The Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2018

62 JULY-AUGUST 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL In the halls we encountered another American, Susan Hirsch. “I’m looking for my husband,” she explained. Susan was in the chancery cashing a check while her Kenyan husband waited outside. Edith and I both realized that this story was not going to have a happy ending; she stayed with Susan, and I returned to the ophthalmology department. The surgeon had stabilized the CLO’s eye. Now we had to medevac her. The mobile phone network was unreliable; call completion rates plummeted as everyone tried to check on loved ones. For- tunately, the IPO had sprinted to activate the embassy’s backup radio network, so we had some comms. I began coordinating the hospital component of the medevac. Venturing to the parking lot for better radio reception, I saw Susan sitting on a low, crumbling concrete curb, cradling her head while calmly talking on her mobile phone. “Jamal amekufa bom.” She was explaining to her Mombasa family that the bomb had killed her husband, their son. By late afternoon, the medevac team Land Rover rolled onto the hospital compound. We gently moved the CLO to the airport, where she had 10 minutes alone with her husband, the Marine Security Guard detachment commander, before boarding. Waiting for wheels up, we watched evening CNN reports of the bombing in the city where we lived and worked—weird. On Saturday morning, at the emergency response meeting convened by the embassy, I volunteered to assist the FBI. Having started two businesses in Dar, I had a good head for how to get things done and lots of contacts. The first FBI agent flew in from Cairo, and we scurried to find lodging for the team of 50+ agents arriving the next day. I ultimately took time off frommy company to help the FBI get in gear, and was astonished months later to receive a thoughtful commendation from them. It sounds banal, but the bombing showed how fragile life is. One forgets. We remain vigilant, wary of flashy hotels and restaurants in foreign lands. Dar was a soft target, as are many other locales. I flipped one morning in Nairobi, years after the bombing in Dar, when I saw a pickup truck delivering gas cylinders to the Interna- tional School—the Dar bomb was engineered from shaved TNT stuffed into industrial gas cylinders. No matter how pissed off we may be with each other, my wife and I try to remind ourselves daily howmuch we love each other. Mostly we succeed. My advice? Carry your radio. Without comms, medevacing a wounded colleague would have been tough. Mobile phone networks saturate in emergencies, or get destroyed. Though hav- ing a radio slung on my ass scales somewhere between silly and pretentious, when bad things happen I’ll be the smartest guy in the room. And maybe save someone else. Learning from Experience Sherry Zalika Sykes USAID/Tanzania Private Sector Development Team Lead (locally hired American) The morning of Aug. 7, 1998, began like any other day, but would end with immense sadness and a lesson about our multitiered community. I was in my office at USAID, packing my briefcase for a meeting that I was due to attend at the embassy, when I felt and heard a blast and could see a large plume of smoke from my office window. I immediately thought that something I had feared would happen had occurred: someone smoking near the embassy’s gas tanks had ignited them. Someone shouted through my door to turn on my radio. Over the airwaves, I heard an announcement that American installa- tions were under attack in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and possibly other locations in East Africa. My immediate thought was that I needed to get my daughters from their high school that was located directly across the Selander Bridge from the embassy— just hundreds of meters away. They were the only American children in their Islamic school. My daughters were broadly welcomed; however, there still existed an element that resented their presence. Due to the tenor of the radio broadcasts, I feared for their safety at school. Several bloodied and injured Americans appeared in the USAID offices, and “all Americans” were called into our largest conference room. At the door of the conference room, another locally engaged American colleague and I were told, “Not you.” You see, I was not an FSN. I was not a direct-hire officer; I was a locally engaged American employee. The meeting, I was told, was meant only for direct-hire and American U.S. Personal Services Contractors (Americans on contract sent by Washington to post), so I waited outside with other locally engaged staff. It mattered not My family and I have never forgotten that the bombing affected a much wider circle than the embassy itself. —Sherry Zalika Sykes