Ghost Watch

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Warm sheets of rain fell from clouds piled like towers of shaving foam above the steaming rainforest. Orange mud showed where vehicles and foot traffic had flayed the skin of vegetation from the ground. There was so much mud, it was as if the base had been rubbed raw. The tread in my boots was clogged with it, making my feet feel heavier than a drunk’s. The stuff was under my fingernails, grinding between my teeth, in my hair and my groin. The sweat and grease of eight days in the Congo rainforest stung my eyes, and a miasma of flies and mosquitoes trailed behind me, along with the rest of my beaten little troop, as we trudged in the stinking humidity through rust-colored puddles of rainwater.

I was looking for someone among the organized chaos and, when I found him, I was going to spoil the asshole’s day.

We looked like the walking dead — a bunch of filthy, haggard, hollow-eyed cadavers lacerated from head to foot by nature’s razor wire: the elephant grass that grew everywhere here. Groups of so-called US allies hereabouts, the armed militia known as the National Congress for the Defense of the People, stopped what they were doing and stared at us. The government troops from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, just across the Rwandan border, called these soldiers ‘the rebels’. My fellow American advisors, here to train the rebels in the art of waging war against the insurgent Hutu militants hunkered down in the DRC, also stared as we cut a swath of silence through the late-afternoon activities at Camp Come Together — most of which consisted of lounging around, smoking and drinking.

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