In my
travels I have met a number of really crazy ex-pats (people who have, for
whatever reason, opted to live in another country), but Bill definitely takes
the cake as the craziest. These ex-pats are sometimes business men with serious
cases of narcissism, wandering yogis, kids of travelling parents that never
really fit in anywhere, or in Bill’s case, former military.
I met Bill
at a hostel in Lima, where he drops by a few nights a week to speak English and
play pool. He is a 5’7” American white guy with black hair and fair skin, and he is always in a firm military stance. He wears tank-tops and camo-pants and
frequently scans the room his in, as if enemies may be lurking behind couches. He
speaks loudly and clearly, and in as few words as possible to get his point
across.
To get
around Peru, it is often the most convenient option to go through Lima; it
ensures you will get a bus to wherever you are going, and it breaks up the often
20 plus hour bus trips that are needed to get from place to place (Peru is a lot
bigger than you would think, if you haven’t seen this, check it out…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection…
a map of the world with respect to landmass, not Northern Hemisphere chauvinism and lazy cartography).
Whenever I was in Lima, I would make a point of hanging out with Bill, because he was the craziest and one of the most interesting people I have ever met. Over
the course of 4 or 5 days together with me constantly questioning him, I feel like
I got to know this guy fairly well.
As with any
complicated man, it’s hard to know where to start to paint an accurate portrait
of Bill. Bill was trained as a sniper in the army; he claims he was one of the
best around. Because he was one of the best, he was selected for a very covert
and very illegal US military operation in the 80s that is warmly referred to as
the Contra Wars.
Quick
history lesson for those who won’t read the links: The Contra Wars in Nicaragua
were a decade’s long civil war against the then socialist/communist leaders;
the resistance was made up of pro-democracy soldiers within Nicaragua and a
coalition force of black-ops troops from Argentina and the US, among other
democratic advocates of the time. There were very few US troops, and they were
off the books, under the radar, and had a nearly infinite supply of money; Bill
was one of these guys. Where did they get the endless supply of money? You may
ask. Cocaine (I guess it was before the US government just opted to spend money
they didn’t have)
The CIA was
actually going to Colombian and Bolivian drug lords, getting massive amounts of
cocaine (allegedly 100 Kgs per month), and selling it to a guy named ‘Freeway’
Ricky Ross in LA, the man who was the inspiration for the hip-hop artist Rick
Ross’s on-stage and on-mic persona. He applied a modern corporate business
model to cocaine distribution and is arguably the cause of the crack epidemic
in the 80s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross...
This is where some of the condemnations of Reagan come from, whether or not he
knew about it is up to you.
The CIA
would take this drug-money and supply these select US troops in Nicaragua with
anything they needed: guns, explosives, helicopters, tanks, etc. Bill claimed
that one time they got a tank dropped from a plane to them within 30 hours of
ordering it.
Bill also
claimed that none of his comrades followed Geneva conventions unless it was
convenient. He described mercury tipped bullets he had custom made and their
effects when shot into tanks… ugly stuff.
After
democracy was sort of established in Nicaragua, Bill knew he had no shot of
cutting it in normal society. He took his talents and skills to the freshly
opened up Balkans, where he fought as a mercenary for the highest bidder while
all the former Soviet Warlords were attempting to fix the borders for their new
countries. Bill once told me, with empty eyes: ‘I’ll tell you everything you
want to know about Nicaragua, but you don’t need to know about the Balkans,
they did… we did… some horrible things over there.’ I didn’t ask much about the
Balkans after that.
After the
Balkans, Bill found himself in various Latin American countries before settling
in Peru in 2003. He does what he needs to do to get by, and that sometimes
includes selling cocaine to the youthful world travelers on the hostel scene.
I had my
doubts about the growing background story of Bill when he started telling me
about himself, but over the course of the night I started thinking that he was
likely telling the truth; he taught us how to throw knives, he let us hit him
as hard as we could, and told story upon story of crazy things he had done in war times and as a small time drug dealer. An Austrian guy
we were with was former military and a martial arts expert; he obviously didn’t
believe Bill’s claims because he kept prodding Bill and enticing him to fight. Finally, Bill obliged his constant challenges, and this big Austrian had his face firmly pinned down to the ground in less than 10 seconds. At this
point, we realized Bill was legit.
Stay tuned
for the detailed chronicles of 4 nights spent with the craziest guy I have ever
met.
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