The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

52 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Been Here Before Gary Gray ■ Washington State As my wife and I stroll through the idyllic Fort Vancouver National Historic Reserve near our home in Southwest Washing- ton state, I find myself instinctively going into 360-degree mode, constantly looking around and behind me. But now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of watch- ing out for Maputo bandidos, Securitate and KGB surveillants in Cold War–era Bucharest or Moscow or, more recently, rapacious soldiers in Juba, my eyes are peeled for runners, cyclists and skateboarders who could come upon us suddenly, violating the six-foot distancing rule. I’m struck by how familiar the current circumstances seem, by how reminiscent they are of my previous Foreign Service and United Nations peacekeeping lives. Reading all the accounts of wildlife appearing on now-deserted city streets, I can’t help but recall our first months in 2000, setting up the U.S. mission in devastated Dili, Timor-Leste, when liberated animals were everywhere. Goats, hogs and cute piglets were frequently underfoot, inducing my wife to swear off pork forever. We gave water to a group of emancipated horses grazing on the grass in front of our office/residence. From among the hundreds of canines wandering around, we adopted a bedraggled puppy who would become the unofficial U.S. mis- sion dog. In the first anxious weeks of Washington state’s lockdown, as we delved into the inner reaches of our pantry for some well-past-the-sell-by-date peanut butter and beans, I felt fortunate to have overcome any qualms about consuming expired food while serving in Bucharest and Moscow. There, in the 1980s, our embassy shops featured a variety of expired jars and cans discarded by U.S. military com- missaries in West Germany. The challenge of filling the hours when our usual leisure activi- ties no longer exist evokes a long 1992 temporary duty (TDY) post- ing to help set up the U.S. embassy in Minsk, then still very much a Soviet provincial town offering few diversions outside work hours. Anticipating this issue, I brought along my long-neglected copy of War and Peace , finished it in two weeks, and remember feeling rather disappointed that the book wasn’t longer. Dealing with disease threats is also all too familiar. Seeking some context, it’s been interesting to look at the relative degrees of lethality of the more serious maladies my wife and I contracted during our Foreign Service years, including dengue, chikungunya and Shigella, to name just a few. Without doubt, we FSOs and ex-FSOs may be among the best prepared for the current challenges. But I’m finding that the tem- plate for assessing hazards that I employed in places like Timor, Indonesia and Mozambique—that the risks be clearly defined and reasonably low, and the objectives worthwhile—is not quite working in this present situation. This is more like being in South Sudan in 2013, dispatching people on fact-finding missions to isolated locales with only the scantest, mostly outdated intelligence on which amorphous mur- derous armed groups may be operating in those areas. A military colleague com- mented then that it was the worst situation he had ever seen; at least in his previ- ous experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a systematic method of assign- ing a quantified risk score to every sector. Most frustrating of all in this present situation is the unknowingness—not being able to define the risks of entering the potentially peril- ous supermarket (are the odds of infection one in a thousand, one in a hundred?), realizing all the while that our Foreign Service friends throughout the world must be confronting such uncertainties many times over. Gary Gray is a retired Foreign Service officer who served in Bucharest, Pretoria, Moscow, Maputo, Jakarta, Dili and Kuala Lumpur. He also served with U.N. peacekeeping missions in Timor-Leste and South Sudan. Among the many abandoned animals wandering around Dili in the wake of the September 1999 destruction of the city were these horses grazing outside the U.S. mission and residence. At the time, Presidential Management Intern Erik Rye, standing at back, was the only mission staff member other than the author. GARYGRAY