[BRC-NEWS] BOOK: Hideous Dream

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>From: Stan Goff <sherrynstan at igc.org>
>Reply-To: editor at haiti-progres.com, sherrynstan at igc.org
>Subject: [BRC-NEWS] BOOK: Hideous Dream
>Sender: worker-brc-news at lists.tao.ca
>To: brc-news at lists.tao.ca
>Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 06:29:51 -0400 (EDT)
>
>http://www.haiti-progres.com/2001/sm010328/XENG0328.htm
>
>Haiti Progres
>
>This Week in Haiti
>
>March 28 - April 3, 2001
>
>Emasculated Invasion:
>A review of Stan Goff's "Hideous Dream:
>A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti"
>
>By Kim Ives
>
>Rare is the individual who can withstand the relentless and
>insidious indoctrination which takes place in modern
>capitalist society. The military culture submits its
>recruits to even more rigorous brainwashing, making its
>escapees rarer still. But those who manage to rebel, clearly
>analyze, and speak out against the dynamics of the U.S.
>military-intelligence-financial complex after having been on
>"the inside" are the rarest of all. In this respect, Stan
>Goff's "Hideous Dream" is a true gem. After nearly a
>quarter-century career in the U.S. military, Goff
>participated in the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti as a Master
>Sergeant of Special Forces (SF) team number 354. The Master
>Sergeant or "Top" is the non-commissioned officer (NCO) who,
>in effect, cracks the whip and leads the team to achieve its
>goal (although he works under the command of a captain).
>
>Goff's goal -- at least as he chose to interpret his
>commanders' directives -- was to assist Haitians in
>liberating themselves from the grips of military
>dictatorship and paramilitary death-squads which directed
>the 1991-1994 coup d'etat against President Jean-Bertrand
>Aristide and to be an agent of the Haitian people's will.
>Although this was a reasonable interpretation of U.S.
>Commander-in-Chief Bill Clinton's stated objective, Goff's
>forceful moves to "uphold democracy" -- such as arresting
>death-squad members and publicly admitting that the U.S. had
>backed Haitian dictatorships -- brought him within a whisker
>of a court-martial, the fate which befell another
>literal-minded soldier, Capt. Lawrence Rockwood, who
>attempted an unauthorized single-handed prison inspection on
>Sep. 30, 1994 (see Haiti Progres, Vol. 12, No. 51 3/8/95).
>
>Both Goff and Rockwood learned the hard way that their
>"mission was never to restore popular power," as Goff
>explains in his introduction. "It was to put Aristide's face
>on a neoliberal fraud... Our mission in Haiti was to stop a
>revolution, not a coup d'etat."
>
>The book plots the final stages of Goff's radicalization,
>which crystalizes in Haiti, a process which began 24 years
>earlier when, as a young infantryman on patrol, he called a
>Vietnamese peasant "a fuckin' gook." The man then offered
>him a stalk of sugarcane asking "Why can't we be friend?"
>
>"For the rest of that day, I fought hard against the hole he
>had driven in my dam with the simplest act of courage and
>hospitality," Goff writes. "That night the dam ruptured in
>the darkness, and I cried quietly through a whole guard
>shift, wanting more than anything to just go home."
>
>In another scene marking his road to political
>consciousness, Goff relates his outrage and deception when a
>lieutenant colonel told SF team leaders on the
>Port-au-Prince airfield the first night after the
>intervention that they would be working with the Haitian
>Army [Fad'H], rather than against it. " 'Bullshit,' I said,
>too loud. Helmets turned in the dark," he writes. "The
>implications were converging on me too fast to sort them
>out. This was to be the one mission I could be proud of when
>I had a clear look back at it... Here was the badge I
>sought, disappearing before my eyes. I had wanted so badly
>to do this one thing. One decent thing to salvage me and my
>country... Just one decent fucking thing as absolution!"
>
>The book is studded with such poignant vignettes, and Goff's
>emotions pour onto the pages with the force of an open fire
>hydrant.
>
>The author is as unsparing with himself as he is with those
>around him. An implacable foe of racism, he describes with
>intimate detail and brutal honesty his ultimately futile
>battle to root out bigotry from his soldiers. Goff's
>anti-racist crusade in the intrinsically racist Special
>Forces finally pushed his troops to mutiny. They turned to
>his superiors to have him drummed out of the service.
>
>Nonetheless, he had turned his team from one of the worst in
>the Special Forces into one of the best. Through night-time
>parachute jumps and long-distance treks with 110-pound
>rucksacks, Goff's Detachment 354 earned a " 'killer team'
>reputation." Goff and a few of his men were among the first
>to surreptitiously venture out of the U.S. compound at the
>airport into the streets of Port-au-Prince in a Humvee,
>where they were greeting by cheering throngs. "I was
>completely overtaken by it, exhilarated beyond words," he
>recalls. "I made up my mind then and there to do everything
>I could not to betray the hope that flooded around us."
>
>They took an aggressive stance against the Haitian Army
>(Fad'H) starting from their deployment out of a helicopter
>in Gonaives, where in front of a crowd of thousands, Goff
>grabbed a club from a Haitian soldier's hand and flung it
>away. "The wild chorus of approval from the crowd was
>deafening, and they flooded toward the now terrified,
>retreating Fad'H soldier," Goff writes in one stormy scene.
>In Gonaives, Goff became known disparagingly as "Batman,"
>and his team "cowboys."
>
>The author takes the reader on a soldier's-eye-tour of the
>U.S. intervention from Ft. Bragg, to the U.S. Naval Base in
>Guantanamo, Cuba, to the landing at the Port-au-Prince
>airport. His comical anecdotes, like having to piss into a
>bottle on a crowded helicopter ferrying troops across the
>Windward Channel, brings home the very human realities of
>"U.S. deployments," which have become so lionized in the
>popular imagination by the mainstream media's Pentagon
>spin-masters.
>
>In fact, "Hideous Dream" is essential reading for anyone
>seeking an antidote to the ceaseless glamorization of the
>U.S. military, especially those who have read Bob
>Shacochis's "Immaculate Invasion," another account of the
>Haiti invasion (see Goff's review in Haiti Progres, Vol. 17,
>No. 40 12/22.1999) Shacochis became infatuated with the
>Special Forces and portrayed them as heroes, albeit flawed.
>Goff strips away this romantic fuzz and bares the
>incompetence, pettiness, and stupidity of this "elite" corps
>and the military in general. A recurring comic thread in the
>account is how the 354 was constantly being "busted" for not
>having their uniform sleeves buttoned at the wrist in
>Haiti's 90 degree heat.
>
>The book is tremendously entertaining, deriving much of its
>humor in describing such absurdities. In one scene, Goff
>explains his astonishment when his team was forced to
>rehearse an assault on the Gonaives barracks in which the
>commander would be killed. "I had always learned that if you
>are planning a course of action that has a high probability
>of unacceptable casualties, you change the course of action
>to preclude that contingency," he writes. "Yet here we were,
>practicing the commander's demise again and again."
>
>Such amusing commentaries are spiced with Goff's down-home
>expressions which pepper the account. I liked, for example,
>when his nerves were "stretched tighter than a rat between
>two terriers" and when some group went after someone "like
>ducks jumping on a June bug."
>
>The final half of the book recounts the 354's experiences in
>the northeastern town of Fort Liberte, where they were
>based. On arriving in town, Goff immediately arrested FRAPH
>leaders, befriended the Lavalas mayor, and established an
>icy relationship with the local Fad'H garrison. Goff refused
>to let the team set up in the comfortable hotel of a former
>Duvalierist ambassador Neal Calixte -- who was also arrested
>but immediately released on orders from Washington -- but
>instead forced them into a hot cramped house in town which
>had formerly been used by the French NGO Doctors Without
>Borders, a decision which would ratchet up the team's
>growing resentment against him.
>
>The author also reveals his early naivete, describing how a
>former Tonton Macoute and military attache temporarily duped
>his team into cracking down on Lavalas partisans by
>misrepresenting them as Tonton Macoutes. The complexities of
>Haiti, far from a comic book battle between good and evil,
>are laid out in instructive and self-baring concrete
>examples.
>
>Portraits make up much of the account. There is the
>murderous Gonaives Fad'H Captain Castera "clean cut, uniform
>pressed to a razor edge, shoes gleaming, mustache trimmed so
>perfectly it seemed painted on, nails manicured, smelling of
>cologne;" the team's mild-mannered translator Lieutenant
>Percy "his head pitched indefinably, as if bravely awaiting
>a blow;" hyperactive eight-year-old Ft. Liberte neighborhood
>girl Eaulin, who "constructed strange architectures with
>stones, searched the crannies of broken buildings and trash
>dumps for bits of food and treasure, or played 'jacks' with
>small rocks;" Lt. Col. Schroer, a "clueless asshole" with a
>Napoleon complex; Ft. Liberte mayor Adele Mondestin, who
>became one of Goff's closest friends; and then the members
>of Goff's team: Ali, Gonzo, Rod, Pedro, Kyle, Skye, and Dave
>Grau, a "shiftless" warrant officer who ended up ring-leader
>of the mutiny against Goff and his captain, Mike Gallante.
>
>Also amusing are Goff's portrayals of the journalists,
>missionaries, spooks, aid workers, and "international
>policemen" with which his team came in contact.
>
>Goff writes full-throttle prose punctuated by poetic
>ruminations. A Shakespearean scholar (his title is culled
>from Julius Caesar), medic, and former West Point
>instructor, Goff also takes time throughout to make
>penetrating social analyses. "I'm only supposed to relate --
>to be evocative -- because I'm a soldier, and if I begin to
>tread in the realm of theory, if I begin to form
>conclusions, I become threatening, and I lose my charm," he
>writes in his last chapter "Epilogue." "But I've already
>broken a whole jar full of taboos, so fuck it." He proceeds
>to lay out his radical social vision based on his years in
>the military and lessons learned in Haiti.
>
>"Revolutionaries are not normal people," Che Guevara once
>remarked. Trained precisely to combat revolutionaries, it is
>clear after reading "Hideous Dream," that Stan Goff became
>one, a true abnormality. "I was an instrument of imperialism
>for quite a long time before I realized what I had become,"
>he writes toward the end of the book. "I learned what I was,
>and began learning who I must become in Ayiti."
>
>Passionate, intelligent, and brutally honest, Stan Goff's
>account is essential reading for anyone wanting to
>understand the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti, the modern-day
>U.S. military, and the imperial wars still ravaging
>countries like Yugoslavia and Colombia today.
>
>
>("Hideous Dream," 483 pages, published by Soft Skull Press,
>2000, available at www.softskull.com)
>
>Copyright (c) 2001 Haiti Progres. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
>
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