Working papers
Reflections on a life
Afterthoughts become Prologue
Posted on July 8, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
(Note: this blog post will change as memories come back to me and i seek to fill the spaces. You may want to check back after a few days.)
Today’s American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) Daily Media Digest (July 8, 2020) is teasing us in a fascinating way. Scroll down, past the News and Articles and past Opinions and Blogs and there is a section called Odds and Ends. What’s this? Is my friend Diplopundit now editing the Daily Media Digest? She’s known for playing tricks like this from her hideaway at that consulate in Australia.
So what’s the trick? There is a very subtle juxtaposition of almost poetic dimensions there at the bottom of the page. The first submission, from the 25-Year Apprentice website, is an article/interview by/with T. Pickering, the Grand Old Man of the Department of State who has weathered storms and blasts, and yes, scandals, and lived to tell about it. The second submission, by T. Spears (note the parallelity! Is that a word? Yes!) is a missive and a blog post that should have been in the upper Blogs and Opinions section, a letter from a potential careerist drummed out of the service way too early. Wrong sex, wrong race, wrong state of mind to serve in this hallowed and highly sought after apprenticeship. You see where I’m going, so I really don’t even need to go into too much detail. It’s just another tautology. Like Black Lives Matter. (I know, but I couldn’t resist!)
OK, I’ll not spoil it for you. But there is obviously a higher intelligence and a creative design at work at AFSA Daily Media Digest. I follow it religiously.
Different plate. My series of blog posts on my career transition is crying out for a prologue, in the classic Greek drama Euripidean sense, and perhaps a witty piece of verse that serves as a scene setter, a note from the playwright. That would be me!
The prologue might include an account of the fourteen years of my life before I got shipped off for the integration experiment. Life in my village. Life in the tribe, among my kinsmen, a fitting prelude to the Section #10 Epilogue and beyond. We will see. Apparently time is on my side.
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Prologue
“Thou knowest my years entire, my life,
(My long and crowded life of active work—not adoration merely;)
Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth;
Thou knowest my manhood’s solemn and visionary meditations;
Thou knowest how, before I commenced, I devoted all to come to Thee;
Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows, and strictly kept them;
Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee;
(In shackles, prison’d, in disgrace, repining not,
Accepting all from Thee—as duly come from Thee.)”
— Walt Whitman, Prayer of Columbus
Class of 1960, Metropolitan Day Nursery and Kindergarten, Greensboro
I’ll begin with this: I cannot remember a time in my life when I couldn’t read and write. There must’ve been a time, but I certainly do not remember it. I remember reading bible verses in Sunday school and writing letters to my aunts and cousins, all before first grade. Then I remember helping Mrs. Cooke, my first grade teacher at Bluford, with other students with their first reading lessons. See Dick run with Spot and all that.
I should also mention that everything described here took place in Greensboro, NC, mainly in the Dudley Heights community. On Sundays we’d take road trips to see my father’s family folks in the Jackson community of Brown Summit, NC, just a few miles up US 29, or to see my mom’s folks in Draper, NC, a few more miles up US 29. Our whole lives existed within that one hour radius.
I remember weekly trips with my Dad, my sister, Sheila, and I to Carnegie Library to check out books. I developed an early love for the library and for librarians. Then Daddy bought me the 24-in-1 electronics kit (Norelco) where you could build projects on a peg board. That was third grade. (Just checked and that kit is still available on Ebay in the original box. Amazing!) I fell in love with building electronics stuff, radios, musical keyboards, light and moisture detectors, etc., which was probably the point! Also in the third grade I began playing viola and did that right up through 8th grade jayvee football.
It was the 4th grade when I started reading whole books. I don’t mean kiddie books, but what would now be considered young adult fiction. There was the book about the puff snake, and the book about the time-traveling boy who came back for a baseball game. That year I also started with the classics: I, Juan de Pareja; A Wrinkle in Time; Shadow of a Bull; and my favorite, cover to cover, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In the fifth grade I discovered the black classics, no doubt assisted by my favorite teacher of all time, Mrs. Lillian Jeffries Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy and my father grew up together out in Brown Summit, just 16 miles away. I always suspected something had gone on between them back in the day. She brought me dog-eared copies of the Richard Wright novels, Black Boy and Native Son. I didn’t understand everything i read, but plowed through it nonetheless. Then she kept us for the 6th grade, she said she loved us so much, and graduated me to Ellison’s Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and all the James Baldwin paperbacks at the time, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Notes to a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time (the mother of a gal pal who was also a teacher would later introduce me to Giovanni’s Room and Blues for Mr. Charlie. I read though both with a more mature relish). And poetry. Mrs. Kennedy taught us poetry that we would memorize, and monologues from plays and famous speeches and writings like the Declaration of Independence. And there was viola twice a week and private lessons with Mr. Scott and practicing at home.
Meanwhile, on the weekends, I would go with Daddy on electrical jobs. I’d be the one to crawl into attics and underground crawl spaces and between walls and pull the wires. Daddy would say “Don’t be scared now,” but truth be told, I was often terrified in some of those dark and damp spaces. Terrified. But I told myself I could do it and I wanted to help my dad and be a real electrician’s helper! Then after we were done, he’d take me fishing out in the country (most of the jobs were in rural areas in Guilford County) and that made it all worthwhile.
At some point we, that is, the boys in our block, Kenny, Pete, Rodney, Larry and me discovered the wonder of riding our bikes down to Buffalo Creek to catch tadpoles and guppies and the occasional salamander. Then we’d transfer the tadpoles to a big tub in the backyard and watch everyday as they turned into little frogs and escaped. One day we discovered that the stream at the end of our street was just a runoff tributary to the real Buffalo Creek. As we walked along the side of the stream, all of a sudden the grass got higher and the water got deeper and we got scareder and scareder and begin to backtrack to safety. When I told my father about it, he drove me out to a bridge out Willow Road that crossed the real Buffalo Creek and showed me how water moccasins skimmed the surface and copperheads hung out on the shore. Never again would we “discover” Buffalo Creek tributaries!
It was also the 6th grade when I joined the Boy Scouts. It was Camp Wenasa every summer and sometimes twice a summer. (Note: Camp Wenasa had just integrated and black troops were allowed to participate. Occasionally, my troop alone, Troop #442 sponsored by Grace Lutheran Church, would go to Camp Carlson, an old abandoned camp where black troops could go on weekend camping trips before integration. End note.) I would lug books with me for reading between camping and hiking and campsite projects and merit badge meetings. Every merit badge dealing with nature and conservation, and every one related to electronics, radio and computers was on my sash, along with a few of the required ones. And Camp Wenasa had the best blueberry pancakes for breakfast in the dining hall.
I think this was the same summer that I got three yards to cut during the summer. Mr. Foster on Lincoln Street and Mr. Speight on Benbow Road had their own lawnmowers and I just had to show up and push. And there were always nice snacks. For Mrs. Whitehead on Lincoln Street I had to bring the lawnmower from home, but it was just a block away. And paid a bit better. And no snacks! It could have been an every summer gig had I stuck with it, but in the 7th grade I chose to go out and got a summer job with an outfit called the Neighborhood Youth Corp (or something like that) where I started out with library work at Gillespie School and finished the summer doing windows and janitorial work at UNC-G. This would have been around 1968, and the UNC-G counterculture was at its height – bookshops, used record stores, funky restaurants. I remember buying my first John Coltrane album, Sunship, and I discovered in a bookshop on Tate Street the Franz Fanon’s trio, The Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin White Masks, and A Dying Colonialism. Heady reading for a rising 8th grader.
I was headed to Eagle when time ran out. I quit Scouting and the viola in exchange for 8th grade football. Not sure why but at the time it was one or the other. I “went out” for Lincoln’s jayvee team and survived summer training. Coach Kanoy made me jayvee captain and I played offense and defense and every special team. We only had five games but we went undefeated and unscored upon. I knew I had a future in the NFL! We’ll come back to that in a subsequent post.
We learned all our sex education from the older girls and guys at weekly Jr. Usher Board meetings. They really should not have left us without adult supervision in that church! I often wondered if they had the same fun in the junior choir. I somehow doubt it.
And always, beginning in the fourth grade, fleeting little crushes. Marian, and Pearlita, and Linda, and Karen, and then in junior high, Denise, and Janice, and Sylvia. Innocent, fun, special.
The Carnegie Library moved from Bennett College to the new Southeast branch after integration. Hanging out with the big boys, Reggie, Skip, Rodney and Bobby, we biked downtown to get library cards when integration came. I didn’t tell my parents until we got back. I got in a bit of trouble for that. The librarians all transferred from the Carnegie Library to the Southeast branch of Greensboro Public Library so we already knew them and they knew us. We’d go every afternoon for homework and flirting with girls who went to different schools, evenings during football season.
Kenny and I took over the newspaper route in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade year. We had about 100 customers across Dudley Heights. Kenny did Pichard and Dunbar Streets and I covered Lincoln and Hook Streets. The 4 or 5 dollars a week we cleared after paying the weekly paper bill kept us in comic books, a summer that began with innocently enough with Superman and Batman and the Fantastic Four and ended with Daredevil, Spiderman, and, wait for it, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes (the Vietnam influence). And the occasional movie at the National Theatre (where blacks still had to sit in the balcony), and french fries from a downtown Greensboro bar where we should not have been going.
And the reading never stopped. Not that I understood everything I read, but a lot of it was beginning to make sense. I especially loved reading the steamy stuff in the coming of age books, Manchild in the Promised Land, Down These Mean Streets, and The Learning Tree. We passed that stuff around like it was pornography. For us it was pornography.
It was the summer between 8th and 9th grade when I met the Baha’i people and the Black Muslims, folks going door-to-door proselytizing. It was the same summer that I got my first summer reading list for Woodberry Forest and chose to read The Greening of America, Future Shock, Silent Spring, and Soul on Ice. Soul on Ice was, frankly, a tough read for a 14 year old! Thus armed, I packed my belongings in a trunk and made the trip to Woodberry Forest.
A “catching up” email on a similar subject:
It’s been a busy summer, even though the lockdown has us teleworking 99% at the memory factory (but I’ll get to that later).
50 years ago this summer I was girding up for what would become the signature experience of my life, the integration of Woodberry Forest School. Here’s the interesting story in a nutshell. Ex-Confederate Captain Robert Walker acquired a mansion and a large plot of land in central Virginia from President James Madison’s ne-er do well baby brother, Willey, designed and architected by Madison’s partner in crime, Thomas Jefferson (though we now forgive them all). Walker started a school to educate his sons, pulling his oldest son out of UVA law school and installing him as headmaster, a post he held until his death 50 years later. (p.s. James Madison was a leading proponent of Negro repatriation, and we have Liberia (Americans), Sierra Leone (British) and Nigeria (Brazilians) to show for that brain fart.)
In the 60’s, the great white fathers of Woodberry decided that their boys needed a more “multi-cultured” exposure because the world, she was a-changing. They called up an alum who ran a foundation in North Carolina to dispose of the fortune of another alum who had been huge in North Carolina textiles and said, “We need to integrate. Find us some worthy colored students.” But not yet. Wait until after the capital fund-raising project in 1968 so as not to scare off big donors. In 1969 the school also admitted their first Asian student, their first Jewish student, and their first known Native-American.
Greensboro, Durham, Fayetteville, Houston, and Washington, DC would provide that black human fodder. And off we marched.
This year we lost one of the original crew to ALS. That event has served to reconnect the remaining few. My re-entry to the Woodberry orbit came in 2013, when, you guessed it, one of my classmates made the connection between me and that guy involved in that Benghazi mess. Good guy, did a stint in the Marine Corps and returned home to run the family pipe business, found me and called me up. “Ray, are you that guy? What can we do to help?” Small world.
Impossible to make this all up, I am turning my hand to fiction-writing after penning a two-act play I buried and over a thousand pages of poetry my grand nephew has been instructed to publish posthumously.
And the memory factory. While on extended admin leave, I started taking classes in the Library and Information Science program at Catholic U. After finishing it i worked a series of librarian and archivist jobs, settling on archiving as my calling. While serving as town archivist in the tony Maryland suburb of Garrett Park, I got a call from Howard University’s famed Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where I have been for the past two years. Y’all would not believe the stuff they have. But I am fairly certain that after the vandals take down all the statues, they’ll be coming after the libraries, archives and museums next. America’s Cultural Revolution. So, as we speak, I’m planning my next caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis.
Woodberry Forest Memories
Shabazz Bakery Memories
Navy Memories
Afterthoughts become Prologue and beginnings
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Woodberry Forest School memories
Posted on July 30, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
More rumination than poetry….the great experiment
We are coming up on the 40th anniversary (2012) of the graduation of the first group of Anne C. Stouffer Foundation scholars. To mark that achievement, a bunch of us are holding monthly conference calls to plan a February 2016 reunion in Atlanta. Perhaps we’ll include some of the prominent luminaries, educators, politicians, etc., who were involved in the original experiment.
Here is my oral history submission from the archives:
It was an interesting, and maybe even a noble experiment.
Prelude. Lincoln Jr. High had never seen so many white people! John and Rosemary Ehle and a couple of other people working tape machines and taking notes took over the library (or was it the guidance counselor’s offices? One was across the hall from the other). I recall that once we were tested and selected, we had to submit a preference for schools. I thought Asheville, because it was closer, but my mother did some checking and discovered a whole bunch of Greensboro folks were already in the Woodberry family. My father was dead set against the whole enterprise, I remember, and he had his reasons, but my mother was all for it and all in for Woodberry Forest School.
We took a Greyhound bus up for the interview. It was winter and it was cold. Snow met us in the parking lot when we arrived by taxi from the bus stop in Orange, VA. But on the return trip we met some relatives in Richmond, where we spent the weekend before returning to Greensboro and Lincoln Jr. High. I finished out the semester, but learned before Spring that I would be Woodberry bound.
Ron Long, Terry Jones, and Art Gaines led the charge in 1969. They were the first generation, the pioneers. I think they had some interesting experiences, but I’ll leave that story to them to tell. In the second year, 1970, Ron Lipscomb, Kevin Miller, Wayne Booker and I arrived as boarding students, and Gary Mance and Wayne Williams came in as day students, tripling our numbers and making a significant addition to the number of variables in the social experiment. In 1971, Clifford Johnson and Robert Long, Ron’s younger brother, joined us, both as boarding students.
Of course, it didn’t take long for us to discover one another. Kevin and I both came from Greensboro and from Lincoln Jr. High. (Five Lincoln students went to Virginia prep schools that year under the Anne C. Stouffer Foundation. Veda Howell went to Foxcroft, another girl went to Chatham Hall whose name I can’t remember.). I don’t remember if we came together officially or if we just gravitated to a center. Gaines, Long and Jones were the big brothers we went to for advice. Ron Lipscomb and I had classes together. And we all played football that first fall: Ron, Art, Wayne and Gary on JV, Terry, Ronald, and I on Junior Orange, Kevin and Wayne Williams on Junior Black. In my second year I gravitated to cross country after showing some promise as a middle distance runner the previous spring. Several of us continued together in winter track, though Ronald Lipscomb early on distinguished himself in JV basketball in the winter, as did Ron Long in varsity baseball in the spring. Was I really the first African American in the history of the school to letter in cross-country? Damn, I guess I was.
We got into the habit of sitting together in the dining hall for Saturday and Sunday breakfasts, which were buffet and informal (no coat and tie, and no assigned seating). It is amusing looking back on it, and maybe even a bit contrived, but at the time it seemed the natural thing to do.
My favorite teachers. Dave Bloor tripled as my earth science teacher, track and cross country coach and assigned academic adviser. He was definitely one of my favorites. I learned so much from Mr. Bloor, in the classroom and on the track. I will never forget him. Bob Vasquez, my Spanish teacher, started me off on a language learning track (he was also my basketball coach, though his best efforts at converting me to basketball fell short). Wilfred Grenfell ranks right at the top; I lived for his history lectures, and he, more than any other, bears the blame for my insatiable curiosity about Middle East issues and about foreign affairs in general. Robin Breeden, our dorm guy, maybe we called him dorm master, would invite us into his apartment for tea and biscuits and tell us about the time he swam the English Channel. How I adored those “civilizing” chats. And the Bond couple, Tom and Vicki, with whom I studied both Spanish and French, fueled my thirst for foreign language skills that continues until today, with Portuguese and Arabic added along the way.
I have warm memories of running cross country. Those long autumnal runs, named Arrowpoint and Chicken Ridge, and the long 13-mile trek to Achsah and back, introduced me to and acquainted me with the beauty of Orange County. Those runs were the ambrosia that nourished my soul. The habit I formed, of finding wonders and magic in routine and mundane chores, like long distance runs, would later prove to be the source of personal and professional strength. But I digress. We had a great cross-country team, eventually winning the Virginia Prep League championship. The camaraderie of that team filled a social and a personal void for me.
In retrospect, my most enduring thoughts about the Woodberry experience center around its well known and highly regarded honor system. I will make an addendum to discuss the honor system, how I internalized it, and how it informed and influenced me in later life.
Still, though, for reasons perhaps imagined and perhaps real, thoughts lingered and grew within me that I really didn’t “belong.” Those thoughts reached a height in the spring of my second year, a growing and gnawing loneliness that I couldn’t explain or even understand. At the end of my second year, I told myself I would not return. The loneliness and alienation I felt at Woodberry, I would later come to learn, had a lot less to do with Woodberry and a lot more to do with me and my emergence from adolescence and puberty. It would stay with me through college, where, like a ship without a rudder, without an anchor, and without a means of propulsion, I bounced around for three long, uncertain years, changing my major almost every semester, back and forth from electrical engineering to biology to economics. It was actually an interesting combination. Finally, midway through 1978, the year I should have graduated from college, I left school at mid term, degree-less, and enlisted in the Navy’s Nuclear Power program and the submarine force. It was there that I finally hit my stride, serving four years in engineering billets on the USS Hammerhead (SSN-63) and the USS Michigan (SSBN-727(B)).
In the intervening years, I lost track of everybody. I bumped into Ron Lipscomb on Duke’s campus, maybe in 1976. A girl I dated knew Wayne Williams, also at Duke. Kevin Miller (God rest his soul) and I had mutual friends in Greensboro. In 1985, I went back and finished college and upgraded my Navy status from enlisted to commissioned. My tenure as a commissioned officer was a pre-set duration; I finished my four-year obligation and transferred to State and the Foreign Service in 1992.
While serving the London Embassy, I completed an M.A. at the School of Oriental and African Studies. There I earned the credential “Africanist.” It would serve me well in subsequent assignments, focusing my studies on decolonization, resolution of border disputes, and transnational organization legal identity.
I stumbled on Ron Long’s name in the news in the late 90’s and got back in touch. Ron put me in touch with Art Gaines, who by that time was doing humanitarian relief work in East Africa. Following assignments in Guinea-Bissau, London, Angola and Ghana, I landed a Washington job also covering East Africa. I thought maybe our paths would cross on many trips I made to Khartoum, but it wasn’t to be.
Afterword. The integration experiment was not for our benefit exclusively. The purpose was to produce a slightly different environment for the white boys who would be entering a changed world, a multi-colored world. One might even say they (the white boys) would need to get an early start developing more nuanced negotiating skills to retain mastery in that new world.
We were funded by an external foundation that counted every penny they spent on us. There were always questions about whether there would be funding in outlying years and threats that our families might have to pay an increasing portion of our expenses. It wasn’t enough that we were being provided as subjects in an experiment. In retrospect, there were so many racial undertones to the constant hazing and the honor system provided no protection against a constant barrage of hate speech and racist microaggressions.
One night during study hall I reached my breaking point. Two known racists, twins no less, and one of their little whipping boys were outside my room talking about “nigger this” and “nigger that,” and “that little son of a bitch, Maxwell.” My mother had sent a pound cake and i took a table knife from the dining hall to my room to cut slices. Well, without much thought, I grabbed that table knife and went out into the hall to confront my enemies. No blood was spilt, but telephone calls to parents got me a meeting the following day with the campus disciplinarian, Jack Glascock. No disciplinary action was taken on either side, but for them, and for me, everything changed. From that point on there was no more shouting of racial epithets outside my door, but the whispering throughout campus made me feel totally guilty and unworthy. It was as if I had violated some unwritten code. Perhaps I had. When I packed at the end of that semester I knew I would not be returning. What I didn’t know at the time was that the pendulum had been set in motion and I was yet to experience the other side of its swing.
A response 50 years later to the whipping boy:
Thanks for your e-mail. The years have passed. I would not have expected to hear from you, even with the e-mail I sent out to the general alumni crowd. It took some courage, moral courage on your part to reach out like this, and I want to acknowledge that courage from the outset. There is far too little courage left in the world.
That small event between you and me with the cake knife was a part of my decision not to return to Woodberry Forest for that third year. But only a small part. We were both young and trying to figure out the worlds we were about to enter. Whether being rich or poor, spoiled or not, was, over the long haul, largely immaterial. I felt at some level the need to return to Greensboro to spend time with my parents, to get to know them better in the few years they had remaining. To hear my father recite poetry. To hear my mother’s hopes and dreams for her children. I would have missed that had I returned to WFS. Looking back, I am glad that I remained home. Everything else worked itself out in time, though there were plenty of bumps in the road. But it was those bumps that made me the person that I am, that I have become, so no complaints there.
That’s my story. Roller coaster ride through college, dropped out and joined the Navy, two submarines in five years, back to college, Navy commission, back to sea on an aging destroyer, foreign service assignments in Africa and the Middle East and that most foreign of countries, Washington, DC, wonderful wife, pages and pages of poetry I’ve written that I can share with good friends over aged scotch. Early retirement in a city apartment filled with books. Not too shabby for a poor boy from Greensboro.
I never disliked you and I bear no grudges. I stopped doing grudges a long time ago. I have wondered how those Peterson boys are doing, but I imagine they are functioning in their world, as I am in mine, in the world I have created for myself. That’s what we do over the years, isn’t it, create our world for ourselves and live in it.
I hope things are going well for you. There are bumps in every road. I have helped people navigate their bumps, and people have helped me navigate mine. It is a continuous process, one that keeps unfolding in front of you.
I have meandered. Forgive me for going on and on. It is my therapy and maybe it works for you too.
Let me know. We can continue.
Ray
p.s. Keep being courageous. The Portuguese say, “Coragem!” (Have courage!).
Shabazz Bakery memories – the lost years
Posted on July 28, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
In the spring of 1972, I voluntarily withdrew from the prep school integration experiment. The pendulum swung and I took a deep dive into my black nationalism period.
From September, 1973 until July, 1975 I lived in Washington, DC and for the majority of that period I worked at Shabazz Bakery. During the day I was finishing up my senior year in high school and taking university-level courses, I worked second shift, 4-12 midnight, at the bakery. It was tough going back and forth, catching one bus on Florida Avenue to 8th and I St, and a second one to Anacostia, but I was young and energetic and I pushed through it. I remember having to walk several blocks through a tough neighborhood after midnight when I got off the bus at the end of my shift. The brothers told me to walk fast and look straight ahead. That’s what I did and nobody ever bothered me. It would turn out to be a good lesson in life: Walk fast and look straight ahead.
In my first bakery position, I was apprenticed to the pastry maker. I made mistakes, God did I make mistakes! I let the donuts proof too long, and sometimes the icing came out either too thick or too watery. I figured it out quickly though. My boss was a funny guy. Often I could feel him staring at me from behind the cooling racks. He always went there to eat pastries we had prepared. Oh yeah. The bakery had a firm “no snacking” policy, which I was ok with, but those who broke the rules had to sneak while doing it. I’ll not mention my supervisor’s name because he died in ’75 and one should not speak ill of the dead. He came down with some sort of virus, got weaker and weaker, and his absences from work got longer and longer. Eventually he passed away. I had moved back home by that time, but was still in the area, on an engineering co-op at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. I hitchhiked back to DC for the funeral.
From pastries I went to pie crusts, replaced in pastries by a new FOI member, Linzell. I would prepare a predetermined number of large and small pie shells based on the orders from the front shop and the route salesmen, stack them up, and have them ready for the pie guy who came in at midnight. Brother George. Very patient guy, very even-tempered. Student minister. Occasionally I would stay and make the pies with him. Brother Richard also came in around midnight to wash the pots and pans stacked in the stainless steel sinks from the previous day’s production. He and I lived in the same FOI house in Northwest. Richard took me under his wing. Somewhere I have a poem I wrote about him and the church songs he used to sing while slinging the pots and mixing bowls. Richard had made two migrations in his life: from Mississippi to Chicago, and from Chicago to Washington. My only migration was from Greensboro to Washington.
High school graduation was held in February, 1974, and my mother and sister came up from Greensboro to celebrate the occasion. I was salutatorian! I fell asleep at my cousin’s house after dinner and they let me sleep through my bakery shift. George stepped up and covered for me. What a prince of a guy!
On those overnights I became buddies with the guys in shipping, Lawrence, Dayne, and Carl, whose main job was preparing the orders for outgoing distribution the next morning. There was bread to bag and label, pies to wrap, and cakes and cookies to box and/or wrap. And gingerbread, our famous gingerbread with raisins and chocolate icing to cut and wrap individually. We had three route salesman, Jeffrey, Darnell and James. James was from Martinsville, VA and had studied engineering at A&T. Jeffrey was the Mosque’s leading Muhammad Speaks salesman. I think at one point he was pushing 1000 copies per week. The day bakers were Ralph, Charles and Floyd. Michael came later. Ralph and Floyd both adopted me as their little brother and showed me the ropes. Charles had been a basketball player at Howard and was always very intellectual and sophisticated. We had long chats and conversations about life from time to time. He had been friends with Paula, a girl from Pichard Street who went to Howard. And the Bakery had two managers, James and Melvin. Melvin was from Greensboro. James from from New Jersey and had also been a student at Howard.
The folks in the Mosque referred to the bakery brothers as “the scientists.” It was a derogatory reference to conversations we had late at night, on the midnight shift, that leaked out perhaps, conversations questioning a lot of the fundamental tenets of the faith. No, we had concluded, for example, Fard Muhammad was not God in person and no, Elijah Muhammad was not infallible. No, twelve black scientists did not separate the moon mass from the Earth and send it hurtling into space. And yes, a lot of really bad shit went down in Detroit and Chicago in the 20’s and the 30’s, including murders and ritual sacrifices, all of which resulted in the founding of the Nation of Islam under a cloak of secrecy. And yes, those thugs from the Newark Mosque did kill Brother Malcolm, the Newark Mosque, where, at the time, Farrakhan was minister. But the Yacub thing, and the Tribe of Shabazz thing? Well, maybe? I still haven’t figured it out.
As an aside, for several months the DC Mosque (Mosque #4) was locked in a rivalry with the Philadelphia Mosque (#12) over the sale of Muhammad Speaks newspapers. When we went up to 60,000 (weekly circulation), Philadelphia increased to 75,000. When we went up to 90,000, Philadelphia went up to 100,000. We pushed past to 105,000 and Philadelphia went to 125,000. This was about the same time that the so-called Black Mafia in Philadelphia had completely infiltrated the Mosque and was using it as a front for criminal operations, mostly drugs, extortion and prostitution. Street gangs controlling turf would be forced to buy bundles and bundles of Muhammad Speaks newspapers whether they sold them or not. It was probably a good time to be in the newsprint recycling business! Washington had no such Black Mafia infiltration, though we probably had plenty of US Government agents in our ranks. Eventually we yielded to Philadelphia’s numerical superiority. There has always been a tale of two cities thing going on between Philadelphia and Washington, going back to the early days of the republic. We were just another manifestation of an age-old struggle. Shortly after Elijah Muhammad’s death, we all drove up to Philadelphia where his son and the organization’s new leader, Wallace D. Muhammad, would give a keynote address, “Remake the World.”
For a short while during the following summer months I shifted my hours to begin a bit later and work through the night making pies as demand for bean pies increased. We were doing something right. And for a short while, as demand for carrot cakes increased, I would get an early start before her arrival helping Charlotte out with cake decorating, which took some practice, but she needed the help and I was a quick study and the cakes were a high profit margin item. The cake decorating training was where I fell in love with a much older woman, or so it seemed at the time when I was 18 and she was 27. But it happened. It was a period of extreme mania for me. I wrote poems and convinced myself the sky was the limit. There was this song Valerie Robinson played on WHUR’s Quiet Storm program every night, the Spinners, I’m Glad You Came Into My Life. It was our song. So silly. I lost the poems she wrote. I still have mine. Eventually Robin was hired to help with cakes. One of the managers had a thing for the cake decorator who trained me and resented the attention she was giving me. So he pushed me out of that close proximity situation by bringing in a new hire. But by that time the die was cast.
Our eventual breakup marked the end of my manic period. WHUR’s Quiet Storm played a new song by that time whose lyrics I didn’t really understand but I knew it had some bearing on my situation, Love Don’t Love Nobody. Lucky for me the pendulum did not swing from manic to depressive, or if it did I never noticed.
At some point I moved from pies and cakes to front shop management, working for Nelson. Nelson was a cool guy who didn’t suffer fools gladly. And I was a bit of a fool. But I learned a lot from him. In fact, I’d say I grew up under Nelson’s tutelage. Nelson ended up getting married to Robin, the new cake decorator.
Somewhere along the way I decided that bakery management was a worthy career path. I was still studying, but I was wondering whether it was worthwhile. The bakery was expanding, soon we’d have shops in Alexandria, in Arlington, in Seat Pleasant, and we, the original crew, would all get our own shops to run. Every other Monday we had Bakery meeting at the Mosque. Dr. Shabazz, the minister of #4 who presided over the meetings (and who was also my calculus tutor, though I never became the mathematician he would have had me become) would remind us how important the bakery was to community economic development, and by extension, how important our individual contributions were to its success. And we would talk about these long-range plans for expansion. I was a true believer.
That was before the Russian wheat deal and the effects of the Arab Oil embargo sent our commodity prices sky high, and before our manager, James, spent way more money than he should have on some used equipment he bought from a New Jersey mob-looking guy to mechanize our processes. The combination of events and their effects on prices of our ingredients pushed us into an unsustainable financial position. Oh yeah, and the Mosque leadership changed and the new minister insisted on changing all our recipes from all whole wheat to mixed white and whole wheat and from all honey and brown sugar to a white sugar mixture. Said it had worked for him down in New Orleans. Things went crazy, very crazy, and I got an offer to work as a short order cook at a joint some FOI brothers I knew ran, also in southeast, Amir’s Oasis. That lasted for a couple of months, but when my mother died unexpectedly, I packed my stuff and returned to Greensboro. The bakery is now an Islamic museum.
There’s a lot more for this chapter. I will fill it in as memories return to me.
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Here are some of the poems from that period
Part 8.
A number combination
unlocks the secrets
of the mysteries
of the microcosm called mind.
The young man asked,
“is there life after death?”
The middle-aged man replied,
“there is no life after death.”
The elder replied,
“there is no death.”
Shabazz Bakery poems and prayer-songs 1974-1975
Bakery Victory Song
Work on! O laborers of God!
Our goals have already been set,
Our eventual success is assured,
So we have no need for regret,
Since others through faith have endured.
Strive hard, O servants of God!
The mission is a dead land to raise,
And a new world to bring into being.
We must learn to submit and give praise
To the Lord of the Worlds, the All-seeing.
Fight on! O warriors of God!
The battles are bloody and long,
The trials are hard and severe,
So be brave, be steadfast, be strong,
We shall win if we just persevere.
August 1974
Bus Station
Newspapers and M&M’s
Coca-cola and a cigarette
Happiness/sadness
In its purest state –
A devil sitting there
Emotionless, expressionless,
Temporarily permanent
“We remind you that federal regulations permit…”
prostitution…
poverty…
ignorance…
drug addiction…
and every conceivable form of immorality….and
“…cigarette smoking only in the rear of the bus.…”
where black people are still forced to sit,
“…in seats clearly marked
for convenience.”
…now loading at Gate 3…
your schedule for:
Danville…
Lynchburg…
Charlottesville…
Washington…
Freedom?
Dear Mr/Mrs Paternalistic White/Black Supremacist,
how many men/women have you destroyed today
with your lustful liberality
with your calloused conceited charm
with your sinister southern smile,
How many of my people have you destroyed today?
How many have you paralyzed:
from the waist down?
from the neck up?
on either side?
How many have you paralyzed?
Did you reach your quota today?
1974
Laundromat at NY and NJ Avenues
dirty puddles of Clorox and
lemon–flavored Fab invade
my nostrils
pollution within
and pollution without.
a child drops her candy
on the filthy, flooded floor
now she is picking it up
and eating it
and gasping for breath
and dying – her bulging
beautiful brown eyes
wondering why
the washers are running over
the dryers don’t work
and the customers are satisfied
because they have nothing
1974
Left home
Left home
In search of knowledge
In search of that missing link
That connects reality with mysticism
And gives one a foundation
From which to understand
The whole as well as the sum of the parts
Conceived in frustration and hopelessness
Born on the verge of a great eruption
Raised in affluence, then poverty
Bred on religious half-truths
and misguided righteousness
Educated by a cruel enemy
I betrayed my teachers and
accepted my own…
1974
Prayer Song for Charlotte (1) – You Have Become the Object
You have become the object
Of my affection,
Of my devotion,
Of my dedication.
From you I understand loyalty
And patience
And fidelity
And love.
For you are loyal to your guide
And I to you
And I shall forever love you.
This is the extent of my love:
Limitless and
Practically undefinable.
1974
Prayer Song for Charlotte (2) – Softly
Softly and more tenderly –
Give us peace of mind and consolation,
Pacify our urges and our passions,
Put us in a state of earthly heaven.
Softly and exquisitely –
Speak to us sweet words of inspiration,
Warm our hearts, increase our dedication,
Soothe away the aches and pains of hatred.
Softly and so daintily –
So precise and so in tune with nature,
So express, beyond anticipation,
And yet so humble, so reserved in station.
Softly and submissively –
Let us guide each other to perfection;
Let us free ourselves from false subjection;
Let us base our lives on true affection.
Softly but with certainty –
Mould us from the clay of love and kindness,
Fashion us with patience and sincerity,
Breathe in us the breath of generosity.
Softly and with thankfulness –
This is our prayer. Amen.
October 1974
Prayer Song for Charlotte (3) – A Diamond in the Rough
a sweet and tender flower
and a diamond in the rough
a perfect union…
gentility of strength
nobility of character
humility in wisdom
subtlety in understanding
Help us, and be in us, and
show us, and guide us, and
enlighten us, and reveal to us…
…the truth.
1974
Prayer Song for Charlotte (4) – Discovery
God is free from imperfections
and I am full of faults.
Yet if I strive hard in His Way,
They’ll dwindle down to naught.
So I am thankful to my Lord,
Submissive to his will;
For He delivered me from death
And showed me what was real.
Praise be to God!
The Lord of all the worlds.
January 1975
Prayer Song for Charlotte (5) – The Moment of Creation
step by step
day by day
hour by hour
minute by minute
second by second
transcending the immeasurable progression of time
until one reaches the understanding,
the recognition,
that there is no birth or death,
no beginning or end,
but all things come of God.
the mysterious qualities of space and time
and their relativity, therefore,
are reduced to simplistic roots
of zero and unity.
so we travel through our lives
thanking God for direction and guidance.
March 1975
Prayer Song for Charlotte (6) – A Flower
A flower
blooming in the winter
out of tune with time
out of touch with reality
out of accord with unity
A flower
blooming in the springtime
blossoming into its fullest growth
blossoming into its truest beauty
leaning towards the sun
A flower
blooming in the summer
lives, thrives,
and dies in a single season
A flower
blooming in the autumn
preparing for the cold wind
preparing for the icy nights
preparing for the coming of spring
A flower
March 1975
Prayer Song for Charlotte (7) – The Will
The will, the unconquerable will –
to come into existence, to survive
the trauma of deliverance, to endure
the loneliness of separation from security.
the will, the irrepressible will –
to grow, to learn all, to comprehend
the whole, to discover oneself and
develop oneself to the fullest.
the will, the indomitable will –
to repel evil, to resist weakness,
to retain one’s inner discipline
against a flood of promiscuity.
the will, the Divine will –
to escape the bonds of slavery mentality,
to transcend the limits of grafted knowledge,
to break the chains of sin and immorality.
May 1975
Prayer Song for Charlotte (8) – The Flight by Night
What was the meaning of the flight by night?
Was it to escape the enemy’s oppression?
Was it in search of a rare sunbeam?
Or was it to recapture a nostalgic dream?
What was the meaning of the flight by night?
Was it a stage in a gradual progression?
Was it to retrieve the gifts of life and time?
Or was it the revival of something more sublime?
What was the meaning of the flight by night?
We must fight to overcome this frightening obsession.
We must search until we find the answer
to this question. Then, and only then,
will we be free from past transgression.
February 1975
Be Still
Be still for a moment…!
Watch the images emerge
watch the ideas materialize
into real life entities
watch the thoughts become visible
watch the truth made manifest.
Peace! …Let there be peace!
Everything takes its natural order
everything tends towards unity
everything fades into darkness
everything is seen in the light.
Slow down for just a second!
Come back down to reality
come back down to nature
come back to your lost faith
Appreciate God’s handiwork,
the morning glories,
the honeysuckles,
the sparrows singing,
the calmness of dawn.
1975
Welcome Home
Welcome home
So glad to have you back, to see you again.
You’ve been gone so long.
What did you do while you were gone?
You’ve grown so much.
Not as skinny as you used to be.
You’ve really grown.
Why don’t you take your coat off,
make yourself at home.
This is your home.
Sit down.
Have a glass of water.
Let me turn on the radio.
What kind of music do you like.
You’ve changed a lot.
You’re not like you used to be.
Are you married yet?
Why did you change your name?
Spring, 1975
Graffiti
Scribbled on bathroom walls
one is made consciously aware
of the funky nature
of the American spirit.
An adulterated spirit,
the wasted semen
of technological fornication,
re-emerging in social incest
and zero population growth
An international whore
who just doesn’t give a good goddamn
what she gives birth to:
resulting in a tribe of illiterate bastards
who are unisexed,
polysexed,
or no sex at all
Spring, 1975
Navy memories
Posted on July 23, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
Forty years ago, during a four year stint as a submarine diesel mechanic (among other things) I was exposed to pendulum motion. What, one might ask, does pendulum motion have to do with diesel operation? OK. So you have these cylinders (the Fairbanks Morse machines we ran had two opposing rows of twelve cylinders) that go up and down, hence reciprocating. Then there is this rocker arm assembly that connects and transfers the reciprocating action of the cylinders to rotating action of a main shaft, and it is that rotating action, inside a magnetic field that generates electricity. Still with me?
So what is the pendulum connection? Well, these cylinders are timed to fire sequentially in a way to smoothly turn the shaft, mimicking a pendulum in that the piston starts at the cylinder top (one extreme) pushes down to the bottom (opposite extreme) compression ignites the fuel, the piston is driven back to the top, passing an imaginary point in its travel called top dead center. Same as the swing of a pendulum, far to one side, midpoint, far opposite side, back to the mid point, and so forth, covering the whole range of the pendulum swing.
(It’s been forty years, mind you, so the experts can correct me if required, but that’s what I recall of the basic motion.)
So what? What does this have to do, say, with the price of tea in China? (A rather fitting analogy for another time, but demand and supply curves shift on an oscillating plane, setting the price, or as the old black preacher used to say, “da Sun do move.”)
This is becoming a longer status post than I originally intended.
Political “things,” movements, changes occur on a spectrum that is “pendulumatic,” i.e. from one extreme, past the middle, to the opposite extreme, back past the middle, and on and on. Social “things” move on the same pendulum, a sort of oscillation. Even businesses operate on a business cycle. It actually makes things predictable. And history can be viewed on the same alternating spectrum.
But in the political realm, you have to be careful. Entrenched interests seek to prevent the pendulum swing, to keep themselves or their party in power. But the pendulum is not just a nice thing to think about, it is actually physical law. We see a sort of contrived political alternation in the election of “opposite” parties for executive and legislative office, and correspondingly for judicial appointments. I say contrived because increasingly, in the two party system, the “opposing parties” begin to look so much alike as to become hardly indistinguishable, which basically means there is no pendulum motion at all. Ah, but as the old preacher, Rev John Jasper used to say, “da Sun do move,” and the pendulum action is in effect, sooner or later. Of course, folks ridiculed Rev. Jasper because they thought he was saying the Sun revolved around the earth in a geocentric way described by Ptolemy of Alexandria, debunked by Copernicus and Galileo long ago. Now we know that the Sun moves through the galaxy, orbiting around the center of the Milky Way. (Now that’s a poem begging to be written.)
Those on the bottom will someday swing to the top. “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.” And those at the top will eventually descend to the bottom. In an analogy, yesterday’s slave will be tomorrow’s master, a frightening consideration for some but a necessary prospect for all parties. They used to say “be careful who you step on on your way up because you might see them again when you come back down.”
**************************************************************
Boot Camp, TDY Saratoga, Nuke School, Sub School
Enlisting
My life was two out of sync sine waves, maybe three, maybe four, actually, and my best efforts couldn’t pull them into sync. Ups and downs constantly, between my courses and campus activities, work and service at the mosque, family obligations, and balancing part-time jobs, constantly pushing and pulling energies, thoughts in various directions.
I was working on an A&T co-op job in Reidsville, NC, Farmer’s Home Administration, an agency of the Department of Agriculture. In my third year I changed my major (yet again, after switching back and forth between electrical engineering and biology) to economics. In this coop job I worked in rural communities in Rockingham County, making loans to farmers until their crops were harvested and doing collateral checks on the land and equipment that secured their loans (it was called “chattel checks,” a throwback to slavery, perhaps), and financing large rural housing developments and rural electrification projects. One of the librarians I worked with at Greensboro Public Library (where I had graduated from page to associate) lived in Reidsville and introduced me to Mr. and Mrs. Stockton, who rented me their basement apartment.
Walking back and forth to work everyday, I passed a Navy and an Air Force Recruiting office. Over time, they changed the posters in the window. When they put up a poster advertising the Navy’s Nuclear Power program it caught my eye and I went inside for a closer look. I was greeted by an Air Force recruiter who was very off-putting and stressed the standardized exam, called ASVAB. I had always done very well on standardized exams and took it very lightly when the recruiter stressed the overwhelming importance of the exam. The Navy recruiter, on the other hand, regaled me with sea stories, no doubt from his own experience on submarines, that I found quite charming.
One day I stopped by and he offered to let me take an abbreviated version of the Nuclear Power exam, a second exam after the ASVAB. It had some mathematics, some chemistry, and some physics questions. He checked my results when I finished and I had aced the thing! He asked me would I be willing to go to Greensboro to take the full Nuclear Power exam along with the ASVAB and I agreed to do it. He called me after a few days and told me my score on the ASVAB was the highest he had ever seen, plus I had qualifying scores on the Nuclear Power exam. So, he asked me, was I interested in signing up?
It was the summer and I was already registered for my classes in the fall, along with continuing work at Farmer’s Home Administration. He said I could sign up but not have to report until December. He called it the delayed enlistment program. I saw it as the solution to all my problems, balancing work, school, and life. So I signed up!
December came, I enjoyed Christmas with the family, said my farewells, and got on a plane to Orlando for Navy boot camp. I told folks at the Mosque, but I didn’t say anything to anybody at school.
Boot camp and training
Other than catching pneumonia and missing three days of training and returning to my training unit still weak from the illness, boot camp was fairly uneventful. Our sister unit had an interesting person who was headed for dental technician training. We corresponded for a couple of years and I even met her family in Hartford, but it wasn’t to be.
From Orlando I went to Great Lakes, IL for Machinist Mate A School. That was fun because on the weekends I could take the train into Chicago where I had friends and relatives, including the distant cousin my mother stayed with during her Chicago sojourn. Good food and happy times in the Windy City! The training was a self-paced study of equipment and systems in a propulsion plant where the toughest part was actually tracing pipes and systems and then drawing them from memory. It would be excellent practice for later submarine quals.
I finished ahead of schedule and had a four month delay before returning to Orlando for Nuclear Power School. I got TDY orders to an aircraft carrier in Mayport, the Saratoga, CV-60, also known as Sorry Sara. I was assigned to an auxiliary division, maintaining refrigeration and AC units, hydraulic power plants, and fire pump stations throughout the ship. Also did my share of painting out engineering spaces. I must have done something right because when it came time for my departure the Chief Engineer offered me immediate promotion to E-5 and my own shop in the propulsion plant. In retrospect, I should have taken it. There was a government shutdown and a resulting delay in getting my orders cut to Orlando but it all worked out in time.
Life at Nuke School was very regimented. Breakfast at 7, classes from 8 to noon, lunch, classes from 1-4, Star Trek in the barracks common are followed by Kung Fu, dinner at 6, and study hall from 7 to 10:30. Repressive would be putting it mildly. In the 19th week my father passed away and I went to Greensboro for a week, breaking the routine. When I returned I had four weeks to go and, still grieving my father’s passing, I basically pushed it through to the end. The beginning was straight forward math, physics, chemistry, basic engineering principles. But the end was electrical theory, material science, thermodynamics, reactor operations, rad/con chemistry. Anyway, I made it.
But at the next stage of training, Nuclear Prototype at D1G in Ballston Spa, New York, I sort of unravelled from the stress of it all. The rotating 12-hour shifts didn’t agree with me and as soon as I got a couple days off I was on the road to Albany to spend time with an old friend and love interest. That relationship was up and down for reasons I couldn’t fathom at the time. But hey, it is what it is, as they say. About two months in I went to the officials and threw the towel in the ring. I told them I just didn’t want to do it any more. Plus our whole class was headed to the USS Carl Vinson, the newest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. My days on the Sorry Sara convinced me I wanted nothing to do with no more aircraft carriers no more. They tried to convince me otherwise but I had already convinced myself that my mind was made up. They cut me orders to the nearest Navy base, Submarine Base Groton, in Connecticut, and sent me on my way.
Groton gave me a shit assignment checking people into the chow hall. Very boring but I worked with a cute girl from Reno whose name I can’t even recall. She was a bit of a tomboy and we spent our free weekends together smoking reefer at a house she shared with two guys she was probably fucking. I didn’t care. She had an interesting, sort of counter-culture, devil-may-care personality.She liked me because I wasn’t constantly trying to get into her pants. And we were both voracious readers. When the library at Connecticut College had a used book sale, we practically went crazy buying books. It’s a shame I can’t remember her name.
After a couple of months I was informed that I was getting orders to a submarine tender, unless I wanted to volunteer for submarine duty. Submarine duty involved three more months in rotten Groton that I could spend with my new friend, or immediate transfer to Norfolk. I volunteered for submarine duty. Once I started training our paths never crossed again. Maybe all it ever was was a mirage anyway.
Submarine basic training was uneventful. During follow-on auxiliary machinery training I reconnected with Jan, who by that time was in training at Ballston Spa. But we were star-crossed and we knew it. I was offered orders to a diesel boat in Subic Bay, but I saw The Phillipines as very far away and others were dying to get a Subic Bay assignment. I really didn’t get it at the time and I’m glad I didn’t. Ultimately I got orders to a Fast Attack out of Norfolk, the Hammerhead (SSN-663).
******************************************************************
Some poetry from the period
End of Life Criteria (Notes from Reactor Theory class)
like a piano tune
that starts and ends,
so is life …
death cuts in:
a toneless key;
a nameless chord;
a sharp discontinuity …
judgment occurs
without a moment’s notice;
and on the second half
one regrets not doing
what should have been done …
every second is judgment –
and every opportunity
affords one yet another
to correct the incorrection –
before the final hour …
has passed.
February 1980
Thoughts about judgment day (D1G)
the hour actively approaches
while we, its victims, sit and wait,
with folded arms, trying to appear
comfortable and carefree,
and mutually exclusive.
days pass quickly, and nights,
like the blink of an eye…
nay, the pupil’s dilation…
time races to its destination
while we, in our lethargy,
approximate suspended animation.
there is no conclusion,
only the vain pleadings
for a fresh new start,
another sequel,
a couple more opportunities.
The rope by which we hang,
is long, connecting us, tethering
us to our past and future,
but its knot is sure.
June 1980
Mind is cluttered (D1G)
mind is cluttered…
fragments of thoughts uncompleted
dangling modifiers fill
the lower heavens.
thunder would quiet the
noisy confusion and clamor,
lightning would illuminate
the darkness and charge the
atmosphere with order,
raindrops would dampen
the soil and give new seeds
the chance to germinate and grow,
but there is none of neither.
deep in the inner chamber
there is completion, and order,
and noiselessness, and illumination,
and freedom from famine and drought,
if we could only find the entrance…
if we could only find the entrance,
we would enter.
June 1980
Morning glories (at D1G)
morning glories bloom along the fence.
They are the prettiest flower
in the vegetable garden.
Second is the bloom of the yellow squash.
mother used to like African violets the most.
sister likes cacti and green plants that seldom bloom.
daddy liked tobacco blossoms and jimpsom weed.
I like the vegetable flowers.
June 1980
To Towanna
A peculiar beauty,
A gentle glow,
A kindness
and a caring –
an attractiveness,
a radiance,
a heart that tends
toward sharing –
a pleasant smile,
a friendliness,
though hardship
she is bearing –
a tender kiss,
a warm caress,
her love makes
life endearing.
July 1980
As you depart
As you depart
It breaks my heart
That you would leave my life
But leave you must
And so I trust
That soon you will return
These poems I write
Reveal the plight
Of one who loved and lost
So bear with me
And soon you’ll see
This life’s a short sojourn.
July 1980
Inside me burns a fire
inside me burns a fire
consuming and refining
fueled by stone
contained and self-sustained
it’s your love I desire
to soothe and warm and please me
but now I am alone
and circumscribed by pain
tonight we shall conspire
the stars in heaven to guide us
to where our souls are one-
the goal of love to attain
September 1980
Nothing survives
nothing survives the ordeal.
friendships are forgotten,
and associations, disassociated.
‘tis a tortuous path we travel,
sharp curves and bends
that baffle the mind, only
the soul survives the ordeal.
conflicts go unresolved,
obligations, unfulfilled, and
there’s no time to stop and/or
backtrack. The moratorium
has ended and the battle is raging
for the soul’s survival
after the migration,
from the realm of nothingness
into the new reality,
the ordeal ends and
the soul finds peace
September 1980
Groton, CT
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Hammerhead
I reported to the Hammerhead in early February, 1981. The boat evoked an image of awesomeness, long and black, moored at D&S piers at Norfolk Naval Station. In less than month (or perhaps it was my newness) we would begin at earnest our workup for an extended deployment.
It was billed as a 9-month deployment that would include a port visit in Perth and a circumnavigation of the globe. Guys extended and re-enlisted for just the Perth part because of all these rumors about sailor fun down under. Some hung around for the circumnavigation part, crossing the Equator, rounding the Cape of Good Hope AND
Cape Horn, or with any luck, navigating the Straits of Magellan, stuff that old salts live and breathe for.
We got underway in April. The water was still cold. It was very stormy and I got very seasick. I ended up “hugging Ralph” a couple of times (that’s submarine talk for the only relief there is for seasickness, though it’s still no relief!). We hit the dive point by supper time – then it was smooth sailing.
Let me make a small confession here: I had never been underway for an Atlantic crossing and I was frankly terrified. A lot about submarine operations I only understood academically. I had no idea just how unforgiving the sea environment could be, nor how vicious some of my shipmates could become while shaking off the various addictions they were able to maintain while ashore. One lives and learned. Quickly. Within a couple of weeks the newness of it all wore off and I was able to settle into a routine – standing watch, keeping up my assigned PMS, doing whatever divisional work, drills, field-days, and working on submarine quals.
Getting qualified in submarines is every non-qual’s dream. A lot of good things happen once you get qualified and wear the dolphins: you can watch movies after the evening meal without being hazed; you got an assigned rack instead of sleeping in the open bay of the submarine room. After getting the dolphins you were a made man, so to speak. Being in engineering got me an assigned rack, but I fell behind in my quals and the work load picked and I lost my rack to a qualified guy and did my time in the torpedo room. I got real good at the control stations, and even got appointed battle stations helmsman, a tremendous honor, but with progress on getting my quals done falling behind, I joined the ranks of the “delinquent,” also called “dinks.” I envied somewhat the non-rated guys who had limited division requirements and could dedicate their time to completing their ship-wide qualifications.
Eventually, in the ultimate disgrace, as time wore on, all the non-rates either completed their quals or completed their 90 days of mandatory mess cooking and even engineers had to fill the gaps, leaving their divisions to work full time cleaning the mess decks, serving meals, and busting tables, every six hours around the clock. I was the first from engineering and the first petty officer so designated, though many followed in my wake. I took it all in stride and did what was required. I must have made an impression because the Chief of the Boat, himself a mess management specialist, made me an offer to change my rate from engineering to supply. I was totally invested in being in engineering. He explained that although being a cook in the junior ranks, as you advance you get into contracting and with contracting there were lots of shore billets. I stuck to my guns, but in retrospect, I probably should have been more circumspect. (Didn’t mean to rhyme, I swear it!)
My time on the mess decks came and went and I rejoined A division. We were scheduled for an upkeep in Mombassa to tide us over until a full maintenance period in Perth, but something happened and there was no submarine tender coverage in Mombassa. Plus our operational tempo had picked up with reports of a certain adversary’s submarines operating in the area. So we remained on station. At one point, we had spent weeks at periscope depth at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden and just when we thought we’d get some relief, we got repositioned for several weeks of the same duty at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman. With the change in schedule we were not able to pick up supplies in from the tender that wasn’t in Mombassa and at some point we began running out of food. Except there was plenty of breaded veal, and plenty of canned vegetables. So that is what we ate, breakfast, lunch, supper and midrats.
The schedule shift set a bunch of changes in motion. We missed the tender in Perth, so that leg of the trip would be cancelled. But there was a destroyer tender harbored in Diego Garcia and that would have to do. And since we wouldn’t be getting a full maintenance upkeep scheduled for Perth, we would be returning the way we came vice the originally planned circumnavigation. That change disappointed a lot of guys but at least we got some “down time” in Diego Garcia. And because there was no “pier” for us there, we had to anchor out, which meant engineering plant watchstanders had to keep on standing watches and that was a bit of a drag. But there was nothing to “do’ ashore, so most of us stayed on the ship. We did a bit of fishing and caught beautiful red snappers which the cooks prepared for meals. So there was that. I went ashore one time and found a rather poorly staffed Navy Exchange. I remember buying a cassette of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy.
One other weird thing is worth mentioning. You could go onboard the tender to the comms shack and the duty radio guy could patch you through to a ham operator in or near your hometown and he could put you in a phone call with your family. There was a name for this procedure but I can’t remember it. Anyway, I “called” my aunt and my sister from Diego Garcia.
Finally, for folks who were expecting some sexual release in Perth, Diego Garcia was not so demographically endowed, the only women being those on the tender crew. That’s life!
As a slight nod to crew morale, on the way back we got a port visit in Rio de Janeiro. It was in Rio that I figured out I could dress down and blend in. My color was an advantage! I had some fun, but not too much! From Rio we headed home and it was a reasonably short transit. We were lucky, though, because the diesel broke while anchored out in Rio, and as the primary backup to the reactor, we probably shouldn’t have gotten underway without it being operational. We casrepped (a casualty report drafted for non-operational engineering equipment) the diesel pulling into post and Squadron was never the wiser.
********************************************************************************
Some poems from the Hammerhead period
Hammerhead – First Dive
as we descend
into the depths
I think about
the things left loose:
the promises
I should have kept;
the yesterdays:
they all reduce
to a fleeting moment
of awe and dread;
I offer no reason,
I make no excuse–
The nightmare ends,
I lay in bed.
The journey is over:
it was all in my head.
March 1981
Hammerhead – Second Dive
begin in the affirmative
I am, this is, we are
erase all doubt
but allow for error
make no excuses
and assign no blame
remember yesterday
while you yearn for tomorrow
begin in the affirmative.
April 1981
Endurance 81 (poem written for the 1981 cruise book)
We left home port.
With tears and sobs we parted
From our loved ones.
A journey hard and arduous
We knew we had ahead;
Trials and calamities would befall us
But we knew we would endure.
Sleepless nights and restless days,
Drills to test us (they just pestered us);
Never getting too much praise,
But who complained?
We knew we would endure.
Liberty port –
The run almost complete;
New places, new faces,
A chance to wet our feet…
Good times helped us to endure.
Homecoming!
What joy! What happiness!
Wives, children, loved ones,
All waiting on the pier to receive us!
Months and months of work and sweat
Bear fruit, what a reward!
We accomplished our mission,
Achieved our goals,
But most of all,
We endured.
Norfolk, Summer 1981
To Luciana
her voice is a blooming flower
beckoning the bumblebee
to alight and pollinate–
her charm is sweet like honey
and warm like fresh milk
in a wooden bucket—
her style is simple and easy
but her demands are complex
and difficult to fathom –
but the satisfaction she brings is so complete,
so absolute, so gratifying that
heaven itself turns green with envy-
her love is as the sunlight
and the rain, free to all though
each wants it for himself alone–
she was created for all the world to know,
and sufficient it is for me
to share her love with all.
Rio de Janeiro
October 1981
Letters to Amantha
USS Hammerhead (SSN-663)
October 7, 1981
Dear Amantha:
I’m writing you in pencil
‘cause I’m not sure what
I want to say to you
And I want to allow for
erasures should the need arise…
a margin for error –
we do make mistakes,
and sometimes, oftimes,
overplay our hands…
except that our actions are
not written with pencil
on notebook paper
but with permanent ink
on a perfect, everlasting medium…
“forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.”
I’m questioning myself:
what are my demands?
what can I supply?
do I have any right
to desire your company
as much as I do?
the way that I do?
I spoke with our friend
tonight. She alone knows
the degree to which
I care for you…
to the exclusion of all others.
none of the conventional
rationalizations/justifications
are valid with respect to
this relationship. I know
better than to try to feed you
any bullshit; as Shelley
wrote: “one word is too often
profaned for me to profane it.”
(He was talking about love.)
I digress…
mere words fall short,
far short of their intended meaning.Torpedo Room
USS Hammerhead SSN-663
October 12, 1981
Dear Amantha:
I’ve had time to contemplate,
to think things through…
I’ve busted through the fallacies,
the hypocritical rationalizations,
the bullshit justifications that underlie
the reasons why, we say,
things are as they are…
I’ve built for myself,
step by step,
a new world view,
tested it for structural strength
for internal stability,
and for resistance to extreme
changes in temperature…
I’ve tested it at deep depths
and at high altitudes…
I’ve put it in a vacuum
and I’ve pressurized it until
it has become hard as diamond,
clear as crystal, and pure as
water in a mountain stream…
life in a monastery –
ideology reaches perfection –
works arrive at completion –
material wants lose their significance,
their urgency, their nearness to the heart…
Torpedo Room
USS Hammerhead SSN-663
October 22, 1981
Dear Amantha:
Thinking about you…
out of stationery,
writing on loose-leaf,
college rule…
Loose-leaf…
considering the possibility
this heaven-made union
may never exist on earth…
Nothing but our future together
is at stake here…
one more union will not
change the course of human events,
and one less union is
one less division…
we can be happy without each other,
we can be satisfied alone…
we can reach fulfillment unaccompanied…
we can…we are…we will…
we will into existence what
most pleases us (again he is talking
about love, what a bore…)
we give rise to circumstances
which produce a moment…
we build around ourselves the environment
most conducive to reaching the ends we seek…
we determine our destiny
‘cause God, inside us, is always with us.
Talked to Lynne
talked to Lynne again today
talked about my Georgy girl
and how my head is in a twirl
over that lady, who’s driving me crazy
and haunting me night and day
talked to Lynne again last night
told her how my soul was hurt
how my mind has gone beserk
over this woman, more ghost than a woman,
who’s haunting me night and day
talked to Lynne again this morning
talked to her ‘cross land and sea
‘cause I need her sympathy
she knows my heart, she knows the part
that haunts me night and day
talked to Lynne tonight, tomorrow
share with her my joy, my sorrow,
told her my love has found another;
such is life, so ends the strife
that’s been haunting me night and day
1981
Fragments from a letter to LW
the more I think about you,
the fonder of you I grow, albeit
in an abstract kind of way.
I treasure and cherish
the memories I hold of you
and of the time we spent
in each other’s presence,
however fleeting,
and I hope, with all my heart,
that the future holds in store
some measure of time, again,
that we can share.
November 1981
I love my love (to J)
I love my love
’tis true I do
with all my heart, my soul.
I care for her
and long for her,
and shall when I’ve grown old.
‘Tis true, ’tis true I must confess,
She loves me not, no more, no less.
It grieves me so
but I should know:
that apparitions disappear;
that summer passes every year;
that tears are often insincere;
that all the reasons are not clear
why people love, why lovers fear;
thus, I shall fill my cup with cheer
and search ’til I have found the best.
November 1981
Hammerhead
I reported to the Hammerhead in early February, 1981. The boat evoked an image of awesomeness, long and black, moored at D&S piers at Norfolk Naval Station. In less than month (or perhaps it was my newness) we would begin at earnest our workup for an extended deployment.
It was billed as a 9-month deployment that would include a port visit in Perth and a circumnavigation of the globe. Guys extended and re-enlisted for just the Perth part because of all these rumors about sailor fun down under. Some hung around for the circumnavigation part, crossing the Equator, rounding the Cape of Good Hope AND Cape Horn, or with any luck, navigating the Straits of Magellan, stuff that old salts live and breathe for.
We got underway in April. The water was still cold. It was very stormy and I got very seasick. I ended up “hugging Ralph” a couple of times (that’s submarine talk for the only relief there is for seasickness, though it’s still no relief!). We hit the dive point by supper time – then it was smooth sailing.
Let me make a small confession here: I had never been underway for an Atlantic crossing and I was frankly terrified. A lot about submarine operations I only understood academically. I had no idea just how unforgiving the sea environment could be, nor how vicious some of my shipmates could become while shaking off the various addictions they were able to maintain while ashore. One lives and learned. Quickly. Within a couple of weeks the newness of it all wore off and I was able to settle into a routine – standing watch, keeping up my assigned PMS, doing whatever divisional work, drills, field-days, and working on submarine quals.
Getting qualified in submarines is every non-qual’s dream. A lot of good things happen once you get qualified and wear the dolphins: you can watch movies after the evening meal without being hazed; you got an assigned rack instead of sleeping in the open bay of the submarine room. After getting the dolphins you were a made man, so to speak. Being in engineering got me an assigned rack, but I fell behind in my quals and the work load picked and I lost my rack to a qualified guy and did my time in the torpedo room. I got real good at the control stations, and even got appointed battle stations helmsman, a tremendous honor, but with progress on getting my quals done falling behind, I joined the ranks of the “delinquent,” also called “dinks.” I envied somewhat the non-rated guys who had limited division requirements and could dedicate their time to completing their ship-wide qualifications.
Eventually, in the ultimate disgrace, as time wore on, all the non-rates either completed their quals or completed their 90 days of mandatory mess cooking and even engineers had to fill the gaps, leaving their divisions to work full time cleaning the mess decks, serving meals, and busting tables, every six hours around the clock. I was the first from engineering and the first petty officer so designated, though many followed in my wake. I took it all in stride and did what was required. I must have made an impression because the Chief of the Boat, himself a mess management specialist, made me an offer to change my rate from engineering to supply. I was totally invested in being in engineering. He explained that although being a cook in the junior ranks, as you advance you get into contracting and with contracting there were lots of shore billets. I stuck to my guns, but in retrospect, I probably should have been more circumspect. (Didn’t mean to rhyme, I swear it!)
My time on the mess decks came and went and I rejoined A division. We were scheduled for an upkeep in Mombassa to tide us over until a full maintenance period in Perth, but something happened and there was no submarine tender coverage in Mombassa. Plus our operational tempo had picked up with reports of a certain adversary’s submarines operating in the area. So we remained on station. At one point, we had spent weeks at periscope depth at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden and just when we thought we’d get some relief, we got repositioned for several weeks of the same duty at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman. With the change in schedule we were not able to pick up supplies in from the tender that wasn’t in Mombassa and at some point we began running out of food. Except there was plenty of breaded veal, and plenty of canned vegetables. So that is what we ate, breakfast, lunch, supper and midrats.
The schedule shift set a bunch of changes in motion. We missed the tender in Perth, so that leg of the trip would be cancelled. But there was a destroyer tender harbored in Diego Garcia and that would have to do. And since we wouldn’t be getting a full maintenance upkeep scheduled for Perth, we would be returning the way we came vice the originally planned circumnavigation. That change disappointed a lot of guys but at least we got some “down time” in Diego Garcia. And because there was no “pier” for us there, we had to anchor out, which meant engineering plant watchstanders had to keep on standing watches and that was a bit of a drag. But there was nothing to “do’ ashore, so most of us stayed on the ship. We did a bit of fishing and caught beautiful red snappers which the cooks prepared for meals. So there was that. I went ashore one time and found a rather poorly staffed Navy Exchange. I remember buying a cassette of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy.
One other weird thing is worth mentioning. You could go onboard the tender to the comms shack and the duty radio guy could patch you through to a ham operator in or near your hometown and he could put you in a phone call with your family. There was a name for this procedure but I can’t remember it. Anyway, I “called” my aunt and my sister from Diego Garcia.
Finally, for folks who were expecting some sexual release in Perth, Diego Garcia was not so demographically endowed, the only women being those on the tender crew. That’s life!
As a slight nod to crew morale, on the way back we got a port visit in Rio de Janeiro. It was in Rio that I figured out I could dress down and blend in. My color was an advantage! I had some fun, but not too much! From Rio we headed home and it was a reasonably short transit. We were lucky, though, because the diesel broke while anchored out in Rio, and as the primary backup to the reactor, we probably shouldn’t have gotten underway without it being operational. We casrepped (a casualty report drafted for non-operational engineering equipment) the diesel pulling into post and Squadron was never the wiser.
*****************************************************
Some poems from the Hammerhead period
Hammerhead – First Dive
as we descend
into the depths
I think about
the things left loose:
the promises
I should have kept;
the yesterdays:
they all reduce
to a fleeting moment
of awe and dread;
I offer no reason,
I make no excuse–
The nightmare ends,
I lay in bed.
The journey is over:
it was all in my head.
March 1981
Hammerhead – Second Dive
begin in the affirmative
I am, this is, we are
erase all doubt
but allow for error
make no excuses
and assign no blame
remember yesterday
while you yearn for tomorrow
begin in the affirmative.
April 1981
Endurance 81 (poem written for the 1981 cruise book)
We left home port.
With tears and sobs we parted
From our loved ones.
A journey hard and arduous
We knew we had ahead;
Trials and calamities would befall us
But we knew we would endure.
Sleepless nights and restless days,
Drills to test us (they just pestered us);
Never getting too much praise,
But who complained?
We knew we would endure.
Liberty port –
The run almost complete;
New places, new faces,
A chance to wet our feet…
Good times helped us to endure.
Homecoming!
What joy! What happiness!
Wives, children, loved ones,
All waiting on the pier to receive us!
Months and months of work and sweat
Bear fruit, what a reward!
We accomplished our mission,
Achieved our goals,
But most of all,
We endured.
Norfolk, Summer 1981
To Luciana
her voice is a blooming flower
beckoning the bumblebee
to alight and pollinate–
her charm is sweet like honey
and warm like fresh milk
in a wooden bucket—
her style is simple and easy
but her demands are complex
and difficult to fathom –
but the satisfaction she brings is so complete,
so absolute, so gratifying that
heaven itself turns green with envy-
her love is as the sunlight
and the rain, free to all though
each wants it for himself alone–
she was created for all the world to know,
and sufficient it is for me
to share her love with all.
Rio de Janeiro
October 1981
Letters to Amantha
USS Hammerhead (SSN-663)
October 7, 1981
Dear Amantha:
I’m writing you in pencil
‘cause I’m not sure what
I want to say to you
And I want to allow for
erasures should the need arise…
a margin for error –
we do make mistakes,
and sometimes, oftimes,
overplay our hands…
except that our actions are
not written with pencil
on notebook paper
but with permanent ink
on a perfect, everlasting medium…
“forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.”
I’m questioning myself:
what are my demands?
what can I supply?
do I have any right
to desire your company
as much as I do?
the way that I do?
I spoke with our friend
tonight. She alone knows
the degree to which
I care for you…
to the exclusion of all others.
none of the conventional
rationalizations/justifications
are valid with respect to
this relationship. I know
better than to try to feed you
any bullshit; as Shelley
wrote: “one word is too often
profaned for me to profane it.”
(He was talking about love.)
I digress…
mere words fall short,
far short of their intended meaning.Torpedo Room
USS Hammerhead SSN-663
October 12, 1981
Dear Amantha:
I’ve had time to contemplate,
to think things through…
I’ve busted through the fallacies,
the hypocritical rationalizations,
the bullshit justifications that underlie
the reasons why, we say,
things are as they are…
I’ve built for myself,
step by step,
a new world view,
tested it for structural strength
for internal stability,
and for resistance to extreme
changes in temperature…
I’ve tested it at deep depths
and at high altitudes…
I’ve put it in a vacuum
and I’ve pressurized it until
it has become hard as diamond,
clear as crystal, and pure as
water in a mountain stream…
life in a monastery –
ideology reaches perfection –
works arrive at completion –
material wants lose their significance,
their urgency, their nearness to the heart…
Torpedo Room
USS Hammerhead SSN-663
October 22, 1981
Dear Amantha:
Thinking about you…
out of stationery,
writing on loose-leaf,
college rule…
Loose-leaf…
considering the possibility
this heaven-made union
may never exist on earth…
Nothing but our future together
is at stake here…
one more union will not
change the course of human events,
and one less union is
one less division…
we can be happy without each other,
we can be satisfied alone…
we can reach fulfillment unaccompanied…
we can…we are…we will…
we will into existence what
most pleases us (again he is talking
about love, what a bore…)
we give rise to circumstances
which produce a moment…
we build around ourselves the environment
most conducive to reaching the ends we seek…
we determine our destiny
‘cause God, inside us, is always with us.
Talked to Lynne
talked to Lynne again today
talked about my Georgy girl
and how my head is in a twirl
over that lady, who’s driving me crazy
and haunting me night and day
talked to Lynne again last night
told her how my soul was hurt
how my mind has gone beserk
over this woman, more ghost than a woman,
who’s haunting me night and day
talked to Lynne again this morning
talked to her ‘cross land and sea
‘cause I need her sympathy
she knows my heart, she knows the part
that haunts me night and day
talked to Lynne tonight, tomorrow
share with her my joy, my sorrow,
told her my love has found another;
such is life, so ends the strife
that’s been haunting me night and day
1981
Fragments from a letter to LW
the more I think about you,
the fonder of you I grow, albeit
in an abstract kind of way.
I treasure and cherish
the memories I hold of you
and of the time we spent
in each other’s presence,
however fleeting,
and I hope, with all my heart,
that the future holds in store
some measure of time, again,
that we can share.
November 1981
I love my love (to J)
I love my love
’tis true I do
with all my heart, my soul.
I care for her
and long for her,
and shall when I’ve grown old.
‘Tis true, ’tis true I must confess,
She loves me not, no more, no less.
It grieves me so
but I should know:
that apparitions disappear;
that summer passes every year;
that tears are often insincere;
that all the reasons are not clear
why people love, why lovers fear;
thus, I shall fill my cup with cheer
and search ’til I have found the best.
November 1981
Michigan
NROTC FAMU
Luce
Hammerhead
Michigan
NROTC FAMU
Luce
**********************************************************************
Woodberry Forest Memories
Shabazz Bakery Memories
Navy Memories
Afterthoughts become Prologue and beginnings
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 1a of 10. Pre-Foreign Service
Posted on June 20, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
Introduction: In the blog posts that follow, I serialize some highlights of my 1992-2013 foreign service career. Post by post and assignment by assignment I cover some of the memorable events. Names are not changed to protect the innocent or the guilty. It is written exactly as it happened, more or less. At the bottom of each post I provide links to all succeeding sections. There are even a few photos thrown in for those who like visual prompts. I hope you enjoy my chronicle.
(Note: these blog posts are growing a bit each day as I come across old stuff to add and weave in. I read an old African proverb to the effect that the smith forges the Word, the weaver weaves it, and the leather worker beats it smooth. Yeah, that’s what’s going on!)
Before State. Excerpted from my Oral Assessment Biographical statement.
In this autobiographical statement for the FSOA, I outlined the general milestones of my life and discussed that chronology from the perspective of the influences, the persons, the places, and the ideas that guided me, steered me and propelled me through life.
First, and most significantly, as influences are my parents, Raymond Robert Maxwell and Sallye Anne Hairston Maxwell, both of whom are deceased, yet both of whom continue to exert a tremendous influence on my life, my daily decisions, my hopes and my aspirations.
My mother was the socializer of the pair. She enjoyed parties and balls and relished giving teas on Saturday evenings and dinner parties after Church on Sunday. She worked as a secretary but she found special satisfaction in volunteer work, carrying my sister and I out with her as she canvassed the neighborhood annually for Easter Seal, Muscular Dystrophy, the March of Dimes, NAACP membership drives and voter registration. Her dream for me was to become a lawyer, and she saw law as the loftiest, noblest, and most lucrative profession.
My father was not a grand socializer, church being the extent of his social life. But in some respects my father was just as much a people person as was my mother, concerned with improving the lot of those less fortunate by direct action and on an individual basis. He was an electrician by trade, and he brought many families into the twentieth century, wiring, at low cost, old houses for electricity for the first time, which meant heat during the winter and light at night and television and access to the use of modern appliances. He wanted me to become a preacher and a teacher. The most enduring lesson I learned from him was that one can’t help large groups of people collectively to bring about a change in their condition, but small groups and individuals can be shown how to help themselves, and many small groups become a large one.
I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina and attended public schools through junior high. My elementary school teachers were all friends of my parents, either through prior association or from my parents’ involvement in PTA and civic activities, and they all took a special interest in our academic and intellectual development. Supplementing our public education was the weekly pilgrimage to the Carnegie Negro Library with my father, where I developed a love for books and acquiring information while he developed his lecture for the adult Sunday School class which he taught. At one point, I decided I would become a librarian, and eventually, my first real job was as a library assistant at that library.
At age 11 I joined the Boy Scouts. George Herring, my scoutmaster, was a boyhood friend of my father’s, but he showed me no favoritism. I learned under his supervision hiking, camping, map-reading, Morse Code, and self-reliance. But more importantly, I learned from Mr. Herring that nature and the environment can be very unforgiving, and that there are no substitutes for gains and achievements that are hard-earned though diligence, persistence, and directed efforts. (Here I was thinking about the campfire incident at the Snowflake Camporee at Camp Wenasa, December, 1968. It was snowing and the wind was blowing and all we wanted to do was get a little flame going so we could warm our hands. As we were “hand warming,” Mr. Herring came out of his tent with a bucket of water and doused our little fire out, shouting that we needed a strong fire that could resist the wind, lest the wind spread the flame and burn our little campsite down). The parallels between my experiences as a Boy Scout and years later as a naval officer, as I reflect back, are amazing. Troop #442 presented me with my first exposure to a relatively heterogeneous group, where I began to develop the ability to deal with a variety of people with varied interests, from varied backgrounds, and with varied personalities.
I discontinued my involvement with the Boy Scouts when, in the eighth grade and after making Star rank, my parents gave me permission to go out for the junior varsity football team. I made the team as defensive and offensive end, playing both ways, and I was appointed team captain. Our JV team went undefeated and unscored upon. We were ecstatic, and I was certain that I was on the fast track to a career with the NFL.
After the eighth grade, I was awarded a scholarship to a prep school in Virginia, Woodberry Forest, not necessarily to play football. There my football career floundered, giving rise instead to a promising future as a middle distance runner. But other things also happened at Woodberry Forest.
Woodberry Forest exposed me to society’s upper crust and a whole new world of perception and expectation. I had a Spanish teacher from Spain, a history teacher descended from British nobility, and a track coach who told me that blacks could not run long distances competitively. After a disappointing first quarter academically, I made the necessary adjustments to my studying habits and my grades improves substantially. Athletically, track and cross-country practice provide me the opportunity to measure personal improvement, and the long afternoon runs enabled me to do the deep introspective thinking that, daily, nourished my soul. I despised mandatory chapel on Wednesdays and Sundays, and I resented the conspicuousness of my absence which insured my punishment (there were only eight of us that first year, so the prefects only needed to count black heads and issue demerits to the ones not counted…). I utilized extensively the school library, which was extremely well-stocked, better stocked that any library I had previously visited, and I especially cherished those long-distance runs, where my thoughts would take wings and fly.
After two years, I returned home and enrolled at Dudley Senior High. The adjustment to public school was difficult, and I never made the adjustment. Unfortunately, my track career ended at Dudley; I worked during the afternoons, evenings and weekends to help out with family expenses. Those part-time jobs, at a library and a bakery, reading books and baking pies, convinced me that my future was in the understanding of economic theory and development.
(Note. Missing in most accounts are two very seminal sets of experiences in my life. The first set of experiences I have not written about centers on my father’s worsening alcoholism and how it affected our family. The second set of experiences is my extended flirtation with black nationalist organizations, including the Nation of Islam. Both these experience sets, somewhat related, interestingly enough, should be carefully and appropriately examined.)
The following summer, I was selected to attend the Governor’s School of North Carolina, a summer enrichment program for the state’s top performing high school juniors. There I learned more about economics, the economic impact of current and international events, and the interrelationship of various disciplines of knowledge. We also watched daily telecasts of the Watergate hearings. At Governor’s School I met and studied with the brightest and best high school students in the state, some of whom I have kept in touch with over the years.
Going back to Dudley in the fall was analogous to a college basketball player who, in the summer between his junior and senior year, made the Olympic Team, traveled to Munich, and overcame great odds to win the gold medal, only to return to a mediocre team in the fall, or so I imagined. Impatient, adolescently immature and foolish, and against my parents wishes, I left Greensboro and moved to Washington, DC. There I got a job at a larger bakery, and spent my offhours at a larger library, the Library of Congress.
Washington provided me my first exposure to an international city, and I took full advantage of that opportunity, visiting embassies and consulates and talking with people from foreign countries and cultures. The Arab oil embargo was in full swing at the time, and I was especially interested in Arab cultures and cultures. Being of African descent, I also spent a lot of time reading about and talking with African nationals. Shortly, however, the price of sugar skyrocketed due to the embarge, and a huge Russian wheat deal drove the prices of bakery ingredients sky high, driving our bakery operation into bankruptcy.
We tried several remedies, such as decreasing sugar content in our products, substituting honey for sugar, and concentrating on bread sales (low profit margin) as opposed to cakes and pies which required large amounts of sugar (high profit margin). But none of these measures were successful. I found a part-time job at a restaurant, and started looking into enrolling in school, concentrating my efforts on American University. A young local politician and operator named Marion Barry was spearheading a scholarship program at AU. Shortly after applying, though, my mother’s unexpected death resulted in my return to Greensboro, where I enrolled in electrical engineering at North Carolina A&T State University.
Grief-stricken and perplexed, I made several false starts over the next two years, my performance roller-coastering between excellence and failure. I worked for a year as a coop student at Farmer’s Home Administration in Reidsville, NC, and, everyday, walking back and forth to work, I passed a navy recruiting office. One day I stopped in to check things out, and the rest is history: I enlisted the Navy Nuclear Power Program.
After many months of intensive training, I reported to my first sea-going command, the USS Hammerhead (SSN-663), a fast-attack submarine. My greatest achievement there was in becoming battlestations and special evolutions helmsman, where I became known for my ability to sense changes in the depth and course of the ship before those changes showed up on the indicators, and applying the proper correction. That gift, in abstraction, of finding and solving potential problems before they became actual problems, has been a tremendous asset for me in life.
After fifteen months, the chief of the boat encouraged me to re-enlist for reassignment to the commissioning crew of one of the new Trident submarines, the USS Michigan (SSBN-727 (B)). The next three years passed quickly; I made several deterrent patrols and maintained my equipment in top-notch working condition. As I approached rotation to shore duty, my supervisors encouraged me to apply for a program that would enable me to return to college to complete my undergraduate degree in preparation for a naval commission. I applied and was selected to attend Naval Science Institute in Newport, Rhode Island and Florida A&M University (FAMU) in Tallahassee.
At FAMU, I majored in economics and took course in international studies, mathematics, and ROTC courses in naval science. I did very well there, graduating at the top of my class. Two of my professors became best friends and confidants. Upon graduation, I returned to the fleet as an Ensign, to the destroyer USS LUCE (DDG-38) in Mayport, FL.
Within a month of reporting aboard, we deployed to the Mediterranean, conducted operations with NATO navies, and visited ports in Spain, France, Italy, Turkey and Israel. The remainder of my time aboard LUCE was spent in shipyards and maintenance periods, on short underway periods in the Caribbean, and managing a large number of inspections, examinations and assist visits.
Pt. 1b of 10. Prelude: How I came to take the Foreign Service Exam, my pre-dawn arrival in Atlanta for the Oral Assessment.
We were clearly headed in two different directions. So I moved to a small apartment around the corner from the Jacksonville Art Museum where I could focus on my new vocation, working on my ship by day, and writing sonnets at night. She (who will remain unnamed) moved to Madison, Wisconsin (I helped with the driving) and we closed out the apartment we had shared. Shortly thereafter, I enrolled in a linear algebra course at night at Jacksonville Community College to beef up (a friend told me I needed a course in linear algebra for graduate school economics) and on a lark had filled out one of those bulletin board postcards to take the Foreign Service Exam (FSE). But when the package came to the former address at Belle Rive, it wasn’t forwarded to Art Museum Drive, where I was, but to her new address in Madison. Luckily, without even knowing what it was, she forwarded the package back to me. I filled in all the forms and met the submission deadline to take the exam.
The LUCE was scheduled to do a two-month law enforcement ops with a Coast Guard detachment in the Caribbean during the period when the Foreign Service Exam (FSE) was scheduled. I talked with my Executive Officer and together worked it out with the ship’s education officer to receive the test and administer it to me underway. At least that was what they promised me. They lied. So when I checked with the XO a week before deploying, he offered me the following deal: I could stay in port and TDY to the civil engineering detachment for the six weeks deployment period, freeing up a spot on the watchbill for one of the newer officers. Sounded like a good idea to me, since I had already completed all my quals. Knowing the XO, it was probably a trick. He was a tricky guy. But it served my needs, so I took him up on it.
I spent a month working up a database of Mayport Naval Base contracts and warranties on emergency sprinkler systems (a bit boring, but it saved the government a ton of money to get systems repaired on existing warranties, vice re-contracting and paying each time something broke. It would be excellent training for my GSO future). Then, the second month, I inventoried each emergency hurricane kit (and there were hundreds of them on base, all of which were missing key pieces of equipment).
And I had a study program for the FSE. At night, I read Economist, cover to cover. I read Scientific American. I read the Atlantic Monthly. And I took sample GRE exams under time, all in preparation for the FSE. On the appointed Saturday, I took the foreign service exam. It seemed easy. I actually left early.
The LUCE returned. The crew had had a lot of fun in the Caribbean. I missed out. Life and work returned to normal. A few months later, I heard from State that I had passed the written exam and should make an appointment for the Oral Assessment. I chose to take it in Atlanta, a four hour drive from Jacksonville. My ship only allowed me one day off: we were working up for some type of inspection. I got off at 6pm, headed home, showered, packed a small bag, and hit the road. I stopped outside Savannah en route, to say hello to old ROTC buddies at Fort Gordon, then, around 10pm, hit the road for Atlanta.
I ran into a heavy thunderstorm en route, and of all times, my windshield wipers broke, so I had to pull over to the side of the highway to wait out the storm. I resumed the trip around midnight, arriving at the hotel, way out on one of the the Atlanta beltways, around 2:30am, totally exhausted. I set the alarm for 5am, and left at a quarter to 6 to find the assessment site in downtown Atlanta.
I made it through the Oral Assessment. The interviewers called me in and told me they had one more question for me. I had a sense that everything would be riding on the response. They told me that I had a critical piece of information in the group discussion that I failed to reveal. Why had I not revealed it? I told them the whole story. My windshield wiper broke. I got to the hotel at 2:30 am. I was operating on 2.5 hours of sleep. Sorry if I screwed it up. I passed. One of seven. They told me they really liked my biographic statement. It was much more than a resume, they told me. I’ve always enjoyed biographies, since Governor’s School. Why not make mine special and authentic? I still have that statement buried in a blog somewhere. That’ll be grist for another mill, as they say.
A year passed. My ship decommissioned. I moved to St. Louis and put my stuff in storage in anticipation of the fall semester at Wash U. Then it was two months in Palo Alto at Stanford for the summer AEA program, ten months back at Washington University in St. Louis doing graduate work in economics, and one month on Naval Reserve duty in Guam where we planned logistics for providing drought relief and medical assistance to people in the islands that made up Micronesia. I bid farewell to St. Louis after returning from Guam and drove to Washington, DC to begin a new adventure.
Next: Part 2 – A-100 and FSI training.
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 2 of 10. A-100 and pre-assignment training
Posted on June 21, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
Pt 2 of 10. A-100
A bit of a blur. We were 32, 16 men and 16 women. Some fresh out of college, some fresh out of graduate school, some, like me, in their mid-30’s and starting a second career. All very interesting people. Through the boring lectures, and through the regular nightly happy hours, we bonded (which was the A-100 purpose). To this day, eight years after retirement, I’m still in contact with A-100 buddies.
postscript #1. I later learned, through reading autobiographies and oral histories of diplomats, that A-100, the orientation course for new foreign service officers, was named for the room in the Old Executive Office Building where the course was once held. This predates the re-location of the State Department to its present location at 2201 C St NW and the relocation of the training function, Foreign Service Institute, to Rosslyn and later to the sprawling campus in Arlington.
postscript #2. I made a big mistake not negotiating my initial salary. I accepted the FS-06 step 1 they offered me, but I should have made a strong case for additional steps to reflect the four years I spent, post-graduation, gaining critical management and supervisory skills as a sea-going naval officer. The experience certainly aided and informed my foreign service career and added value to the contribution I was able to make at every grade level. It is a cautionary tale for any new FSO’s just joining the service, especially those with prior military service. The Foreign Service HR system was not equipped to automatically recognize the value of prior military service, and a few extra steps at the beginning can make a big difference in total earnings over the course of a 20-year career.
Post A-100
Between ConGen Rosalyn and the start of language training I had a six-week gap. My career assignment officer (CAO) found me a job “running clearances” in what was then IO/HW, Human Rights and Women’s Issues. In the pre-e-mail days, you actually had to carry drafts to various offices and wait while a responsible officer read it and made edits. It was a crazy time to be running clearances in the Department, what with the Bush-Clinton transition and all. And it was an interesting time to draft position papers for new political appointees and to put together the briefing book for delegates to the UN Human Rights Conference in Geneva. The Bush folks had packed up and the Democrats were taking over all the front offices after twelve years out of power. The Human Rights Conference delegation was still Republican-led by Amb. Ken Blackwell, a holdover from the Bush Administration. After completing the routine of getting clearances from the functional and geographical bureaus involved, I went to the various “front offices” for their approval and clearance. The new political appointees and their new staff assistants were pretty much clueless and would actually say stuff like “And what am I supposed to do with this?” I wondered what manner of organization I had joined. It turned out to be good practice, however. I would see two more transitions of comparable magnitude in foreign countries, the U.K. and Ghana, over the coming years.
GSO training was interesting though not much of it was actually useful. Consular training, interpreting ancient sections of immigration law was not really my thing, but I plowed through anyway and wrote a sonnet about it at the end. We composed haiku on the spot for our graduation ceremony (and you know I enjoyed that!). Two weeks of compressed area studies with weekly single days of visiting lecturers during language training served as my initiation into a sort of “cult” of African studies and Lusophone studies that would continue until today. We loved Dona Maria who wrote the Portuguese verb book. There were a couple others whose names I don’t remember. I do remember Dona Gloria. She was stern and tough but she was an excellent Portuguese instructor. Drill Sergeant Gloria. She would snap at us or roll her eyes when we mis-conjugated a verb. But we adored her in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. And she knew everything about the place I had been assigned to, Bissau.
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 3 of 10. Guinea-Bissau, the first year
Posted on June 21, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
Part 3. Bissau, Guinea-Bissau – The first year
Note 1. Guinea-Bissau was my first overseas posting. It will forever occupy a special place in my heart and in my imagination.
Note 2. It is said that if you ever drink from the waters of Pidjiguiti, you will always remember Guine.
August 1993. Off we went to Bissau. The first sign of the culture shock I was to experience came at the airport in Lisbon. On Sunday evenings at the Lisbon airport, flights depart to all the former colonies, Praia, Bissau, Maputo, Sao Tome and Luanda. My God! I had never seen so many Africans all together in one enclosed place. And the boxes. And the crates. And the colors. And the long lines. It all made me dizzy.
We arrived in Bissau around midnight. My new boss and his wife met us on the tarmac. It was raining cats and dogs — the middle of August and the height of the rainy season. They gave our passports to some strangers called expeditors and whisked us away. What about our luggage, we asked? “Oh don’t worry, it’ll come later with your passports.” Right. We arrived at the Embassy residential compound. It was quaint, in a word — four American-looking townhouses on the side and two colonial mansions in the middle. Cute. Quaint. “America em ponto pequeno” the locals would say, America in microcosm. The next morning the culture shock continued. My boss drove me to work and as I looked to the right and the left going down the Bissau’s main drag all I could think of was Dodge City. You know, the one with Sheriff Dillon and Festus and Doc. We arrived at the “Embassy.” What a dump! What a dump! I kept shaking my head and blinking my eyes and looking again, thinking that perhaps, what I thought I was seeing would change.
Bissau had its first parliamentary elections and its first ever presidential election on our watch. The coup leader/dictator “Nino” Vieira resigned from the military and ran as a civilian candidate. Our embassy sponsored (staged may be more appropriate) a pre-election mixed doubles tennis tournament. President Vieira, paired with the wife of the leading European retail expat, won the tournament, proving that he was virile and healthy. (Yours truly was eliminated in the first round!). The first round of the election was inconclusive; a formidable Kuumba Yala candidacy shifted the balance of the first round by capturing the Balanta vote. Ambassador McGuire encouraged President Vieira to stay the course and let the full democratic process play out. He listened and eventually won the election in the second round. Observers said the election was free and fair.
Conditions got better. We built a new, prefabricated chancery, State Department’s first, just across the street from the housing compound, and in a record time of nine months. My first assignment was to remove the squatters from the land the local government had given us. Getting the people to re-locate was easy; getting rid of the snakes, especially the black mambas, was much more difficult. I found a tiny, abandoned kitten on the site and took it home and nursed it back to health. We named her Manuela, after one of the maids in the compound. Manuela bore two litters with one of the he-cats at the next door “Chinese compound.” I caught her sneaking out the bathroom window. We provided kittens to Peace Corps volunteers throughout the country.
Other conditions got worse. Mefloquine didn’t agree with me and I stopped taking it. I came down with malaria. I caught it twice. Believe me when I say the cure for malaria is far worse than the preventative medicine. The sudden curtailment of the admin officer pushed me into his position. I doubled up on my one-a-day vitamins for a while as the work wore me down. After acquiring a taste for the local food and the local intestinal parasites, I lost about 30 pounds in a way I had not anticipated.
Nevertheless, this cloud had some silver linings. Friday poker night on the compound was always enjoyable, especially once I learned how to play and actually how to win! I met the Cuban cigar, Cohiba, by way of Cuban doctors resident in Bissau and we became lifelong friends. I learned to dance a modified kizomba. Going fishing with the USAID Director Mike Lukomski introduced me to Guinea-Bissau’s inland rivers, knowledge that would come in handy sooner than I expected and in ways I could not have imagined. Weekend-long bicycling treks through the backroads of the coastal region with Fulbright scholar Walter Hawthorne gave me a deep appreciation for the “terra” and the “povo.” Day trips to see the “Homem Grande” in Caliquisse exposed me to a different, a hidden knowledge. The FSN’s were troopers who always came through in the clutch.
In Bissau, the rainy season is followed by the cricket season. During the cricket season, there are crickets everywhere, almost like a biblical plague. After some complaints by compound residents, we had the gardeners apply a local product to “neutralize” the screaming crickets. One day, Manuela got a hold of a cricket that had already been treated. She acted a little strange the rest of the evening. We found her the next morning, stiff and cold. We buried Manuela in the woods at the back of the compound.
I hired casual laborers to “harvest” the bat dropping out of the attic of the old chancery as we were moving out. I saw it on one of my inspections of the building, and had heard somewhere that bat droppings make excellent fertilizer. Bats are true herbivores, after all. We ended up with enough of the stuff (boxes and boxes of it) to fertilize the whole of the new embassy compound grounds with some left over. The gardeners, God bless them all, planted new grass, one stem at a time, under a hot summer sun. In a few weeks the newly planted embassy lawn was a rich and luscious carpet of green.
Negotiating the closeout of the old chancery building was fraught with coincidences. I started in earnest negotiations with the landlord, Carlos Gomes, Sr., the richest man in the country who was in the middle of a Ross Perot-type campaign for the presidency. Very early in his campaign he proclaimed that I would be the only person in the Embassy he would talk to. For weeks he baffled me with stories about the Bissau’s former colonial grandeur, about his ancestors and the role they played in the country’s development, and about his own role both in the independence struggle against the Portuguese and in the struggle for free enterprise against the first communist governments after independence. I listened and learned.
At length, we got down to brass tacks. He pulled out the original lease from 1975 and pointed to the sentence that read words to the effect that if the US Government ever departed from his building, it would restore the building to whatever specifications the landlord required. I gasped, not believing that a foreign service contracting officer would sign such a lease. We won’t mention his name. He went on to have an illustrious career, including several ambassadorships.
After some wrangling and horse-trading, we agreed that each party would hire an architect to cost out the restoration work, then use the two figures provided as initial offers. Then, in a stroke of pure luck, the TDY Admin Officer Bob Kile and I stumbled upon the landlord’s architect, at a bar, crying in his beer because the mean old man refused to pay him for his work in estimating restoration costs (the landlord was too busy running for president to focus on such a mundane issue). We hired him, had him work up for us a counter proposal, and, to make a long story short, it ended up saving the USG about half a million dollars in restoration costs. We paid the architect his fee.
About the same time, the warehouse landlord (a different landlord altogether) asked for $150,000 in restoration costs (same type lease. What were they thinking about in 1975?). Fortunately for us, we learned that Coca-Cola of Spain was moving into town and looking for a warehouse. They bought out the lease, restoration costs and all. The gods were with us.
Note 3. If you like Year #1, you are gonna truly love Year #2! Of course these posts are really a metaphor. It is me in the final stages of healing.
A gathering of local employees at the Residence, 1994
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 4 of 10. Bissau, Guinea-Bissau – the 2nd year
Posted on June 22, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
Part 4. Bissau, Guinea-Bissau – The second year
Note 1. Yes, Guinea-Bissau requires two posts. A country small in geographical size, it is gigantic in historical significance, in spiritual force, and in wealth potential.
A whole chapter is required on my journeys to Caliquisse and meetings with the Homem Grande. “Homem Grande” in Portuguese means great man. But in Guinea-Bissau, Homem Grande means the big voodoo/spiritual/mystic guy, and Caliquisse is the capital of the spirit world. Now I was not particularly a believer in this stuff, though I did read a book on Santeria as an undergraduate that led me to make a pilgrimage to the above ground crypt of Marie Laveau in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Glad I made that pilgrimage then, because I doubt those sites still exist! Anyway, returning to the original subject, a warehouse theft that we couldn’t solve resulted in my boss’s decision to consult with the Homem Grande to find out who was ripping us off. My boss was a very religion guy, very observant, but he had this obsession with, how can I say it, “local culture.” So one Saturday, five or six of us piled into two vans and headed to Caliquisse to visit with the local oracle.
After a huge midday feast at the home of a local merchant, Silvestre was his name, I think, we picked up gifts for the Homem Grande, rice, live chickens, a baby pig (leitao), and several bottles of cana (a Cape Verdean sugar cane liquor) and started on a trek into the bush. When the road ended, we continued driving until we reached a clearing, then the guide took us by foot several hundred yards to a wooded area where we found a large tree with a hollowed out base, one of those ugly trees that grows the delicious cabaceira, a white tangy powder in a large green pod. There, we awaited the arrival of the spirit man.
The spirit man arrived, greeted us and offered us a sip of cana, a distilled spirit made from sugar cane, from what appeared to me to be a very questionable container. I very politely declined. Through a translator, we explained that we needed to know who was robbing our warehouse. My boss believed our warehouse employees were guilty, but I maintained they were innocent and that it was clearly an “outside” job. The spirit man nodded, took another sip of cana and pulled a long rusted knife from a sheath. I thought to myself, “Oh shit, he’s gonna kill us!” But the knife wasn’t for us, it was for the hen we brought, the galinha de terra, the reading of whose entrails were to provide the answers we traveled to Caliquisse to seek.
With a quick snap of the wrist, he decapitated the chicken, while holding its still twitching body in his left hand. Then, with a smaller knife, he cut open the chicken’s underside. Here, he began the close reading. Looking carefully at the chicken’s ovaries (I found that out later), he revealed to us that bandits were entering the warehouse through the roof, and that it was definitely an outside job. I took a deep breath of relief; my staff was not involved at all! Then he asked us if we wanted to know anything else! My boss and the OBO project director asked if they would have sons. He said yes, sons for both. But in exchange, both would be required to bring their sons back to Caliquisse for a visit. He looked my way, but I kept my mouth shut! (I had attended a lecture earlier given by a lady named Crowley (can’t remember her first name) on the practice of making deals with the Spirit world. To break a promise is very bad ju-ju. Better not to make it.) The translator advised us that once we uncovered the plot and learned the truth of the robberies, we would be required to return to the Homem Grande and bring more rice, more cana, and more chickens. Satisfied, we piled into the vehicles and returned to Bissau. Little did I know, this would not be my final encounter with the Guinea-Bissau spirit world! Here is a link to a poem I wrote about Bissau: http://poemsbyray.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-return-to-mother-africa.html
The locals, employees and contacts, adopted me as one of their own. They exposed me, through weddings, funerals, and late night parties, to the full cultural panorama of life in Guinea-Bissau. My favorites were the baby-naming ceremonies and the end of Ramadan Eid al-Fitra celebrations. The Peace Corps volunteers who came around on weekends from the interior of the country became lifelong friends as, after their service in Bissau, they navigated their way through life transitions, careers, family, etc.
We transitioned from the horrid location downtown to the new Embassy compound in Bairro de Penha. We managed to preserve the cashew trees on the compound, guaranteeing a supply of delicious cashew fruit and nuts. We also managed to preserve a supply of poisonous black mambas on the compound lawn.
In July, 1994, shortly after the move to the new embassy compound, we got a call about trouble in a neighboring country. Well, sort of “neighboring.” When Gambian troops returned home to Banjul, Gambia, after a peacekeeping stint in Liberia, the troops, led by a then unknown Lt Jammeh, ran into a bit of “disrespect” from airport officials. In response to the airport slight, Jammeh and his crew plotted and carried out a coup d’etat. The Wikipedia article says “In July 1994, the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council (AFPRC) seized power in a military coup d’etat, deposing the government of Sir Dawda Jawara. Lieutenant Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, chairman of the AFPRC, became head of state.” When the coup occurred, the deposed president was out taking a maiden voyage on a navy patrol craft the United States had provided to the Gambians. We maintained VHF radio contact with the president’s party from Bissau. Sir Dawda Jawara didn’t return to Banjul until several years later, when a more enlightened President Jammeh decreed that all former presidents would be maintained and taken care of by the State for life.
When the time came, my CAO, Nick Williams, asked me where I wanted to go next. His predecessor, Kathy Peterson, who suggested I consider bidding Bissau in A-100, promised me a good follow-on assignment if I did well in Bissau. I thought, “Go for it now! It’s your only chance.” I asked for the London, CON/POL rotation. My second choice was GSO in Nassau. He said he would work on it. I got the London assignment.
Here is another Bissau poem: http://poemsbyray.blogspot.com/2009/12/natural-forces-or-notes-to-former-lover.html
We can, frankly, end the story here and it will be quite complete. Everything after Bissau is pretty much a footnote to be truthful. But let us continue.
p.s. Addendum
Our private security company (a model well-to-do neighborhoods and gated communities are likely to turn increasingly to as we take steps to defund public police departments) found car batteries for sale in a local market, traced them back to our embassy and to the band of thieves, who when pressed (spare us the details, please!), confessed they were entering the roof at night across the tops of several adjacent buildings.
As fate would have it, the owner of our security company is now the country’s Minister of Interior. But back then he was just a guy with a security company.
And yes we went back. Well, you know Americans, after getting what we wanted there was no great motivation to return and actually pay the price. But towards the end of my stay I kept remembering that lady’s lecture about making deals with the Spirit World (She is still around, I think in Europe with FAO, Eve Crowley). With three weeks left and my boss having left post in disgrace, I got a driver to take me out to Canchungo where Silvestre lived, and he made the arrangements. We took a box of several bottles of Cape Verdean cana, aka grog, along with a couple of baby pigs and full grown chickens and paid a final visit to the spirit man.
Of course he wanted to do the whole thing again and give me a reading. I very politely declined.
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 5 of 10. The London Embassy, U. Kingdom
Posted on June 22, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
The consular year in London was uneventful. The Government shut down for a few weeks and the consular section bosses all took free leave. Junior officers were, of course, declared “essential personnel.” In my spare time I started a mystery novel about odd third-country national visa applications, strange travel patterns and a vice-consul who took his work home with him one time too many. The novel never saw the light of day, but the draft still lives on my hard drive! I continued doing NIV interviews in the morning and eventually took over the Volume Visa Unit in the afternoon. Toward the end of my consular “sentence” I headed the E Visa section after mornings at the NIV window. My boss warned me I was spending too much time on NIV interviews and wrote in my EER a backhand slap that I would make a fine political officer. My excuse about gathering information for my mystery novel obviously neither amused nor impressed him. Luckily I got an early release and transition to the political section.
Work in the political section was a blast. A great team of mid level guys who would all become famous in their own right: Jim Young covered Africa and Labour, Matt Tueller covered the Middle East and the Lib Dems, Charlie Peacock did PolMil, Blair Hall covered Northern Ireland and the Tories, and as the junior officer in the shop, I had Latin America, Scottish and Welsh national parties, international organizations, and global issues. We had outstanding leadership in deputy Marcie Ries and political counselor Mike Habib.
I went to the Foreign Office each week to explain why the USG chose not to pay its annual UN dues. On alternate days I went to the Foreign Office to explain why the USG had a right to refuse visas to influential British subjects who invested in expropriated properties in Cuba. My senator Jesse Helms was behind both efforts – demarches that my boss Marcie called carrying dirty water.
And I got to write the annual Human Rights Report. Gathering the material and writing it was a different experience, but the clearance process was a real killer, no pun intended — I found it curiously strange that so many people of color were dying in custody in UK jails and prisons. Even more curious was the contorted criteria we devised for determining which of those deaths qualified as extrajudicial deaths while in police custody for reporting in our annual Human Rights report.
Going by overnight train to Inverness, Scotland for the Scottish National Party (SNP) conference was an adventure in a lot of ways. It was my first work trip outside the immediate London area (other than the prison health and welfare visits we did in consular). Surprisingly enough, at the conference in Scotland I met people named Maxwell and Hairston whom I presumed to be descendants of Maxwell (paternal) and Hairston (maternal) ancestral lines. Cousins, perhaps. Distant cousins. Way distant cousins. White cousins from the back-home families of absentee fathers who owned Virginia and North Carolina plantations. (There is no such thing as consensual sex with people whom you own). That’s a different story, of course, though I did find out many years later when I sent a spit sample to Ancestry.com that I am 12% Scottish! Shit happens in America. See my later poem: rape culture.
After my first big reception an SNP Member of Parliament I had worked with in London, Rosie Cunningham, took me out for a single malt tasting expedition. We were in Scotland, after all. And she regaled me over dinner with stories about the Loch Ness monster! I got real dizzy after the fourth or fifth sample. Forever a lightweight!
SNP members, at the time, were a curious blend of KKK-types at one end of the spectrum and Weathermen at the other and everything in between. What a bunch! I remember writing a cable describing my meeting with the SNP leader, Alex Salmond. He reminded me, I wrote, “of a Southern Baptist preacher I had grown up knowing, one hand thrusting the Bible into space, the other holding a white handkerchief to wipe his sweaty forehead — one foot planted in the muck and mire of our temporal abode, the other foot already in Zion.” Way too much context, perhaps. Definitely way too much information.
But back to real politics. I spent a lot of time with UK counterparts on UN scales of assessment. I covered Scottish and Welsh devolution issues back in London and spent some time chatting with the then Shadow Secretary for Scotland and Wales, George Robertson. He later became Defense Minister in the first Blair administration and was later tapped to be NATO Secretary-General. Wow! How fortunes change!
When New Labour won the election, after 18 years in opposition, we scrambled. I mean, it wasn’t like we didn’t know Blair and company would make a clean sweep. I drafted a cable detailing what would happen in the event of a tie in the parliamentary elections. The Queen gets to choose if there is a tie; but in fact, it wasn’t even close. As the junior officer of the section, I drew the straw to draft the Tory condolence note. “The US Government is so sorry you lost, buster. See ya, but I wouldn’t want to be ya.”
Along the way, I was coned Admin (this was the “unconed” era. For a short span of years, FSOs entered without a conal designation and bid their cone in their second tour. Coming into the service directly from a year in a PhD program in Economics, I assumed I would go for Econ. But the fun I had doing GSO work in Bissau, coupled with the lack of fun I saw econ officers having in London conspired to persuade me to bid Admin), and I thought it made sense to chat with the Admin folks at post. The admin counselor, Lyn Dent, took me under his wing and remained a mentor throughout my career. He walked pass my office one day and mentioned something about bidding on jobs in the Ops Center. I took him up on it and while in Washington that fall, stopped by the Ops Center for an interview. The rest is history (see part 6).
A word is in order here about meeting Filomena, our courtship and marriage. Filomena and I met a month or so after I arrived in London, November 1995. We started dating the following February and shared most of our weekends together thereafter. It was fun, we shared similar interests, liked the same music, and enjoyed browsing London bookstores and art galleries together. Cupid’s arrow struck. We got married in July, 1997, just before the London tour ended. Happily ever after. We packed up and moved back to Washington together.
I enrolled in a graduate program at SOAS (University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies) in my last year in London. The Center for International Studies and Diplomacy was in its second year and reaching out to folks who worked in the hundreds of embassies in London. I went to an orientation session and decided to do it. I had classes three nights a week and spent evenings and weekends studying and writing papers for class. It wasn’t really kosher for the junior guy in the political section to dash out at 5:30 three nights a week to make it to Russell Square for class by 6pm, but I did it and suffered the consequences. The schedule was hectic, but it all worked out and I completed the coursework and my MA dissertation on transnational organization legal personality on time and within budget.
Next stop, Washington, DC and the Operations Center!
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 6 of 10. Domestic assignment – The Ops Center
Posted on June 23, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
August 1997. I arrived at Ops. George Kent, Lisa Johnson and Mike Keller had already reported for duty. Julie Adams, Lara Friedman and Mari Dieterich were ending their tours. Scott Boswell came the following year. It was a 63rd class reunion. We had a swell time and I got good material for my continuing mystery murder novel. Who dunnit? Nobody knows. The buck never stops. It never even slows down in this city.
This chapter is decidedly shorter than the rest, because, you know, if I told you, would you like it? Would you like it if I told you? Making the sausage is never pretty. Collecting raw data for policy makers is even worse. Blood all over the decks. Plus, if I told you I’d have to kill you! No, just kidding . . .
A highlight of my Ops Center tour, without a doubt, was working the Bissau evacuation. It was one of those rare and incredible moments of being in the right place at the right time with the right information. Listening in on a Task Force conversation (as was our jobs to do), I heard then A Assistant Secretary Pat Kennedy talking with then CA Assistant Secretary Mary Ryan about sending a small boat up a particular river to extract the embassy staff. I knew that river and I knew the boat landing. I interrupted, with some initial reluctance if not trepidation, to tell them that the river was a tidal river and that when the tide ebbs the river turns to little more trickle through the muddy bottom.
Fishing those inland rivers in Guinea-Bissau with Mike Lukomski endowed me with a special knowledge that we were able to put to good use in the embassy staff evacuation. And coming from London where I occasionally “hung out” with my Navy brothers, I knew who to call at the Navy Base across the street from the embassy to get local tide charts for any location on the Atlantic (we learned to do tide charts manually in Naval ROTC. I imagine it all is done with computer programs now). A rented boat entered the river at high tide and met the embassy staff at the small boat landing we used to call the Swedish Camp. The staff trekked through the woods, with baggage and a few pets, for the rendezvous and all departed without incidence. Some folks say our efforts at Ops saved people’s lives.
Another height was working the overnight of the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, a sad event where many lives were lost, an event I would revisit often in a future PMO assignment. I recall it was a long shift, beginning at midnight and lasting until around noon the next day. There was a lot of work to be done.
Bidding time came again. I should mention here that I gave some thought to leaving the Foreign Service during that Washington year. Domestic assignments can do that to you. I prepared a resume, contacted search firms, and attended preliminary meetings with counselors. There was a big push at the time to place people in association positions and Washington, DC has “beaucoup” associations and association-like organizations. An old guy I trusted convinced me to stay with the Government until I could “cash in” on the time I spent in the military. It wasn’t the last time I would think about leaving.
Most of my Ops colleagues were bidding on desk officer jobs. I looked at some as well, and inquired about a PMO job in the Africa Bureau. The AF bureau deputy director Nancy Serpa told me I would need to manage a post overseas before I could be a good post management officer in the AF Bureau. (Such standards, unfortunately, no longer exist). I took the bait and submitted a bid for the FS-02 admin officer job in Luanda (really should have been FS-01. I bet it has been upgraded by now), a two-grade stretch, knowing full well that if I put it on my bid list, there was a very strong possibility I’d get it. What the heck, I figured, they had already taught me Portuguese. Why not use it again? After delivering a cryptic handwritten note from SS/EX Director Dick Shinnick (a friend and mentor at the time who would later betray me) to the AF/EX Director Steve Browning, and after enduring long interviews in AF/EX the morning after a long night shift on the watch, AF accepted my double stretch bid and assigned me to Luanda as administrative officer.
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 7 of 10. Embassy Luanda, Angola
November 1998. Approaching Luanda by air, you see this beautiful city on the coast with tall buildings and winding avenues. Only as you get closer do you realize the tall buildings are empty shells of construction halted when the Portuguese left suddenly in 1975. And when you get real close, you can see bullet holes from Savimbi’s last stand in 1992. Not to be confused with Savimbi’s last stand of 2002. My oh my! Luanda! No place like it on earth.
Embassy Luanda was a trailer park, plain and simple. As admin officer I was the only American in the admin section, which meant I was also leasing officer, contracting officer, certifying officer, and HR adviser. I sort of saw this coming and managed to get enrolled in the the financial mgmt and HR courses before leaving Washington. I had time to take the overseas management officer course, but my brainless Career Development Officer (CDO) informed me that you had to be FS-02 to take that course. When I countered that I was going to fill an FS-02 job, she simply said, “but you’re an FS-04, No exceptions.” It was a big disappointment for me. I could have used that class. But that is spilt milk, no use crying over it.
One by one, we found residential properties outside, negotiated leases, and moved all remaining staffers off the compound and into newly rented houses and apartments as quickly as our guys could complete the make-ready preps. Of course, it was never quick enough, nor the make-ready good enough for the prospective tenant. We did our best. Then we started the arduous task of securing the permits and permissions from various government offices to begin the New Office Building (NOB) construction project.
After several meetings with several different ministries and regional and local government departments, we arrived at a stalemate regarding a “showstopper” for the prospective NOB, closing off the back street to enhance, no to secure setback requirements. In a final meeting I attended with the Provisional Governor (who was on our side) and representatives from the Interior Ministry (who were not on our side), the Interior Ministry folks drew a line in the sand. Their position was that to grant us permission to close off the back street “for security reasons” somehow suggested that they were not doing their job to provide adequate security for a foreign mission (which of course, in their estimation, they were. The Interior Ministry guys studied under the Russians, the East Germans, and the Cubans back during the good old days. They were the best at what they did in the world.). It was all in the wording.
One of the city traffic planners offered the following olive branch proposal: Close off the back street, not for security purposes, as stated, but to provide for temporary construction, knowing full well that once the traffic patterns were changed to close the road for the three years of the construction period, no one would bother to change them again afterwards. I phoned the DCM to get the go ahead. We cut the deal and shook on it. It was done. Ground was broken, and a few years later, after my departure, the New Office Building became a reality — the trailer park, a distant memory.
In retrospect, while I didn’t fully recognize it at the time, I would certainly come to miss the support DCM Jeff Hartley and Ambassador Joe Sullivan always extended to us. Telephones didn’t work half the time. There was no e-mail to the Admin annex where I worked, Casa Inglesa. But I could count on the support of upper management to do the work I had to do. I could take it to the bank. The support I enjoyed and took for granted in Luanda, the collegiality we shared, I would later learn, was rare in this outfit. I remain grateful for having experienced it there.
Addendum: Farewell to Luanda (10/2000)
Dear friends and colleagues,
We are packing out and already I am missing this sad, strange place. Luanda. No place like it. No place like it on Earth.
Coming down with malaria is a pain that I won’t miss. Nor will I miss that illness we get from time to time that fakes out the malaria test. The locals call it catolotolo, while I call it total physical misery. But I will miss the peaceful sunsets and late dinners out on the ilha, the hypnotizing popular music, dancing (more like watching them dance) the kizomba and the high-fives shared when one hits that out-of-sync step with rhythmic perfection.
I’ll miss the taste of zindungo (a spicy sauce made from peppers, garlic and whiskey), the smooth harshness of Angolan robusta coffee, the sweetness of overripe pineapple sold at inflated prices by the women on the street who swear it will last until tomorrow, and the bitter-sweetness of gimboa (a type of local greens) fried with onions and olive oil. More than anything else, though, I’ll miss the effusive, infectious enthusiasm of our local Foreign Service National (FSN) employees, their willingness to learn, their professional dedication and loyalty.
The war, which resumed in earnest two years ago, continues in earnest. The rebels continue to wreck havoc and random mayhem in the distant and not-so-distant provinces. The government continues to blame the rebels and, by extension, the war for all the ills of the kleptocratic society it leads. Luanda’s majority continues its struggle to survive and overcome desperate, oppressive poverty. Luanda’s privileged elite continues to revel in opulent, ostentatious wealth. International oil companies continue to discover and suck out black gold, Texas tea, like there’s no tomorrow. And then there are diamonds. Diamonds are forever. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Diamonds. Y’all know the rest of that story. The American Embassy continues its bifurcated operation in the Miramar trailer park and on top of the downtown garage known as Casa Inglesa. Continuity, for better or for worse, is Luanda’s most obvious constant. The strong get stronger, the weak go further off track. Or, if corruption empowers, then absolute corruption empowers absolutely.
Angola diz basta, Angola quer paz. Angola vai vencer. Or so says the steady flow of local media propaganda. Angola says enough. Angola wants peace. Angola shall win. An associate with party connections gave me the red, black and gold t-shirt that repeats the mantra. That makes it so.
The NOB didn’t start on time and may or may not start in the foreseeable future. While I am buoyed by our accomplishments of the past two years, I am a little disappointed over the NOB delays and the failed prospect of being personally involved in yet another building project in yet another former Portuguese colony. Never mind. A luta continua e vitoria é certa (translation: the struggle continues and victory is certain).
We are coming up on two years of official USG presence in Angola in the post-Cold War era (1992-2002). I am soliciting information, anecdotes, photographs, etc. from folks who have served in Luanda, and from PMO’s, FBO Area Managers and desk officers who have paid Angolan dues, so to speak. While talking with people in Luanda and in Washington, I’ve made interesting discoveries regarding the colonial-era Luanda consulate and its employees (1952-1975) and the Benguela and Luanda consulates that supported US Navy ships (the African Squadron) involved in slave trade interdiction efforts in the 1840’s and 1850’s. Keep those cards and letters coming and let’s all meet for a big birthday bash in Luanda in 2002!
Luanda Charter FSN Association, 2000
Combined State/USAID gathering at our house in Bairro Azul.
Part 8 of 10. Embassy Accra, Ghana
Posted on June 23, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
September 2000. I was at my desk doing some paperwork when the phone rang. “Hello, may I speak to Raymond Maxwell?” Not expecting any calls out of the ordinary, I responded in my normal manner, “This is.” “Please hold from the Ambassador.” I found it strange the ambassador’s OMS would be on the call and with so much formality. Ambassador Sullivan usually just picked up the phone and called. But it wasn’t Ambassador Sullivan, it was Ambassador Ledesma calling from Gabon, a somewhat neighboring country. He called to offer me a job as his admin officer. We were two weeks from packout and pretty much set on going to Accra. I very politely declined the offer. Lesson learned: if an ambassador calls with an offer, not the Bureau and not DC HR, you may want to give it very careful consideration. He (or she) has an interest in you and will very likely support you and “take care” of you. That support is nothing to take for granted, as I would soon enough discover.
November 2000. We left Luanda and moved to Accra where I took over the reins of the General Services section as supervisory general services officer (GSO). Prior to arriving at post, I bumped into my new boss at FSI. He told me “They say very good things about you in the AF Bureau.” He laughed, then said, “There is no way you can live up to your advanced billing.” He laughed again, then smiled. O my god, I thought, a psycho for a boss. Three years. OMG!
We arrived. Elections brought in the opposition just as we were settling in. The coup leader turned dictator turned democrat stepped down after nineteen years of rule. Western pundits called it the Ghana Miracle because Lt. Rawlings bowed out gracefully. But it was no miracle — just normal folks behaving like adults. To expect otherwise says more about the expector than the expected.
Accra was fine and we did some outstanding work in GSO, especially in contracting and residential leasing. Filomena returned to USAID, managing child health programs. But the level of collegiality and camaraderie at Embassy Accra was not the same as it was in Luanda — perhaps because Angola was a country at war, while Ghana was a country at peace.
Embassy operations were spread out in locations throughout the city and bad traffic made moving from location to location stressful. GSO itself was operated out of four separate facilities. As lead contracting and logistics officer I had a very diversified operational portfolio of responsibilities. I spent a lot of my time on the road, getting from location to location.
Mentors warned me it would be taking a backwards step going from administrative officer in Luanda to general services officer in Accra. They told me I might not even be invited to Country Team meetings. Their predictions came true, but I was willing to take that backwards step for the complex construction, services and security contracting opportunities the position would afford me. It turned out to be a bad trade, especially when I had my pick of administrative officer positions in the Africa Bureau and beyond from which to choose. It didn’t help that this was my boss’s first administrative officer position and he had no interest in my “big picture” previous experience.
There were tensions across agencies and even in the administrative section, lots of pettiness, lots of bickering. Having my own universe outside the main embassy did not make me immune from the seeds and sources of division.
On the other hand, being in Accra provided some very bright moments. Ghana was rich in pre-colonial, colonial and post colonial history. As an aside, It was Sierra Leone, I would learn, and not Ghana that the British had groomed for eventual independence. Historically, well-to-do folks in Ghana sent their children to Sierra Leone for civil service and teacher training.
(Side note. Three countries had somewhat interesting but unique and different recolonization pilot efforts for their freed and enslaved Africans. Brazilians sent their emancipated slaves back to Nigeria, from whence many of them came. By the end of the 19th century, colonial officials outlawed the speaking of Portuguese by repatriated Africans from Brazil, ultimately under penalty of death. The United States experimented with recolonizing freed and enslaved people to Liberia, even before blanket emancipation. President Madison, whose baby brother Willey had a house in central Virginia that eventually became the site of a prep school I would integrate in the early ’70’s (but that is a whole different kettle of worms) was a leading proponent of solving the Negro problem through massive “recolonization.” What a disaster that would have been. Great Britain found itself with a sizable population of freed slaves following the rebellion in the colonies and their offer of freedom to any slaves willing to escape and join their cause. Similarly during the War of 1812. They were first settled in Canada, then in England. Ultimately the British would experiment with resettling them and their dependents in Sierra Leone. End note.)
But that all changed in 1957 when the Ghanaians jumped the gun and declared their independence from colonial United Kingdom. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first leader, studied at Howard University (where I presently work) and a steady stream of African American leaders made pilgrimage to Accra and to the Ashanti Kingdom center, Kumasi over the 50’s and 60’s, including W.E.B. DuBois, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
It was Ghanaians who introduced me to yoga. The Fantes enstooled me and gave me the name “Nana Kweku Appiah.” The Ashantis embraced me and taught me their culture and philosophy. The Ewe and Ga protected me and kept me safe from harm. To quote an Emerson poem, “. . . give all to love . . . . when the half-gods go, the gods arrive.”
At the end of my tour, the local employees and I performed a traditional “blessing” of the land where we hoped the new embassy would be built, Bud Field, but not before making a convincing presentation to OBO and AF/EX that Embassy Accra needed a new Embassy compound as soon as possible. A powerpoint presentation I composed and delivered to OBO Director Williams and AF/EX Director Huggins provides a snapshot view of dispersed embassy operations at the time and made a strong case for a new unified embassy compound.
How did I leave out 9/11? Probably because it was all very abstract experiencing it overseas. I got a call on my cell from the facilities maintenance guy around noon. He heard that something had happened in the states. We arranged to meet at my house for a late lunch. A meeting had been called of the Emergency Action Committee but we weren’t members, just as we were not invited to Country Team, but information filtered through that there had been some sort of attack. When I got home I turned on the television and CNN was showing replays of those planes flying into those buildings in New York. I pulled out a bottle of single malt and we had a drink. Middle of the goddamn day. Things had suddenly changed forever. Some months later we got more directly involved when there was a threat that the diplomatic pouch had been contaminated by anthrax worldwide. We donned anti-c’s and cleaned the pouch room down to parade rest as part of our effort, along with embassies and consulates around the world. It was the dawning, for us, of the Age of Terrorism.
Also omitted in the first draft. I joined the African American Association of Ghana shortly after arriving. One of the activities I got personally involved in was forging a relationship between the association and the Embassy, or more specifically, actually, the Public Affairs section. During African American History Month we were able to borrow the 16mm copies (several reels) of Eyes On The Prize and a 16mm projector from the PAO section to screen over several weeks at the W.E.B. DuBois Center for association members and their guests.
The most memorable project I was involved in at Embassy Accra came at the very end of my tour. By a fortuitous turn of events, we needed at least a 200-year lease on a large piece of property for the construction of an embassy compound at the same time that the Ghanaian Ambassador in Washington needed to close a deal on property he was purchasing for his official residence out in Potomac, MD. The Ghanaian constitution did not allow foreigners to own land, but OBO assured us that a long-term lease of at least 200 years was as good as a title deed.
Fortunately for us, the new supervisory post management officer (PMO) in AF/EX in charge of the project, Stephanie Sullivan (presently the chief of mission in Ghana), had previously been political counselor in Accra and knew all the political players, including the Ghanaian Ambassador to the U.S., Alan Kyerematen. The management counselor was on leave, so it fell to me to handle the negotiations on the Accra side. We worked the phones, just like in Ops, Embassy Accra to AF/EX in Washington, Embassy Accra to the Ghanaian Embassy, Embassy Accra to the Foreign Ministry, Embassy Accra to the Presidential Palace, Embassy Accra to the members of Parliament, and every combination and permutation within and across all these elements. Stephanie steered me masterfully through the local and national Ghanaian government bureaucracy. Within mere days, we managed to execute an MOU with the Ghanaian government, in effect persuading legislators to amend their constitution to grant long tern lease rights to a foreign government, resulting in granting us the 200-year lease on Bud Field. Great work, by the way, from the DC Office of Foreign Missions pushing the reciprocity angle. A couple of years later, NOB construction commenced at that very site, blessed by all the local chieftains on the GSO staff. And in a few months I would be joining Stephanie’s PMO shop in Washington.
Signing the MOU for the 200-year lease with Amb. Twining
Control officer for John Lewis codel, Labadi Beach Hotel, Accra, Ghana
Part 9 of 10. Domestic Assignment – AF/EX PMO
Posted on June 23, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
Part 9. Mid-career domestic assignment: AF/EX Post Management Officer
We returned to Washington in the fall of 2002. As soon as our tenant vacated the apartment we embarked on a major refurbishment project, resurfacing the hardwood floors, painting throughout, and a complete renovation of the kitchen. Meanwhile, the DC sniper was terrorizing the District and we were wishing we were back in West Africa. I had developed a nasty little habit of smoking cigarettes over the past several years, about a pack a week, nothing too intense, and decided to use the DC sniper craziness as an excuse to quit once and for all. Cold turkey. Piece of cake.
That summer we moved back to Washington to a post management officer (PMO) job in AF/EX — Anglophone and Lusophone West Africa, as originally assigned. But upon arrival, the deputy executive director told me I would be covering countries in East Africa, which included Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mauritius. My prior assignments, Bissau, Luanda, and Accra, had all been west, so this region would present a new, unexplored set of challenges. I rolled up my sleeves, little knowing that, later, in retrospect, I would consider it my favorite all-time assignment and the most productive period of my foreign service career.
At work, I sat out to master the ropes of the Washington bureaucracy. We had major projects underway: new embassy buildings under construction in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; re-establishment of operations in Khartoum; and potential New Office Building (NOB) site search and selection projects for Djibouti, Asmara, and Antananarivo. In meeting after meeting, I came to understand and appreciate the thoughts and contributions of my counterparts in the Office of Building Operations (OBO), Information Resource Management (IRM) and Diplomatic Security (DS), and before long we were able to pick up the phone and unstick things, solving problems before they reached anybody’s notice. In the Spring I traveled with Under Secretary for Management Grant Green to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam for the new embassy openings, then broke away for site visits to Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Asmara. I was scheduled for visits to Antananarivo, Kampala and Djibouti, but the Iraq war started when I got to Ethiopia and my boss phoned and told me to return home immediately.
We spent quite a bit of time back in the office on Khartoum. Early on the deputy director, John Sheely (a fabulous guy and a great boss, by the way. We were all lucky to have him as our immediate supervisor and mentor) directed me to organize a series of weekly meetings, cross-departmental, to come up with a strategy to restore full operations to Embassy Khartoum. Since evacuation and shutdown in the 90’s, American staff in Khartoum had been assigned to Nairobi and only made TDY visits to Khartoum, even though the local staff was still assigned. The situation worked very well for USAID, which was principally engaged in South Sudan (still part of Sudan at the time, though at war), a short flight from Nairobi.
During those weekly meetings, I managed to forge even stronger working relations with colleagues from DS, IRM, and OBO. The weekly meetings were always well attended, and I stayed late or came in early the next day to draft and send the meeting minutes and to-do items out to various offices. One of the weekly meetings was particularly rousing: we were coming close to closure on a way to restore unclassified and classified e-mail at the Khartoum chancery. Thanks to ideas from AF IT and logistics guru Steve Deutsch, we had a number of excellent ways forward to consider. Nonetheless, organizational lines were crossing and tempers were flaring. As host and erstwhile moderator, I lost control of the meeting due to all the bickering and turf defending between and across the various groups. Suddenly, without warning, I slammed my hand on the conference room table and said, in a firm but convincing voice, “We, here, today, in this conference room, must decide if Embassy Khartoum is going to be an Embassy of the United States of America, or a hole in the wall.” The room got silent. You could have heard a pin drop. And slowly, cooler heads prevailed and we found a way forward that satisfied the requirements of DS, OBO, IRM and AF/EX. There is nothing like bureaucratic success, or, as a Quaker friend always says, “the truth is in the room; you just have to allow it to emerge.”
That fall of 2003 we moved to 18th and G so our suite could be renovated. It would be the first ever renovation of AF/EX since the building was built in the 50’s. My boss, Jamie Agnew, masterminded the project from start to finish. I really came to admire Jamie and I enjoyed working for her. She remains one of my all-time favorite bosses, and being a PMO in AF/EX remains my favorite all-time jobs. I got a lot done for my posts and I learned a lot about the inner workings of the State machine, especially HR, OIG, OBO, and the A Bureau, bureaus whose operations affect people at post the most.
A few days into my second trip to the region, Ops found me to let me know about a death in the family, my aunt, Rebecca Hairston. Aunt Beck stepped in and became our mother figure when my mother died unexpectedly in 1975, so she had served as a mother figure for a longer time than did my actual mother. I was in Asmara when the call came, but luckily there was a flight to Europe the very next day. I changed my itinerary and returned home.
The second year in AF/EX was the year of evacuations. Abidjan, Bangui, Kinshasa, and Nairobi evacuations kept us all very busy. The Nairobi evacuation went on for almost six months! We nor any bureau had ever had an evacuation that lasted so long, and it created a number of complications for our office, for folks at post, for people assigned but evacuated, and for people “caught out.” Through our efforts we got changes made to the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) during and after the Nairobi evacuation to better accommodate evacuated families, their allowances, and their choices of safehaven. It was quite an accomplishment. The bureaucracy doesn’t like to change the FAM!
After the evacuation ended, we expended a lot of shoe leather on the Embassy Nairobi build-to-lease housing project, Rosalyn Ridge. OBO, Embassy Nairobi, and AF/EX were strong proponents. The AF Front Office was not on board, however. And DS waivered and for good reason – potential bad guys had line of sight access to the housing compound. Ultimately, a risk management regime was proposed and the project was approved and became the choice location for residential housing at Embassy Nairobi.
It was a very busy and eventful second year. But we had a great crew! My fellow PMO’s, Henry Kaminski, Doug Brown, and Barbara Gates were all just super people. Our deputy director, John Sheely, gave us all the guidance we needed, and lots of encouragement. And we got great support from the folks in the budget shop, in HR, the IT guys, and the GSO shop. I look back with fondness on my time in AF/EX; it was an extremely productive time in my career. Again, I will always maintain that being a post management officer was my all-time favorite job at State!
Bureau of African Affairs – (AF/EX) – East Africa posts
Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 10 of 10. Epilogue: The final eight years – The Islamic Trifecta
Posted on June 23, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell
This point marks the end of the first twelve years, the nucleus and the core of my foreign service career. I was one year away from retirement eligibility, assuming 50 years old and taking my military time into consideration. But in fact there would be eight more years of service and a year, more or less, of administrative leave with pay before my retirement at the end.
The final eight years of my foreign service career were pretty stellar until the very end. We can compress it to a single paragraph. It began with assignment, in 2004, as special assistant to the Bureau of Administration Assistant Secretary and includes assignments as special assistant to the Under Secretary of Management, Arabic language training at FSI, deputy management counselor in Cairo, chief of staff in Baghdad, DCM and Charge d’affaires in Damascus, and NEA/RMA office director.
I summarized it all into this note I sent to a long lost prep school classmate:
I am one to talk. After Bissau, Luanda and Accra, I returned to DC to work East Africa issues. Then I took a job in Cairo. Cairo morphed into Baghdad. Baghdad morphed into Damascus. The Islamic civilization trifecta. I started to wonder how I would survive without hearing the call to prayer throughout the day! Finally I am back in DC. There is no call to prayer in DC, only the low frequency rumbling of the underground gears of the federal bureaucracy, grinding human souls into inanimate dust.
It all ends with my last assignment, 2011-2012, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Maghreb (North Africa), a position from which I was unceremoniously but conveniently, shamefully, ingloriously and inaccurately removed on December 18, 2012 as part of an over-zealous Department response to unfounded fears of Congressional fallout from the Benghazi ARB report.
Here is a note I wrote to my poetry group, The Breakfast Club, at the time:
“Dear Breakfast Clubbers: I thought about you all as I poured the second cup of french-pressed goodness and decided to share in this forum some life reflections. I have had a lot of free time since my dismissal at State on December 18. Still on the payroll, but with no desk and no secretary to order my life, I have been free to take long morning walks, hit the DC think tanks after breakfast, and work on writing projects in the afternoon. The passage of time has given me a clearer understanding of the whole administrative process that envelops me. It (this administrative leave period) was only supposed to last for a few days until Clinton could testify before Congress. But she got sick and had to postpone so my release was delayed until after her testimony, now scheduled for January 24.
My actual piece is this whole Benghazi drama is actually quite small. I was responsible for North Africa, but because Libya was so sexy, several more senior folks carved parts out, including people VERY well connected to the Clinton machine. Of course, they couldn’t be fingered, so it rolled down to me, unconnected me, in a most undignified and uncollegial way.
In a letter to the senior politicos who made this decision, leaked my name to the press, and executed this decision, I told them the way they treated and were treating me was shabby, thuggish and third worldly, and that I actually held the third world in a higher regard, having spent most of my career there. They didn’t like that. But my, wasn’t it poetic!?
The whole thing is further complicated because my small part has become a chink in Clinton’s armor, and, consequently, in Obama’s armor, since they both “signed off” on the findings of the Benghazi ARB, whose official unclassified report, by the way, mentions neither my name nor my position as deputy assistant secretary for the Maghreb. Unfortunately for me, any effort to extract me from this mess, to exonerate me, to clear my name, risks exposing Clinton and Obama managerial weaknesses, not to mention policy flaws that the political opposition would love to exploit.
The Clinton machine is focused on 2016, already. The Obama machine, as it has for the past four years, lacks any true foreign policy focus. This is Washington, baby. The buck never stops; it never even slows down. I have decided to share with the Breakfast Club, and any ModPoers who lurk therein, this inside view of Washington policy making.
I will get through this: they use tough, resilient material to make the Maxwells and Hairstons down in piedmont North Carolina. There will be poems written, and memoirs, and maybe even a slick movie. Yeah, a Spielberg slick movie. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” –Omar Khayyam. p.s. Keep up with the latest by occasionally checking out my poetry blog: http://poemsbyray.blogspot.com
People have asked me if my demise were somehow racially determined. I have never “traded” on my race. I never had to. I grew up in a very nurturing community, an “African village” of sorts in Greensboro, NC. We lived less than an hour’s drive from the farming and rural communities where my parents, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents were raised. All the way back to Great Grandaddy Caswell Maxwell and Great Grandmama Emily Weatherly and 2nd Great Grandaddy Frank Pritchett and 2nd Great Grandmama Hannah Weatherly and Great Grandaddy Dick Rankin and Great Grandma Mary and 2nd Great Grandma Harriot on Daddy’s side, and Great Grandma Sallie and Great Grandpa Tom and 2nd Great Grandma (Big Mama) Rhodie and 2nd Great Grand Papa Nelson and 2nd Great Grandpa Sonny and 2nd Great Grandma Mariah on Mama’s side and everybody in between all lived their lives and died right there in Guilford County, NC and Pittsylvania County, VA. The farms and plantations where generations of my enslaved ancestors lived and labored are also inside that one-hour radius. One could say, from a spiritual level, that I grew up under the watchful eye of multiple generations of African ancestors. It feels sometimes they are still watching over me. May they all rest in peace.
(Note: I didn’t consciously think about it at the time I was writing the paragraph above, but this listing of or calling on the ancestors is a practice steeped in African spiritualism. It’s a recurrent theme in August Wilson’s plays, esp. Gem of the Ocean, The Piano Lesson, and King Hedley II. End note.)
For me, doing the work was always sufficient, beginning in my village, then on the track and in the classroom at Woodberry and extending over a succession of submarines and ships where I proudly served and institutions where I studied. I never claimed victimhood nor projected guilt onto others. I am of African descent and my affirmation of my Africanness and my Americanness have worked out more to my benefit than to my detriment over the course of my life and professional career. Uniting me with my ancestors, both heritages have given me confidence and strength and developed in me a well-built internal honor code. I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors. I stand – on holy ground. That’s my opinion and has been my guiding principle. I have always been “black and proud.” But race in and of itself is a merely a social construct, plain and simple. Don’t forget it.
In 2020, we live in an extreme racially-charged atmosphere. In most election years we watch evidence emerge of forces that display and give rise to divisive tendencies in society. Politics reign. Stir up and excite the masses to get their vote. It seems more intense this year but that is because of widespread opposition to the government in mainstream and social media. Information warfare is being waged in every town and hamlet, in every city, at every internet node.
For better or for worse, the State Department and the Foreign Service do not exist in a vacuum. The same ills that exist in broader American society are normally distributed across all USG agencies and institutions, including the Foreign Service. To believe otherwise is being naive, if not intentionally dishonest.
That’s it, y’all. That’s all she wrote.
The next and final part (bonus) highlights the twelve months I spent in Iraq in a thoughtful and perhaps philosophic way. Sit back, pop some popcorn, and enjoy!
Bow-Tie Day in the NEA Front Office
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Addendum #1: Benghazi Quartet
1. Invitation
“Many others did go and there was a sacrifice, of what shall we, a sheep, a hen, a cock, a village, a ruin, and all that and then that having been blessed let us bless it.” – Gertrude Stein, Idem the Same – Let Us Describe
The Queen’s Henchmen
request the pleasure of your company
at a Lynching – to be held
at 23rd and C Streets NW
on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 –
just past sunset.
Dress: Formal, Masks and Hoods –
the four being lynched
must never know the identities
of their executioners, or what/
whose sin required their sacrifice.
A blood sacrifice –
to divert the hounds,
to appease the gods,
to cleanse our filth and
satisfy our guilty consciences.
Arrive promptly at sunset –
injustice will be swift.
There will be no trial,
no review of evidence,
no due process, and
no accountability.
Dress warmly –
a chilling effect will instantly
envelop Foggy Bottom.
Extrajudicial.
Total impunity at the top.
A kangaroo court
in a banana republic.
B.Y.O.B.
Refreshments will not be served
because of the continuing resolution.
And the ones being lynched?
Who cares? They are pawns in a game.
Our game. All suckers, all fools,
all knaves who volunteered to serve – us.
And the truth? The truth?
What difference at this point does it make?
In case of inclement weather,
or the Queen’s incapacitation,
the Queen’s Henchmen will carry out
this lynching – as ordered, as planned.
2. The Wizard of Oz
The wicked witch of the East?
The old, decrepit, ancient East?
She dead.
House fell on her ass during the storm.
Feet all shriveled up.
That witch ain’t going nowhere!
Ain’t gon bother nobody!
But the wicked witch of the West?
The new, modern, amoral West?
She’s alive and kicking.
Causing all kinds of trouble.
Done signed a deal with the Wizard –
the lying Wizard.
Dorothy has her hands full with those two.
And the lion ain’t got no courage.
3. Trapped in a purgatory…
“The top of the pyramid – the organization is composed of Technologists who only pretend to have power, although they are only actors in the theater of mirrors. When the mirror is broken they die, because the internal drive of their actions vanishes.” – Svetislav Basara, The Cyclist Conspiracy
Trapped in a purgatory
of their own conceit…
The web of lies they weave
gets tighter and tighter
in its deceit
until it bottoms out –
at a very low frequency –
and implodes.
It may be just
a matter of perception –
they can’t undo their wrongs
for fear it’d undermine their
perceived authority –
an authority they think
they require to stay in charge.
Yet all the while,
the more they talk,
the more they lie,
and the deeper down
the hole they go.
There’s nothing I need
to go back to –
nothing to re-litigate –
nothing to defend –
and certainly nothing to prove
to the unworthy.
Just wait….just wait
and feed them rope.
4. Man and the expanding universe: art
moral courage dies
and corruption’s stench prevails –
lies erase the truth –
my LinkedIn friends keep endorsing me
for Government. But me and Uncle Sam
are a shrinking universe. I’m leaving
the troop that errs, the team that lies,
leaders who destroy lives for sport, as art –
themselves a crime, a sin, a plague. Farewell.
Addendum #2: They got it all wrong on Benghazi
“You are taking this all too personally, Raymond. It is not about you, it is about Hillary Clinton and 2016.”
Those words were uttered by the State Department ombudsman in January 2013 in an apparently well-intentioned attempt to simultaneously admonish and console me. Her assessments probably were right, but when you are run over by the bus it is difficult to appreciate that it was swerving to avoid somebody else.
The attack on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 and the resulting deaths of four U. S. government representatives were horrific. The American people deserve a complete and accurate account of those events. However, the investigation conducted by the State Department’s Benghazi Accountability Review Board (ARB) into the events was woefully incomplete and consequently misleading. Perhaps most importantly, the ARB failed to interview a number of key officials who had a direct role in decisions regarding Libya. Among the officials not interviewed by the ARB were three high-level political appointees: Thomas Nides, Deputy Secretary of State and the official with overall responsibility for management of Department resources in Libya; Andrew Shapiro, Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs and the Department’s point person for ensuring (to the extent possible) appropriate employment of the thousands of US-provided shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles in Libya; and Ben Fishman, the National Security Council (NSC) Director for Libya.
Also limiting the ARB’s investigation was the fact that the Board, despite its claims to having unfettered access to documentation, experienced – perhaps unknowingly – the same problems gaining access to emails, memos and similar materials that Congressional committees later faced. The Board’s difficulty in gaining access to information was not accidental, it was by design. When the ARB issued its call for documents, the executive directorate of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) was placed in charge of collecting all emails and other relevant documents. However, once the documents were gathered and boxed, a select group of NEA staffers spent a weekend in a basement operations center pouring through the entire collection. I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon. There, one of the staffers from NEA’s Office of Maghreb Affairs explained the operation to me. “Ray,” she said, “we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the NEA Front Office (i.e., Assistant Secretary Beth Jones or Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) Elizabeth Dibble) or the 7th Floor (State Department short-hand for the Secretary of State and her principal advisors) in a bad light.”
A few minutes later, in walked Cheryl Mills, chief of staff to Secretary of State Clinton, and Jake Sullivan, another trusted Clinton advisor. When Cheryl saw me she snapped, “Who are you?” Jake explained, “That’s Ray Maxwell, an NEA DAS.” She conceded, “Well, OK.” A few minutes later I voted with my feet and returned home.
Despite its claims to being independent, the ARB was anything but. Sworn Congressional testimony revealed that ARB co-chair Admiral Michael Mullen made phone calls to Cheryl Mills to report on the fitness of a potential Congressional witness who had been interviewed by the ARB. When questioned about that September 2013 testimony, ARB co-chair Ambassador Thomas Pickering said he would not have “said that.” His response was carefully parsed diplo-speak. What he did not say was that he would not have “done that.” Because of the casualness of the remark that Admiral Mullen made and the oblique reference Ambassador Pickering made to it, we have every reason to believe that communications between the ARB and the Secretary’s staff was on-going during the ARB process. Even if contact occurred only that one time, that is NOT being independent.
Despite claims to impartiality, several officials involved in the Benghazi ARB, and in the overall damage control process following the events of September 2012, had possible tracks to cover from previous fatal attacks of U. S. diplomatic facilities, specifically the bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998. In the 1998 East Africa bombings, 224 lives were lost, including those of twelve Americans. Susan Rice, currently President Obama’s National Security Advisor and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 2012, was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1998 and consequently in the direct chain of command that declined then-Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell’s request of additional security funding. ARB co-chair Thomas Pickering was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in 1998, also in that chain of command. Dick Shinnick, a member of the Benghazi ARB committee, in 1998 was then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s Executive Director. Current Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy was the acting Under Secretary for Management in 1998. I remember those officials and their positions in 1998 because I was a watch stander in the State Department’s Operations Center in 1998 and was on watch the night of the bombings. No-one was held accountable in 1998, which generated increased pressure to assign responsibility and name names after the Benghazi attack.
Lest we forget, our facility in Benghazi was not a consulate. That would have required Congressional approval and direct funding. In fact, the U. S. government presence in Benghazi was not primarily a State Department operation at all. It was, as has been reported widely in the media, a CIA operation. Did the ARB question why the CIA did not provide better security? Was anybody from the CIA held accountable? Was anybody from the CIA even interviewed by the ARB? No, no and no.
Finally, the ARB report completely let Congress off the hook, assigning no specific blame to Congress for the security funding decisions it had made. Almost certainly, this aspect of the ARB report was specifically designed to persuade members of Congress to find the report’s findings palatable. It worked. The chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time of the report’s release focused solely on the status of the four people named in the classified section of the report. “Why can’t they be fired?” she asked. “What is being done to discipline them?” she demanded. Never did she ask, “Did they receive due process?” Or even, “Are we sure the findings are correct?” State Department political leadership played Congress like the hard-to-tune viola I played in my youth.
Let’s face facts and call the Benghazi ARB by its proper name. It was a disgrace. It perpetrated a disservice to the memory of the U.S. officials who lost their lives on September 11, 2012. The ARB inquiry was, at best, a shoddily executed attempt at damage control, both in Foggy Bottom and on Capitol Hill. I am confident that history ultimately will judge the ARB report to be a flawed product and will conclude that the entire ARB process, unfortunately, was little more than an exercise in misdirection and political theatrics.
Prologue and beginnings Part 1 – Foreign Service Exam and Oral Assessment
Part 2 – A-100 and reassignment training
Part 3 – Embassy Bissau – the first year
Part 4 – Embassy Bissau – the second year
Part 5 – The London Embassy
Part 6 – The Ops Center
Part 7 – Embassy Luanda, Angola
Part 8 – Embassy Accra, Ghana
Part 9 – Domestic Assignment – AF/EX
Part 10 – Epilogue: the final eight years
Part 11 – Bonus: Reflections on War and Peace in Iraq
Part 11. Bonus round! Reflections on War and Peace – My Twelve Months in Iraq
“It is not about funding. It has never been. It is about our professional capacity to help bring about the peaceful resolution of conflicts. It is about peace-making.”
(Note: This may be dated by history and things may have changed. This was my reflection returning home in early 2009 and suffering from insomnia and possible PTSD.)
My service in Iraq, from January 2008 to January 2009, was a complex sentence that had, for me, several significant punctuation marks. A semicolon marked the pause of my early transfer from the Office of Provincial Affairs to the Front Office; a series of exclamation marks accompanied the March and April bombings in the International Zone (IZ) and on the Palace grounds; tentative commas marked our move from the “hootches” to the NEC apartments starting in May and the intense heat of the June through August summer months; repetitious question marks from September through November caused us all to wonder whether the Iraqis would actually accept the terms of the Strategic Agreement and the Strategic Framework Agreement; the period, full stop, of December ended our occupation of the Republican Palace; and the exclamation mark of our January move to the new chancery coincided, altogether, with some measure of restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and the establishment a new US-Iraq bilateral relationship. Through it all, the exceptional courage and the tireless sacrifices of fellow foreign service officers, foreign service nationals, third country nationals, and contractors left me in a state of awe and with a deep sense of humility, of the privilege that was mine, to be there in service with them.
Service at extreme hardship mega posts, like Baghdad and Kabul, demands great courage and sacrifice, as does service in less heralded but equally demanding smaller hardship postings, such as Luanda, Monrovia, and Khartoum, to name a few (I betray here my AF background and professional lineage). The point, however, is that success in tough places requires personal courage and sacrifice, both of FSO’s and of their families. And the sacrifices are not equal – our families and loved ones pay far more, far more. Much of the human costs of our political success in Iraq, or in any of these places, such as it is, goes unpaid.
Shifting gears quickly, a great American diplomat once confided that perhaps we pay too much attention to direct compensation, such as hardship pay, danger pay, special differentials, etc., and not enough attention to the appeal to a sense of duty and the possible achievement of patriotic success so rarely experienced in a long career. It may be that we have lost faith in such intangibles, such outmoded values, and that we place more faith in the details of the Service Recognition Package. That loss of faith in our core values, quite frankly, identifies us less as diplomats and more as mercenaries, soldiers for hire, and we sell ourselves short, cheaply, at that.
And what is to become of our Foreign Service? That’s a question that came up often in Baghdad conversations where it was evident and obvious that traditionally diplomatic functions, once the province and the domain of the Department of State, were and are slowly being taken over by a far better resourced, better trained, and better equipped Department of Defense. Many studies have been and are being conducted on the militarization of diplomacy (just google the words and see what comes up) and the more euphemistic “civilian-military cooperation.”
Baghdad was a huge laboratory for such studies. Military units named Strategic Effects and Strategic Communications leveraged the massive resource imbalance between Defense and State to spring themselves into former State-dominated areas of political and economic reporting and public diplomacy efforts. Regional and combatant commanders became the equivalent of ambassadors and chiefs of mission, outside the traditional inter-agency setting, but with far more resources and more robust means of budget execution. The Country Team was just another joint interagency task force, among many. Fortunately for us, I guess, Defense showed no taste for administrative or consular work, State’s traditional and historic stepchildren, so State’s monopoly was safe there, for the time being.
Where did the Foreign Service lose its soul, its purpose, its identity? We allowed the lines separating foreign service professional service from military professional service to be blurred. But there are important differences between us, more than the false dichotomy espoused in the phrase “State is from Venus and Defense is from Mars.” We are both from Earth, but there are differences in the way we think, the way we approach problem solving.
Military professionals, in my view, and having been a naval officer, see things digitally, zero or one, all or nothing. Situations, problems to be solved, are black and white. For them, enough technology, be it smart bombs, smart tanks, or smart powerpoint presentations, can win any debate or resolve any difficulty. Military professional have little regard for or patience with the workings of international law or agreed upon conventions.
Foreign service professionals, by contrast, are trained to be analog, and to focus on problems between nations as a range of issues, with a range of solutions, some more appropriate than others, some less. Situations are shades of gray, not just black and white. For us, technology is useful, but might doesn’t mean right, right means right. Correspondingly, foreign service professionals are more inclined to support and promote abiding by international law and conventions.
In a different analogy, from my own military engineering training, Defense is a big gate valve in a system of large pipes. Closed gate valves are strong and hold well against incoming pressure. Open gate valves offer minimal resistance to fluid flow. But gate valves only work in the fully open or fully shut position. Measured flow is not an option. State is a needle valve that provides throttling where needed and can distinguish between, say, two gallon of flow per minute, and 35 gallons of flow per minute, by raising or lowering the valve stem. There are large needle valves for large applications, and there are microscopic needle valves for nanotechnology applications. But they all provide measuring capability.
In yet another analogy, Defense is like the stern planes on a submarine that provide for large depth excursions, say from the surface to four hundred feet. State is like the fairwater planes on a submarine that allow for precise depth changes, say from 200 to 150 feet, and enable a fast attack boat to do underhull surveillance of other ships and surfaced submarines, maintaining a six-inch depth excursion band. As an aside, I remember once studying a class of Russian submarines that did not even have fairwater planes. Up and down, only.
Finally, diplomacy — true diplomacy — can prevent war and all the attendant physical and human losses and has done so. But the the tools of diplomacy, falsely, inappropriately or unprofessionally applied, have a high probability of failure. Diplomacy has come to be seen in recent times as simply the prerequisite and prelude to war. The noted military historian, Geoffrey Blainey writes, “many historians, in explaining the outbreak of war, argue that ‘the breakdown in diplomacy led to war.’ This explanation is rather like the argument that the end of winter led to spring: it is a description masquerading as an explanation.” Where war, the noted historian Barbara Tuchman writes, is the unfolding of miscalculations, diplomacy is the precise calculation itself, and the accurate reporting of solutions to correct calculations that eliminates the need for war and all its corresponding horrors. State’s core competency is diplomacy to prevent war. Defense’s core competency is war itself.
Where do we go from here? We start by unequivocally defining ourselves and our core competencies. It is not about funding. It has never been. It is about our professional capacity to bring about the peaceful resolution of conflicts. It is about peace making. War has brought us a limited economic development, followed by financial disaster. Peace brings a much broader and more widespread prosperity. History is the judge. Blessed are the peace makers . . .
Thanksgiving at the DFAC
The Embassy Baghdad B Team 2008-2009
#ThisIsMyPoetryBlog 