A worker came over to chase the children away, and the young boy who looked so much like my son scampered up the hill, his form dissolving behind a beige veil. Jane stepped into my vision, her face signaling worry.
“Are you okay, Ash?”
I did not answer. Instead, I returned to the convoy.
This experience will haunt me for a long time. I’ll dream of the abandoned skyscrapers of Honduras, vertical slums catching twilight through their hollowed-out frames, and the women who were baking cookies from salt, butter, and dirt to feed their children. I’ll remember donning galoshes to squelch through the few muddy ponds remaining of Lake Chad on the Nigerian border—once one of the mightiest bodies of fresh water in Africa, now only a salt-blasted desert lake bed that maintains the name. I’ll find time to write of our security convoy traveling through a heat-seared IDP camp north of Kidal in east Mali, the makeshift city awash in plastic tarps attempting to catch condensation while people clotted around the only well, this immense brick-lined straw in the earth, and used ropes to lower buckets to the bottom to fill their cisterns.
Again, I ask, who ultimately was this fact-finding mission for? Certainly not the children watching us longingly in every city or village hoping we’d hand over a pack of snack mix from the airplane. Not their parents, some of whom approached us to beg that we take their sons or daughters with us. Not their governments, to which we promised to implore our recalcitrant nation to send more food aid. At times it felt like we were only in these failing, hungry, violent states to convince ourselves that the American empire has any footing left in the world, that it could be compassionate or heroic when called upon to do something other than deliver weapons to whatever political faction it deemed least likely to cause it problems.
On the flight back home from the Philippines, with most of my fellow fact finders asleep, I read from a report on India. The fascist Hindu government is executing a grueling endgame as it attempts to corner and starve its Muslim population. I was lost in thought on this harrowing subject when a rough and gnarled index finger intruded, tapping the paper twice:
“Some light reading while you can’t sleep?”
Admiral Michael Dahms slid into the open seat beside me. I regarded him for a moment.
“The Hindu government is using our visit as propaganda to declare what a humane job it’s doing.”
Dahms nodded solemnly. He had the physique of a bodybuilder, a smooth bald head with the overlarge ears of an elderly man, and a distractingly large mole on his nose that must catch his vision incessantly. He looked hard and brittle and spoke with a hoarse voice ravaged by polyps:
“These situations with allies are incredibly complex.”
“Obviously what has proved most edifying, Admiral, are not the states we visited but those we were not allowed into.” Here I spoke of multiple governments, including US allies, referred to in the report, that are using the disruption in the global food supply to administrate starvation. “Or perhaps President Love is in agreement with these methods.”
Dahms shifted uncomfortably and looked at the screen on the seatback, which showed our plane hovering in the middle of the Pacific. He then proceeded to offer me a pointless condolence:
“I would say I’m sorry for your loss. And I am. But I’m sure that means exactly bupkis to you.”
I regarded him with great animosity.
“May I ask why you haven’t resigned like so many other officials in the executive branch?”
“Impractical.” He spat the word more than said it, and I thought he might leave it at that. After a moment, though, like most people in a defensive moral posture, his justification stumbled on. “I’m a hyperrealist. Forty years in the service will make you that way. Resignations get to an itch for self-regard. What Vice President McGuirk did was deeply stupid. There may yet come a time when events necessitate that a steady hand be at least near the rudder.” His eyes moved around the plane. The cabin was dark, humming, but otherwise silent. Not one other passenger seemed awake. His voice was wounded: “This is not in President Love’s defense. Not at all. But what he’s looking at every day in the daily intelligence brief, it’s truly terrifying. What happened in Washington, it’s nothing compared to what’s going on out there on the rest of the planet. You’ve seen the reports on the India-Bangladesh border. Pakistan. The Uyghur autonomous zone.”
“Saudi Arabia’s policy of mass starvation of its own citizens to root out insurgents. Israel’s closing off food access for Gaza and the West Bank. IDF robo-snipers and auto-kill zones.”
“We’d be calling these war crimes if the politics would allow us. Or genocides.”
Now that word buzzed in the air. I was very surprised he’d been the one to say it.
I said: “The term ‘war crime’ could as easily be applied to what happened in Washington.”
Dahms rubbed his upper lip, and with some agitation nodded. “Of course. And there is no one more appalled by what happened than me. But when folks are trying to manage chaos with no good options, they are forced to make extreme decisions quickly. We have a band of lawlessness and slaughter now encompassing the earth. The president has been downright restrained compared to some of his counterparts. There is intense political pressure to go much further than he has. My job is to be the voice that keeps his worst impulses in check. He needs advisors other than Yes Men—or Yes Women. Christ, Caperno wanted to hit the Mall with a drone strike.” I could not tell if he was joking. “We need people who can ride herd on his worst notions.”
He was looking at me almost eagerly.
“I’m not sure what you want from me, Admiral. Absolution is not something I’m capable of giving you. We do what we think is right, each of us, with the information we have available.”
I turned my head to the window to indicate I wanted him to go back to his seat. And without another word, he did. Drifting over the vast expanse of the Pacific through the earth’s most perfect and silent slice of night, I thought of the arrogance the living carry. We ensconce ourselves in an epistemological certainty born from the mere fact that we’ve known history marginally longer than the dead. We elbow each other knowingly at their failures and ignorance. We almost never ask what it is that we don’t yet know.
While you took to the media to describe what our delegation had seen on its journey around a starving, panicked world, I collected Forrest from my sister and returned to D.C. to write my report. Yet as I got to work, Seth still lingered in every corner of the house, and I found myself unable to focus until I excised him. I began by removing the pictures, then donating his clothes. His toothbrush and other toiletries went in the trash. His devices, I backed up, wiped, and recycled.
I also took this time to begin an experiment. Most of the malnourished people we came across had access to only six hundred calories a day, sometimes less. I allotted twelve hundred calories each day for Forrest and myself and started work on the white paper. Each morning began the same. I’d prepare a bit of soy milk and applesauce for Forrest and granola and milk for myself, and we would not eat again until that night. Of course, the very first day, he began crying around one o’clock and did not stop until I gave him a half cup of macaroni with chopped broccoli at 5 p.m. I ate only a small can of soup. We proceeded like this.