15

p I CONTINUED MY ATTEMPTS to contact the guerrillas, spending my weekdays studying Spanish in Cuemavaca and my weekends at a Quaker hostel in Mexico City. The commute was always an adventure. The winding, mountainous roadway connecting the two cities is a sports car driver’s fantasy, a true test of man and machine. To my dismay, the Mexican bus drivers seemed similarly inspired by the route. By day, the countryside flew past in a blur. Even more harrowing were the night rides when on each dip or hairpin curve we seemed to become airborne.

p It is possible that the FDR saved me from becoming a traffic fatality.

p I first received messages at the hostel to go to such and such a place and wait for so and so. No one showed up. Once, thinking my determination to meet them was being tested, I stood on a dark corner in the rain for more than two hours before giving up.

p The third approach began in an equally unpromising way. A note with a telephone number on it came to me at the hostel. At the appointed time, I called the number from a public booth, but at the sound of my gringo "jBueno!" there was a click.

p I dialed again and the same thing happened, nothing unusual for Mexico City public telephones. I tried once more and finally understood instructions for a rendezvous in a restaurant in the university district, where I was to wait for someone to approach me. I was given no name, no description.

p I found the noisy, bustling cafe and sat down to wait, fully expecting another disappointment. I had spent almost two months in Mexico by then, nothing had happened and my money was running out. I was beginning to think that maybe I could find satisfying work in a Cuemavaca CEB rather than continue this silliness when a plain, middle-aged Mexican gentleman walked up and introduced himself as 16 Rogelio. There was no way of confirming who he was or whom he represented, but at least somebody had shown up.

p I followed Rogelio to a city apartment where he questioned me for three hours. In Spanish, he asked about my reasons for coming and my understanding of the civil war in El Salvador. I answered as best I could in the two tenses of his language I knew.

p He was searching for a deeper political affiliation. I was searching for guarantees. One, I expected medical neutrality to be observed, which meant that I could treat anyone without regard to political considerations. Two, as a Quaker, I would not bear arms. Three, I wanted to work with a civilian population.

p There was no comment. He concluded by asking for references. Who could vouch for me? He asked also that I prepare some sort of resume and return to Cuernavaca to improve my Spanish. In other words, don’t call us, we’ll call you.

p I wasn’t exactly disappointed with the meeting; I hadn’t been sure what to expect. But Rogelio did trouble me when he asked if I was willing to work in a government-run refugee camp. I answered yes, but told him I’d been warned against such risks. I assumed he knew as much as I about the killing of doctors, so why did he even ask? Maybe, I thought, on another hair-raising bus ride back to Cuernavaca, the guerrillas believed the murder of another gringo would be good publicity for their revolution.

p Rogelio did contact me again, however, and introduced me to a second interviewer, Carmen, who questioned me several times that winter. Tough and to the point, Carmen reminded me of a district attorney. I couldn’t help but feel like a felon every time we spoke.

p Jaime, my third contact, was even more abrupt and intense with me. Judging from the deference shown him by Rogelio and Carmen, I guessed that Jaime was a person of some •stature in the FDR, if, in fact, this was the FDR. I still didn’t know for sure.

17

p I did know that his Spanish was particularly difficult for me to decipher and that his eyes were almond-shaped, almost Asian. After many weeks, when our relationship seemed relaxed enough for me to pose a question, I finally worked up the courage to ask if he was Vietnamese.

p "No!" he chuckled. "I’m Salvadoran.”

p It was the first time any of them had offered any information, let alone a smile.

p "I do have some Asian blood,” he explained. "My parents used to run a Chinese restaurant in San Salvador."

p All my meetings with Rogelio, Carmen, and Jaime were held in the same small Mexico City apartment. A family I assumed was Rogelio’s was usually there, too. While nothing we discussed was the least bit seditious, I still was struck by their total lack of security. It seemed to me that these people were dedicated amateurs in the ways of spycraft and clandestine operations. I was soon to be proved very wrong.

p Through January of 1982, Jaime would be no more specific than to urge me to improve my Spanish. He didn’t need to remind me since I have always been awful with languages. But then came the word: I was to be ready to leave for El Salvador in two weeks; I was not to communicate a word of my plans to anyone. When I asked if I would be in a referral hospital or in a clinic in the countryside, he said he couldn’t tell me. I told him that I was going to need to buy medical supplies in Mexico City. He nodded, but told me to be careful. He also repeated the warning to keep silent.

p I decided to prepare for the worst; that is, to assume I might be practicing in some place where there was neither personnel nor equipment. I would need a mobile army surgical hospital, a M.A.S.H. unit, that I could carry on my back. I wondered if they came complete with humor like on TV. I would probably need a lot of that where I was headed. I also needed money and advice. Ignoring Jaime, I took one last trip to Cuernavaca, where I called several private numbers in the States. I knew a small network of physicians who were ready to assist me in whatever way possible.

18

p The next day I was summoned back to the apartment in Mexico City where Jaime, in some detail, recounted my conversations. Flabbergasted at the quality of what he knew, I was suddenly for more respectful of their capabilities. For his part, Jaime declared himself disappointed in me and said that my departure had been put on hold. He acknowledged that I had neither mentioned time nor place, but made it clear that indiscretion could cost lives and that no further willfulness would be tolerated.

p I had come to the threshold and I knew it. Winning their acceptance meant my total submission. The gringo doctor was welcome as long as he did as he was ordered. What, I thought, am I getting myself into? Standing in front of this revolutionary, I wondered if my commitment to heal and to witness was strong enough to place blind trust in him.

p Reminding me that I, not they, had initiated this process, Jaime said, "People’s lives may depend upon your discipline or lack of it."

p One of those lives, I realized as I looked at him, could very well be my own. I told him I understood.

p CERTAIN NOW THAT THE SALVADORANS, and who knows who else, were watching my every move, I was up at dawn each day crisscrossing Mexico City in search of equipment. My first priorities were compactness and versatility. I couldn’t count on electricity, replacement parts, or laboratory support of any kind.

p An old, German-made bone saw was my first treasured discovery. It even folded! Across town, I found “cold” sterilization equipment. A third supply store provided various sizes and types of tubing. Always careful not to buy so much in one place as to arouse suspicion, I made the rounds of all Mexico City’s medical supply houses.

p It took forever to find reusable glass syringes, everything was disposable, and some pieces of equipment were simply not available. This I had already communicated to my 19 physician friends at home. The proper items found their way south via couriers, mostly American tourists who had no idea what packages they brought with them.

p Since I didn’t dare attempt further consultations on what I should take, I tried to imagine the types of operations and emergencies I needed to prepare for. This wasn’t such an easy exercise for someone barely trained as a family doctor. My minimal surgical experience had been in fully equipped and professionally staffed hospitals where all I needed to do was hold out my hand and the proper gadget was slapped into it.

p Somehow I managed to pull it all together. My "Son of M. A. S. H.” could handle anything and everything from obstetrics to dentistry, but it would weigh no more than seventyfive pounds and could be fitted into one backpack.

p I still knew absolutely nothing about my itinerary. Jaime was only helpful enough to warn me against buying anything colored olive drab—canvas, duffles, satchels, clothing—because such a military shade is instantly provocative in Central America. When I pressed him for more specifics, he told me not to become separated from my equipment or I’d probably never see it again. He also advised me to take up smoking. I declined the suggestion, even though smoking would help combat insects, and more importantly, he said, it would be a foil against hunger.

p There was no foil for my anxiety about the void that lay ahead. Although confident about the correctness of what .1 was doing, I began to feel the isolation, the removal from familiar things, the loneliness of living under a pseudonym— Camilo—among people who had no last names, no histories they would talk about, no identities other than as guerrillas.

p I was an utterly contingent being. Unseen others now planned my every step and shared nothing of this process with me. It was the beginning of a nearly complete submersion of my individuality.

p In late February, 1982, as I sat and waited with my gear in my small room at the Quaker hostel, my instructions at last 20 arrived. I was given $200 in American money and was told to take a flight to Nicaragua the next day. That was all, except that, as usual, an unnamed someone would contact me there.

p Managua, Nicaragua, population 400,000, was about what you’d expect of a Central American capital ten years after a devastating earthquake, and three years after the bloody overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza. Managua was only partially rebuilt; it was still in the process of becoming. Somoza’s regime had barely bothered to clean up the debris after the 1972 quake. The only tall structures that remained intact were the Bank of America building and the Intercontinental Hotel. Cattle were grazing in their shadows. In the city’s main plaza, the facade of the cathedral still stands, but its collapsed roof has never been replaced, and the side walls continue to crumble.

p The revolutionary Sandinista government has concentrated its scant capital resources on housing for the poor, simple one-story cinderblock houses. Similarly, I noticed many newly built clinics, also of cinderblock, and many playgrounds outfitted with sculptures and futuristic equipment.

p There were billboards and signs everywhere. Some denounced imperialism or hailed the revolution’s martyrs. Others urged mothers to breastfeed or warned against the dangers of infant dehydration from diarrhea.

p There wasn’t time or opportunity to make informed judgments about the course of the revolution itself. The issues that dominate news of Nicaragua in the United States—press censorship, tensions with segments of the clergy, treatment of the Miskito Indians, Soviet-bloc influence—require more careful study than I could give them in a brief stay.

p This was a society under enormous stress. There were ration lines for many food .staples. American-sponsored insurgents, many of them former members of Somoza’s National Guard, were active in the north and south of Nicaragua, raiding villages and attacking key economic targets. These contras were the recurring topic of the few conversations I overheard, as were the widespread shortages of everything 21 from spare parts for buses to most kinds of medicine. A good deal of the latter I had intended to purchase there, but the virtual embargo thrown up around the country by the United States government had cut off most traditional sources of medical supply, along with everything else. In fact, the customs inspectors at the Managua airport nearly impounded the equipment I’d brought with me.

p One surprise was the city’s ethnic diversity. Not even huge, cosmopolitan Mexico City seemed to offer such an array of human types. Most common were the mestizos, a mixture of Spanish and Indian. The Irish, too, had long ago settled in Nicaragua, and part of their legacy was the occasional pair of blue eyes or shock of red hair. Black slaves once worked the east coast plantations, and their descendants were a reminder of the country’s African heritage. Every now and again, however, I’d encounter an atavist, a man, woman, or child who so thoroughly resembled his or her Mayan ancestors that downtown Managua might have been pre-Columbian Tical or Chiche’n Itzi. The effect was eerie. In all, Managua was an ethnic microcosm of Central America. I would have liked to have spent more time there, but I was eager to move on to my goal: El Salvador.

p On the radio, I listened to both the Salvadoran government and guerrilla news broadcasts about a major offensive against a region just north of the capital. According to both accounts, an area called Cuazapa was being assaulted mercilessly. The clandestine rebel station reported, ”. . . enemy planes dropped bombs and napalm endangering the lives of hundreds of women, children, and elderly.” The government radio boasted that hundreds of subversives had been killed in an operation that would permanently eliminate this guerrilla stronghold. It sounded like a bloodbath I’d just as soon not get caught up in. Colonel Garcia, the Minister of Defense, spoke of aerial bombardment with five-hundred-pound bombs, but reassured me somewhat when he said that the Air Force "... acted with complete freedom because there were no 22 civilians in the area.” I knew that I needn’t worry about Cuazapa being my home because I’d be working only with civilians.

p MY CONTACT IN MANAGUA, also a doctor, at first suggested that I fly to San Salvador and then wait for my equipment to catch up with me once I was safely behind guerrilla lines. Mindful of Jaime’s warning never to let the pack out of my sight, I told him I would prefer to enter with my equipment. He shrugged and left, saying that he would get back in touch.

p When he did, he informed me I was to fly north to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and from there I would make my way to the Salvadoran border. He gave me a very detailed list of instructions as to how to make contact in Honduras. I was to stand in a certain way on a certain corner with a newsmagazine under my left arm. When approached, I was to run through two sequences of phrases and was given an entire second set of instructions should anything go wrong at the first meeting. It was, all in all, pretty impressive and I felt as if I were in the middle of a spy novel.

p The short flight to Tegucigalpa was uneventful, but my arrival there was like passing through a culture warp. While Managua had evinced a nervous elan, the Honduran capital seemed gorged, tawdry. The airport was filled with soldiers and sinister types wearing shiny suits and dark glasses.

p By pre-arrangement, a Latin man in a business suit stood next to me in the baggage claim area and commented that his bag looked just like mine. Though I was reassured by his presence, I would have been much happier if he, not I, had to take seventy-five pounds of medical equipment through Honduran customs.

p The inspectors looked like they came from Central Casting—scowling thugs with no necks. Around them stood armed security troops who, in my nervous state, appeared ready to pounce at the slightest nod of an inspector.

p I flipped my bag onto the inspection counter with an 23 affected nonchalance that practicajly dislocated my shoulder. Eyeing me up and down, the inspector grunted for me to unzip my luggage. It was like opening Fibber McGee’s closet— surgical tubing, scalpels, clamps, syringes came bursting out.

p "Where is your license to import this medical equipment?" he demanded. I had had enough experience in Latin America to realize this was time for the mordida (the bite), a fifty-dollar bill tucked conspicuously into my passport. I handed it to him.

p "El permiso" (the permit), I said boldly as President Grant’s likeness disappeared into his ham-like paw.

p "The customs duties on medical equipment are very high,” he responded unambiguously.

p I choked back my first impulse. "I am a guest in your country,” I said instead. "At the invitation of Senora Alvarez, I am going to work in the missionary hospital of Gracias a Dios. If you require more customs duties, I suggest we get on the phone and ask her to come pay them."

p The operative words were "Senora Alvarez,” wife of Honduran strongman General Alvarez. I couldn’t imagine any Latin American general not having a religious wife who kissed oiphans and cut ribbons at important events such as the opening of a hospital.

p The inspector and I stared at each other, or rather I stared at my sweaty, trembling image reflected in the silvered lenses of his glasses. After an eternity of silence, he curled his upper lip and motioned me through. With great self-discipline, I resisted leaping toward the glass doors and walked calmly outside to a taxi.

p In the moonlight, I could make out rickety, lean-to slums clinging to the hillsides that encircle Tegucigalpa. The center of the city reminded me of Saigon in 1970, a neon bazaar of expensive American consumer goods. The streets swarmed with young trendies in their designer jeans and hand-made loafers. Tegucigalpa’s carnival effulgence contrasted sharply with the grimness of the surrounding barrios. There I saw little electric light, and no one seemed to be stirring.

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p The next day my interest was focused on medicine. With what little money I had left, I went for the big As—antibiotics, anti-malarials, anti-parasiticals, analgesics, and anesthetics. When there were no more funds, I discovered my plastic was good and soon had a stainless steel pressure cooker, a tiny portable stove, and some dental pliers that could extract molars, canines, incisors, and other varieties of teeth I couldn’t even identify.

p MY CONTACTS NAME WAS JOSE, a Latin of indeterminate nationality. He was among the most hospitable of their people I’d met. Nevertheless, the cordiality did not extend to personal small talk. In the course of a very pleasant two-hour dinner with Jose, I learned nothing of his past, whether he was married or not, where he’d been, what he’d seen, or if he expected the sun to come up tomorrow.

p Before it did, we were driving west toward the Salvadoran border. Our transportation was Josh’s Cherokee, a sort of stretch sedan with four-wheel drive, a cargo area in back, and sinister, smoked-glass windows. Cherokees and similar vehicles are ubiquitous in Central America, where there is a premium on a reasonably comfortable car that is also capable of traversing streams and slopes and the frequent road that is no road but only a rut in the forest.

p José’s choice of a Cherokee was cunning. Of all the competing makes and models of such cars, it is the preferred vehicle of the Salvadoran death squads. So frequently are Cherokees reported seen near the site of an abduction or the roadside discovery of dead and mutilated "subversives,” that their appearance alone provokes dread in the country. Driving across neighboring Honduras, we were probably in the vehicle least likely to invite suspicion.

p I remember the drive from Tegucigalpa principally because it was in Jose’s Cherokee that I met Lupe. She and another Latin, who introduced himself as Francisco, were 25 both headed to work in El Salvador, as I was, and they both said they were doctors.

p To my knowledge, I have never before elicited such instant antagonism as I did in Lupe. She was short, about twenty-five years old, and sullen. While Jose" and Francisco were patient with my halting Spanish, Lupe mocked it, or pretended not to comprehend me. Within a half hour of our first acquaintance, she had questioned my competence, impugned my motives for coming, and openly begrudged my right to sit in their company. She was so thoroughly disagreeable that I was reminded of the customs inspector at the Tegucigalpa airport.

p "Lupe,” I came within an eyeblink of asking, "do you have family working at the airport? In the customs branch, perhaps?"

p With the tone for our journey thus set, we descended from the high hills around Tegucigalpa and drove for hours along a paved and well maintained two-lane highway. The lush countryside seemed barely inhabited. The many shades of green were only occasionally interrupted by the bright reds and purples of bougainvilleas vividly outlined against white-washed adobe houses capped with orange tiles. What settlements we encountered grew more primitive in direct ratio to their distance from the capital. We ate breakfast, for instance, just an hour or two outside Tegucigalpa and could order from a full menu in a large and well-equipped cafe. Our lunch stop’s sole modern appliance was an ancient-looking refrigerator. At nightfall we bought warm sodas at an adobe hut where we were told it was the last chance for cigarettes. I reconsidered what Jaime had said about hunger and bought a couple of packs.

p The road began deteriorating about midday. First we were on gravel, then dirt, and finally, nothing more than a dusty track accessible only by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The closer we got to the Salvadoran border, the more roadblocks and Honduran army patrols we met. Jose’s government license plates served as our visa past them.

26

p There are several reasons for the heavy Honduran military presence along the border with El Salvador. The soldiers are there to keep Salvadoran refugees in and supplies or personnel like myself out. But there is also a historical enmity between Hondurans and Salvadorans, which last manifested itself in the so-called Soccer War of 1969. The conflict lasted only one hundred hours, but in its aftermath fully 300,000 Salvadoran campesinos were forcibly repatriated from their small plots in Honduras to whatever space they could find in their overcrowded homeland. Relatively underpopulated Honduras has always appeared attractive to the land-hungry peasants just across the border in El Salvador.

p Today, these peasants aren’t drawn to Honduras so much as they are fleeing from El Salvador. As we rode along, we saw a couple of huge tent cities, refugee camps, filled with Salvadoran peasants. They looked to me as forlorn as any POWs I’d ever seen, and I asked Jos6 about them.

p He explained that they were the "lucky ones.” Since the current civil war began, he said, the Salvadoran military had conducted several assaults against villages near the Honduran border. The people we saw in the camps had been fortunate enough to escape.

p Many of the rest, he went on, were lost in several "hammer and anvil" operations jointly conducted by the Hondurans and the Salvadorans. These were classic military operations, at least as old as Caesar’s Roman legions, designed to trap and destroy a fleeing enemy. When that. enemy is a band of unarmed civilians, the strategy can be devastatingly effective.

p In one well-documented massacre, campesinos fleeing the hammer of the Salvadoran troops made it across the Rio Sumpul at the border only to be pushed back into it by the Honduran army, the anvil. Trapped in the river, more than six hundred of them drowned or were killed by the advancing Salvadoran troops and aircraft.

p By dusk, we had come to within a mile of the border. Jos6 split the group up. He went to one village, Francisco 27 and Lupe to another, and I was dropped off in yet a third settlement. We would meet again on the other side of the border the next morning.

p MY HOSTS WERE A HONDURAN PEASANT FAMILY who occupied a two-room adobe house. I have no idea how many actual family members there were. I only recall being shown to one of several hammocks in a small room. We all slept together, adults suspended from the ceiling in their hammocks and children bedded on a piece of plastic on the earthen floor. There was no more than a couple feet of free space anywhere.

p One of the adults must have been tubercular. That night he introduced me to a common rural Central American habit of spitting on the floor, which wouldn’t have been so unpleasant had he not been hacking so perilously close to my ear. One or more of the children cried through the night.

p Dawn was a relief, even though it brought the most hazardous part of the trip—the actual crossing into El Salvador. The attempt was planned for just after seven when the Honduran guards left their nightly outposts on the border to sleep a few hours until they began the first of several sporadic daytime patrols.

p I was still in possession of my large pack and had taken stern criticism from Lupe and Francisco for insisting I would take it with me across the border. They argued that I should leave it for later transport past the guards because it would attract too much attention—as if a gringo didn’t already stand out in rural Honduras! But I stuck to Jaime’s advice and compromised only on my duffle bag of recently purchased medicines. I didn’t like it, but I left the precious Pharmaceuticals and hoped they’d be brought to me later.

p My Honduran host enclosed the pack in a burlap bag in an attempt, I suppose, to disguise it as a sack of corn. I watched in awe as he hoisted it, all seventy-five pounds, onto the head of his middle-aged wife, who slowly and gracefully carried it down the main path of the village.

28

p She headed toward the unmarked border, about one-half mile away along a ridge of grass and low scrub bushes. There was very little cover until well past the border. Heart pounding, I sauntered along behind her. The men had already gone to their fields. Several women were up and beginning their day’s wash. The village pigs were out oinking and rooting around for their breakfast in piles of casually deposited excrement.

p No one paid me any mind. It was as if the villagers were all extras in this little drama, and it was their role to prevent any undue attention in my direction. I looked around for trees, anything I might duck behind if it came to that, but found only a few thorny mesquite bushes. It was excruciating to amble along, affecting an early morning constitutional, when I knew that at any moment I might feel the cold steel of an M-16 muzzle in my neck.

p But we made it without incident. Behind a thicket of vines, the woman dropped the pack and hurried away. The Honduran guards snoozing in their bunks saw or heard nothing as I dashed the last few feet to my pack, swung it over my back, and marched with relief into rebel-held El Salvador.

p FIRST TO WELCOME ME to the revolution on the morning of March 7, 1982, was Nico, a twelve-year-old correo ( messenger). He explained that he would lead me to the others, and from there he would be our guide to the village of Quipurito, a half-day march away. Nico was an incongruous sight, a little boy with a big grin and an even bigger pistol tucked into his waistband. He was as fair skinned as I, with brown hair and a smile so full of rotted teeth that I instantly anticipated the day I’d have to pull them. He was twelve, but by North American standards his physical development was that of a slight-framed eight- or nine-year-old. Later, if there is any later for Nico, the stresses of war and hardships of life as a campesino will age him prematurely. If he makes it to 29 forty-seven years of age, the life expectancy in El Salvador, he’ll look more like sixty.

p He silently led me to a nearby stand of cactus where the others waited. Then, for the next two hours, he communicated only with gestures and whispers as he led us deeper into El Salvador.

p EVEN THOUGH I WAS IN PRETTY FAIR SHAPE, the march to Quipurito was exhausting. There was the matter of the seventy- five-pound pack I was carrying and the rugged hillsides and ravines we had to negotiate. Halfway to Quipurito, the vegetation changed from the lush lowland green to dusty scrub brush and tall, golden-dry grass that reminded me of southern California in the summer. It wasn’t tropically hot, only 80° or 85°, but with the lack of shade the temperature seemed to rise with my every step. Only Jose and I had thought to bring canteens. Lupe polished off half my water at our first rest stop.

p After a while, I noticed that we had been joined by an escort of two campesinos with automatic weapons. They noiselessly scouted the trail in front and guarded our rear. About two hours into the trip, they froze. In the distance, I could hear the very familiar chop of a Huey helicopter.

p I had thought nothing of it. In Vietnam, every U.S. soldier knew helicopters to be their friends. Their sound meant firepower to be directed at the enemy or resupply time for food or ammunition. Sometimes they brought mail. Sometimes they came for the wounded. But to the Viet Cong—and now the rebels in El Salvador—the Hueys meant death. They could scream in over the treetops spewing machine gun fire.

p In Vietnam, the enemy countered them with .50 calibre machine gun fire and were remarkably good at catching them when they took off and landed. But during my time in El Salvador, I would never see a helicopter in such a vulnerable position. They never brought soldiers anywhere near hostile fire, nor were they ever used for close air-support of ground 30 troops. The pilots seldom brought their Hueys lower than 1000 to 1500 feet. They would hover safely out of range of small-arms fire while door gunners poured automatic rounds onto the villages. Other times the Hueys dropped huge gasoline bombs. This tactic is useful only for stationary targets such as villages.

p We all flattened ourselves against the ground and waited while the Huey, which showed Honduran markings, flew past. With my burdensome pack, I wasn’t very agile and rolled off the trail into some boulders. Nico pressed himself into the dusty trail and squeezed his eyes shut; he had developed a healthy respect for helicopters.

p We lay there for some time, not certain if we had been seen and not certain if the Hondurans were coming back. Only after a silent signal from one of our escorts did we rise and continue on.

p The closer we got to Quipurito, the more relaxed Nico became and the more eager he seemed to want to talk.

p “¡Porqué un gringo se incorporo?" he inquired before asking my name. The question puzzled me. I didn’t understand the verb.

p "riQue’ quieres decir por incorporarse?" (What do you mean by “incorporate”?) I asked.

p He explained that when you join the struggle, you “incorporate” with the guerrillas-^-literally, I suppose, to join their body. He went on without my prompting to explain that he had “incorporated” soon after his mother’s rape and murder. He described the crime graphically, dispassionately, a recital of watching the rape itself and then seeing his mother’s brains splattered against the wall. I guess being able to discuss it was a positive sign, although Nico seemed incapable of appropriate grief.

p What affected me more, however, was the context in which he viewed the crime. The soldiers, he said, were no better than animals, and it was important to him, as a guerrilla, not to sink to their level. He could not dishonor himself or his mother’s memory by committing similar acts. He would 31 fight and kill and possibly be killed, but he would not degrade himself by behaving like a beast.

p This was a gentleman’s oath, not dissimilar from the rules of conduct drilled into me at the Air Force Academy. As startling as it was to hear from a seventy-five-pound boy, who had been quaking with fright minutes before, his words were a reassuring departure from the images of “terrorists” that were used so much in the media. His code of honor was personal, but it had the earmarks of indoctrination. He had been taught to think this way.

p As we tramped on toward Quipurito, I inquired about his family and found out that on the night of the tragedy his father had fled with Nice’s two sisters and infant brother to a refugee camp in Honduras. Nico went to a guerrilla camp. He was too young to be a combatant but after six months became a messenger. I asked if the gun wasn’t a little too large for him. He laughed and admitted that he wasn’t usually allowed to carry one. He’d been given it on this special occasion and was to fire it into the air only as a signal in case something went wrong. Though I had no doubt that he was mature well beyond his years, a twelve-year-old with a .357 magnum was still unsettling.

p We had been steadily climbing into the dry foothills and began to see stubbly corn patches. Then we crossed a ridge and passed through a fortified stone fence. Nico announced we were in Quipurito.

At first I didn’t see anything that resembled a village, but looking more carefully, I made out a half-dozen houses scattered among the prevalent vegetation, bamboo groves, and clusters of large oak trees. Nico had said the march would take five hours, but that was guerrilla time, not gringowith-pack time. Though he and our escorts seemed hardly winded from the march, I was done in. Even Lupe and Francisco, who had traveled without packs, looked pretty bushed. Jos6, his mission accomplished, rested for a short while, then said his farewells. He was heading back to Tegucigalpa. I was shown a hammock under the porch of a. large adobe house and was asleep within minutes.

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