The bulletin board outside the mess hall had a new advertisement on it about a week after I arrived. It was one of many such notices directed at both students and staff at the school and after a while their appearance was so commonplace and innocuous that I didn’t even pause to read them.
“Foreign Broadcast Information Service, P.O. Box 2604, Washington, D.C. 20013 - OFFICERS WANTED: this service of the Central Intelligence Agency has available foreign language officer openings for persons with strong reading ability in a foreign language. Principle duty is to scan foreign-language newspapers, journals, and monographs for information needed by analysts and policy makers in the foreign affairs community. (Actual translation is done off-premises by contractors.) Other duties include periodic review and evaluation of translation done by contractors; occasional translation; and miscellaneous language service. To apply, send brief resume to Personnel Office at above address.
Work is in Washington, D.C. area, with limited overseas work opportunities. U.S. citizenship required.”
It didn’t take me long to find out what miscellaneous language service might entail, at least as it was practiced in Panama. One night in a quiet bar in Colon, the only real town on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, where I’d gone to unwind a little after a long afternoon spent lecturing to a group of senior Honduran officers on how to survive in the bush when your supply lines suddenly disappear, I met Raymond Torres. One minute the barstool to my left was empty and the next it was filled with a Sidney Poitier look-alike whose outstretched arm was so massively muscled my first instinct was to duck my chin to protect my windpipe as I tried to roll backwards with the anticipated blow. It never came and I felt silly; his laugh was friendly and I knew he’d sensed my response.
“Sgt. Ray Torres -- glad to finally meet you. Buy me a Bacardi straight-up and I’ll tell you the story of my life.”
We never got around to that that night -- there was time enough during the next year for me to put together the bits and pieces he dropped, time enough for me to get a fairly coherent picture of his growing up poor with his Panamanian parents working for the Canal Zone Company, of his joining the American army after they both died (he in an accident on the Gatun Locks and she by suicide) so he’d be sent to a good college in the States, trained and fed and clothed better than his heritage had led him to expect, and of his time in Asia and his recruitment and his eventual transfer back to his homeland -- but we bought each other a few rounds and at his suggestion we headed for Rainbow City, Colon’s roughest and poorest section, to finish off the evening. As we walked he spoke quietly, being careful to talk slowly and enunciate clearly for me as he switched into Spanish whenever we passed other pedestrians, whether they were in uniform or in civilian clothes as we were.
“It’s really quite simple. All we have to do is listen carefully and remember what we hear. From time to time we’ll be asked to tell others what we’ve heard. Much of the time it’s rather uninteresting, but we get to move around quite a bit and nobody hassles us with the routine stuff and every so often we’ll get to go to some fancy affairs and meet some people we ordinarily wouldn’t come across. The important thing is to be sharp, to pay attention, and to appear as if you’re not if it ever gets awkward. We’ll hit one of the bars here and then call it a night, okay? It’s where some of Panama’s finest, the Guardia Civil, come for their pleasure between bouts with the local revolutionaries.”
We spent about an hour there, talking to each other and two Panamanian girls in English and listening in Spanish to several Guardia officers at a neighboring table. My listening comprehension would improve with practice but as we rode the old converted school bus back to Gulick I realized that just listening, under certain conditions, could be a matter of pleasurably restrained excitement. I went to bed that first night thinking that my last year in the army might not be too hard to take at all.