The interviews have been scheduled back-to-back, one man coming in as another leaves, the Public Affairs container having taken on the quiet, hangdog air of a Catholic confessional. We just listened to the commanding officer of an inshore boat unit that protects Navy ships from USS Cole–type terrorist attacks in the port of Djibouti City. He demonstrated the maneuvers using Seamus’s stapler as the “high-value asset” kept safe by a tape dispenser and a bottle of allergy pills, zigzagging across each other’s paths. An inopportune bathroom break would leave the stapler vulnerable to attack. Even if crew stick to their posts, their vigilance is compromised; “illness preoccupation” is an overlooked military liability of diarrhea.
We heard a similar tale from a bombardier. On a long sortie out of Diego Garcia island, the only crew member capable of operating the plane’s defensive equipment abruptly left his post to use the chemical toilet—while flying over Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. On the return flight, a faulty seal combined with the pressure differential between the toilet’s tiered chambers caused the contents to spew into the crew cabin. “Be assured,” he deadpanned, “this blue-brown precipitation affected the navigator’s ability to concentrate on his duties.”
Our 3:30 is retired from Special Operations, now working as a contractor. A tattoo on the inside of one forearm depicts a pair of crossed metal objects that I can’t identify but guess to be martial arts weapons of some variety. When I ask what his job is, he answers cryptically, “I fix things.” I take this to be a euphemism for some unspeakable niche calling—eliminating witnesses, disposing of bodies, God knows. Subsequent conversation reveals that the man is, in fact, a mechanic. He fixes things. The objects in the tattoo turn out to be pistons.
The mechanic was hit with diarrhea every time his team deployed. Because of this, he was never assigned any “long-range surveillance,” meaning counter-terrorism missions deep into insurgents’ turf. These missions, he says, entail hiding out in a hole,** watching a particular spot—say, an intersection: who comes and goes, how many trucks drive through, at what time of day.
I nod, but don’t entirely understand. “To find out . . . ?”
“Do we aim a bomb here.”
“Ah.” Silly me.
I ask the Special Operations mechanic whether he knows of a vital operation that might have been compromised because someone got a vicious case of food poisoning. He dismisses the very idea. “The guys they select for this type of work? They don’t have these types of problems. They’re selected for a reason.”
After he leaves, Seamus turns to us. “Wow, do you think that’s part of the screening for Special Operations? Give you some bad food, see how you do?” He’s joking, but in fact 20 percent of the population are what Riddle calls “nongetters”: people who can eat ceviche from street vendors, drink the water, never get sick. It would certainly be an asset. Riddle wonders whether Special Operators take antibiotics or Imodium prophylactically, just in case, before critical missions. Or are they just suffering in silence? The Camp Lemonnier Special Ops doctor—they have their own, natch—talked about the men’s reluctance to seek medical help lest they lose their Special Operator status.
Riddle and I have a lot of questions. Alas, no one from Special Operations replied to the diarrhea email.
Perhaps a second email is in order, this one offering compensation. Riddle advises against it. He says people will make up a story to get the cash. He has had men sign up for the diarrhea study, go into the bathroom, and hand him a Commode Specimen Collection tub with a perfectly formed turd inside.
“Also?” Seamus again. “I’m done sending out PSAs about diarrhea. I’m set.” He got some blowback from Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa headquarters regarding appropriate content for base-wide email.
Chow is my one shot.
SEAMUS NELSON is six foot three. When he extends his neck to its full reach, his head is like a periscope. It’s up now, surveying a sea of clean-shaven, supper-chewing heads in the Camp Lemonnier dining facility. He’s scanning for facial hair. Only two categories of men here are allowed to wear beards:?? Special Ops and civilian contractors who want to look like Special Ops.
“There’s your guy.” The neck now retracted. “Far corner by the door.”
Riddle and I rise from our seats. We saw this man yesterday, coming out of the tactical shop. Even without the beard, you’d know he’s one of them. There are men who attempt to broadcast toughness by what they wear or drive or have tattooed on themselves. And there are others, like this man, who do nothing to cultivate or consciously project it, and yet it is obvious. It accretes naturally of the things they’ve experienced.
Besides, I saw him go into the secure zone.
This promises to be awkward. It’s not just the topic. It’s how people like this make you feel: the sudden reveal of your smallness and the inconsequential preoccupations of your existence. What could be smaller than writing about diarrhea? And how to explain why I’ve singled him out?
“Seamus, come with me. Introduce me.”
Seamus peels an orange, one long strip spiraling down to his tray. “I don’t know, Mary. We weren’t trained on this in public affairs school.”
I collect my notepad and tape recorder.
“Hang on.” Seamus, clearly stalling, wipes orange from his fingers, one at a time. “I’m going to be shaking his hand. He’ll kill me.” He lowers his voice: “You got me sticky.”
I stand up. Seamus makes a brief, warbling unhappiness sound and pushes back his chair.
We cross the cafeteria, nervous middle-schoolers at the dance. The man sees us but does not alter his expression. We stop a couple feet back from the table. Some kind of attitudinal concertina wire. Seamus plunges ahead. “Mind if we join you for a second?”
The man takes hold of the sides of his meal tray. “I’m done.”
“We . . .”
“I’m leaving.”
Seamus keeps paddling. “Do you have time for a quick question, what line of work are you in?” What line of work are you in! I adore Seamus Nelson.
The man glances at Seamus, at me, and back to Seamus. “Who are you.” Said like something thrown.
“I’m in Public Affairs, and this is an author. She’s working on a chapter for a book, and she’s specifically focused on how diarrhea impacts a mission . . .”
This is my cue. I’m going to assume the man is Special Operations, and that he knows we know. “I was wondering whether you might ever have been in a situation where . . . in a critical mission that . . .” I back up. “Well, because diarrhea is looked on as sort of a silly—”
“It’s not.”
He speaks softly, and what he says next I can’t quite make out. Something about being curled up in a hole in the fetal position. He says that where he just got back from, some unnamed “out station” in Somalia, it hits everyone. This is probably not exaggeration. In Riddle’s survey of diarrhea in Iraq and Afghanistan, 32 percent of respondents reported having been in a situation where they couldn’t get to a toilet in time. And Special Operators in the field get sick twice as frequently as everyone else.
His name, he says, is Carey. He invites us to sit down. I place my tape recorder in plain view—that is to say, in plain view of anyone on my side of the table. That is also to say, behind the condiment caddy.
I need Carey to set the scene. “What if you . . . I mean, what if someone were a sniper, and they’re in a hide for . . . well, how many hours would it be?”