To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  I believed that the ambush had to be fully investigated; the survivors deserved at least that much. And there was another reason to investigate it more thoroughly: if the Indonesian military was involved in the ambush, then they couldn’t be trusted to be allies in combating terrorists. In fact, if they pulled triggers on Americans, they were terrorists themselves.

  As I saw it, U.S. funding for training the Indonesian military was the only leverage the United States had. I concluded that the U.S. should suspend those funds until the ambush investigation was complete.

  What I did next still surprises me to this day. I dropped that vow I made not to write about my travels; I sent an article to the Washington Post, spilling my entire Freeport story.

  I had helped people before, of course, in small ways, doing things that would not particularly inconvenience me. The opinion piece for the Post was different.

  I didn’t know the survivors of the ambush; I owed them nothing. Confessing to my bribes and trespassing could open me up to criminal charges, I supposed. Challenging the U.S. government decision to support the Indonesian military would probably bring me nothing but hate mail. I had plenty of reasons not to write that piece.

  I can only explain why I did it this way: my journey had now changed. This was no longer a self-absorbed quest. The climbing and surfing record had taken me in an unexpected direction. The sensory deprivation tank of Antarctica had put an end to my detachment from the world. The ambush in Indonesia would push me further into it.

  I no longer have that first e-mail message from her, but I remember when I received it. A few days after my article was published in the Post, I sat, frozen in my chair, staring at an unopened message in my computer’s inbox. It was an e-mail from Patsy Spier, one of the survivors of the ambush.

  From the moment the article appeared, I was blasted with criticism from people who thought that I was jeopardizing the ability of the U.S. to effectively combat terrorism. The only interesting thing that had come out of all this was that I had been sent, confidentially, a copy of the classied police report on the ambush investigation. The report was clear—there was good reason to be wary of the Indonesian military—but it was no help in my responding to people whose minds were made up.

  Amid these fuming e-mails, Spier’s message arrived.

  I didn’t open it right away. I sat back in my chair, questions coming to mind. Was she offended by my article? Would she be angry that I had brought the ambush back into the media? Maybe she preferred that the public attention would go away so she could move past it and get on with her life. Perhaps she would regard my behavior at the mine as reckless, that I was an enabler, encouraging the bad behavior of the military? Now I saw only downsides to the opinion piece, none of which had occurred to me until that very moment.

  I leaned forward in my chair and clicked open Spier’s message.

  There are people in this world who, against all odds, press on. They are vigorous, despite having seventy shards of metal perforating their internal organs. They are calm, even when they have a rifle barrel pointed at them, a whisker away from death. They are engaging and warm and determined, despite having every reason in the world to be consumed by hatred. Such is Patsy Spier.

  I blow into my coffee, cooling it off for a sip. Across from me, green eyes blazing, sits Patsy Spier. She sits upright, not stiff or tense, simply poised, confident, with a presence that comes from spending an afternoon in the company of death. She is waiting for me to put the cup down before she speaks; she wants my full attention.

  Her e-mail had simply asked to meet with me, since she would be in Washington the following week. I accepted the offer and here we are meeting for the first time. In the next few seconds I would find out what she thinks of me.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  To this day, I don’t think that opinion piece I wrote deserved a thank-you. Yet she said it nevertheless. She went on to explain why she was in town: she was trying to get members of Congress to suspend funding to the Indonesian military until the investigation was complete.

  I agreed with her, of course. But I thought to myself: what more can I do about it? The odds of halting the federal funding to Indonesia seemed insurmountable. I had written the article, I had delivered my opinion, and I was done. This wasn’t my fight.

  Then she said a few more words, penetrating words, and everything changed.

  “I want to see the shooters hunted down. But I’m not doing this for me.” She looked at me, unblinking, eyes fixed. With absolute conviction, she explained to me her reason, her deeper motivation.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to keep someone else from suffering the way we did.”

  Those words froze me. This was not about vengeance, although she had every right for it to be. She wasn’t seeking payback or retribution. She wanted the killers found and removed, certainly, but not for her own sake. She was fighting for others: she had humanity.

  And then I thought about myself.

  What was the point of my post-Antarctica desire to connect with the world if it was only for my own sake, if I was still so self-absorbed?

  Evolution is usually gradual. It took 600 million years for creatures to grow, develop, deepen their capabilities, and then claw their way out of the depths, struggle into the sun, and take their first full breath of air. That very evolution occurred in me over my decadelong journey, but much of it would happen now, at this very moment, as Patsy Spier’s words sank in.

  My surfing and climbing record served no purpose beyond my own self-satisfaction. Now I had the opportunity to engage in something far larger than myself and I was invigorated by it. I was compelled to participate more deeply. This was something beyond my own self-interest; Patsy and I had a shared purpose. I would warm to a more human temperature, a temperature at which the ground softens, and pillars start to teeter and fall.

  There will be readers at this point who think I have lost my way.

  What does the ambush have to do with surfing and climbing?

  Nothing.

  What does the ambush have to do with what my journey had become?

  Everything.

  Three years earlier I would have ignored these events, never turned on my computer to write that opinion piece for the Post, never have sat before congressional staff testifying to what I saw. Instead, I would have turned my head and continued down the list, planning the next ocean to surf.

  Why the change?

  As I listened to Patsy that day I realized what had been in the back of my mind since the afternoon on the beach in Bali when I opened that paper and saw the story of the ambush. I had dodged a bullet, and I was now looking at the person who took it, full in the back.

  Yes, I had plenty of near misses before, but never one where someone else took the hit instead. It could have been Mike and me in that ambush; and becoming aware of that fact bent my life.

  That conversation with Patsy Spier changed me. It had to.

  Some people are born with a deep concern for the welfare of others; I was not. For them, taking action on someone else’s behalf is a no-brainer. Of course, they would think, you do what you can for the survivor of the ambush and you say what you know to congressional investigators. But not me.

  I had to experience the near miss and meet the person who suffered in my place before I developed the sensitivity to get involved and get outside myself.

  Every culture and creed has its way of explaining a moment like that. For the religious, as the sixteenth-century preacher John Bradford said while watching a prisoner walk to his execution: “There but for the grace of God go I.” There are plenty of other ways of conveying the same point.

  In Farsi, the phrase is “Ghesser dar raftan.”

  In Spanish: “Se salvó por un pelo.”

  In Italian: “Per il rotto della cuffia.”

  For me, it is simply this: I dodged a bullet.

  “So who did it?” the staffer from the Homeland Security Committee asks from across the table
.

  I pause before responding, reminding myself of the way I had planned to address that very question. “How about I walk you through the evidence? I’ll tell you what I know—the forensics, the bullets, the clues—and then I’ll tell you what I think it all means.”

  The staff nod their approval. I start with the motives.

  The OPM had been seeking independence from Indonesia since 1965. Claiming to have no cultural or geographic ties to Indonesia, they established their own flag and guerrilla army. They gained support among the indigenous population, due in large part to their opposition to the Freeport-McMoRan mine.

  The guerrilla force is poorly equipped and vastly outnumbered by the Indonesian military. In order to get visibility for their cause and demonstrate that they are a force to be reckoned with they needed a strike against high-profile targets. At the time of the ambush, according to various sources, the OPM was looking for precisely that; it wanted to put a target in its crosshairs that would get it international attention.

  All of the assembled congressional staff accept that motive. It’s the story that we all want to be true. If the ambush was all the OPM’s doing, it would simplify the decisions on who the U.S. should ally with in combating terrorists. Unfortunately, things weren’t so straightforward.

  Implicating the Indonesian military was touchy and I didn’t want what I was about to say next to hang just on my word. So I had brought with me an investigative article from the New York Times.

  U.S. Links Indonesian Troops to Deaths of 2 Americans

  By Raymond Bonner

  New York Times

  JAKARTA, Indonesia, Jan. 29—Bush administration officials have determined that Indonesian soldiers carried out a deadly ambush that killed two American teachers returning from a picnic in a remote area of Indonesia last August, senior administration officials say.

  The Indonesian military has denied any involvement in the ambush, which also killed an Indonesian teacher and wounded eight Americans. But a report by the country’s police force last year suggested that the military was behind the killings.

  The administration official and diplomats from other countries said there was still a mystery about who ordered the killings and why. They said the most likely explanation was that soldiers were trying to send a message to the teachers’ employer, an American company that operates one of the world’s largest copper and gold mines in the area. The company, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, had reduced payments and other benefits to soldiers, the officials said.

  “Extortion, pure and simple,” said a Western intelligence analyst, explaining what he believed was behind the attack.

  Money from Freeport may have been the motivation. A soldier’s pay is roughly $15 a month, the report says, adding that soldiers have “a high expectation” when they get assigned to the Freeport area. But they had been disappointed by what they received, and some “perks” had been reduced.

  The Indonesian military receives less than one third of its budget from the government. To make up the difference, it relies on its own business activities as well as supplements from foreign businesses, especially natural-resource companies.

  Freeport had begun to reduce these payments, on the advice of company lawyers who said they would have to be disclosed under new American corporate-responsibility laws, Western officials and people close to the company said. They also said the military wanted a portion of payments—1 percent of profits—that Freeport makes for community projects, part of its effort to improve local relations.

  That pressure was apparently on the increase: investigators say they have been told that, in the weeks before the attack, Freeport had received threats of retaliation from the military if more money was not forthcoming.

  So at the time of the ambush, the Freeport-McMoRan mine had begun cutting back on payments to the Indonesian military. The mine reduced perks, salaries, and the number of troops. An ambush at the mine against high-profile targets would demonstrate the need for a strong, sizable military presence and would likely restore those cuts. Clearly, the military had a plausible motive, just like the OPM.

  I summarize it this way to the staff: “Both the OPM and the Indonesian military had reasons to carry out the attack.”

  With that established, I turn to the hard evidence and what I had intuited, starting with the guns and shells.

  According to U.S. State Department documents, some of the weapons that were used during the ambush were Steyr AUG assault rifles. That rifle fires 5.56mm rounds and ninety-four of those very shell casings were found at the scene of the ambush. The Steyr rifle, as it turns out, is a weapon of the Indonesian military and not in the arsenal of the Free Papua Movement.

  Ninety-four Steyr shells were found scattered on the ground, but more rounds were fired than that. Investigators walked through the entire scene, attempting to reconstruct the ambush bullet by bullet. The dozens of holes punched through the sides of the jeep and fuel truck were easy to add up, but there were countless additional rounds that had shattered glass, torn through tires and trees, laying waste to the surroundings but eluding the count. At minimum, the investigators determined, two hundred and thirty four rounds were fired.

  “At least two hundred bullets,” I repeat, pausing over the number. “That’s a clue in itself.”

  The Free Papua Movement has few resources. All of their previous assaults were small-scale, using only a handful of bullets, conserving what limited supplies of ammunition they had. That, according to one of the investigators, suggested that it was highly unlikely that they would use hundreds of rounds in a single operation. “The group does not have the quantity of bullets,” the investigator concluded.

  And then there is the issue of time. Previous guerrilla attacks were quick, limited strikes, lasting only a few minutes. With the Freeport ambush taking place just five hundred yards from a military base, you might expect that the shooters would be quick, the operation brief to allow them to flee the scene before the army arrived. But that wasn’t the case; the ambush lasted half an hour. And rather than a limited strike, the shooters expanded the attack, engaging more targets as they arrived on the scene.

  And what about credit? Don’t most terrorists boast about attacks so they can generate the attention and public fear that they’re after?

  In fact, the Free Papua Movement had a history of taking credit for their assaults. But in the case of the Freeport mine, with the bloody ambush receiving international attention that brought a high profile to whoever was responsible, the guerrillas denied any involvement. No one took credit for the attack.

  “All of that evidence is compelling, but it’s all circumstantial,” I say to the congressional staff.

  While together it suggests that the Indonesian military was involved, the clues could each be explained in other ways. The guerrillas could have acquired the Steyr rifles and ammunition in a raid of a military barracks. They could have determined that a high-profile target required the use of a larger portion of their ammunition. They could have changed their typical strategy, lengthening the time of attack for the Freeport assault.

  At this point, it seemed the case could be argued either way; nothing tipped the scale. But I wasn’t done.

  “There’s one more piece of evidence.”

  Everything I have said up to this point could be intuited from newspaper reports and TV coverage of the ambush. But I had something more, something that was not publicly available; I had a copy of the classified police report. It was delivered to me after my article appeared in the Washington Post. The report contained one additional, critical piece of evidence.

  “Another body was found at the scene.”

  For nearly twenty-four hours after the ambush, no bullets had been fired at milepost #62, in the heart of the Freeport-McMoRan mine. Investigators had paced through the destruction, counting shells and attempting to reconstruct the massacre.

  Now soldiers were patrolling the crime scene, safeguarding the evidence for the continued
investigation.

  At 11:40 A.M., the sound of three rifle shots broke the silence.

  Within hours, the scene was again filled with investigators. The Papua police chief, Major General Pastika, arrived to find a dead body. Standing beside it was an army corporal, one of the soldiers patrolling the scene.

  The soldier explained that he spotted an armed Free Papua Movement guerrilla walking along the cliffside above. Realizing that his life was in danger, he had lifted his rifle and shot, firing off three rounds. They were direct hits; the guerrilla fell from the cliff, his lifeless frame entangled in the vines of the jungle floor. With the help of fellow soldiers, he hauled the body out and onto the nearby road.

  Pastika examined the body but found no identification. He called it “Mr. X.”

  Mr. X was clearly a native Papuan. Criminals return to the scene of the crime, the Indonesian military officers explained to Pastika, and that is precisely what Mr. X had done. This body, the officers insisted, is all the evidence that was needed. It proved that the guerrillas, the Free Papua Movement, had committed the ambush.

  But Pastika continued to examine the body. He discovered that there was no blood flowing from the three bullet wounds. There were no broken bones, despite the fall from the cliff. The body was stiff, surprisingly so; he tried to reposition it but the hands couldn’t be folded. The military’s story was beginning to unravel.

  Pastika transferred the body to the hospital and ordered an autopsy.

  The forensic specialist, Dr. Agung, found small larvae in the body. Those larvae acted as a stopwatch, their growth an indication of the very moment of death. The evidence was now inescapable. Mr. X had been killed much earlier than 11:40 that morning, hours before the corporal claimed to have shot him.