Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  Fifteen minutes into the ride, Lance, riding shotgun in front of my seat, started speaking into his walkie-talkie in an agitated tone as he saw ahead that our Nasiriya police detail had inexplicably turned left onto another main road while the plan was to continue driving straight. The procedure for these motorcades was never to inform the police in advance which road we would take, but rather to tell them during the journey by radio what turns to make (or not to make). Lance, subbing for my regular head of security detail, Derek Dela-Cruz, who was on leave, was concerned that the trip go well under his command, and therefore seemed particularly annoyed with the police for turning off the route.

  As we moved forward along the two-lane road, all wondering why the police car had turned left at the intersection, we heard a deafening boom and saw just ahead of us a massive plume of thick black smoke rise into the air from the right side of the road. The vehicle ahead of us carrying JoBu and others sped furiously through the wall of smoke. My vehicle began to slow down, the U.S. driver momentarily unsure whether to keep going through the smoke, which is a standard maneuver in such situations to foil the possibility that the bomb was a decoy designed to make a stopped vehicle a sitting target for a rocket-propelled grenade or small arms fire. Lance, his diplomatic security training and his personal leadership very much in evidence, immediately shouted at the driver, “Go! Go!” and the driver slammed the accelerator to the floor, violently flinging those of us who had been leaning forward, back into our seats as the vehicle surged ahead into the thick wall of smoke.

  We braced ourselves in the expectation that our armored Chevy Suburban would hit something ahead hidden in the smoke, but as we emerged from the detonation area, I marveled that we were still roaring forward, as was JoBu’s car in front of us, now only vaguely visible through the dust and smoke. Just then the road took an abrupt left turn that our skilled driver, even at an accelerating speed, managed (barely) to careen through, getting us safely onto a bridge and over a dry riverbed. A huge gasoline truck stood on the side of the road. Could this be the real bomb? We sped by it, holding our breath at the thought that everyone had but nobody dared utter. Greta Holz, sitting next to me, shouted to me, “Get your PPE on!” referring to personal protection equipment, a flak jacket, something I had neglected to do when we were departing Nasiriya. “It’s too late, I’m going to be in trouble with Lance. He’ll write me up for this,” I responded, managing a lame joke.

  We continued to drive at breakneck speed on through a small settlement, where nobody except for some young boys playing by the side of the road even bothered to look up at our speeding convoy. It took still another thirty minutes to get back to the base at Tallil, where we entered the safety of the facility, past the American soldiers on the checkpoint. We all wearily lumbered out of our SUVs, still feeling the brush with fate in our stomachs. Roadside bombs had claimed so many lives over the course of the Iraq War, but it was not a subject I wanted to dwell on that day. I felt fine and quickly checked the vehicles to see how others were doing.

  Jen Davis, who had been sitting next to JoBu, was having serious headaches and some bleeding from her ears, an apparent concussion, and was whisked off to a medical facility. I moved away from the vehicles to telephone the embassy and tell them we were all fine. I told our public affairs team to try to downplay the attack in talking to the press, since we didn’t need any panic buttons pushed. Just as I completed the call my mobile phone rang and it was the State Department Operations Center patching through a very concerned Secretary Hillary Clinton, who asked for details. I told her “it was nothing,” and that we were all fine. I wasn’t really sure that was true, having been through other such circumstances in the past and realizing that people are not always as okay as they appear.

  After concluding the call I found myself momentarily reflecting on the fact that the purpose of the bomb was to kill somebody. Later I saw on the internet the creepy video belonging to a group calling itself the “Regiments of Promised Day,” relating news of the incident with the voice-over, bragging that the intention was to kill me. Whatever the intention, I thought it was best not to dwell too much on that either. I looked up at the darkening sky and saw that a sandstorm was fast approaching and that we would probably be spending the night in Tallil, instead of returning to Baghdad. That was fine with me. I had had enough traveling for the day.

  JoBu was also checking on how everyone was doing, with no shortage of his usual high energy.

  “You good, JoBu?” I asked. He stood there, glancing around briefly at the scene of hastily parked SUVs, and took his helmet off. He ruefully shook his head in relief as he wiped his brow, and finally looked back at me.

  “Jobu?”

  “Sir, you should have said yes to the airport.”

  1

  EARLY DIPLOMATIC LESSONS

  There is a bleakness to Belgrade in the winter months, when snow instantly turns gray from the soot-filled air. So even on a clear day like that day in January 1961, everything seemed to have a dirty dampness to it.

  The school bus that took me to and from the International School of Belgrade was a two-tone, pale blue and white VW Microbus with gray vinyl benches. Along with its dirt and grime and black ice clinging to its undercarriage, it fit in well with the winter landscape. The best part of the bus was the turn indicators. Incredibly, whenever the driver flipped the turn signal next to the steering wheel, an eight-inch, ruler-shaped stick would obediently snap to attention, flipping up and out from its hidden perch in the pillar just behind the front doors on whichever side the vehicle was to turn. I never tired of seeing that mechanical turn signal operate. As soon as Mrs. Brasich’s class was over, I would race outside from the huge, old stone mansion that served as the school for children of diplomats to find the bus in the driveway and secure my seat behind the driver to have the best view of the indicator. The driver, Raday, a small man who was usually, though not always, in a good mood, sometimes would let me inspect the flipper up close while he would operate it from inside. One time the driver’s side flipper wouldn’t work and Raday started to pull it with his hand. “My dad,” I said, “always tells me never to force something. If it isn’t working, there’s a reason.” Raday, who by this time was pounding the side of the vehicle, didn’t seem to appreciate the advice coming from an eight-year-old. I don’t know if Raday ever remembered my dad’s advice, but it stuck with me the rest of my life. Things work or don’t work because of something else, so try to find out, if possible, what that something else is.

  The school bus drive to my home from the International School was fifteen minutes at most. When we turned from Topcidarsko Brdo Circle onto Tostoljevska Street, I gathered up my books and papers, knowing I was only a minute away from home. Our house was located on a small cul-de-sac, Krajiska Street, opposite a wooded area. But that afternoon, as Raday turned to pull the microbus off the road and into the small woods on the left, I could see that everything was not quite right. As I got out and Raday began the careful exercise of backing the vehicle into Tostoljevska, I saw immediately that the sidewalk and high fence surrounding my house were covered with graffiti that included (in English) “Yankee go home” and “Lumumba,” and something that ended with “CIA.” I looked around, a little confused and concerned, as Raday drove the vehicle off, evidently not noticing what I had seen, because he presumably was focusing all his energies on backing out into the busy Tostoljevska Street. Two policemen in their long gray coats were talking to each other nearby, not an unusual sight for this area of town that housed many senior Communist Party functionaries. I hurried over to the rusted iron gate and pressed the doorbell, anxious to get inside to something more familiar and out of the January cold. But as I stepped back from the gate I could see the front of the house, the main floor of which sat up like a second floor with the basement and garage level underneath. Most of the front of the house—my house!—had almost all its windows broken, as if it were abandoned and no one was living there anymore.

&nbs
p; When nobody came out, I shoved the gate with my shoulder and despite its rusty resistance it somehow opened. I stood there and stared into the cobblestone driveway below the house. I could see shattered glass everywhere. Instead of turning to my left to make my way up the stone staircase to the main entrance, I walked farther along the driveway and could see that not just some, but almost all the windows on the right side of the house were broken and the driveway littered with rocks that had bounced back off the stone siding of the house. Now far more scared than surprised, I ran up the stone stairs to the big, wooden front door and pounded on it to get inside. My mother, holding one of my two-year-old twin brothers in one arm, opened the door with the other. “What happened here?” I asked. And she responded calmly: “Chris, you won’t be playing outdoors today.”

  What had happened on that day in January 1961 was that the Congolese leftist leader Patrice Lumumba had been killed at the hands of the CIA—a suspected targeted assassination that was finally confirmed as such years later. His assassination was a cause célèbre throughout the world, especially in communist countries, where he was seen as the vanguard of a new wave of communist expansion in sub-Saharan Africa. And what happened at 2 Krajiska Street in that heavily wooded suburb of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where my father, the embassy’s political officer, lived with his wife and five children was that an angry Yugoslav student mob, presumably with the knowledge of the Yugoslav communist government under Tito, had marched to a house they (somehow) knew to be occupied by an American diplomatic family, chanted epithets, scrawled chalk slogans, and threw rocks until the police, who had apparently stood by, finally chased them away.

  But what did not happen was any sense of panic in the Hill household that afternoon. My father came home to see how we were doing. As if to explain that nothing much had really happened at our house, he told me what had been going on at the Belgian embassy that day. A mob broke into the Belgian compound, located just a few blocks down from the American Embassy, and threatened to come up the main stairway inside the building before the Belgian ambassador, wielding a pistol, yelled to the crowd from the top of the stairs: “Ça suffit!” That’s enough! They left. My father enjoyed telling that story that night as he sat in the living room next to the fire, making his way through his usual evening pack of cigarettes. I’d often sit with my parents at night, getting my dad to tell me about the embassy while they both had their martinis, and I wondered how anyone could drink such a thing (though I did always lay claim to the olives).

  My father had a special affinity for Belgians, having served his first assignment in Antwerp immediately after World War II, and admired them for the suffering they had endured in that conflict. Dad explained to me who Lumumba was, and why the connection with the Belgians, and for that matter the connection with Tito’s nonaligned Yugoslavia. “Everything has a reason,” he always explained. “Our task is at least to try to understand what that reason is, even if we don’t agree with it.” I couldn’t understand why a Yugoslav mob was attacking our home over something we obviously had nothing to do with. “Well, not everything has an easy explanation,” he said, as if to negate what he had just explained. “We’d probably have to talk to them.”

  “Talk to them?”

  “Of course. How else would you find out what they are thinking?”

  I don’t remember my father ever telling the story about the pistol-wielding Belgian ambassador again. It just wasn’t that big a deal. Stories like that had a short life span in the Hill household. We would get on to the next issue quickly.

  Late that afternoon my mother was still dealing with some remaining shards of glass that had become stuck in her hair-sprayed hair when she had dropped to the glass- and stone-littered floor of the living room to shield Jonny and Nick. Embassy carpenters came the next afternoon to repair the windows (with my assistance in the form of passing them their cigarettes). Apart from those two policemen, who had seemed more interested in their own cigarettes than in protecting our home, there was no additional security and no routines altered or created. My father went to work the next day. I went to school, after the usual argument with my mother about what to wear to my third-grade classroom. I do not remember my parents ever talking about the incident again. It never became part of family lore. I talked to them years later, but it fell to me to jog their memories with my own.

  Just two and a half years later, in May 1963, the seven Hills were living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. François Duvalier had just declared himself president for life, and from our second-floor porch, which had a view overlooking much of the city, I could see fires and hear gunshots. As luck would have it, my dad, the embassy’s economic officer, was the duty officer that week, meaning that he would make frequent trips to the embassy in the dead of night to check on telegram traffic that required immediate attention. This night he had gone to the embassy at 11 P.M., but now at 1 A.M. had still not returned. My mother radioed the marine guard (there were no phones) and was told he had left an hour earlier to make the twenty-minute drive home in an embassy car. She woke up my older sister, Prudy, and me to explain the situation, and we sat on the upstairs porch, our mother with her cigarette, and I with my worries.

  He soon returned, to our great relief. He explained that he had been ordered out of the car at gunpoint by Duvalier’s not-so-secret police, the dreaded Ton Ton Macoutes, and held there for some thirty minutes while the TTMs decided what to do with him and his embassy driver. The next evening Mother and Dad told me the situation was deteriorating, that we all might be evacuated, but wanted me—I was ten years old—to know that we had a revolver (with five shots) in the event it was needed. Dad showed me how to aim and fire, while I focused on the fact it had only five chambers and not the six that I assumed every revolver had. “Don’t use it unless you have to,” my mother helpfully told me.

  Just a day later my dad came home to tell us that all families were being evacuated and that we needed to pack. “Where are you going to be?” I asked him anxiously. “I’ll be fine,” he told us.

  The next morning we were at the airport, boarding a chartered Pan Am flight bound for Miami. My dad, and other Foreign Service dads, stood on the tarmac as we made our way up the stairs. He was waving at us, telling us all to take care of our mother, who was holding on to Nick and Jonny, now four years old, while my two sisters, Prudence and Elizabeth, and I followed. He was still waving at us when the plane pulled away. I was so struck by the fact that if he was worried about anything, he sure didn’t show it.

  2

  PEACE CORPS

  Eleven years later, in 1974, during my senior year at Bowdoin College, I knew I wanted to serve my country. The military draft was over. I decided to join the Peace Corps. Many Foreign Service officers trace their first jobs in diplomacy to their decision to answer President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to spend part of their lives working in the developing world. In October 1960, at 2 A.M., in what he called the “longest short speech” he had ever made, one given to a University of Michigan crowd of five thousand, President Kennedy told students that on their willingness to perform such service would depend “whether a free society can compete.” Generations of Americans joined the Peace Corps filled with a sense of Kennedy’s idealism and many returned with an even stronger dose of realism about what we encountered, and how we needed to manage—and sometimes not—other people’s problems. Whenever I am asked what my favorite Foreign Service job was, I invariably answer that it was my time as a Peace Corps volunteer, the position from which I entered the Foreign Service.

  I waited a few weeks before receiving an offer to join a credit union project in Cameroon, West Africa. A few weeks after graduation I was in a credit union accounting training course in Washington, D.C., and on August 11, a day after my twenty-second birthday, with twenty other nervous and excited volunteers I boarded a flight from New York City to West Africa. The Pan Am Boeing 707 stopped at every coastal capital on its way to Central Africa. On the fifth stop, we arrived in hot a
nd steamy Douala, Cameroon. We staggered down the stairway off the airplane into sheets of warm rain and headed to the terminal, where we collected our bags and went through customs, all the while wondering whether we could get a flight the next day to go home. A rented bus whisked us off to a hotel for late-night briefings by an endlessly cheerful Peace Corps staff. The next morning we got on that same dripping-wet bus and headed to a small airstrip in the town of Tiko to board a Twin Otter aircraft. It groaned audibly as it somehow managed to lift off the dirt and muddy runway and begin the one-hour trip to Bamenda in the highlands of the Northwest Province of Cameroon, where the temperatures were far more comfortable than in the coastal south. Our three-week training took place in a Catholic mission where we were housed in a two-room, whitewashed, cinder-block building, ten cots jammed into each room. We had our meals in a similarly austere cafeteria, where we received tips in Cameroonian culture and the basics for communicating in Pidgin English. At the end of the program I was assigned to supervise the credit unions of Fako Division in the Southwest Province, so I packed my bags for the trip to the town of Buea.

  Buea had been an administrative capital in the latter half of the nineteenth century, during Germany’s ill-fated colonial era, which came to an abrupt end at the conclusion of World War I, when Germany lost its entire colonial empire to the French and the British. The town is located some 3,500 feet up on the slopes of Mount Cameroon, a volcanic peak that rises from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the Bight of Biafra, to reach 13,270 feet. With its cool and pleasant weather, albeit with a long rainy season, it is easy to see why the Germans chose Buea at the turn of the century as an administrative capital for its vast plantation system in “Kamerun.” The plantations, which were mostly within one hundred miles of the Cameroon coast, produced rubber, palm oil, bananas, and, in one plantation along the side of the mountain, tea.