban environment. Because it was only a drill, to stay motivated the marines practiced Indian war yells that they had heard in the movie The Last of the Mohicans.

The Marines were an example of how government channels the testosterone of young males toward useful national ends. If the military were much smaller than it was, the result might be only more gang violence within the homeland. “I joined because I felt I needed discipline,” one of Staff Sgt. Dickinson’s squad leaders told me. Not only were the crew cuts, tattoos, and bodybuilder-type physiques of all the marines down to the squad leaders similar, so were their expressions. They bore a metallic intensity like water pouring over rocks in a fast stream.

It was at the range where I saw how the Marines made due. With Special Forces, you’d go out and shoot live fire and rocket-propelled grenades to your heart’s content, using the latest M-4 assault rifles with rail systems. The marines shot blank RPGs. They had a limited number of 5.56mm rounds. They did not have the latest helmets, and used older, heavier, and more awkward M-16s. And these were marines who had seen combat in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Yet this was an afternoon at the range such as I had never experienced. Rather than go out for an hour or two and shoot from a clean berm, we were there six hours in the hot sun, crawling on bare elbows in the greasy African dirt, running from one prone position to another, practicing an assault. Staff Sgt. Dickinson insisted that I experience it firsthand. Lying on my stomach in a prone position, I had trouble aiming because I was so out of breath.

He yelled throughout the day. They were mean yells, especially when two marines fired their rifles on “burst,” for marines were taught to always fire deliberately, in order to make every shot count. The discipline never let up. But it was a discipline that instilled not only obedience but also responsibility, because many of these marines commanded others in ever smaller groups.

That evening a fistfight erupted in the barracks and Staff Sgt. Dickinson stormed in. He looked so angry that his face was as red as his hair. Then he turned calm. He spoke to us about his own anger, why it was necessary, and why it was necessary to solve problems within the squad by looking out for each other.

“We fight. I yell. But we’re a family. I’m your father and mother. It’s the Marine culture. It’s why we’re still around after two hundred years.” These were tough kids from difficult family backgrounds. The Marines were like an orphanage that worked. Cpl. Richard Cabrera was typical. He had joined the Marines to avoid the route that had led his older brother to jail after his father died. His mother was working all the time to support her three children, and Cabrera, being young and ignorant, thought that she hated him because she was rarely around. It was the experience of the Marine Corps, he told me, that made him realize that she had loved him all the time. “All I ever wanted at home was to be missed.”

“Column right, column left. Left, left.” Staff Sgt. Dickinson called cadence on the hot gravel, as the platoon marched to a formation point to mount up for guard duty. At the formation point each marine neatly piled his helmet and rifle atop his web gear, which in turn was atop his flak jacket—or, as Special Forces had called it, IBA (individual body armor). There was a procedure for everything. It was a small example of how the Marine Corps, more than the other services, stripped away civilian identity.[67]

Before heading off to their guard posts there was a PME (professional military education). The Vietnamese-born gunnery sergeant, Taun Pham, strutted around, barking in sing-song fashion: “Why is there a need for repetition, gents?” he asked rhetorically. “Because repetition is the way we learn. When an awesome new hip-hop song comes out, what do you do, gents? You listen to it over and over again, until you know the words. You do the same thing with your weapons that you do with a good hip-hop song. You practice loading and aiming and shooting over and over again. And how do you communicate with each other?” he went on. “Through a brevity code. And why do we do that, gents? In order to convey a lot of information quickly. Marines aren’t like other people. Marines don’t waste time with jibber-jabber. So what do you do when you have to tell someone to shut down the base? You say, ‘Sandstorm.’ Or if you want to announce that there is an improvised explosive device inside the base? You say, ‘Firecracker.’ Or if you want someone to have a magazine inserted in his M-16, with the bolt forward, the chamber empty, and the ejection port closed? You say, ‘Condition Three.’ There is a brevity code for everything, so, like I said, don’t waste time with jibber-jabber. Marines should say in a few seconds what it takes others to say in a minute.”

For the Marine Corps, the most bureaucratically powered-down of the armed services, the gunnery sergeant was the ultimate rank. The “gunny” was the go-to guy, the captain’s technical advisor, the senior enlisted man who handled all logistics, the iron grunt.[68]

As Gunny Pham continued with his chantlike brief, the officers and noncoms went inside one of the tents for their own PME. The session was led by Capt. Charles Cassidy of Evergreen Park, Illinois, India Company’s commander. Second Lt. Wagner, Staff Sgt. Dickinson, and the officers and noncoms—so domineering moments before with their corporals and privates—now became subservient. In the Pentagon, a Marine captain was lost amid many other officers. But in the field a captain was a company leader, a truly big deal. Capt. Cassidy’s position and responsibility made him seem remote almost. He lectured for over two hours, frequently employing a brevity code. The train of logic and material he packed into his presentation was truly remarkable. In a competition for substance, he would have murdered just about any academic or media pundit. Capt. Cassidy was not interested in what was interesting, only in what mattered.

The subject of the lecture was an imaginary assault on enemy troops that were situated on an elevated plain. The assault route led up through marshy woods and sparsely vegetated ridges. “The terrain comes before the enemy,” Capt. Cassidy told us. “The terrain is the most important element because it impacts everything we and the enemy do. The enemy has a different personality, depending upon the terrain in which it must operate.” Geographical context was everything, in other words.

Key Terrain, Capt. Cassidy explained, was the part of the terrain that provided an advantage toward acquiring Decisive Terrain. Key Terrain could shift, “because there may be only one fucking machine-gun position holding up an advance, to be replaced later by another machine-gun position.” As for Decisive Terrain, “it may not exist at all,” because the nature of the enemy configuration may make it impossible to secure success by holding any one piece of ground. Terrain was also divided between an Area of Operation and an Area of Interest. The Area of Interest, in this case the elevated plain, extended beyond the Area of Operation, which was the marshy woodlands and ridges. Key Terrain in this particular assault was situated near the ridgeline where the Area of Operation met the Area of Interest.

The brief went on, becoming increasingly specific as every ridge and path leading up to the plain was described and considered. It followed the unyielding logic of both the Ranger Handbook and the Fleet Marine Force Manual 6-5 (FMFM 6-5), the latter known as the “Grunt’s Bible.”[69]

From the beginning of my journey, I had been meeting men for whom “the mission was everything.” Capt. Cassidy’s brief clarified the mission further. It showed that the mission had to be tangible; that it had to be finite; that to be successful it need not—and often could not—be perfectly executed; and that, most of all, the mission was about priorities. It assumed, in other words, a messy world with imperfect results.

In such a tactical universe, intentions were meaningless; only effects mattered. This was a universe that featured total accountability, for success and failure were specifically measurable in terms of inches of ground and lives of men. It was a restrictive logic, but not self-delusory like other kinds. Therein lay its power.

It was only a few minutes’ walk from Capt. Cassidy’s office to that of Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa, whom I knew from the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Marines of India Company guarded Camp Lemonier, from which Brig. Gen. Robeson launched missions throughout the Horn of Africa and beyond. But while Brig. Gen. Robeson applied himself to larger, strategic matters, the disciplined logic of the Marine field manuals guided his approach. From western North Carolina (though he now lived in Jacksonville), he was tall, trim, and gray-haired, and with a sly, curious expression that made me think of a rifle scope being zeroed in.

The CJTF-HOA labored under “the tyranny of distance,” Robeson told me. His AOR (area of responsibility) included not only the traditional Horn of Africa countries—Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia—but also the adjacent real estate of Yemen, Sudan, and Kenya. This subfiefdom of CENTCOM was five times larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, yet the American footprint had remained relatively small. “We’re conducting an archaeological dig, not doing urban renewal,” he explained. “It’s about working the fringes, finding needles in haystacks, not dismantling regimes.” There was obviously a lot less going on here than in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what was going on—as in Colombia, Mongolia, and the Philippines—was more instructive of how the U.S. military would likely operate in the future.

The Horn of Africa had registered on the American intelligence radar screen long before the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Al-Qaeda had been operating around the Horn for years. When Osama bin Laden relocated from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1995, he left a financial support structure behind in Khartoum. Though terrorism thrived on ungovernability, it also required cultural and linguistic access, so that terrorists could blend into the population. In the case of al-Qaeda, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and heavily Muslim northern Kenya offered such access.

“This is a region,” Robeson told me, “where young al-Qaeda operatives drift into towns and villages, get established, marry local girls, and go to ground.” Saleh Nabhan, a key operative in the 2002 attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and of the surface-to-air missile launched at an Israeli airliner from Mombasa, fit that description perfectly: one day he had arrived at a coastal fishing village near Lamu Island in northern Kenya, settled in and married a fifteen-year-old local girl, then bought a house with the dowry and laid low for several years. “How many more like him are out there that we don’t know about?” the general asked aloud. As it was, CJTF-HOA was tracking more than five hundred terrorists by name. “It’s like pulling up a rug and realizing, holy cow, where’d all those cockroaches come from? Once you start playing zone defense in depth, like we’re doing in the Horn, it’s amazing what turns up.”

To a greater degree than Afghanistan even, the Horn was a place for a light and lethal force structure. Robeson had flattened the command hierarchy by collapsing his own staff and that of the CJTF-HOA’s Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF) into each other. He had created a single intel-fusion center with representatives from all the countries in the area of responsibility to analyze political, military, and terrorist activities in the Horn and beyond, making for a holistic tapestry unavailable at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency.

Less so than the State Department, Brig. Gen. Robeson was unburdened by bureaucratic boundary seams. If terrorists could take advantage of the porosity of borders, why couldn’t the U.S. government? And yet U.S. embassies, established according to a system of nation-states, were, by definition, country-centric, with localitis the natural result. The State Department, more than the Pentagon, was also hindered by the Cold War–era divisions of its various “line” bureaus: the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the Bureau of African Affairs, and so forth. Robeson’s area of responsibility, on the other hand, overlapped several geographic domains: the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, North and East Africa, and the Pacific. The Horn, Yemen, and Kenya were all inside CENTCOM, which comprised the Middle East and parts of Africa most impacted by the Arabian Peninsula. EUCOM, which handled Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, had allowed Robeson to pursue leads into Tanzania and Uganda. Meanwhile, PACOM had granted Robeson similar access to the Comoros islands.

“Bureaucratically, we’re doing things we never did before,” Robeson said. “I speak a few times a week to Gen. [John] Abizaid [the CENTCOM commander], and that is the extent of my instructions. It’s great to be ignored. It means you can innovate.” The newer and more immature the theater of operations, the more opportunity that existed for entrepreneurship.

Djibouti in its own quiet way manifested the ultimate effect of 9/11, an effect that was general and sustaining rather than specific and transitory. Iraq and Afghanistan were about dismantling regimes and consequent nation-building, which, because it grabbed headlines, excited journalists and intellectuals who lived off the news for their debates and discussions. But the Horn demonstrated that the killing of a few thousand Americans on one day two and a half years earlier had provided the U.S. military with the trigger for a new kind of great power role, a role that was precise and subtle, did not involve large numbers of troops, and was not truly about nation-building.

“Just whacking crack houses doesn’t cut it anymore,” Robeson explained. “The new Economy of Force model we’re working on is to whack people quietly, while running a lot of aid projects that generate good publicity in the areas affected.” Consequently, Robeson was sprinkling his vast desert and savanna fiefdom with aid missions. U.S. troops, often in civilian clothes, were building schools and hospitals and digging wells; holding MEDCAPS and DENTCAPS for the inhabitants, and VETCAPS for their animals. They were training the indigenous troops of several nations in counterterrorism, establishing local coast guards from Kenya to Yemen, and dispatching clandestine Special Operations teams here and there to snatch and kill “bad guys.” September 11 had given the U.S. military the justification to go out scouting for trouble, and at the same time to do some good.

In Ma’rib, the Yemeni badland east of the capital of Sana’a where I had traveled thirteen months before, there had recently been dozens of arrests of al-Qaeda suspects, facilitated by the U.S., which coincided with the insertion of marines to train Yemeni commandos. In the Ogaden desert region of Ethiopia, Army civil affairs teams (CATs) were establishing relationships with local clan leaders who needed help against bandits and refugees seeping in from chaotic Somalia.

“Who needs meetings in Washington?” Army Maj. Trip Narrow of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told me. “Guys in the field will figure out what to do. I took ten guys for a week through eastern Ethiopia. Everywhere we went people wanted a bigger American presence. They know we’re here. They want to see what we can do for them. One four-man CAT [civil affairs team] can accomplish more than a battalion of infantry. Forget the Vietnam baggage,” he went on. “It’s still about hearts and minds, a Peace Corps role for the military.”

Fifteen years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall a new paradigm was emerging for how the American military projected itself abroad, one that borrowed more from the French and Indian War and the Lewis and Clark expedition than from the major conflicts of the twentieth century. Just like the British and the French dealing with the Iroquois Confederacy on the western slopes of the Appalachians and in northern New York State, Americans in the Horn were interacting with indigenous peoples in small numbers, making various deals of mutual self-interest, and killing a few of them when necessary. And like Lewis and Clark, small groups of soldiers and marines were being dispatched to little-surveyed areas, armed with only general guidelines. But because progress was often imperceptible, it was unclear how much defense officials in Washington appreciated the significance of what was going on here.

The new paradigm gave Brig. Gen. Robeson a sort of power that no U.S. ambassador or assistant secretary of state quite had. Not only wasn’t he burdened by the State Department’s antiquated bureaucratic divisions, but his ability to deal with the region’s leaders and strongmen may also have been helped by a cause-and-effect, working-class mind, disciplined by the logic of Marine tactical operations manuals and the classical military education he had received at Fort Leavenworth. Though democracy was gaining in the region, many of the elected leaders with whom Robeson had developed relationships were former guerrilla fighters and military men, men from hardscrabble beginnings who may have had more in common with a Marine brigadier general who had studied business administration at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, and lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina, than they had with a civilian ambassador who had, say, studied liberal arts at an elite university and lived in a prosperous Washington suburb.

The fact that generals like Mastin Robeson were in the diplomatic forefront, somewhat at the expense of the State Department, troubled commentators who assumed the permanence of industrial-age categories of bureaucratic responsibility, categories helped into being by the early-nineteenth-century professionalization of European militaries, which consequently separated them from civilian command structures. But such distinctions appeared to be weakening.

In 1994, two Special Forces officers helped the Paraguayan government to ratify new laws just after Paraguay’s constitution had been adopted. On the other hand, it was under the State Department’s auspices, not the Pentagon’s, that helicopters were leased to the Colombian military to fight narco-terrorists. And just as Robeson was a model for future generals, the model for future diplomats might have been Deane Hinton, who oversaw counterinsurgency operations as ambassador to El Salvador in the early 1980s, and then oversaw efforts to arm Afghan guerrillas as the ambassador to Pakistan in the middle and late 1980s. In both cases, a military strategy would have been unavailing in the absence of a successful interagency strategy, which backed diplomatic initiatives and aid packages with the power of a cocked gun. As military and diplomatic divisions of responsibility continued to break down, the U.S. government was likely to revert to the unified leaderships of the ancient and early modern worlds—what Socrates and Machiavelli recognized as a basic truth of all political systems, whatever the labels those systems claimed for themselves.³

With his practical mindset, Gen. Robeson was impressed neither with the appearance of progress nor with scholastic definitions of it, but with progress itself. To wit, like others in the defense establishment, but unlike many in the State Department, Robeson liked the president of neighboring Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki. “Isaias doesn’t need bodyguards,” Robeson told me. “He goes around alone. He lives in a normal house. He governs an African capital that is crime-free, without slums, even though there are relatively few police. There’s no terrorist threat in Eritrea. More than any other country in my AOR [area of responsibility], it has a secular Western sense of patriotism. Isn’t that what we claim we want?”[70]

Eritrea was interesting as a symbol of how the Pentagon and the State Department saw the world differently. My own reporting experiences in Eritrea caused me to initially side with the Pentagon, though, as the human rights situation there continued to deteriorate, even I was fast losing hope.

While the State Department defined civil society in terms of generic criteria such as elections, a free press, and the absence of political prisoners, that way of thinking missed vital nuances: President Afwerki did not require a vast security apparatus to protect him as did the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi. Eritrea was arguably the least corrupt of third world countries. It had a record of near-perfect accountability when it came to utilizing international aid, and took care of its handicapped citizens better than any other country in Africa.

As Robeson put it, “Rather than give up on Isaias because he won’t conform with our standards of Western democracy, it’s in our interest to bring him into the tent, before the human rights situation gets even worse there.” He mentioned that the Eritrean leader gave up the disputed Hanish Islands in the Red Sea to Yemen, just as the international community had asked him to. Going on in his mild North Carolina drawl about the tense relationship between Eritrea and Yemen, Robeson remarked: “[Yemeni president Ali Abdullah] Saleh has been a real impressive leader, make no mistake. And the only way he has succeeded is by making deals with one tribe and another. But that’s why Isaias can’t respect him. You see, Isaias lived in a cave for years during the guerrilla war with Ethiopia. Nobody chooses to live in a cave that long except to defend a strong principle. And so in Isaias’s mind, Saleh has no principles, he’s just a wheeler-dealer.

“Meles [Zenawi] also lived in a cave for years,” he went on, referring to the leader of Ethiopia. “That’s why both these guys are so smart. They had nothing to do for years except read.”

Indeed, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had met with Zenawi in 2002, making Ethiopia a linchpin in the struggle against al-Qaeda. The Ethiopians were granting overfly rights and sharing intelligence with the U.S., even as troops from the 10th Mountain Division were training Ethiopian soldiers. Orthodox Christian Ethiopia clearly felt threatened; it was now 50 percent Muslim, with Saudi-financed mosques spreading radicalism, and the Islamic separatist Oromo Liberation Front active in the south of the country.⁴

Robeson showed me a map of the ethnic groups of the Horn. The territory of the Afars overlapped Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, and that of the Issas Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia. The numerous Oromos inhabited both Ethiopia and Kenya. The Anuaks inhabited Ethiopia and Sudan, the Digil occupied Somalia and Kenya, and so on. The map looked quaint, but as the Islamic resurgence in Ethiopia evinced, it had urgent political meaning. For example, Somalia was a failed state that had effectively severed into three parts: the Issa-dominated northwest that configured with former British Somaliland; the largely Darood central part called “Puntland” (a reference to the biblical land of Punt, by the mouth of the Red Sea); and the Hawiy-dominated south around Mogadishu, which had been an Italian colony.

Somalia couldn’t get any worse. Only the former British northwest had a semblance of government. Robeson was equally concerned with Ethiopia and Kenya. They dominated the region demographically, and had gone from being repressive regimes to weak democracies, as the U.S. had been in the early nineteenth century. Ethiopia still constituted a sprawling empire more than a country, and was ruled by a minority Tigrean. While predominantly orthodox Christian, it had large Muslim areas, as did Kenya. Mosque construction in Robeson’s area of responsibility had increased more than eightfold. Sub-Saharan Africa’s institutional decline was generating stronger religious identities as the post-colonial state lost its grip on people’s imaginations.

Terrorists were the beneficiaries of such trends.

Talking with Gen. Robeson, I could not help recalling Donald Levine’s mid-twentieth-century portrait of the Ethiopian Amhara, Wax and Gold, an ethnographic area study that is one of the finest of the genre. A professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, Levine labeled himself a “pragmatist”: someone, he explains, who affirms the human values of modernity, yet conceives of modernity not in fixed ideological terms, but as “relative to the cultural context in which modernization takes place.”⁵ So while democracy may ultimately be the best system for every society, each society must reform in its own time and in its own way, depending upon historical and geographical circumstances. Because Levine’s experience in the Horn was prodigious, and he was unafraid to generalize about human behavior, Wax and Gold, researched between 1957 and 1962, has a practical, old-fashioned common sensibility rare in contemporary academic circles.

Wax and gold, Levine explains—sam-enna warq in Amharic—“is the formula used by the Amhara to symbolize their favorite form of verse.” It is a verse formula built of two semantic layers: the apparent, figurative meaning of the words called the “wax,” and the hidden meaning called the “gold.” This is the key, he implies, to understanding Ethiopian culture. While the relative absence of ambiguity—clear, straightforward talk—is necessary for the running of a modern society and bureaucracy, the management of social and ethnic tensions requires considerable reliance on ambiguity for interpersonal relations. A culture of deception, according to Levine, has always been the obstacle to Ethiopia’s modernization, but also the protector of its relative social peace.⁶

In Ethiopia’s “minimal, Hobbesian order,” Levine goes on, moral obligations rarely extend beyond the family and tribal circle. Suspicion and secrecy are ever present, partly due to a history of living under the dual threat of Islam and Western Christianity. (Thus, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church concerns itself with “practical justice, not universal love.”) Ethiopia, to which Levine was lured by its “extraordinarily handsome people in a setting of great natural beauty,” is a hard, cruel place. The author notes “the surly use of authority, the subtle sense of fatalism, the adulation of rank rather than human qualities… the narrowness of outlook… the interpersonal aspects of the ethos of wax and gold.”

The countryside’s appearance is proof of this absence of community. There are few venerable urban centers, or villages even, in the Ethiopian highlands, just thinly scattered groups of houses up and down the mountainsides. Instead of clustering, there is dispersion.⁷

Wax and Gold was published a decade before the Ethiopian revolution that toppled Emperor Haile Selassie and brought to power arguably the most systematically murderous regime in the history of twentieth-century Africa, a suspicious and morosely secretive Marxist killing machine that evinced many of the negative cultural traits that Levine had earlier identified in his researches.

Looking at the ethnic map of the Horn and what might transpire there in coming years, I knew that such a book could only grow in relevance, for just as terrain comes before the enemy, in Capt. Cassidy’s words, indigenous culture—a reaction to geographical circumstance—must be appreciated before anything can be accomplished with its inhabitants.

The diminishing emphasis on central authority had led the U.S. military to forge a presence in far-flung parts of Ethiopia and Kenya. That’s what “working the fringes” was all about, according to Brig. Gen. Robeson. Thus, one morning before dawn I slipped out of the penitentiary-like world of the Marine barracks and walked over to the airstrip at Camp Lemonier, boarded a Navy C-20, and by lunchtime was in Nairobi, where I boarded a small commercial prop. Before mid-afternoon I was looking at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro through the plane window. By late afternoon I touched down in the Kenyan coastal town of Manda Bay near the Somali border, where the African bush meets the milky turquoise of the Indian Ocean. Here the Horn gives way to East Africa, and the world of the Muslim Near East melds with that of syncretic sub-Saharan Africa to form the purest Swahili culture. From Manda Bay, I boarded a dhow for the short sail to the island of Lamu, my destination and that of the four-man Army CAT (civil affairs team) with which I was traveling.

Like the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines, Lamu is another lost paradise of empty beaches, aquamarine inlets graced by swirling coral patterns, thatched hutments, and quiet, contemplative alleys hypnotized by the sun and plied by burros. It was saved from mass tourism only by the threat of terrorism and Kenya’s reputation for crime.[71] Muslim dominance was another factor, because it limited liquor licenses on the island.

Lamu, a medieval creation of Arab traders, is the first of the Swahili city-states reached by single-mast dhows sailing from Oman and Yemen. The prevalence of the Persian and the Portuguese in these waters contributed to the cultural eclecticism. Lamu boomed during the centuries of the Arab-dominated East African slave trade. When the slave trade ended, and the British built a rail link from Nairobi to Mombasa south along the coast, Lamu became a backwater, frequented only by a small band of sybaritic Europeans, including the royal family of Monaco. It was in Lamu where Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, with their husbands and hangers-on, attempted to escape from the klieg lights of the paparazzi.

But the Grimaldi sisters soon had company—Arab terrorists and the American military. Both came for the very reason that had made Lamu and other nearby islands fertile ground for the Swahili language and the slave trade—location. For the Arabs, Lamu was the most forward point of cultural access into sub-Saharan Africa. (Swahili, after all, represents a fusion of Arabic and Bantu words and civilizations.) In these island paradises, filled with welcoming Muslim populations, young al-Qaeda operatives with money and good manners could quietly establish themselves. Kenya was an inviting target because of the large concentration of westerners in

its major cities. The group that bombed the Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa worked out of Faza Island, next door to Lamu.

As for the American military, it had a long-standing relationship with the Kenyan one. But the relationship intensified with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of order in adjacent Somalia. Next came the bombing of the Nairobi embassy and then 9/11, as the threat shifted from Soviet domination of Central Europe to radical Islamic terrorism fostered by third world institutional decline.

Edged Mallet, an annual joint American-Kenyan military exercise, was in its fourth year now. Its focus was Kenya’s northern coast near Somalia, where at Manda Bay the Kenyan military had an air base and naval station.

Manda Bay required an improved pier and a better runway, which, as it happened, served the interests of the American and Kenyan militaries. It also served the interests of Kenya’s new fledgling democracy, which was trying to upgrade services and establish an institutional foothold after the abuses perpetrated by the former ruler, Daniel arap Moi. In an age of democracy, bilateral military contacts were more important than ever. In countries like Kenya, civilian politicians came and went, but leading security and military men remained as behind-the-scenes props. Thus, the better the relationship between American officers and their Kenyan counterparts, the more likely that the Kenyan military would be honest and democratic. As Brig. Gen. Robeson had put it to me, “The success of Kenya’s democratic experiment offers the best hope for American security in the region.”

A key fact to remember is that the Americans did not require a base of their own; rather, they wanted the Kenyans to have a fully modernized base, so that present and future democratic Kenyan governments would project Kenyan power into the chaotic reaches of Somalia. As for the Americans, they could always use these base facilities if—and only if—the U.S. maintained a strong relationship with the Kenyan military, and with the local inhabitants of Lamu and Manda Bay. That was where Army Civil Affairs entered the calculation.

Civil Affairs had an obviously civilian connotation. That was the beauty of it. In truth, Civil Affairs was part of USASOC, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, headquartered at Fort Bragg, which also included Special Forces and Psychological Operations. Civil Affairs acted like a relief charity or NGO (nongovernmental organization). It built schools, dug wells, provided medical assistance, and so forth. The four-man civil affairs team that I accompanied to Lamu would be replacing a four-man team that had already been on the island for several months.

These teams had a twofold mission: make a sustained contribution to the island’s quality of life, so that the inhabitants would see a relationship with the U.S. as in their best interests; and, more immediately, be the advance guard for U.S. Marines from the U.S.S. Germantown coming ashore to repair a school and conduct a MEDCAP.

Lamu was an example of the new paradigm for projecting American power: modernize host country bases for use as strategic outposts, maintain local relationships through humanitarian projects, then use such relationships to hunt down “bad guys.” Whether it was upgrading a runway, digging a well, or whacking a terrorist, the emphasis was always on small teams.

The civil affairs teams were usually composed of reservists. Rather than the young, high-testosterone marines I had been staying with, they were more like their Special Forces colleagues in Army Special Operations Command: middle-aged men with civilian skills relevant to the task at hand.

But the people skills required on Lamu were not those the U.S. military usually looked for, even as they were the most important skills to have in a new era of ambiguous war.

A four-man team led by Capt. Steve Stacy of Tiffin, Ohio, a graduate of Ohio State University, would be replacing a team led by Capt. Jeff Rynearson of Orlando, Florida, a graduate of Southern Illinois University. On the plane journey from Djibouti, Capt. Stacy’s team did not make much of an impression on me, one way or the other. Stacy’s team sergeant, Glenn Elenga of Phoenix, was a friendly, garrulous former Special Forces 18 Delta medic. Sgt. Anthony Diaz of Tenafly, New Jersey, was a handsome ethnic Colombian who planned to do graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. Sgt. Michael McCoy of Las Vegas was just plain quiet and tense. He seemed more suited to direct action than to the softer, humanitarian unconventional war.

It was only when I met the other team at the civilian airstrip in Manda Bay that I realized how much the new team would have to struggle in order to adapt, for the reality of Lamu and the skill set it required hit me at once.

Lamu was just so laid-back. The moment you landed, and the heat and enervating humidity lathered your skin, rotting the back of your shirt, and you saw your first dhow and bougainvillea bush, any tensions or worries you might have brought with you on the plane simply evaporated. Here there was no gritty dust, only fine white sand. It was an Indian Ocean version of what the Greek islands must have been like in the 1950s, before reduced jet fares and Never on Sunday—just beautiful scenery, uncorrupted natives, a sensuous concoction of Arab architecture and African styles, and a sprinkle of Western pleasure-seekers.

Capt. Jeff Rynearson, the departing commander, met us at planeside. He had a beefy and relaxed surfer’s manner, with a deep tan, longish sun-bleached blond hair, and wraparound shades. He was wearing shorts, sandals, and a loud Hawaiian-style shirt. With his “We Are the World” smile, he was like any engaging relief worker or Peace Corps volunteer, except for the Skoal chewing tobacco in his mouth and the 9mm Beretta under his Hawaiian shirt. Capt. Rynearson’s sidekick, who at first I thought was a Kenyan security heavy, was Sgt. John Philoctete, an ethnic Haitian from Brooklyn. Sgt. Philoctete had the same jet-black complexion as the locals. He wore a white Muslim-style skullcap and gold chains around his neck.

“Jambo,” they greeted us, as well as the people they passed on the short walk to the dock, whom they all seemed to know. It was Swahili for “Hello, how are you?”

“Mzuri sana [Very good],” came the reply, followed by “hakuna matata,” which strictly translated as “no problem.” But it had a larger connotation akin to “everything is cool.” It was seventeen years since I had last been in Kenya, and I had forgotten the electric sense of life that Swahili imparted.

Beautiful African women in black buibuis smiled broadly at us. The cotton robes concealed everything but their faces, while accentuating their swaying hips. One girl around seventeen began smiling and talking to Capt. Rynearson. She obviously knew him. “It’s sad,” he whispered in my ear. “There are a lot of girls here like her. They’re at the age when the hormones kick in and they start begging their father to arrange a marriage for them. Then they’re finished in this culture.”

Looking at the local women, and a few of the fetching European ones by the dock, and smelling their perfume, I remembered that there were marines in the tent in Djibouti who had told me that because of their extended deployments they hadn’t been laid in years.

Capt. Rynearson and Sgt. Philoctete represented the future reality of Special Operations: the Peace Corps with guns, the final articulation of unconventional war. An unstated reason the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, often relief charities) were uncomfortable with the emerging humanitarian role of the American military was that it represented strong professional competition.

Capt. Steve Stacy had the concentrated look of a sprinter before the starting gun sounded, as Capt. Rynearson began talking to him about how to hire a dhow, what to pay the porters, and which of the “Bob Marley clones” with matted hair and colorful woolen caps who were hanging around the dock were trustworthy and which were not. Staff Sgt. Glenn Elenga and Sgt. Tony Diaz were all smiles: Wow, what a deployment, I could hear them thinking; whoever said, “War is hell”? As for Sgt. Mike McCoy, he was stone-faced. I had heard he was disappointed that the team was not sent to Iraq.

Looking at Sgt. McCoy’s expression, seeing how pale Sgt. Elenga and Capt. Stacy were, and observing their heavy clothes and Stacy’s high-and-tight crew cut he had gotten a few days before at Fort Bragg, I worried that a few days would not be enough for the transition from one team to the other. You wondered who planned these things at Fort Bragg; who it was that ordered Stacy to get a haircut rather than to start growing his hair long and stock up on beach clothes. The problem with the Special Operations community was that it knew intellectually what was necessary for America to project its power stealthily, but it couldn’t bring itself to make the necessary cultural adjustments.

The boat that took us across the channel to Lamu was a Jahazi, the largest type of dhow, capable of sailing as far as India. But ocean journeys were rare now because the Somali coast was covered by pirates. With majestic lateen sails and forward overhangs, dhows looked as aerodynamic as the sleekest fighter jets. They littered the channel, which in the sharp, late-afternoon sunlight resembled a sheet of tinted glass running with condensation. The approaching seaboard was cluttered with faded white archways, flowering trees, and small burros. I saw no paved roads and no cars. After disembarking we rested for a moment by a local hotel with potted palms and a dark, cool bar.

Then things happened fast. We met with the district commissioner, James Mwaura, to whom Capt. Rynearson introduced the new team. That was followed by a discussion about compensation to be paid by the U.S. for the destruction of a boat and a fire station, caused by the wind generated by a CH-46 helicopter during Edged Mallet. Next we walked over to the boys’ secondary school, where Marine Capt. James Bauch of Cedar Falls, Iowa, explained how a platoon from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), based off the U.S.S. Germantown, had flown in by chopper and in four twelve-hour workdays laid a new roof and refurbished the rest of the building. The marines were now playing basketball with the local kids. Watching the game, Rynearson told me, “This is where we win.” At a ceremony for the opening of the new school building the next day, District Commissioner Mwaura would tell the crowd, “In the midst of all the problems in the world, it is important to see the humanitarian hand of the American military.”

The island’s population was under one hundred thousand. The economy was weak. A few dozen Americans—marines and Army Civil Affairs personnel—going around, spending money in the shops and restaurants, was in and of itself appreciated. Rynearson’s team had convinced some of the locals that the U.S.S. Germantown should pay a port call. Those locals, in turn, convinced other locals at a community meeting. A Navy SEAL team then arrived to “pop smoke,” to keep dhows away from the Germantown’s wake. “The SEALs put on a real show for the local kids, throwing a lot of colorful smoke grenades,” Rynearson said. Turning to Capt. Stacy, he told him, “Never speak to the community as a group; speak to individuals and have them go to the community. And make sure to call people by their titles here, they like that.”

Such details were critical. The endgame was to turn the local media, as Special Operations Command—Pacific had been able to do with the Philippine media during the Basilan operation. Recently, though, things had gone horribly wrong at Garissa, a town in the Kenyan interior near the Somali border. A local mullah had paid off some demonstrators to throw rocks during a MEDCAP, resulting in stories in the Nairobi press about how the Americans were not wanted.

At sunset, we finally arrived at the villa that Rynearson had rented: a white, cubistic masterpiece graced by bougainvillea, geraniums, and sweet-smelling jasmines. We were so close to the equator that on the balcony in the middle of the night I thought it might be possible to see both the Southern Cross and the North Star at opposite points on the horizon.

It was on the balcony where the two teams gathered for a sit-down over beer. Now I met the two other sergeants from Rynearson’s team, another ethnic Haitian and an ethnic Nicaraguan, both from Miami, who called themselves Wesley and Max. Wesley, like Philoctete, looked like a local; Max looked like a Lebanese trader. They both had short beards and wore beads and knit caps. There was also someone else present: a Marine force protection specialist whom I shouldn’t name. With a short-cropped beard and a café-au-lait complexion, he might have passed for a “bad guy.” With no locals around, the noncoms addressed Capts. Rynearson and Stacy as “sir.”

The evening breeze was nice and cool. The Kenyan Tusker beer was good, and the bottles were big. When everyone got settled, the force protection guy began dourly: “I’m paid to be paranoid. I’m a marine, so I stay in the box. I don’t go out of the box,” meaning that he couldn’t talk about what was not concrete and immediately definable, unlike Army Special Operations, which was comfortable with nebulosity. “Therefore, here’s what I know. The Muslim religious leaders who run the island community are suspicious of us. At the same time they need us to do projects. This house is beautiful, but don’t get into the habit of hanging out here, or else you’ll really be unsafe. If you guys get snatched, hope somebody will rescue you. But you can’t hunker down.”

Rynearson cut in: “Don’t worry. Even on slow days there will always be someone who wants to show you their school or something. You’ll always be busy checking out potential projects. That’s the beauty of Civil Affairs. You figure it out on your own. You’ll be an easy target, but nobody will do anything in their own backyard. On a scale of one to ten, I’d say the threat level is two.”

Then came a long discussion about local contractors and construction materials. It was a disciplined meeting. The new team members took notes. At the end, it was decided that Capt. Stacy would not wear his combat fatigues at the ceremony the next day for the school opening. “Because nobody here knows you yet,” Rynearson suggested, “the uniform will be a barrier to becoming accepted.” It was no big deal to tell the truth about being an American soldier; it was another to intimidate people with a uniform.

After dinner the new team retired to another part of the villa to meet among themselves. Again, they all had notebooks; Capt. Stacy still had the tense look of an athlete before a race.

“I think,” he began, “that we lose the Camel Paks, the military rucks, and the fishing vests. Buy some beach clothes. All of us except for Diaz look too white, too American military. We can’t put that in people’s faces.” The others nodded. “The old team has racial advantages. Looking like some poor, down-and-out Australian or Canadian tourist is the best me and Glenn, for instance, will be able to do. We can grow goatees, they seem big here.” More nods. “The one good thing about my lousy Fort Bragg haircut is that my hair will grow back.” Some laughter, then Stacy concluded: “This place, this assignment.” He searched for the right words. “It will be like herding cats. In Lamu, slow is fast. If we stay uptight, like we are now, if we try to keep people to our schedule, we’ll fail. We have to slow down, do things at their speed. It may take some time before we can recommend our first aid project. There will be a lull. The major and the others at Camp Lemonier are going to have to accept that nothing may happen for a while. We can’t operate like Capt. Rynearson’s team. We’ll have to find our own way.” More nods.

Capt. Stacy was a pro. He realized fast, as I had, that most of his white bread, standard-issue Army team was out of place in this Bob Marley, everything-is-cool, hakuna matata Afro-Islamic environment spiced by the decadent lifestyle of the royal family of Monaco. He knew that they would all, especially Sgt. McCoy, have to adapt fast, to loosen up or be typecast as ugly Americans. He also realized that in the end they could only be themselves.

Later, back at Camp Lemonier, I asked an Army officer about how people were selected to go to a place like Lamu. He replied: “Select? Do you think we have the luxury to select? The Reserve is so overstretched because of Iraq that we’re just grabbing bodies to fill slots.”

Capt. Stacy’s team did come with some advantages, however. For example, Staff Sgt. Glenn Elenga, an avid reader of the tabloids, briefed us on the various marriages of Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, and the colorful reputation of Prince Ernst of Hanover, Caroline’s third husband, who spent more time in Lamu than the other royals.

For the members of both these teams, Lamu was merely the most recent in a string of deployments that had brought them all over the globe, to places both known and obscure, violent and potentially so. The marines of India Company could almost have been the sons of these guys, such was the age difference. But even the teenagers back in Djibouti had great stories to tell me, not only about Iraq, but also about Portugal, Kuwait, Bahrain, and other places they had been.

Lying awake as Indian Ocean breezes raced through my mosquito net and the lovely white stucco work, I thought that if you were a male of a certain age during World War II and had not served in some capacity, you would have been denied the American Experience. Now I realized that many of my own generation had been denied it as well, however unwittingly, however unaware of it we may have been. Perhaps it was a safer, more enriching global experience that we were having, but whatever it was I knew now that it was not fully American. The War on Terror was giving two generations of Americans vivid memories of places like Lamu, the southern Philippines, rural Colombia, eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, southern Iraq, and so on. The young marines back in Djibouti had fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In not a few cases, they had fathers who had fought in Desert Storm and, yes, grandfathers who had been in Vietnam. World War II was so far distant to them it might as well have been the Peloponnesian War. Yet, as it kept occurring to me in the course of these journeys, for most in my socioeconomic group, World War II was when the American Experience had begun to fade.

The American Experience was exotic, romantic, exciting, bloody, and emotionally painful, sometimes all at once. It was a privilege, as well as great fun, to be with those who were still living it.

Two days later came the MEDCAP that was the culmination of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s onshore visit to Lamu, a visit whose ground-level component had been arranged by Capt. Rynearson’s departing team. There were long lines of Muslim women swathed in black cotton with their babies. U.S. Marines provided the security, while Kenyan soldiers organized the crowd inside the King Fahd Hospital, where Kenyan and American military doctors and medics, wearing hospital scrubs decorated with the Kenyan and American flags, treated more than a thousand inhabitants of the island in two days.

By now Capt. Stacy’s team was beginning to acclimatize. They were wearing appropriate clothes, getting tanned, had stopped shaving, and, more importantly, appeared more relaxed—making friends and learning Swahili. Because the small expatriate community, including the Grimaldis, were capable of spreading nasty rumors, it would be important to befriend them, too. Thus, the team began to hit the bar and restaurant near the villa, for gin and tonics by the moonlit beach.

It was sad to see Capt. Jeff Rynearson and his team depart. They had become veritable kings of the island. Elders had offered to marry their daughters off to them, as they had to al-Qaeda operatives. The old team knew everything that happened around here, down to the rumors about who might have been using the island for money laundering. It was ironic to keep reading stories about unhappy overdeployed reservists, because those in the Special Operations community whom I had met here and in eastern Afghanistan were having the time of their lives.

“You ought to check out of life and remain here,” I suggested, only half in jest, to Rynearson. “This is where you belong.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it,” he replied, smiling broadly. “I know a local contractor who could build me a glass-bottomed boat for tourists to watch fish and sea turtles. I’d buy two dhows to shuttle the tourists between the boat and the shore. I’d open a pub, renovate an old house, marry a local girl, and become a king. All you need to live as a king here is about $35,000 a year. I’ve worked it out.”

Too bad that the American military personnel system did not allow guys to stay put when they adapted well to a place and had no families to return to, which, for the most part, was the case with Rynearson’s team. It was area expertise and adaptation to the local environment—down to the level of the smallest micro-region—that had been one of the pillars of the British imperial system: the sort of expertise and adaptation that could develop only when work was inextricable from pleasure, and eccentricities were tolerated. That, in turn, required less control from higher levels of command.

A few hours by plane and I was out of the world of pink oleanders against white walls and gin and tonics by a phosphorescent sea, and back to the grainy, black-and-white poverty of the Marine barracks in Djibouti. It was midnight when I got in. I found the guys in the midst of a discussion of how much it cost to lift the suspension of a Silverado versus that of a Jeep: $280 as opposed to $1,000.

I told them about Lamu.

“Shit.” They all swooned, but they weren’t too depressed. The next day the platoon had the day off and they were going to the beach.

It was one of the saddest-looking beaches I had ever seen. The Mars-like desert simply ended and greenish water began. The tide was low and licks of mud extended far out into the Gulf of Tadjoura, which led to the Gulf of Aden. Black volcanic rocks by the shore lay encrusted with mussels and barnacles. It was like so much strategic real estate—depressing and ugly. There was a ratty bar where the marines laid out their day packs. Soon their tattoo-covered pale and muscular bodies were all over the place.

“I wish I knew more about seashells,” a diminutive and bespeckled Pfc. Chris Wrinkle of Hamilton, Maine, told me. Everyone called him just “Wrinkle.” Soldiers and marines often called each other by their last names, maybe because their last names were emblazoned on their BDUs. Looking at him knee-deep in the water with his bathing suit, I realized that Pfc. Wrinkle seemed small only because of his wire-rimmed glasses and the especially brawny company he kept. Actually, Wrinkle owned a ropy, muscular physique and had large capable hands.

“I’m weird,” he began. “I’m a fourth-generation marine, from a New England military family. Imagine that. I was born at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. My mother and one of my aunts were born at Camp Pendleton. Another one of my aunts was born at Camp Lejeune. My grandparents, parents, and uncles all have stories of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Desert Storm… but none of my relatives have been deployed for stretches as long as I have in the War on Terrorism. The military has rarely been this busy in our nation’s history. I’m proud of that.

“Yeah, I’m small compared to the other guys,” he went on. “My grandfather, a Vietnam vet, is even smaller than I am. He told me, ‘No grandson of mine is going to be pushed around in the schoolyard. Anyone hits you, hit ’em back and I’ll square it with your mother.’ There were tears in my grandfather’s eyes when I graduated from boot camp at Parris Island. After the ceremony we walked around together and he told me about his experiences there. I signed up for six years and I’ve seen combat in Iraq. I have as much time in the fleet as Lt. Wagner. If I make staff sergeant, I’ll reenlist. But I have no desire to be an officer.”

Wrinkle had a large tattoo over his heart: the Marine insignia of the eagle, globe, and anchor, and a large cross. “I’m no Bible-thumper,” he told me, referring to the cross. “But I am a believer.”

The sun came out after lunch and the beach looked pretty for a moment. Each of the marines drifted off alone, as Wrinkle had done. One corporal whose birthday had been two days earlier lit a Honduran cigar. Another inspected a camel. Another took pictures of us all. The waves lapped. It was a luxury for them just to get off the base.

In coming days I got out and about Djibouti. The capital, Djibouti Town, was sleepy and battered, with gracefully arched white buildings in need of a paint job. It had a charming placelessness. I might have been in Hodeida, Yemen; Cotonou, Benin; or Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The port and airport were being managed by the United Arab Emirates. The Chinese were investing in telecommunications, making loans to the port, and doing all of the major construction. Otherwise, while no one would put it this way, the French were selling Djibouti and the Americans were buying it. The future competition here, as in Mongolia and the Philippines, would be between the U.S. and China.

Like many third world countries that looked small on the map but had rugged landscapes and bad roads, Djibouti was immense. Beyond the capital I found a fantastic landscape of steep canyons and a massive salt lake. Lake Assal was the lowest point in Africa. From a distance its greenish surface looked caked with ice. I had a picnic lunch of MREs at the lake en route back from a MEDCAP that had taken place at Tadjoura, at the top end of a gulf that divides Djibouti’s Afar north from its Issa south. Tadjoura was once a busy port before the French built up Djibouti Town in the nineteenth century. Having receded into oblivion, it had a sorry collection of dusty streets and distempered houses by the water that reminded me of photos of Aqaba in 1917, when the Bedouin troops of Lawrence of Arabia captured it from the Ottoman Turks.

Watching the MEDCAP I realized that the U.S. would have an easy time in Djibouti compared to other places. Unlike in the states of the Maghreb, close to France itself, the French had made comparatively little effort to develop this territory of 750,000 people. Because the American military was already covering all of Djibouti with regular MEDCAPS, DENTCAPS, and VETCAPS, it was fair to say that it had already provided more help to the local inhabitants than the French had in a century and a half of direct and indirect rule. The Americans would not face the problem of rising expectations of the kind that I had sensed in Basilan, following the conclusion of Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines. Beyond Djibouti Town, the population was composed of pastoral nomads who mainly wanted to be left alone.

In fact, the Americans were more ambitious than the local population. “Could we develop this place?” a Marine staff sergeant asked me as we walked through Tadjoura’s destitute streets. “Could we make it a real democracy? Why did the French fail?”

The French hadn’t really tried, I told him. I thought to myself that the Americans might only ruin things if they became too ambitious. As Levine writes in Wax and Gold: “The experience of history has demonstrated the futility of attempting the revolutionary implementation of a clear and distinct ideal in human society. No matter how bold and sweeping the program, traditional patterns persist tenaciously.”⁸

I got back from Tadjoura just as Staff Sgt. Dickinson was beginning a meeting. He was seated in a chair, with marines sprawled around him on their racks in the close, sour air of the tent. The fluorescent lights were on. The generator was droning. He wasn’t angry. It was a morale talk.

“I’m not running a bunch of mindless drones,” he began. “I value your opinion. Guys have been bitching to me about the training schedule: that it’s an insult to those who have fought in Iraq. There’s a reason why we have to go over basic fire drills. It’s called brain dump. Our brains keep filling with new stuff, so if we don’t keep relearning the basics they get dumped. Because we’re standing eight-hour posts, our schedules are tight, so the decision was made to use the available training time to keep our rifle skills sharp.

“Ask yourselves, especially the guys who are not reenlisting and are turning fire teams over to others, how would you feel if you learned that your buddy was killed in the next war because you hadn’t mentored him enough on the basics? You’d feel like shit, eh? That’s why the team leaders need to mentor their riflemen and grenadiers over and over. If only one person out of twenty-nine is not expert on fire and movement, then we fail as a platoon.

“I’m not the one who closes,” he continued. “I’m not the one who takes the objective; the ones here who’ve been to Iraq know that. You guys take the objective: the team leaders and the squad leaders. So if any of you see someone who’s not keeping up, who needs help with his fire skills, fucking help him. I don’t give a fuck if you’re a private first class. If you’ve got knowledge to impart, you’re a leader. That’s the Marine way.”

“Roger that,” everyone responded.

The next morning I was gone, soon to join other marines in Iraq.