*Panama*
It had been a few years since the cheers of the crowd had had any significant effect on me. By the time I’d stopped swimming competitively in my junior year at the university I’d figured out that my motivation for enduring any long-term pain had to come from within, so the yells of encouragement from the other members of the platoon were little more than an audible blur. The 3rd Battalion of the 7th Special Forces had been in Panama almost a year now and my weekly demonstration class on jungle river crossings, theoretically just another redundant exercise designed to keep us fit between Southeast Asian assignments, never failed to draw a small group of green berets who took bets on how long it would take me to make the crossing, how close I would come to the target take-out point on the opposite bank, or if I would get across at all. As I dragged myself out of the river this time, about fifty yards downstream from my intended point, Captain Lopez helped me up the steep incline.
“Ghoulish bastards, aren’t they? Sometimes I think they’d like to see you buy the farm just to break the monotony.”
“Yeh, I know. This stuff is getting a bit old for me too.” I accepted the towel he held out and used it to dry my hair and face.
“Well, maybe your days with the Jungle Warfare Training Center are finally numbered. There’s a civilian type up at the old man’s who wants to see you. Says he’s from the USARCARIB School over at Ft. Gulick. Maybe your flawless Spanish will get you a transfer to the spooks.”
Lopez had come to the 3rd of the 7th only a month before, but we’d talked often enough for him to know my Spanish was just passable and we’d both spent enough sessions as guest instructors at the Ft. Gulick School -- known at various times as the Latin American Training Center, the School of the Americas, and the United States Army Caribbean School -- to be aware of the fact that the students there included both Latin American Officers as well as our own, both civilian intelligence people and U.S. military officers attached, at the time, to our own 8th Special Forces at Gulick. At 23 I knew I was over trained and I was sure I didn’t want to be crossing jungle rivers for the rest of my life.
“Almost any change’ll be welcome. Let me stop off, though, and get cleaned up first.”
I was anxious to find out what the guy wanted, excited about the possibility of a new assignment just a few months before my time was up, and I’d had enough of rice paddies and rivers for a while.
He was a civilian who carried himself like a professional soldier. He took his time getting to the point of his interview after the old man had left us alone in his office.
“I see from your personnel file that you’ve been to Vientiane twice, for a brief period each time, as a member of an abbreviated reconnaissance team. How did you find Laos?”
“Quiet. Parts of it beautiful, like the gardens and the music; a great deal of it depressing, like the poverty and the cripples.”
“Do you know much about Oriental music?”
“Not a thing. A Chinese girl in Saigon once tried to teach me how to play the pi-ba but it was a waste of time.”
“Are you often impatient when you don’t master something at once?”
He didn’t sound like the usual disinterested army psychiatrist so I checked my instinct to be sarcastic or even insulting.
“I don’t know if I’d call it impatience. I do like to do things well -- either that or not put myself in the way of doing them at all.”
“But isn’t it true that one often has no choice in what one must do?”
“I don’t know about one -- I can only speak for myself.”
Enough small talk, mister, and a bit too pompous for my taste.
“The Colonel told me that you were from Gulick and that you’d seen my file and wanted to talk to me. He didn’t say if you were army or not, didn’t say exactly why you wanted to see me.”
“Probably because he didn’t know why. Nothing mysterious in any of this, I assure you. Shall we go on?”
His voice was impressive, as resonant as a good T.V. anchorman’s eleven o’clock voice, and his sincerity was almost palpable.
“Fine. Anything else I can tell you?”
“What kinds of things are you most interested in these days? What would you say were the things that gave you the most pleasure to think about -- aside from sex, of course?”
“I like to travel: the water -- oceans, rivers, lakes, small streams -- they all give me pleasure to be near, though I’m not so sure I like having to swim in them these days. Driving cars and boats, learning other languages, watching a good soccer match -- not a very heavyweight list, I guess, but mine own.”
“Have you read much Shakespeare?”
“Some, but not yet for pleasure. Right now books are a means of escape for me rather than a source of pleasure -- maybe it’s just the tedium of the army. I sure hope so.”
“Quite likely. Would you mind going through a little exercise for me? Just turn your chair so that you’re facing away from me -- that’s it -- and now, without looking at me, would you answer my questions as fully and accurately as possible?”
A series of questions about the details of his own features, dress, and manner followed. It came as a surprise, but I had at least a minimal response to make to most of the questions. No amount of brain-wracking, however, could help me recall the color of his eyes. He ended the series and as I turned back toward him he was smiling.”
“Not bad at all. And no matter about that last one -- I wear various colored contact lenses anyway.”
“Now it’s my turn to answer some of your unasked questions, and I do appreciate your restraint thus far. You have about four months left to go on your tour of duty; if you agree, I can arrange for the army to transfer you on Temporary Duty to several training facilities back in the States for brief periods of time -- I would think two or three weeks in each would do -- and then you would return here, to Panama, but not to Special Forces, for the remainder of your tour. There is a catch, of course, a price to pay for this extra training, some of which I believe you will find quite interesting. If you agree to this temporary transfer we would expect you to extend your tour an additional twelve months -- just so we can get a return on our additional investment, of course.”
He smiled again.
“We?”
“As you will be, in fact, in the U.S. Army for the next sixteen months or so -- assuming you agree to this arrangement -- let’s just say, for now, the army. When you return to Panama for that extra year you will be assigned to Ft. Gulick, you may or may not have to wear a uniform, and various other government agencies may, on occasion, ask for your opinion on conditions both here in the Zone and in the country in general. You might, if you wish, consider our conversation here a contract for sixteen months of temporary employment.”
“Why not think about it until tomorrow? At that time a handshake will suffice in lieu of a signature on that contract.”
It was his broadest smile so far, intelligent and knowing, even more like the T.V. newsman than before. There was no doubt that the interview was over.
I spent the night alone, asking myself all the questions I’d kept inside that afternoon but knowing almost from the moment I stepped out of the old man’s office what my response would be. I didn’t relish another year tacked on to my tour, but I had no pressing plans for my civilian future, the proposal sounded vague and very carefully elusive but also potentially challenging and exciting, and I was tired of humping it through the bush and across rivers. The issues of legality and morality flitted in and out but both seemed, at the time, to be as amorphous and ill-defined as the proposal itself.
The next morning I shook hands with the man in civilian clothes -- he said goodbye with what I took to be some finality, as if he were sending a good friend off on a long journey, knowing they’d never see each other again -- and thereafter things happened rather rapidly. Within a week I received orders to report to Ft. Benning, Georgia, the site of some of my earlier mili
tary experiences, and for the next four months I was temporarily “attached to” (never directly “assigned to“) various military, quasi-military, and non-military organizations. At the Army Security Agency in Massachusetts I was given a fancy-sounding security clearance, in spite of my father having been born in Warsaw, and I was made uneasy by the realization that both national and individual privacy is one of the great twentieth century fictions. A demonstration of one piece of highly sophisticated listening equipment so unnerved me that for several weeks afterward I attempted to completely alter the manner of my morning ablutions, embarrassed by the thought that some instructor I’d have that day might be smiling inwardly at the sensitive condition of my bowels. After three weeks with ASA I learned the value of facial expressions and silent body language and began the arduous process of reading lips.
Time spent with Inter-Mountain Aviation in the Arizona sun was relaxing and pleasant. Several pilots I’d known before were working for the airline when I first met them and as we swapped stories and talked of what it was like to be back in the States I was less than surprised to find out that they had been working for Inter-Mountain even when I first met them in places like Phnom Penh or Vientiane or Saigon. They had been flying Air America cargo planes then; what they were doing now for the Tucson company was never made very clear to me. My stay in the desert was brief; I spent a memorable weekend in Nogales, had some very basic instruction in flying single engine fixed wing aircraft, and learned about a complex network of ostensibly private airlines that could move people and materiel almost anywhere in the world and for which bills of lading and passenger manifests were often considered irrelevant.
In a rural camp not far from the nation’s capital I attended lectures and demonstrations and participated in exercises for several weeks. One of the lectures, billed (in the handout we received) as the “Strychnine vs. Cyanide” lecture, was delivered by a dour-faced man dressed in a well-tailored tweed jacket and dark grey slacks who reminded me of an old chemistry teacher I once had.
“Strychnine, ladies and gentleman, is as powerful as cyanide. The poisons come from different sources, however, and they work in different ways. Each can be fatal in relatively small amounts within minutes.”
“Strychnine, a nervous system stimulant, is a plant alkaloid found in the seeds of a plant called nux vomica. The poison can halt breathing and produce convulsions. As little as 15 milligrams could cause death in a small child. A fatal dose for an adult ranges from 50 to 100 milligrams.”
“Early effects of the poison are restlessness, excitability of hearing and vision, and convulsions.”
“Cyanide, on the other hand, is usually made as a synthetic chemical, although traces of it can be found in some seeds, including those of apples. The poison acts by preventing the body’s tissues from using oxygen.”
“Cyanide poisoning can produce nausea and vomiting, a fall in blood pressure and convulsions.”
“Potassium cyanide, known to chemists as KCN, is usually white in color. It is used to extract gold and silver from ore, to facilitate electroplating, in photography and in the manufacture of certain fumigants and insecticides.”
He hesitated slightly for the fist time in his rather pedantic presentation, but he regained his tone of objectivity as he continued.
“In slightly larger amounts potassium cyanide can be fatal in a dramatically brief period of time.”
The rest of the presentation consisted of a film showing the effects of the two substances on various non-human mammals and a question-and-answer period that focused on which benign liquids and solids the poisons could be mixed with without the latter being immediately detectable.
It was about this time that my enthusiasm for my training began to diminish; it was precisely at this point that I was reassigned to Panama, there to remain until the end of my military service a year later, but this time I went near the water only when I felt so inclined.