Piecework

“She wanted to leave right now,” he said. “With her four children. I told her it would be better to wait a day, until it was safer. Who knows? Maybe her town is gone, too. She wanted to know if the Israelis were leaving, or if they would stay for a long time.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I didn’t know. I said the United Nations troops were here now, and we would know soon if it would be safe.”

The sea was pounding hard against the empty beach, drowning the din of the camp. He walked me back to the gate and shook my hand and wished me a good journey. The road was heavy with traffic. Iraqi trucks moved along slowly, their cargoes covered with wet yellow tarpaulins, presumably weapons for the PLO. A truck full of refugees came from the other direction and slowed to look at the camp.

The driver exchanged some words with the PLO guard, shook his head and moved north. Androuous walked through the crowd, nodding, listening, doing his work. Just past him I could see the woman with the cinnamon-colored skin, cradling her baby, squatting in her tent. She was still crying, for everything.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS,

March 24, 25, and 26, 1978

NICARAGUA

I.

The phone rings suddenly in the darkness of pre-dawn Managua. Can I be ready in 20 minutes for a trip up north with some of the Sandinista commandantes? An hour and a half later, I’m in a small bus with a group of journalists. The announcer on Radio Sandino is exhorting us to defend the revolution, while a young woman hands out sandwiches, cookies and Pepsi-Cola.

Ahead of us, two escort jeeps bristle with automatic weapons. Off the road, a small boy tends a chestnut horse, but doesn’t look at the convoy. The radio announcer gives way to Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing.”

Then we notice who is driving the Range Rover, directly behind us, with Nicaragua Libre license plate MAY S 177. It’s Daniel Ortega. He is the 38-year-old “coordinator” of the nine-man junta that has ruled Nicaragua since July 19, 1979. He’s driving almost casually, talking to others, gesturing languidly with a free hand.

“Anybody want another sandwich?” the young woman asks.

Forty-five minutes later, the bus stops abruptly. We’ve gone a hundred feet past an unmarked dirt road, and the driver has to back up. So do the two jeeps. Standing at the junction with the dirt road are Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, who runs the nation’s agrarian reform program, Joaquin Cuadra, chief of staff of the Sandinista army, and junta member Rafael Cordova Rivas. Ortega is moustached, wearing glasses, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a permanently disappointed way.

“They look like they’re about to take over a college dorm,” someone says, and of course we all laugh with the shock of recognition. The Sandinista commandantes are obviously serious men, survivors of combat, prisons or torture. But most of them are children of the ’60s; they’re the first successful revolutionaries in the world who grew up listening to rock ’n’ roll. In an important way, the overthrow of the 45-year-old Somoza dynasty wasn’t a victory of the Stalinoid cementheads of the Kremlin; it was the only true victory of the New Left.

We see more of this loose, casual ’60s style as the convoy moves up the dirt road and we come over a rise, glimpse three Soviet-built MI-8 helicopters in a field, and rows of barracks with soldiers lounging in the shade. A sign says: “The People of Sandino Are a Victorious Army,” but from a barracks radio I can also hear a Spanish version of “The Great Pretender.” Ortega strolls over to some officers and soldiers, and starts to chat. Wheelock stretches, smothers a yawn, removes his hat and ruffles his hair. Cuadra says something and Wheelock guffaws. This is not the way Charles de Gaulle arrived at an army base.

Then we are hurrying across a field to the helicopters, bound for a “Cara al Pueblo” - literally “Face to the People” — a kind of Sandinista town meeting. A man in civilian clothes, with the grave flat face of an ex-pug, slides behind the mounted AK-47 at the open door. We lift off.

For people my age, I suppose every green countryside seen from a helicopter will always look like Vietnam. On this morning, over this land, the resemblance was uncanny. Down there you could see deep thick jungle, miles of dense valleys winding through mountains. You don’t take that kind of country with gunboats or air strikes or rhetoric; you can only take it with infantry.