Fatal Calling

MAGAZINE Americans in Nicaragua Fatal Calling; Benjamin Linder of Portland, Oregon, felt he was needed, that he could make a difference in NicaraGUA. He understood it would be dangerous. He went anyway. This is why. John Lantigua 05/31/1987 The Washington Post FINAL Page w14 (Copyright 1987) ON THE DAY OF BENJAMIN LINDER'S funeral, hundreds of chanting people marched with his casket in Matagalpa, a Nicaraguan city in the country's northern war zone. The Linder family walked near the head of the crowd, dazed by the heat of the day and the event. Just hours before, the Linders had stepped off a plane from Oregon into Nicaragua's fervid April sun, and they now found themselves suddenly embroiled in this noisy, equally fervid tribute to Ben, the first American killed by the contras. David Linder, Ben's father and a retired pathologist, was asked by a reporter to describe his son, only 27 years old when he died. "You know, I didn't really know him," he said, after a moment. "I don't think any of us in the family really knew who he was. He was the youngest, you know. If you understand who he was, please tell us." It is not easy to understand who Ben Linder was, or why he chose to live a harder life-and in the process risk an untimely death-when, to most everyone else, this seemed unnecessary. And yet there are clues, lifelong patterns that anticipate his tragic end. He was a pale, bespectacled man, only 5 feet 4 inches tall, never weighing more than 110 pounds, a small man with a big vision. On the surface of it, he seemed out of place in Nicaragua, a mass of contradictions. His red hair and fringe of red beard, combined with his size, gave him a happy, elfin look at odds with the violence around him. He was a serious man who liked to clown. He juggled; he wore greasepaint, costumes and a funny nose; he rode a unicycle through rutted dirt streets in villages where children, accustomed to struggle, had never before seen anything so delightful, so wholly entertaining. He was an educated man, a mechanical engineer, at home with scientific study and mathematical equations, in a country where schooling is a recent phenomenon and more than 50 percent of the population was illiterate only 10 years ago. Though never much of a political joiner, there he was, neck-deep in a controversial war. In the end, the ironies seemed endless: Ben Linder was an American idealist killed by men who espouse American ideals, using arms paid for by American taxpayers. Two weeks before he was killed, he told a story that expressed something of himself: "One day it was very hot, so I went down to the stream behind my house with my calculator and my papers. A peasant woman comes down, takes the laundry out and starts washing it on the rocks. Behind, the horses are grazing. I started thinking about my work in Nicaragua. I try to explain as much as I can about what we're doing. But until those people from the community get so they can repeat what I do, not have someone from Managua repeat it, or a gringo like me, then the work isn't done. That poor peasant woman washing her clothes on the rocks, what will it take for her kid to be the one sitting by that stream, fiddling with his calculator?" He paused. "It's far away, maybe, but it's imaginable." Later, Linder invited me to visit him in the town of San Jose' Bocay, where he was beginning work on a new hydroelectric project. Before I could get there, Linder was killed. He died April 28, when he and six other men were ambushed by a group of rebels. Even though he knew the countryside was dangerous, Linder left the relative safety of San Jose' Bocay to take measurements he needed for the new power plant. Why did he take such a risk? Why even stay? According to those who knew him best, he was continuing to follow what he had come to regard as a calling, a mission. As his brother puts it, "He had become part of the process," and had passed the point of no return. There are 1,500 to 3,000 Americans living in Nicaragua at any one time (see accompanying profiles). Many are working in support of the Sandinista government. At least 135 Americans live permanently in the countryside, as Linder did. After his death, a committee of U.S. citizens in Nicaragua issued a statement insisting they would stay in the country and would not be intimidated. "We will work harder to defend the dreams and ideals Ben worked for," they said. What were those ideals? JUST BEFORE HIS DEATH, Linder spoke not only of an early interest in "gadgetry" but also of his involvement with politics, which began in San Francisco at the family dinner table. The Linders lived near the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, the counterculture's most famous address, at a time when "the U.S. establishment" was being shaken to its foundations. Or so it seemed. Dr. David Linder and his wife, Elisabeth, were involved in demonstrations against the war in Southeast Asia and in the civil rights movement. Activists like Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond were dinner guests. The Linder children, John, Miriam and young Ben, listened to accounts of racism and injustice and also to the hopes these people shared for a different future. Guests or no guests, the dinner table staple was politics, domestic and foreign, just as it had been in the Brooklyn household in which David Linder grew up during the '30s, another era of political activism in the United States. "In our house, socialism was not a dirty word, and freedom was not equated with capitalism," David Linder says. "We never knew how to raise our children, but we always had enough respect in what we did to have them share it with us." By the time he was 15, eldest son John was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance in San Francisco. And Miriam would also become active against the Vietnam war. But Ben was different. Apparently, he received his politics by osmosis. To his family, he seemed all but invisible during these dinners and other political events. He would sit at the table, saying nothing, but soaking it all up. "His sister and brother were both so verbal and he just wasn't," says his mother, Elisabeth. "I don't remember him being there during those discussions, but I know he was." Ben was listening, although he felt like a spectator, not a participant. "I learned that politics was a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation, even a desirable one, and that questioning was a good thing," he said shortly before he died. "Questioning anything and everything." Ben's discomfort with verbal communication may have been one trait that led him to his ultimate calling. "In a family of at least three talkers," his brother John says, "the youngest is going to have to make a real effort to be heard." To work-and die-in Nicaragua makes a statement that transcends talk entirely. The experiences that Ben remembered most vividly from his childhood were the huge San Francisco marches against the Vietnam war. He described them the way a child might describe a three-ring circus. "There were people playing instruments, people doing street theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe doing a skit, others carrying banners, and then more banners," he recalled. "Then you would get to the top of a hill and look back and see hundreds of thousands of people. It was incredible!" For the 9-year-old boy dangling from his father's hand, the marches left indelible impressions, and not only political ones.continued on page 18 continued from page 16 As far as anyone can tell, it was during these marches, when he saw the street theater actors in greasepaint, that young Ben developed another interest that wasto blossom later in life-his love of clowning. By the time he was 20, he was juggling, riding a unicycle and wearing face paint and a funny nose during one protest or another. He brought his bag of circus tricks with him to Nicaragua. One time, when he was waiting for engineering work, he signed up for a seminar for circus artists taught by Cubans-"juggling advisers," he called them. He felt he made great strides in his juggling during that seminar. Later, he regularly entertained children in villages where he worked. Shortly before his death, Linder gave his final performance as a clown in El Cua', where he lived. Health workers wanted to get village children together for vaccinations. Preventive medicine is new to Nicaragua, and pediatric care is almost unknown in the backward villages. So, Linder put on his clown nose, the greasepaint, the funny face and rode his unicycle up and down the main dirt street, leading the children to the vaccination center. Throughout his own childhood, Ben had a love affair with "tinkering," as he called it. By the time he was 13, he could take a telephone apart, reassemble it and also tap into telephone lines to make free long-distance calls. "I didn't know what was going on until one day I got a call from the telephone company about calls being made on a line that passed by our house," his mother says, wistfully. "He was only 13 years old and what he was doing was a felony. I must say I was impressed." In high school and into his college years at the University of Washington in Seattle, Ben's fascination with gadgetry grew into a fascination with technology, including nuclear energy. First, he said, he studied its physical principles, then its social implications. Inevitably, he would join in demonstrations against the opening of the Trojan nuclear power plant near Portland, Ore., where the Linders had moved. During one demonstration, he was arrested, and his parents were notified he was in jail. "At one point I had a talk with him," his father says. "He had decided to become an engineer and it made me afraid. Given that many engineers in this country are involved in military projects-in Seattle it must be 99 percent-stomping around anti-war demonstrations and other protests doesn't add to your credentials. I didn't tell him what to do or what not to do. I just wanted him to know he was entering a field that had limited options for a person like him. He told me he knew he was narrowing his options because of his political beliefs, but that was fine with him." Linder's life was a series of these decisions that narrowed his options and led him to the ravine where he died. In an attempt to marry engineering with his politics, Ben studied alternative energy sources and alternative technologies. But Ben still planned to stay in the United States. In 1979, days after his 20th birthday, the Sandinista front led the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Linder said he recalled the event and applauded it but never thought at the time of going to Central America. "Then one day, a couple of years later, I read an article about industrial hygiene programs in Nicaragua," Linder said. "I started thinking about the level of technology and technical skills in Nicaragua and what might be needed here. After that, the idea of working in Nicaragua just kept coming and coming." WHEN BEN LINDER ARRIVED in Nicaragua in August 1983, he thought he would stay a year, maybe two. Bureaucratic delays in Nicaragua's National Energy Institute, where he'd taken a job, kept him waiting for assignment until December. Eventually, he was assigned to a new, 100-kilowatt hydroelectric project in the village of El Cua', a backwater near the northern border, where residents had no electricity. A demonstration project, the first of its kind since the Sandinistas came to power, it had been plagued with stops and starts due, in part, to lack of qualified personnel and a paucity of persistence on the part of those who had worked on the project before Linder arrived. He seemed fascinated by the sheer backwardness of the place. "Going into El Cua'," he wrote in an article that was published last year, "is a lot like going into a small town in the western United States in 1830 . . . A dusty road comes into town. The bar and the bank both have diesel generators so you can get your money out of the bank and then buy a cold beer." It was clear to him that El Cua' needed an electric generating plant and that he was the force that would make the project happen, the only engineer, the guy with both the vision and the skill. Though contra activity in the region was growing, he decided to spend a great deal of his time in El Cua'. He went home to Portland for Christmas in 1984. "He told me there were three things that worried him," his father says. "That he wouldn't be knowledgeable enough to do the work, that he wouldn't be able to fit into such a small town, and, finally, the war. The danger, that was the third thing he was worried about. It was down on the list. I think he was passing through that wonderful moment when a person finds a meaning to his life. But I think as regards the danger, he also made a pact with destiny." IN EL CUA, LINDER LIVED WITH AN OLD MAN, DON COSME Castro, in a house made of wooden planks. Don Cosme was 70, a veteran of A.C. Sandino's original rebel army (forerunners of the Sandinistas) that in the 1920s and '30s fought the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force in Nicaragua. Painted in the red and black colors of the Sandinista flag, Don Cosme's house had a dirt floor, no indoor plumbing and no electricity. Poverty was everywhere in El Cua', food and entertainment scarce, the surroundings uncomfortable, the environment dangerous. But Linder had found his home. He told his friends that if he died, he wanted to be buried there, in El Cua'. Though the project moved slowly, mainly because of bureaucratic hassles, Linder was persistent. He wrote about his life tocontinued on page 20 continued from page 18 Alison Quam, his girlfriend from Seattle. "His letters were full of his activities, places he had been, places he loved," Quam says. "His frustrations with his work andhis elation with his work, too." On May 1, 1986, after nearly three years on the project, Linder turned on the hydroelectric plant's generator, and for the first time in the history of El Cua', its residents witnessed the magic of centrally generated electricity. Linder plugged in a radio in a building that had been wired, and people came from all around to dance to the music in the middle of the dusty main street. It must have been a great day for him; he must have felt an unparalleled sense of power, almost omnipotence, for completing a project, the first of its kind since the revolution, that would bring tangible benefits to the lives of people who had only heard of such technological progress before. That is who Ben Linder was. That is why he was there. He had brought light to El Cua', but so much of the region was still in darkness. From then on, there was no turning back. Last summer, Linder went to Portland for a six-week vacation. It would be his last visit home. With his brother, John, who had been to Nicaragua two years earlier as a member of a coffee-picking brigade, he hiked in the Cascade Mountains and talked politics. With Alison Quam, he talked about the possibility of graduate school someday, maybe in Europe, but only after his work was done in Nicaragua. He was onto a new project: bringing electricity to nearby San Jose' Bocay and the outlying farms. "He was rolling the idea around in his head at one point about ho he might someday work in the States as an engineer," Quam says. "He came to the conclusion that there was no place for him in the United States. I don't think it was an easy decision for him; he was struggling." During his stay in Portland, Ben also spent time with his sister, Miriam. She had never been very close to him, by her own choosing, but now that he was so far away in such a dangerous part of the world, she was trying to close the distance between them. At one point, with her voice full of emotion, she broke into a conversation about Nicaragua between her father and Ben: "I said, `Listen, Ben, if you get hurt, it will be terrible for the whole family.' I didn't say if you get killed, but that's what I meant." Ben shared her fears. In a letter written to Quam, to be opened only if something happened to him or Nicaragua was invaded, he wrote, "There is a possibility I'll be hurt, even killed. That is our reality that we must recognize but we must not dwell on. I have no plans on being a martyr." In the early months of 1987, contra activity increased in the area of El Cua' and San Jose' Bocay. Faced with a possible cutoff of funding because of the Iran-contra scandal, the guerrillas stepped up their attacks in an attempt to prove they were a viable fighting force. Around midnight on March 24, a little more than a month before Linder's death, the contras attacked his cherished hydroelectric plant in El Cua'. Thanks to the efforts of Oscar Blando'n, Linder's best friend and the plant's operator, the project was not damaged. When the attack began, Blando'n quickly ran outside and shut off the generator, killing the lights, making the plant a more difficult target. In his last letter home, Linder wrote about the attack: "For 45 minutes, Oscar and five soldiers were able to keep the contras from destroying the plant. Not so with Oscar's house. A rocket-propelled grenade went through the front wall and blew up in one of the bedrooms. The contras went into the house thinking it was where the power plant was. After asking about the family and the plant, I asked about the next most important thing-Oscar's guitar. No, the contras came in and stole that . . ." In the two weeks that followed, two friends were killed by the contras, including a son of Don Cosme Castro, the man Linder lived with. Asked about the wisdom of continuing to work in the El Cua' area, Linder said that in late 1985 or early '86, the sister of a man working on the hydroelectric project had been detained by the contras and had escaped or been released. She said the contras told her that everyone working on the hydroelectric project was a target for assassination. It was only then that Linder started to carry a gun while traveling on the road, but he would not let the danger interfere with his work. "Sometimes I think about dying and the friends I've had who have died," he said. Then, he just shrugged and said no more. Surely he thought about leaving, too. But as his brother John said of him, "I think Ben felt that all around him Nicaraguans were taking greater risks than he." On April 28, according to accounts attributed to survivors, Linder and six other men had just reached a stream near a place called Camaleon, about a mile from town, where Linder was heading to measure water flow. Right above the stream was a stand of trees and vegetation where the contras were apparently hiding. Although several of the men in Linder's party were armed, apparently none of them got a shot off; they were taken by surprise. Linder and two others died on the spot, and another man was wounded. Linder was buried in the city of Matagalpa, not in El Cua', which was judged too remote and possibly too dangerous for his funeral. Americans who have worked with the Sandinista government helped carry the coffin on its long route to a hilltop cemetery. Oscar Blando'n walked in front of the casket, a sentinel in a baseball cap. On arrival in Managua, Linder's sister, Miriam, who had been trying to make up for lost time with her brother, found an unopened letter she had written to him that had arrived the same day as his death. It began, "Ben, you are a hero." - John Lantigua's novel Heat Lightning will be published by G.P. Putnam's Sons this fall. CAPTION:Linder always loved San Francisco's activist street performers. In this 1984 protest at the U.S. Embassy in Managua, he played the sad clown "Honduras," pulled by U.S. strings. In Matagalpa, close friends and their children gathered in a government office for the wake. Linder's American friends carried his coffin through the streets to the cemetery. After his death, they vowed to continue their work. After the funeral, Elisabeth Linder accepted a medal from Daniel Ortega, awarded to her son for work on behalf of the poor.