Dick Stivers - Kill School

"The idealists could not stop the counterrevolution. They could not stop the death squads. The national guard, the national police, the Orden — they murdered thousands. The families destroyed the Junta.

"To please the new administration in the north, the families formed the Second Junta, the Gang of Death. The gang also promised reforms, but what they gave the people was murder. The gang ruled by the bullet and the machete.

"When the gang stopped the reforms, then it was that your new president sent help. Hundreds of millions of dollars, rifles, helicopters, Special Forces to train our soldiers to find the idealists and campesinos and teachers hiding in the mountains. Now there are ten thousand guerrillas. Now the guerrillas have the mountains and the roads and the villages..."

"Shut up!" Lyons shouted the lieutenant down. "None of that's my problem. That's your problem. You don't like what your government does, why are you in the army?"

"Someone must fight the Communists," the lieutenant seethed. "And after I defeat them, I will fight the others. And soon enough there will be a new American president. Every time you change presidents, it is as if the United States is another country. There may be hope for El Salvador."

Ahead of them, Blancanales swerved off the dirt road. The lieutenant followed the first jeep. Overhanging trees shadowed a fold in the hillsides. No helicopter or patrol could spot the group.

Blancanales left the front jeep. He walked back to the lieutenant. As he spoke quietly with the Salvadoran, he gave Lyons a glance and a shake of his head. Blancanales and the Salvadoran army officer, their weapons in their hands, went to stand sentry at the turn-off. Gadgets explained to Lyons, "We heard it all, man. I turn on that minimike, and what do I hear? The Ironman alienating our liaison."

"I couldn't let him talk that shit without talking back."

"Why not? Can a word make you bleed? Let him unload his lip on you. Let him talk his Yanqui Go Home routine. You want to debate the history of presidential foreign policy? Or do you want to get Quesada? You don't even read the newspapers, how can you talk about anything?"

"It's what yew said that started him off."

"Forget it. Let the Pol do the talking." Gadgets glanced to Blancanales, who talked earnestly with the young Salvadoran officer ten meters away. "He's got the talent for it. Why don't you watch the teenager? He's been praying nonstop. I got to check out this funky radio here."

Gadgets spread out tools and electronics on the seats of the jeep. Lyons went to the other jeep. The boy lay in the back, tied hand and foot, his head pillowed on OD green cans of belted 7.62mm NATO.

"Hey, Ricardo. How you doing?"

The boy looked up with tears and blood streaming down his face. " Senor comandante, por favor. Tengo quinze anos. No soy un comunista. No soy un comunista …"

Lyons glanced at the clotted blood matting the boy's hair. He went to the cases of gear and searched through the equipment for the first-aid kit. With alcohol and a wad of tissue, Lyons cleaned the clots away from the cut on the boy's head. The care indicated to the teenager that the hard-eyed North American did not intend to execute him.

" Gracias, senor. Gracias ..."

"Be quiet, kid. Everything'll be okay. If you'll quit the People's Army of Murder, I'll take you to L.A. We got a half million Salvadorans up there already."

"Okay, senor . Okay, okay."

"Okay, what?"

"Okay, okay. Solamente quinze, anos, no soy un soldado …"

Lyons called out to Blancanales. "Hey, Pol. What did this kid tell you?"

Jogging over to Lyons, Blancanales answered in a low voice. "No time to question him yet. You going to bandage his head? Good. Excellent interrogation technique, gaining the confidence and gratitude of a prisoner. I wouldn't have expected it of you."

"Because I'm just an animal, right?" Lyons shot back, angry at his partner. "I don't let junior hotshots badmouth my country and my president, so I'm an animal. I guess I'll just go clean my weapon. Get ready to annihilate another group of Latin American intellectuals and social reformers. Onward Yanqui soldiers…"

A voice blared out. Lyons and Blancanales whipped around to see Gadgets switching on a tape recorder. He set the recorder in front of the unmarked, nonmilitary radio.

Joining his partners, he said, "That voice sounds official. Like he's a commander. Maybe you could fake an answer to throw the Commies off us."

"Perhaps…" Blancanales moved quickly to the jeep. He listened to the transmission.

"It's ComBloc equipment?" Lyons asked.

Gadgets shook his head. "This is good equipment. The black box comes with encoding and screech transmission circuits. It's as good as what we got from the National Security Agency. Even has a digital code switch. If you don't know the code, you can't turn it on."

"How'dj'oudoit?"

"Bypassed the ten-key with my pulse generator. The electronics put infinite combinations into the circuit until it clicked."

Lieutenant Lizco left his sentry position at the road. He returned to the jeep and listened carefully to the voice, concentrating on the voice itself and its speech patterns. He slowly looked up to the North Americans, his face slack with disbelief.

"That," he said, "is Quesada…"

In the army cuartel of San Francisco Gotera, North American and European journalists crowded around the commander of Las Boinas Verdes, Colonel Alfredo Perez, as he spoke in English of the U.S.-sponsored pacification program. He posed against a ceiba tree, his camouflage fatigues starched and creased, his jump wings flashing on his chest, an Uzi machine pistol slung casually over his right shoulder. His deep, resonant voice boomed in the garrison courtyard.

At one time, the cobblestoned courtyard — brilliant with bougainvillea and hibiscus, shaded by the ceiba — echoed with typing and ringing telephones as the town officials of Gotera administered the prosperous farming region. Secretaries hurried from office to office in the two-story stucco-and-tile buildings framing the courtyard. The national police maintained an office on the ground floor where officers slept through their careers.

A guerrilla bomb had destroyed the national-police office. The soldiers now quartered in the civic buildings had placed a Browning Model 1919A6 .30-caliber machine gun pointing out through a window bricked-in to a horizontal slit. The weapon's field of fire included the town square, the Cine Morazan, the church, and a cafe advertising Coca-Cola and Cervezas Pilsner. Where the now-deceased policemen had slept with their chairs tilted against the walls, soldiers slept against sandbags. On the second-floor balconies where secretaries had minced from office to office in their tight skirts, their heels clicking on the tiles, soldiers played cards behind rows of sandbags, oblivious to the American-accented English of their commander.

"The political details and legal technicalities don't concern me. My duty is the protection of the administrators and the campesinos. If the guerrillas kill the government workers or the farmers who work the land, they kill the reforms.

"Though the war requires more supplies of material from the United States, the reforms are the best weapon we have to defeat the Communists.

"While the Marxists promise a new social order, the government of El Salvador creates a new order.

"The guerrillas make promises while they burn fields and cut roads and destroy bridges. We issue land titles and loan money for seed and fertilizer.

"We'll win. It may take a year or two to drive all the Communists back to Nicaragua and Cuba and Russia, but we'll win because the people of El Salvador are with us."