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From: bon moun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] bit of shameless promotion
At 02:38 AM 12/14/00 -0000, you wrote:
> IT IS A SPECIAL PRIVILEGE OF LIST MEMBERS
> TO FORWARD SELECTED EXTRACTS FROM
> THEIR BOOKS [BILL]
Okay. Here's the chapter called:
Fatigue
So Titid was back for weeks now, and the anticlimax of it bore down on us,
as scorchingly oppressive and empty as the glare on the midday street.
There's a trendy phrase making the rounds among intellectuals these days;
compassion fatigue. We've just grown so tired of caring so much about the
suffering of little black children in the Mississippi Delta, about the
barbarism directed at gays and lesbians, about the murders of Salvadoran
peasants, and the ferocious neo-colonial feuds in Central Africa, that we
just really don't have the energy to give a fuck any more. Compassion
fatigue, along with everything else, happened to my team in Haiti, and for
the same reasons it "happens" to white liberals here. Compassion is a
luxury of comfort, often paternalistic, frequently a thin veil over
contempt. Solidarity is a much tougher proposition.
Liberals find it difficult to accept the elemental humanity of Haitians,
because to do so is to acknowledge our national culpability, our own daily
official collaboration in the Haitian (Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Guatemalan,
Peruvian, Rwandan, Palestinian, Balkan, et al) situation. If they are
human, and we recognize them as such, then they are entitled to the
murderous rage seething under the veneer of temporary gratitude. So, they
were not Dumas, or Etias, or Eaulin, or the school superintendent. They
were "the Haitians," or more frequently, "the fuckin' Haitians." The
troops' original "compassion" was something to get pumped up for a fight
with, something to feel good about oneself, something basically arrogant
and separated, a role...just like the bourgeois liberals for whom the guys
declared their everlasting contempt. And so... "it"..."fatigued."
There was real fatigue, muscular fatigue, to be sure. Physical exhaustion
was sustained by doing everything the long way, pouring gas from a five
gallon can by hand, bathing out of a bucket, flushing a toilet with a
bucket, wringing out ones clothes by hand in a bucket, bouncing endlessly
over the spine crunching potholes, sweating oneself to sleep at night,
carrying weapons everywhere, pulling guard every night.
Psychic fatigue came from the distance to one's loved ones, the lack of
structure in the days, the growing animosity between the command element
and the rest of the team, the boredom.
For me it was responsibility fatigue. Every time someone came to the
door, I had grown to expect a problem we would have to intervene in,
delicately and diplomatically, or aggressively with an element of potential
violence. In either case, it would be something where I was placed firmly
in the middle. Collaborator in the betrayal of the Haitians. Collaborator
against the never fully stated mission intent. So I was two half-assed
collaborators, working in direct opposition to myself.
I had inoculated the locals as well as I could against the ever more
compelling reality that the Task Force policies I was beholden to carry out
were becoming more defined and antagonistic to the desires of the majority
in our sector. My stock with the commanders, never high, was slipping.
Control was increasing over the hinterlands from Port-au-Prince, and I
found myself under tremendous pressure from the team to back off my
original alliances.
My team was tired, and I drove them through my agenda with the Haitians,
so I was becoming "too pro-Haitian." When I reminded them how silly this
sounded, being here in Haiti, they modified the charge. I had become "too
pro-Lavalas." Certainly this was an indictment that could carry weight
beyond the team house, that could be used against me in Cap Haitien at the
AOB, or Gonaives at the FOB, or PAP at Task Force Headquarters. Everyone
knew about Lavalas. For a force supposedly designed to put the legitimate
president back in power, we had worked very hard to demonize his
supporters. Schroer, who thirsted for my humiliation, would have a field
day with that. More than once, I was sucked into the trap of defending,
where I found myself lecturing about what we had been through, what we had
seen, how wrong the propaganda and the intelligence summaries had been. By
this alone, this open disdain for US Military Intelligence, my authority
was thoroughly compromised. No amount of empirical data demonstrating the
consistent inaccuracy of received intelligence would even be acknowledged
if I were to be confronted by commanders above the level of Fort Liberte.
The boys knew it. Mike knew it. I knew it.
And I was crazy. Ever since I'd snapped out the night the lights came on,
that had become the theme for mutterings of mutiny. It was easy to
support, if you just put the right twos with the right twos and came up
with the crazy fours. Just think back ...you remember how violent he got
at the food riots ...yeah, yeah, and he'll pull a gun in a heartbeat ...and
this obsession he has with Brunot Innocent ...oh, don't forget the way he
used to get when we fucked up our grouping on HALO jumps ...and of course,
there was the Gator incident ...hey, he tells people that the United States
is fucked up, that the CIA is fucked up, he tells Haitians and reporters
...he wigged out on me for giving a spoonful of MRE to a fuckin' dog ...oh,
you shoulda been there when he went after Smith Edouard, man, he was
possessed.
They had me by the nuts if they wanted me, and here I was becoming more
autocratic by the day, the most immediate authority in sight. They were
following orders only because they weren't sure who I would be traded for,
and because they still maintained the vestiges of SF clan loyalty that
said, what happens on the team stays on the team. Haiti had come between
us, but they still lacked the catalyst for rebellion. I knew it, but
whatever was happening today concentrated my attention, not the potential
for this thing and that thing, tomorrow, next week. The future was as far
away as Mars.
It was becoming apparent that, between the Task Force chain of command,
above, and my detachment, below, my position would eventually become
untenable as an advocate for any group of Haitians. More and more, I was
losing any optimism I had left about the mission, and I wanted just to go
home before I was forced into a choice between my career and my orders.
Frankly, my career was so near complete, that I probably would have made
some compromises if push came to shove. I had a family, I had worked long
and hard for that retirement check, and I was not prepared for
canonization. If I didn't do it, someone else would, right? I didn't
know, and I didn't want to find out.
I now had something in common with my men. We all just wanted to get the
hell out of Haiti.
So I told them I loved it there. I told them I never wanted to leave. I
went on and on about how well I could live there on a military retirement,
how wonderful the climate was, how many chickens I would keep, what I might
like in my house, how the children would be schooled.
When they asked me if I thought we would be home by Christmas, I said we
would be there through Easter. If they said they were tired, I told them
to take a goddamn vitamin. It was my duty to them not to let them get
focused on a false departure date instead of the job, and my duty to me to
reciprocate their bile.
Ever since the incident with Gator, a door had closed between the boys and
me. Besides Gator himself, who forgave the incident immediately and
apologized for being offensive, Ali was the single exception who had
accepted my apology and behaved as if he did. Mike told me to forget it,
but it was apparent that my ability to direct their activity was no longer
based on the confident loyalty I had from them at the beginning of the
mission. All I had left was my naked tyranny.
Meanwhile, I confiscated time to disappear almost every day to Fort
Dauphin, especially around sundown, where I would smoke and drink a
Presidente and wish I could just turn into a Haitian for a while, so no one
would interrupt my glorious sunset with a request for food or a crowd of
stares. My white skin and my uniform had become a beggars' magnet.
Sometimes, I would be left alone to watch the swallows dive into the dry
well in a whirlpool of wings and whistles, and the bellies of the clouds
change from lavender to salmon to red. All these stolen pleasures were
those of a foreigner, fed and fat in an impoverished land, taken next to a
people who suffered under this beauty, who hadn't the energy nor the
options to share these little raptures. I knew that. And I went there
anyway.
I seldom stayed at Fort Dauphin after dark if I was alone. I do not
believe in ghosts, nor am I a superstitious man. But I always felt
surrounded by malevolence there after dark, like the long diffused battle
blood and slave blood and murder and misery were being released from the
ground by darkness. I loved that spot when I was alone at sunset. When
night closed in, however, I was just a pale lunar face perched in the
blackness atop a ruined French fortress, the latest in a line of invaders
whom I wouldn't blame them for slaughtering.
After much thought, I am convinced that slaughter will provide the only
avenue for Haitian liberation. The World Bank functionaries, the
diplomats, the Haitian dealmakers, the fundamentalist missionaries, the
petty bureaucrats, the families of the post-colonial oligarchy, the
ubiquitous blancs (and this means white or foreign), the FRAPHists, the
macoutes, all ought to give daily thanks for the continued domination of
the Haitian peasant psyche by voudon. It is through this African religion
that peasant rage is sublimated. The effete critics who put peasantry and
its culture on a pedestal will have at me for this comment, but I stand by it.
Every night, near the river, near Sicar, I would listen to the drums
pulsing until two and three in the morning. Every day, the celebrants
would step into the sun, sweep the packed earth in front of their
cailles-pailles, then listlessly trudge the roads and paths in fatigued
pursuit of the most elementary compulsions ...water, food, wood. Were it
not for killing white chickens and dancing to utter depletion in the
darkness, white people and their colonial surrogates might be thrust across
the altar of Haitian peasant emancipation. The emancipated might dance in
victory at a river of blood.
In truth, and I will never say it more clearly in this account, this
macabre scenario is what I concluded must happen in Haiti sooner or later.
History leaves Haiti no options. There can be no question of
reconciliation or reform or reconstruction. These have always been
invitations into a chamber where the Haitian masses have been sacrificed,
and they always will be. Violence! And the sooner the better, I mused.
It is the only answer left to the violence that has subjugated the Haitian
people since their ancestors were chained into the bottoms of boats to
cross the Atlantic.
So there is another little editorial aside. These conclusions were
conceived in darkness over a warm bottle of Dominican beer above the swish
and splash of the Atlantic as it rubbed the bottom of the ruined Fort
Dauphin.
"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
-Vo Nguyen Giap
"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
-Eleanor Burke Leacock
"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
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