You had to feel for the locals. I’ve served in a gaggle of these ass-fucked countries and it’s the same in every one. First, there’s no indigenous economy. There’s no entrepreneurial class, no middle class, no capital, no respect for property rights. There are no businesses other than roll-up storefronts selling rice and cement—or the odd mom-and-pop Chiclets and T-shirt stand. The only enterprising capitalists are criminals. Government exists in external form only, a travesty of legitimate governance, with tribal thugs and gangsters occupying the ministries and looting for themselves and their families whatever revenue or matériel is extracted from the earth or flows in from outside the borders.
What enterprise exists is either subsistence farming or narcotics. Cash comes in from outside, not as capital investment—because no First World bank or corporation is reckless enough to take such a risk—but in the form of humanitarian aid, military support, or poison-pill loans from the IMF and the World Bank to fund well-intentioned but artificial projects such as infrastructure construction and rehabilitation—roads and wells, power stations and water purification plants that look great on paper but on the ground are nothing but sinkholes of corruption, with the outside cash flowing into the pockets of whatever tribal or criminal despot lords it over the region. The infrastructure project itself is abandoned halfway through, when the foreign workers bolt because they can’t stand conditions any longer, with only the shell left standing after every item of value has been looted by the locals.
These countries are often called “failed states,” but the truth is they’re not states at all. There’s no source of revenue sufficient for the central government to pay for police or security forces (if these could even be created, which they can’t) to protect the simple, hardworking villagers in the provinces. So the warlords do it, as they have for the last ten thousand years, by extorting money from the locals and shaking down any outside entity via tolls or road or river taxes (and nowadays pipelines), either in the form of institutionalized patronage from whatever Western or Asian buccaneering entity is ripping off the natural resources, or informally by checkpoints and roadblocks at the muzzle end of AK-47s. The regional lords extract protection money from the narco traffickers (most in fact are indistinguishable from narco traffickers) and use this revenue to recruit and fund their militias. The real currency of the nation is hopelessness. If a young man of courage and vision arises, he has two choices: join the gangs or bolt the country. The rare honest man, the stand-up politician, the crusading editor gets his few column inches in the Western press and then is shot, hanged, poisoned, or “detained for his own protection” and never heard from again.
That’s what you see in these countries. And you see something else: the long-suffering, brave, generous, God-fearing, patient, kind, and, against all odds, cheerful wives, husbands, and children of the villages and cities. That’s what we Marines saw and that’s what Salter saw.
There are three primary tribes in Zamibia—the Zamibs, the Nahallawit, and the Koros. Mbana was a Zamib. These were the majority, constituting about 60 percent of the populace; the other two tribes composed 30 percent, with the final ten made up of smaller tributary tribes. When Mbana was in power, his tribesmen persecuted the others. All the judges and ministers were either Zamibs or tokens. When the Marines took over, the minority tribes didn’t trust the courts because the justices were still essentially Mbana’s cronies. Salter had to have his platoon and company commanders dispense justice themselves, in person, at least temporarily. The problem was the East African mind is so tribal and so finely attuned to distinctions in rank that any man of substance, which was everybody above the age of thirty, refused to have his case adjudicated by these young lieutenants and captains who were perceived by these tribesmen as the “sons” of Salter. The petitioners wanted the real deal. They demanded the man himself.
Salter began hearing grievances. He conducted these proceedings outdoors, first on the palace grounds, then in a quadrant of the soccer stadium—partly because these were the only sites big enough to contain the multitude of plaintiffs, and partly for the transparency of the venue, to let the people see that business was being conducted in the open and nobody was selling them out behind closed doors.
In East Africa, no public act can be taken in the capital without report of it flying on wings to every village and crossroads of the interior. A wise judgment is commended. Two in a row are acclaimed. Three and they’re writing songs about you. Salter dispensed justice like a Marine. What counted to him was the group; every judgment he handed down had as its aim the strengthening of the bonds within the community—and the swift kicking in the ass of anyone who tried to fuck with those bonds. He might let a bad actor slide once, but he’d hang the sonofabitch by his nuts the second time. He couldn’t be bought, he couldn’t be bribed, he couldn’t be manipulated. The people loved him. He became, in the popular imagination, a cross between Solomon and Atticus Finch. The badge of office worn by a native justice is a scarlet sash called an inguro. Salter resisted wearing one at first. He appeared only in uniform. But after a week, he relented.
A Westerner seeking to restore stability to a tribal society inevitably finds himself in an ethical bind. Does he go along with the native customs, which are usually barbarous but effective, or does he attempt to impose “civilized” standards, which the natives consider at best quaint and at worst inscrutable, and which in the end only make matters worse?
In the bush, the machete massacres continued. Official MEU policy, as articulated by Salter in his Orders of the Day, was to prevent these outrages by all means necessary. A typical day had half our battalions in the air, in platoon-sized security-and-stability elements, following up reports of potentially inflammatory gatherings or of out-and-out violence. I was present for several incidents where Marine forces actually intervened. This was wildly unpopular. The women would wail and lacerate their scalps till blood was sheeting down their faces. They wanted justice. They cried Salter’s name, or the name he had come to be called, Ero Horo—“The Man with the Clock”—because of the big Bulova he kept on his desk during the petition hearings. Ero Horo would never order his Marines to prevent justice! Ero Horo understood! He was one of us!
The problem of course was the evidence of the massacres. It was too grisly, too visual—and there were too many cell-phone cameras. Finally, what everyone feared would happen, did happen.
Second Platoon of Kilo Company 3/7 was on a heliborne sweep at the south end of the delta when they came upon a gangara in progress. The date was 11 September 2022, the twenty-first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers. Col. Mattoon was in charge of the Joint Operations Center when the call came in. I don’t know what factors influenced his decision. Maybe the violence on-site had gone too far already; maybe to intervene at that stage would only have risked more lives. Maybe second platoon’s commander indicated that he lacked the force to influence the outcome. Maybe Mattoon was simply acknowledging political reality: that what gave Salter his influence over the population (the solitary element, in fact, that kept the country from descending into chaos) was that he was perceived as being the lone Westerner who understood the locals’ concept of honor and possessed the courage to stand up for their vision of justice. Whatever the reasons, Mattoon ordered 2nd Platoon to RTB—Return to Base—which they did.
In other words, he let the massacre continue.
Someone had a satphone camera.
Three hours later, the video was all over the Web.
The first reporters on the scene were a couple of freelance South Africans. I knew them; they were decent guys. They were actually going to pass up the payday because they knew what a shitstorm it would unleash. But then a take-no-prisoners Dutch journalist named Ditman Kroon appeared, and a couple of Americans who the South Africans knew would never sit on so hot a story. So they went for it.
The press crucified Mattoon first. Then the Marines on the ground. Then Salter. Of all the written pieces, A.D.’s was the most
even-handed in its tone and balance. It at least gave Salter credit for good intentions and articulated the moral dilemma he found himself in. But her piece was the one with the widest circulation, being published by the London mega-zine Topix, whose high-def version featured—and hyped sensationally—the raw, uncensored head-lopping video. And Topix was the first to use the phrase “Lord Jim” to describe Salter.
That did it.
The line was too good.
A.D.’s editors at Topix rewrote her original, scrupulously factual draft, tarted it up with unsourced allegations, rumor, and sensationalized hearsay; threw in a four-page spread of photoshopped atrocity pix; and capped it off for the magazine cover with a photo of Salter wearing his tribal inguro sash, which made him look like a gone-native megalomaniac out of Joseph Conrad. In the press, Salter was already the “Crawling Man” hero from Yemen, a Marine’s Marine, the kind of old-school, Chesty Puller–style jarhead that the media lionizes when he’s riding high and attacks like a pack of hyenas the instant he stumbles.
Now the Chinese entered the picture. Zamibia has oil. The Ninth Expeditionary Army was in East Africa for one reason only. It massed along “the Broomstick,” the demilitarized corridor. The pretext for invasion was humanitarian: U.S. Marines had run amok. The Chinese brought up tactical nuke artillery that could not only annihilate our land forces but also take out the support vessels at sea. Was there a connection to the crisis in Taiwan? I’ll leave that to the Wiki Washington Post. Bottom line: the People’s Republic had Uncle Sam down, and they were about to carve a steak out of his ass.
Salter’s response was aggressive and audacious. He struck cross-border by night with two reinforced rifle companies, seizing a high ground called the “Mons Orientale,” which compelled the Chinese to withdraw. He ordered up his own tactical nukes. (They never actually got ashore, but the ordering was enough.)
A Chinese Jin-class nuclear submarine was reported on its way, to augment the two Song class boats already within missile-launch range. President Cole was compelled to respond. He ordered the Abraham Lincoln with its battle group back from the Strait of Malacca. This was at the peak of the crisis in that theater. We watched on our handhelds. Marines were Sharpie-ing “WWIII or Bust” on their helmet covers.
Salter didn’t back off for a second. Nor was he shy about inserting himself into it personally. He appeared via satellite on Beltway Overnight and, next week, on Face the Nation—both times without clearing it with higher. When the White House furiously ordered him to cease, he obeyed but he continued to blog and tweet. The public saw him on HoloTube, tramping frontier CPs in a flak jacket with no helmet, quoting Livy, Thucydides, and Hobbes as he pointed across the border at the Chinese forward positions in the Broomstick, explaining what would happen to the helpless citizens of Zamibia when “those bastards” crossed the line. His Marines loved it. Amazingly, so did vast segments of the American electorate. Pete Petrocelli told me later that his in-box crashed from the volume of traffic—favorable, nine to one—which included contribution offers totaling well into eight figures and public support from the loftiest spheres of government and commerce.
President Cole ordered Salter to withdraw all troops from forward positions, to disarm all tactical nuclear warheads, and to redeploy out of range of the Chinese all systems capable of delivering such ordnance.
Salter refused.
By this time, anchor-level news crews had arrived from Trump/CNN, WSJ/CBS, SkyNet, and al-Jazeera. Salter called the teams together, along with A.D., Ariel Caplan of Agence France-Presse, and John Milnes of Fox/BBC who were already in-country. What he did then was not as crazy as it was later portrayed to be.
I have this account from Rob Salter, who was present front and center. The occasion was a walk-and-talk near one of the forward observation posts along the border. Salter was responding to questions about why he had refused to stand down his nukes. He answered that he was prepared to do so (in fact, orders were already in the pipeline), but first he wished to speak with the president, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; VTC—video teleconferencing—was slated to take place in two hours.
Salter felt certain, he told the reporters, that he could convince his superiors of the inadvisability of their directive. The United States was not vulnerable, Salter declared. It was the Chinese who had overplayed their hand. With one strike he, Gen. Salter, could topple, not only the Asian despots’ decades-long effort to control African oil, but he could “make their whole house of cards collapse.” Taiwan could be saved—and that was only the beginning.
“Isn’t such strategizing, General, a few levels above your pay grade?”
This question came from Ariel Caplan, A.D.’s friend, who was at that time the most widely watched TV journalist in Europe. Salter responded by asking the news producers if their networks would be interested in carrying him live to “address the nation.” As I said, Rob was there. He heard this. He swears his father’s tone was joking.
Perhaps this was lost in translation. Maybe the story was just too juicy to let pass. Whatever the cause, two hours later, that remark—in garbled video, shot from behind Salter so the expression on his face was not visible—was leading every news broadcast on the planet, and Salter was being portrayed as MacArthur in Korea, Caesar in Gaul, and Alcibiades in Sparta.
President Cole fired him and called him home.
Salter was pilloried in absentia while Task Force 68 was still in East Africa. We watched on our handhelds. The experience was surreal. As Salter on television was being portrayed as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, Salter in real life was standing tall like Martin Luther King at Selma.
He had been relieved of command. Technically he was under arrest. Nobody in Zamibia gave a damn. To the working folk of Princeville and the provinces, Salter was the nation’s savior. The people begged him to stay. Candlelight vigils ringed his CP. The natives knew that Salter and his Marines were the only forces holding back chaos, the next tribal bloodbath, not to mention a Chinese invasion.
The task force’s orders were to embark for home. UN peacekeepers from Burundi and Zaire would take our place.
We were to leave the country to its fate.
Adm. Spence returned and took over. He instructed the commanders of both MEUs to pull out their onshore elements in darkness. He didn’t want a spectacle. The Marines refused. I had never seen anything like it. “Mechanical breakdowns” occurred; communications crashed; schedules fell behind. The troops were supposed to be transported to the harbor by 7-ton MTVR trucks. Instead they marched on foot. The hour of departure was slated for predawn; instead the march-out kicked off at eleven in the morning. The entire city lined the parade route. The Marines marched out by platoons. Women swamped them, weeping. The mamas couldn’t understand why we had to go. They knew Salter had been disgraced but they couldn’t figure out why.
Task Force 68 was not sent directly home. Taiwan was still too hot. We were sent to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, then to Jakarta and finally Osaka, Japan.
Salter had been flown home, first to Camp Lejeune, along with Col. Mattoon, to face an in-service inquiry. We got updates every day from Pete Petrocelli—Jack Stettenpohl and me, and of course Rob. Orders came for the three of us. Jack’s remaining term of enlistment was only three months; he was given a speeded-up honorable discharge and enrolled, like all officers following their service on active duty, in the Active Reserve. Rob was granted the assignment he had been campaigning for for six months: command of a TacOps section—three twelve-man teams—in Paktia Province, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The billet came with a promotion to major. I was returned to Quantico as an instructor at TBS, The Basic School. The story of the massacre of the Brown Bombers was all over the Marine Corps by then, but the unspoken code of Loose Lips Sink Ships kept all jaws locked. If the press ever got wind of that debacle, the Corps’s image, already in tatters from Salter’s public firing, would suffer a blow from which it might never recover. Rob
, Jack, and I parted with vows of silence sealed in blood.
By then, Salter was testifying before Congress.
In stress situations like that, my response is always to train. I was running seven miles a day and swimming two. Jack Stettenpohl was back in the D.C. area too. He was keeping as low a profile as I was, working privately for a friend from Dartmouth, another Marine, who was running for Congress. One night we met at a bar in Georgetown. Jack showed me a bunch of poll figures and other data about his friend. Then he leaned in closer. “But here’s the really interesting part.”
Jack riffed through a sheaf of documents. Sometimes in surveys, he said, the pollsters will throw in what they call “rogue questions.” These have nothing to do with the issue under investigation; they’re inserted just to see if the respondent is paying attention and answering honestly. The rogue question was:
If the presidential election were held today, which one of the following candidates would you vote for?
The choices, Jack showed me, were the expected ones, headed by President Murchison, the Democratic incumbent. I followed Jack’s finger down the columns. “Now,” he said, “look at the write-ins.”
Gen. James Salter 23.7%
“The figure for write-ins typically doubles in an election when the candidate’s name is actually on the ballot—meaning when voters don’t have to go to the trouble of thinking, remembering, and actually writing it in.”
“In other words …”
Jack indicated Murchison’s figure of 26.4 percent and that of Senator Dodd, his Republican challenger, at 29.4 percent. “In other words, our ex-boss is roughly twice as popular as the president of the United States.”
Jack ordered another round.
“But the significance of these figures,” he said, “goes way beyond Salter. It’s the American people and their state of rage and fear. Our fellow citizens are pretty fucking pissed off. Think about it, Gent. A maverick jarhead who has just risked nuclear Armageddon—and Mom and Pop in Peoria are standing by, unprompted, to make him Man of the Year. This is some shit, bro!”