Smack in the Middle of a Low-Intensity Conflict

The taca air lines 727 jet is packed with passengers, and people grow quiet as we enter Salvadoran airspace. Outside the window, the tropical landscape rises slowly to meet us. I see a large lake, a dormant volcano, ridges of saw-toothed hills, the Pacific Ocean in the distance. The jungle valleys are blue in the afternoon shadows and the fields of sugar cane and pineapple form blocks like patterns in a quilt.

It is September 1985.

There is a time warp for me at this moment: I think briefly that it is 1961 again and I am seeing a jungle from the air for the first time, a young Marine officer being sent overseas on Priority One orders to join a task force that will be used to spearhead an invasion of Laos--- should President John F. Kennedy and his counterinsurgency experts decide such an invasion is necessary.

The time warp is fleeting, but I recognize that history may repeat itself. Another Vietnam-style war is not an impossibility. The Kennedys of the Eighties, the bright and aggressive Reaganites, are promoting a supposedly new concept in military tactics. It is called low-intensity conflict, and it's the latest rage in military circles. You'll be hearing a lot about low-intensity conflict in the future, but you should know that it is being debated and discussed in Washington right now.

No one can yet give a precise definition of low-intensity conflict, because its theory and practice are still being developed. For example, the U.S. Army Field Manual on the subject (F.M. 100-20, Low Intensity Conflict, 1981) is being rewritten. The discussions in military journals, scholarly publications, Government position papers and general-interest magazines leave you with the impression that low-intensity conflict is a term whose time may have come---but it is also a term that means different things to different people. Indeed, some experts argue that low-intensity conflict is the old doctrine of counterinsurgency in new clothes.

Put it this way: Low-intensity conflict is the official label for an evolving doctrine of counterguerrilla warfare. This type of warfare is rated low on the scale of possible conflicts, which is how the doctrine got its name.

The Vietnam war, to take a familiar example, would have been classified a low-intensity conflict during its first years. It became a mid-intensity conflict when the air war expanded and the Cambodia incursion occurred. And if Russia or China had intervened with nuclear weapons, we would have had a high-intensity conflict. That is roughly the scale of conflicts as seen by today's strategists.

It would be fair to say that we have low-intensity conflicts today in Central America and the Philippines. These regions have some degree of guerrilla activity, terrorism and civil violence, yet they are not engaged in conventional wars. According to the low-intensity way of thinking, these troubled areas are where the action is, where Soviet expansionism is being practiced and where we must respond to the challenge in a sophisticated, effective way. Proponents of low-intensity conflict offer their theories as Gospel---limited response to limited war, internal defense and development of fledgling nations, counterguerrilla operations that are supposedly more subtle and efficient than those used in Vietnam, U.S. participation at a muted and distant level, local commanders given local control....

On paper, it all looks good. There is a refreshing innocence to the term low-intensity conflict, too. It sounds harmless and, most important, it sounds new. This is not, the argument goes, a theory from the same people who brought us Vietnam. Low-intensity conflict? It's so new we can't tell you exactly what it is, but trust us: It's far different from the counterinsurgency doctrines of Kennedy and his experts. They lost. We'll win.

I'm making this trip to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras to see if I can get a handle on the application of low-intensity conflict. I was trained in the Marine Corps in the "old" tactics of counterinsurgency. What will I find in Central America that demonstrates a new and revolutionary way to deal with guerrilla war? Is low-intensity conflict a gimmick with a neutral name? Or is it an answer to the explosions that seem primed to occur in an area two hours south of the U.S. border?

I think about these things as the jet lands at Comalapa International Airport in El Salvador. I'm accompanying a delegation of Vietnam veterans that was organized by Dr. Charley Clements, author of Witness to War, an account of his time as a physician in rural El Salvador. None of us knew Dr. Clements or the others before we began this trip. That part of it will be interesting, too. How will we get along? What will we see, and how will we interpret it? What risks are ahead for us, and how will we handle them?

I feel apprehensive, alert, wired. Looking out the plane window, I see a number of soldiers with M-16s. They stand around the baggage racks, the fork lifts, the entrance and exit doors. They are short, dark men whose weapons seem too large for their bodies.

I've seen this movie before, I think, as I will often in the next ten days.

To begin to understand Central America, you need to read two books: The Godfather and One Hundred years of Solitude.

---The Source, Washington, D.C.

The VW van sputters and struggles along a four-lane highway that rises and dips, climbs across ridges, moves from the flatland into the interior toward the city of San Salvador.

I see again the immense poverty of what we call the Third World: ramshackle shacks of cardboard and tin, corn planted on steep slopes, banana trees, naked children, thin men with machetes walking the road shoulder, women with baskets and buckets on their heads, more children, always children. Even the storm clouds are green, reflections of tropical lushness.

"It would take two Marine divisions to hold this road from the airport to the city," I say to Harold Bryant, a former combat engineer with the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam, a black man who now works with veteran-outreach programs. "This is guerrilla country. Peaks and valleys. All sorts of cover. Twenty miles of ambushes."

Bryant nods. "Try three divisions," he says, laughing.

Once we are off the bus, San Salvador quickly reveals itself to be crowded, noisy, active, a garrison city in a garrison state, with many police and soldiers in the streets, private armed guards in front of a McDonald's restaurant, jeeps and trucks at intersections, people who seem friendly but are terrified of political questions. It is a city where there is not much peace in the air, where tension is palpable and poverty is never more than a few blocks away.

The first night in the hotel bar, as Bryant and I are having a drink and watching a rainstorm pour onto the veranda outside, the hotel lights suddenly go out as all power is lost to our section of the city. Like two men on a string, Bryant and I move away from the plate-glass windows. There is lightning and thunder, but there are also other sounds, small, sharp cracks that are more man-made than natural.

Lanterns are brought in. Most of the guests go on talking as if nothing has happened. Bryant and I exchange glances without saying a word. I had years in artillery and he had years in demolitions, and our ears are trained to classify sounds and explosions. We know plastique when we hear it.

It is not entirely a joke when I buy a T-shirt in a hotel shop that night. No Me Tieres/Estoy Periodista, it says: Don't shoot me, I'm a journalist.

"You're lucky," Bryant laughs. "You can wear that and not be lying."

"I'll use anything I can get," I say.

I am rooming with Skip Roberts, a former Marine, now a labor-union organizer, a man with a great sense of humor and a detailed sense of history. He and I talk into the night about things we're learning from the people we've interviewed that evening. Several representatives of a human-rights organization have described the activities of the Salvadoran death squads, the bands of armed men in civilian clothes who drive the streets in Jeep Cherokees and pull people into captivity and death or disappearance: tens of thousands of Salvadorans killed or missing in the past few years, as many as 850 per month for a few years, now an average of "only" 35 to 40 per month. A society, if you can call it that, that has eliminated its left and much of its center---The Godfather mentality, in other words. A country under siege, with assassination and disappearance woven into the fabric of life.

"There's a war down here," Roberts says as he stands at the window and points toward the sounds of demolitions and small-arms fire on the perimeter of the city. The lights go out again, and we listen to the air crackle.

"That's not a war," I say. "That's a low-intensity conflict."

"Right," Roberts says. "I forgot."

The spirit of The Godfather infects much of El Salvador. You feel it in the military hospital, where legless young men lie wounded and dying. It is there in the corpses on the roadside, in the faces of the refugees who are holed up in a church and cannot go out on the street for fear of being picked up by the death squads. It colors the testimony of a young woman who was tortured and raped in one of El Salvador's prisons. It shows in the increased air war on the part of the government and the increased use of land mines on the part of the guerrillas. And it hangs heavy in the (continued on page 191) Low-Intensity Conflict (continued from page 106) presidential palace, where Adolfo Prendes, José Napoleón Duarte's second-in-command, tells us, "No one is safe here. I am not safe. I could be killed tomorrow." For those who live or work in El Salvador, there is a given: Violence lies under the surface of every moment. It is a world Don Corleone would understand very well.

But if the spirit of The Godfather permeates much of the culture of El Salvador, so does the spirit of One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are moments of incredible beauty and dignity, moments that are fantastical, mythlike.

Take our trip to Tenancingo, a deserted town in the hills, a place that was bombed and strafed by the Salvadoran air force some three years ago. The delegation travels by van to Tenancingo to visit the Farabundo Marti Liberacion Nacional (F.M.L.N.) guerrillas. The trip is not without risk, especially since we have to pass through army roadblocks to get up and back, and the presence of the guerrillas in the town makes it a no man's land. Sometime in the early afternoon, David Harrington and I climb into the dilapidated church steeple that overlooks what used to be the main square of Tenancingo. Harrington, a former Marine captain who spent 22 months in Vietnam (including four months at Khe Sanh, taking an average of 1500 rounds of incoming artillery per day), is already a close friend. He and I have similar backgrounds, strong Irish roots, both of us the sons of severe fathers---Harrington so affected by his father's fierce temper that even now, when he talks, you can see the caution in his eyes, the desire to say everything completely and perfectly so that no one will be angry, no crisis will result. Harrington and I are men who have been highly trained by our Government and who also mistrust much of what it tells us about its motives and actions in Central America.

The view from the church steeple is spectacular. We look out across Tenancingo---shattered adobe walls, broken tile roofs, streets overgrown with grass and weeds, hills and valleys that sparkle in the distance. It is a moment out of Garcia Márquez, not Puzo. Harrington and I talk about the range of emotional experience in El Salvador, the way things move from terror to beauty and back in seconds.

"You'd never know it today," I say, "but when the journalists came up here after the bombings, they counted 17 dead in the streets. Women and children mostly."

Standing in the steeple, I burrow underneath the label low-intensity conflict for the first time. Low-intensity conflict? What kind of word game are we playing? I am in the middle of disputed territory, in the company of guerrillas, soon to go back down the road through a roadblock set up by the Salvadoran army. Tenancingo was once home for 2000 people. Now it is deserted, bombed out, too dangerous a place in which to live. I know that conflict is too polite a word for what has happened, and the intensity of events has been anything but low.

Low-intensity conflict? The term is misleading, inaccurate, possibly even devious when applied to a town like Tenancingo or a country like El Salvador. There is a war down here, pure and simple. Low-intensity conflict is a euphemism, an inoffensive term for the classical, brutal patterns of guerrilla war. Twenty years from now, we'll probably have another label. What will we call such a war then? Constructive Counteraction? Deniable Discord? Measured Disputation?

Later that afternoon, we pass through a roadblock of nervous and angry soldiers and drive from Tenancingo to an army garrison. The colonel in charge is a very competent man who has received Ranger and Special Forces training. He is frank and blunt: Many of his men are guarding fixed positions; he would like to have more mobile forces; the war cannot be won just with bullets, because it is a struggle for the hearts and minds of El Salvador's people.

Dave Evans, a double amputee from Vietnam and a man of West Virginia honesty, asks specifically if we may visit the garrison hospital. We move through the courtyard and up a flight of steps. The sick bay is nothing more than a dingy room with a large black-and-white TV blaring: Hawaii Five-O in Spanish. Two young men lie in separate beds in one corner of the dispensary. They have each lost limbs to mines. Evans, as he did before, in the San Salvador military hospital, takes off his artificial legs to show the wounded soldiers that he understands their pain, that he knows their suffering and, at the same time, that there is a way back from that kind of mutilation.

The colonel beams in surprise. "I didn't know you were an amputee," he says. "You walk so well. You must have a great hatred for the Viet Cong."

"No," Evans says. "I think I was wrong to be there. It was their country. You know, peace."

The colonel's face undergoes a transfiguration, a twisting of the features that no Hollywood make-up man could match. "Death to the Communists!" he says. It is a crack in the smooth facade he has presented until now. Nothing else he says that evening will be as emotional or as uncontrolled.

As we walk through the garrison and back toward the van, I notice two things that seem small but glare like burning rockets. The weapons of the men, even though they are in garrison, are not well maintained. This does not speak well for their morale or their training. And it is almost amusing to walk at the colonel's side down the steep slope to the town square. His men, campesinos---peasants pressed into duty---do not know whether to salute or how to salute. Some of them walk by him without acknowledging him. Others salute in a slow, ponderous way that makes me embarrassed for the colonel. He knows that we veterans understand the significance of troops who do not know how to salute. It is as if his professional expertise is being mocked by his own men.

The colonel stands at the huge gates of the garrison and salutes us as we move away. It is then that Clements tells me that the good colonel is a familiar figure to him. When Clements was doctoring in rural El Salvador, the colonel was in charge of the national guard in that area. The troops the colonel commanded at that time stuffed 122 people in Guazapa down a well, killing them all. The spirit of The Godfather is never faraway.

On the morning of our departure, I am glad to be leaving El Salvador, even for the unknown possibilities of Nicaragua. El Salvador is a complex nightmare. The entire delegation breathes a sigh of relief as we board the aircraft and take off.

Later that same day, President Duarte's daughter is kidnaped in San Salvador, her bodyguard killed. She will be held for some weeks, and on her return, she will have some good things to say about the guerrillas. Then she will be whisked into therapy and, as of this writing, not heard from publicly again.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff don't want to invade Nicaragua, but it's the only thing Reagan has to give the right wing. We'll send the Contras into Nicaragua to supposedly start a revolution and establish a beachhead. They'll get their asses whipped. Then we'll send in U.S. troops to rescue them. See, this isn't like the Middle East. We don't have an Israel around to do our dirty work for us in Central America. The Hondurans won't do it. So we'll have to do it---after the Contras get in trouble. ---The Source

It is a scene out of a James Bond movie, a humorous moment after much tension. The atmosphere in Managua is much looser than in El Salvador, and after the drive from the airport to our hotel, I go down to the pool for a quick swim. The pool is small, half hidden in foliage, and as I drop my towel on a chair, I see another person near the water---a blonde woman, chunky, muscular, beautifully tanned, gorgeous face, small white swimsuit. We pretend not to notice each other. I think she is probably East European, possibly Russian, one of the advisors we North Americans think should not be in our hemisphere. I swim, she swims. We pass each other several times, end up on opposite sides of the pool. She stares at me; I smile at her. "Beautiful day," I say to her in French.

"Yes," she answers in French.

"You're Russian?" I ask.

"Yes," she says, "and you're American?"

"Yes."

We both laugh. Her eyes are warm, her face almost mocking. There really isn't much more we can say to each other. She climbs out of the pool and dries herself luxuriously. She gives me one more long look, pensive, almost invitational. The Cold War may have melted for a minute, but it comes back. Her expression cools. Reality intervenes. I wave goodbye as she turns slowly and climbs the stairs. If the U.S. ever invades, she will be a wonderful excuse for it.

My hotel overlooks Managua. The city was devastated by an earthquake in 1972 and has never been completely rebuilt. There are great empty blocks of rubble and weeds, a few buildings constructed since then, a city that is seedy, impoverished, poorly lighted at night, pressed by shortages of food and water (the water is turned off twice a week in Managua; you learn to fill your bathtub the night before). This is a country with two coast lines and no significant navy. This is a country at war with our surrogates, the Contras, but I will not find a veteran in the delegation who thinks Nicaragua is a military threat to the United States. On the ground in Managua, the idea is laughable.

Still, as I look out my window at the long expanse of the city and the flatlands and beaches, I recognize how ideal this locale would be for an amphibious operation. Compared with El Salvador, Nicaragua is a dream to invade, a country made for it, perfect in its geography.

Once again, our delegation has good access to many people and places and points of view. We meet with the U.S. Ambassador, with a Miskito Indian leader, with a small-businessman who opposes the Sandinistas, with the editor of La Prensa, who also opposes them. We interview Bayardo Arce, one of the nine Sandinista comandantes, a young, tough, smooth man who is reputed to be one of the heavy-duty Marxist-Leninists in the leadership. We talk with doctors and priests and people in the street. Unlike the Salvadorans, the Nicaraguans are open to casual political talk, freer to express themselves. To a person, they are critical of the Somozas---our leading family in Managua for 40 years---but also to a person, they admit that they are tired of the warlike footing they are told they must maintain, the preparations for a U.S. invasion, the rationing and the draft and the continual pressure from the Contras. Life is hard in Nicaragua, they tell us, and they know it is going to get harder.

We travel a few hours north to Matagalpa. This is Contra ambush country. We meet with Colonel Adolfo Chamorro, the Sandinista deputy commander of the Matagalpa military region. Colonel Chamorro is as handsome as a TV soap-opera star, a calm and soft-spoken man of immense professionalism. He informs us that the Contras are now making deep raids into Nicaragua, ambushing roads, kidnaping farmers, committing atrocities, attacking cooperatives. He estimates that there are between 3000 and 3500 Contras in this region right now, an equal number nearby. But, he claims, they are not doing well, the population does not support them, and the Nicaraguan defense forces are winning. The Contras, he says, are based in Honduras, supported and advised by North Americans. The command staff of the Contras is composed of former national guardsmen under Somoza.

Every trip has its unforgettable moment, the one that comes back in dreams and reveries, the moment that shapes everything else. For me, it is this afternoon near Matagalpa. After Colonel Chamorro's briefing, we drive farther north. The bus we are using has a wooden deck on its roof, and a few of us climb up there to ride in the wind and the sun. It is a foolish gesture on roads that may hold a Contra ambush, but foolish gestures are sometimes at the heart of life.

We are near Jinotega, looking for a military field hospital of the Sandinistas, a place somewhere between the Sandinista and the Contra forces. We find it. It reminds me of a World War Two movie set: tentlike hospital wards, primitive medical facilities, well-policed grounds, wounded young men. The air is cool and clear, the late afternoon sun at a critical angle.

In one of the wards, a young man lies dying. He has been hit in the gut in a Contra ambush. He drifts in and out of consciousness, saying nothing, his eyes fixed on his father, a grizzled man in a torn work shirt and baggy trousers and sandals. The young man's intestines lie exposed in one area, tied off like small balloons. He is about the age of my sons.

The father and I look at each other. He knows only that I am a U.S. citizen, a veteran, a man in a delegation from the country that has financed and equipped the Contras who have shot his son. Martín Gutierrez, our translator, cracks for a second. "Every time I see this, I get pissed off," he says to me.

I look at the father. Something passes between us. I think he may get angry, but he does not. I pull out the laminated picture I always carry of Jim and Brendan, my two sons. "I'm a father, too," I ask Martìn to translate, "and I'm sorry this has happened to your son. I hate war, and I know you do, too. We've all seen too much of it." I despise the shallowness of words sometimes, and this is one of them.

"All we want is peace," the father says. "My son is lost, but all we want is peace." He says it without anger. I reach out my hand to shake his. He takes it.

We part quickly, and I move down the ward, seeing more young men without limbs, some without hope of life. I have been through a lot of this, and I am good at comforting the wounded and the dying. But as I talk to these young men, I seethe inside. I want to bring all the Rambo warriors in Washington, D.C., down to this field hospital near Jinotega. Let Rambo confront reality for a change, I think. Mock my sentiment, mock my loyalty and patriotism, bring everything I represent under suspicion; but come down here in front of these young men and in front of this father and tell me how a nation that lived under the despotic Somozas for decades must now get ready for more of the same, how the revolution that was effected simply does not meet our standards, how Nicaragua must embrace raw capitalism and nothing else or we will squeeze it like a lemon, kill its children, invade its borders and snuff out the flames.

Like most men, I endure these emotions without really showing them. As we climb back onto the bus, I give in to my fatigue and confusion quietly, putting on my Walkman headphones and listening to a tape on the long ride back through the mountains and the rain toward Managua. The tape was made by my son Brendan. He has a synthesizer and a drum machine and a mixer, and he is one hell of a musician who writes beautiful songs.

That night on the bus, I wonder, not for the first time, if Jim and Brendan will ever be drafted into a dirty little war in Central America.

We're racist and arrogant. We always go for the quick fix. We'll go for it again. We think we can solve everything with money and bodies. We don't understand nationalism. Or power flows. Or history. There's no policy. No one's at the helm. We don't know how to protect our interests short of war. So we'll go to war.

---The Source

For most of us, Honduras is an after-thought. Our experiences in El Salvador and Nicaragua are so difficult and rich that by the time we land at Toncontin Airport in Tegucigalpa, most of our sensors are down, our systems on hold. Honduras, we know, is not in a condition of crisis like El Salvador and Nicaragua. Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Central America, is a staging area for the Contras and is essentially a client state of the United States. The danger here is limited. It is decompression time.

Or so we think until we have lunch with the leaders of the Contras.

In retrospect, our delegation probably disappointed the Contras more than we knew. Vietnam veterans? In Honduras to find out about the war? Maybe even to volunteer to fight in it or advise or lend expertise? Soldier of Fortune goes south? This is no doubt what the Contras hope we are there for as our bus pulls up to the gate of the large house.

I'm not crazy about guard dogs, especially ones that look me in the eye and growl that they know where I live. And too many men with too many weapons can also make me nervous. And a living room that looks like an ad for Far Right Klans-men, complete with weapons on the wall, weapons in the corners and stacked rounds of ammunition in the unused fireplace, is not my idea of a relaxed place in which to eat a box lunch. Nor am I fond of the fact that it takes one blunt question from Dave Evans about CIA funding of the Contras to set Commander Mike Lima off on a tirade.

You may have seen Lima. He was pictured in Newsweek in an article about the Contras. He wears a state-of-the-art prosthetic device to replace his amputated right hand. He is in his mid-20s, short, tough, hysterical. His anger at anyone who does not agree with him is intense, his face flushed, his words tumbling over one another like swarming bees. He chews us out for asking such a stupid question, for doubting the Contras' ability to stand on their own, without CIA aid, for harboring any doubt about the darkness of the Sandinistas and the virtue of the Contras. He rants like a maniac, venom spewing. Just outside the living room stand 50 restless men with weapons, F.A.L.s with folding stocks, .45s, M-16s, men with varied hats and angry eyes, listening to their comandante tell this bunch of North American gringos where they can go with their suspicious minds and puny wills.

It is unclear to me what Lima wants to do to us, but as I often do in tense situations, I find myself a little amused. For one thing, I am asking myself a question that I probably never would have asked without this incident: The Sandinistas are not angels---but who are these Contras and what kind of program would they put in place in Nicaragua if they invaded and won? On a scale of one to ten, Lima's political consciousness probably registers about one half. I've worked with and trained a lot of Mike Limas in my time. They are excellent fighters, brave men, often uncontrollable and atrocious in their behavior in the field if they are not carefully watched. They all call themselves freedom fighters, every one, whether our own President hands them that label or not. But what will they do in Nicaragua if they ever gain power? How slow and dumb I have been not to ask that question earlier.

Another thing makes me chuckle. I am on total alert, and so is every other veteran in the delegation. Suddenly, we have stopped sitting and eating. Slowly, carefully, we have moved to different corners of the room, spread out, broadened the target and made it more difficult to group us into a small area. The hair on our collective necks is wired for action and defense. We are in a crazed presence, and we know that anything can happen. The Contras are proving to us that they are what their critics say they are: former Somoza national guardsmen, former death-squad members, hit men and rogues. My body is tight and I'm ready for whatever may explode---yet I recognize the addict in myself, the danger junkie, the man who feels good when certain kinds of risk are present.

That is when I ease up on Lima. I don't like him. But he is also my brother. We are not totally unalike. He has just come out of the jungle and will soon be going back into it, and if I were on his timetable, I'd be as hair-triggered as he is. He is being led and financed by men whose approval he needs more than life itself. I've been there. He thinks he represents freedom and liberty and that any action to further his cause is worth while. I know what that's about. He has been primed for violence, and that particular pump, once primed, is hard to shut off. Most of us in that room in Honduras understand that, too.

Gradually, Lima calms down; other Contras begin to talk. Dr. Rodriguez Alaniz speaks in glowing terms of the creative essences of mysticism and patriotism. There is high language about moral and spiritual goals, a claim that 90 percent of the Nicaraguan people back the Contras and are simply waiting to be liberated by them, a statement that all Contras are volunteers with inbred democratic principles and convictions and that none of them is in it for the money, none has been kidnaped or pressed into service. Atrocities? They are all on the other side.

As I walk out of that house in Honduras, past the guards and the dogs and the landscaped grounds and the wroughtiron gate, the trip is over for me. Life has come full circle, Puzo and García Márquez are joined in my consciousness, and I think I've seen the future.

We will go with the Contras. They will be our shock troops, our Montagnards, our scouts, our point men. Whether or not they receive more public money, they still have private funding. They are men who have been told they are about to go to war.

I doubt that they will be disappointed.

The governing classes in Central America are irresponsible. They plunder their economies and send all their wealth out of their countries. They're pirates. And we buy them off. We grease them, we grease their military. It's totally venal. But don't forget: They may loot and pillage in Central America, but people do the same things in this town. They're just less public about it. ---The Source

From Honduras, we fly back to Miami, where the Vietnam-veterans delegation splits up. People head back to their homes and jobs. In the past ten days, we've formed some close friendships, learned a lot, been changed. We feel the weight of what we've seen.

A few of us travel to Washington to make statements before a forum of three interested Congressmen (Representatives Lane Evans, Robert Mrazek and David Bonior), various Congressional staffers and reporters. Bryant, Harrington and I make statements, as do Charlie Liteky (winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism under fire while a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam), Dennis Koehler (a former U. S. Army Intelligence officer for two tours in Vietnam) and Leslie Feldstein (a former Army nurse and the only female veteran in the delegation; she has the single most effective line in all our statements to Congress: "If our children are to have Rambo as a role model," she says, "let us make certain that the dolls have detachable arms and legs").

It is while I am in Washington that I am first contacted by The Source, a highly placed official of the U. S. Government who predicts that the United States will invade Nicaragua before the current Administration leaves office. The final decision on that adventure is being made as you read this, in the spring of 1986. The Contras will go into Nicaragua under the pretext of saving that country from communism. The Contras will not do well militarily. We will participate in an expanded Grenada-style invasion---a rescue of the Contras that will turn into an occupation of Nicaragua. It will be Reagan's parting gift to his more conservative followers.

That is in the works, like it or not.

If it does happen, as seems likely, there is a final irony. The bureaucrats who twist both our language and our thought will be able to argue that such an invasion is not a war, really, but simply another example of low-intensity conflict:

Low Intensity Conflict (Type A). Internal defense and development-assistance operations involving actions by U. S. combat forces to establish, regain or maintain control of specific land areas threatened by guerrilla warfare, revolution, subversion or other tactics aimed at internal seizure of power.

---Headquarters Department, of the Army, F. M. 100-20, Low Intensity Conflict, January 1981

So when is a war not a war? When it's a low-intensity conflict---get it?