The Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2018 61 Carry Your Radio AdamMesser FS Family Member I was at the office of my internet business in Dar es Salaam, about a mile from the embassy. Around 10:30 a.m., our building leaped. Had someone just slapped all the windows? I called my wife, USAID FSO Diana Putman, at her office; she, too, had felt it. But what was it? Moments later one of my staff lunged into my office: “Your embassy was bombed.” Grabbing my security radio, I pinched a car from a friend downstairs and bolted, waving my dip passport to get me past the police barricades restricting traffic. Vehicles smoldered outside of the embassy, where the bomb had ripped off the front of an annex. Sticky with diesel fuel and blood, and sprinkled with an emerald layer of shredded leaves, the street was unusually bright. Late morning sun poured through mangled trees, their foliage gone. My first thought was that the management officer was probably dead; his third-floor office was ripped in half. Embassy staff had started to make sense of the shattered com- pound, assessing and responding. Asked to locate the wounded CLO and the officer escorting her in search of medical care, I threaded my way through traffic to the main hospital. Muhimbili Hospital was churning with people and wails of grief. I pushed through the crowds, located the hospital director and explained my mission. He had no idea where the Americans were—every surgical theater held casualties. “OK,” I asked, “can I gown and go in?” The director assented. Surgeons were doing everything they could to save the Tanza- nians under their care, but it was clear that they would dispense a lot more grief. A doctor exhibited a metal chunk he had extracted from a victim; it looked like the bottom of a compressed gas cylinder. He handed me the pound of evidence, still warm and bloody, in a thin plastic shopping bag. I traversed the hospital complex until I bumped into the escort- ing officer. She guidedme upstairs to the ophthalmology ward. The chief said that the CLO required immediate surgery to stabilize a wound to her eye. She was lucky—her thick plastic eyeglasses gave some protection against the concrete fragment that slammed into her face, and a deep gouge in one of the lenses proved it. With surgery underway, I roamed the hospital, searching for more Americans. The Peace Corps nurse, Edith Mpangala, had arrived, and together we returned to triage and visited the regis- trar’s office. Among the victims, it appeared that the CLO was the only American citizen. The new American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was completed in January 2003. The design and construction of the embassy incorporated the best safety technology available at the time to ensure the security of embassy personnel. DEPARTMENTOFSTATE/ELIZABETHGILLLUI