The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2003

the little plane, all of us according you total attention. Back at Iranshahr, generals saluted you, garlands of scarce flowers softened the sky for you, we were your court and all paid quiet tribute. The airport held its breath. The silences were yours until we sent you skyward with a plane’s roar and turned and went our ways. I sent a kind colleague to collect what he could find of yours and Kevin’s things. There were far more in Kerman at your home, all the household to be accounted for and packed in sturdy wood (except for the items damaged by your blood) and shipped to Tehran and home. We were controlled, efficient and dispassionate. Were forms required we did them, cabled the embassy, counseled the local staff, did the emergency things, wrote kudos to the gendarmes, but eventually it ended and we made our way back to the consulate. Dadshah was cornered by the gendarmerie and saw his men and women killed, his renegade existence ended. Sooner then because of you. And you and yours because of me. Well ... time explains some things. This could be, had I not met you. Death might not pause for agents or contrivances. You wanted peace, and it came, but in a way you had not dreamed of. You wished to stay with Kevin, and your desire was granted. It is here in what you had not wished that I remember you: your quietness stopped with sound, your caring blasted away by a rifle round, your fine mind trashed by an illiterate Baluchi, your love a casualty of an ignorant hate. I think the universe was lessened when you left. Everywhere people, but without you we are bereft. We should have known you better, but too late for all such wishes. I still relive those days. God made the funny world that it should be left to bemused inheritors like me. The world’s forgotten, but the scene replays: on an earth where mass killing numbs the heart, yours was a personal, distinctive end to someone meaningful. And now we tend you still, those few of us who played a part. ■ Author’s Note: I was the American consul in Isfahan, the consular dis- trict covering all of southern Iran, from 1955 to 1957. In the fall of 1956, I made a very rugged trip, down through the Baluchi Mountains of southeastern Iran to a town called Chakhansur on the coast (a possible warm-water port for the Iranians?), the first American ever to do so. The next spring, from their headquarters in Kerman, perhaps inspired by me, the regional USAID director for southern Iran and his wife, Kevin and Anita Carrol, accompanied by their American staff member (whose name, I think, was Brewster Wilson), an interpreter and a driver, attempted the same trip. They were ambushed in the mountains by a Baluchi bandit gang. All were killed in the initial clash — except for Anita, who was kidnapped. A delegation of embassy officers and Iranian officials came down. Two search planes scoured the area (with me as navigator). In a light Cub plane over the actual ambush spot (which only I knew) we took photos, then tried to fly out of that savage terrain — when the plane’s engine stopped. The pilot, a crop duster, calmly changed tanks as the engine sputtered, and we stopped just short of becoming more American casualties. In a couple of days Anita’s body was found; the bandits had killed her too. With the help of a Baluchi village, I rapidly cleared a mountain spur for an airstrip; an Iranian military plane came in, Anita was carted off and that sad chapter was closed. That’s about it. The poem itself may leave out a couple of details — but what’s in it is all accurate. I also remem- ber that the Carrols were from Washington state original- ly. I suppose there may be details of the affair hidden somewhere in the department’s archives — but I should think the above will suffice to give the readers the back- ground of this poem. Gordon King grew up in central Illinois, Abraham Lincoln country, attended Illinois Wesleyan University and saw ser- vice in World War II in northeast India. Later, with a mas- ter's degree from Johns Hopkins University, he served for 30 years in the U.S. diplomatic corps, posted to embassies or consulates in cities as diverse as Kabul, Peshawar and Lahore, Tehran and Isfahan, as well as Bonn, London, and Washington, D.C. (at Peace Corps Headquarters and the National War College). Retired, he and his wife, the artist Josephine deBeauchamp, moved in 1998 from the coast of Maine to Surrey, to be near their daughter and her English family. Three books of his poetry have been published in the U.S. Individual poems have appeared in a number of U.S. and U.K. magazines including The Spectator. J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63