THE END OF A WAR BEGINNING

...There were few stalls in the normally crowded area...

...She took a sudden, deep, joyous breath and exclaimed, "So do I!" Traffic stopped moving...

...There's a car going, with one more place...

...Being alone, I was half-frightened by the sound of footsteps overtaking me in the pre-dawn fog...

...Honduras...

...I saw that she and her brother were not unusual...

...The old bureaucracy had been displaced...

...But many Americans have forgotten...

...You'd better come with us...

...The guns outside Managua, I noticed, were not new, and those that had them gave a different answer...

...clearly part of the Sandinista litany...

...The others in the car, silent while he talked, now burst out in agreement...

...Here," snapped one...

...Of course," replied Sabina...

...The war...

...even fewer had any food to sell...

...The women are our comrades, equal to us in all things...

...Congress approved another multimillion-dollar donation to his former guardsmen and their allies...

...You don't want to go back to school...

...On Capitol Hill, there was a fair amount of wrangling over yet another gift from American taxpayers to the contra leaders...

...What about this...

...that's impossible...

...I sat down at the typewriter and, with half a dozen teen-agers hanging over my shoulder, filled in the information...

...Where was her brother now...

...The jeep's headlights seemed to illuminate only a few feet of the winding mountain road we traveled, and yet, I realized, those lights must be visible from a long way off...

...What...

...And was he older, or younger...

...Only one thing struck a peculiar note in the celebratory atmosphere, and that was the presence of so many guns...

...The tone in their voices, like the look in their eyes, was different from that of the kids I'd met in the south and around Managua...

...Probably they too had heard on the radio that Somoza had sneaked away in the night, taking with him the entire national airline and all the cash he and his bodyguards could haul from the nation's banks...

...At one roadblock, as I sat waiting for another ride, I watched nervously while a nine-year-old boy picked at something between his front teeth with the sight on the barrel of his pistol...

...Costa Rica's better, but not much...

...they'd return to school...

...Even Sabina, so sure of herself she made me feel timid, looked uneasy...

...Ialways thought I'd go back and find some of those kids to see what became of them after the war...

...You shouldn't put a loaded gun in your mouth...

...Stupid American...

...Her name was Sabina...

...Then someone said, "Who knows...

...What about Cuba...

...Getting rid of Somoza was the most difficult, and that's finished...

...Sabina moved down the aisle greeting other friends and talking excitedly of So-moza's flight...

...There is no other way," explained a fifteen-year-old girl...

...No," I answered...

...I don't think so," I said...

...You want a ride to Managua...

...It's just a slightly less poor banana republic, that's all...

...we have respect for women...

...There was, as yet, no new one to do such a simple thing as open the border to homebound Nicaraguans...

...He took it back...

...they'd probably never held jobs...

...I don't think we can do that," one boy said finally...

...Cuba is fine for the Cubans, but no, it wouldn't work here...

...There was more, but with the two of them, plus the two in the front seat, yelling simultaneously, I didn't catch every word...

...Don't you know what it means to be a revolutionary...

...Is the little gringa afraid of the Sandinistas...

...No, they said quickly...

...But as for the government, no, Cuba's style wouldn't work here...

...Almost teasing, he asked, "How old are you...

...A bus pulled out of the line and up the wrong side of the road...

...I had bought a pineapple to eat earlier in the day but had been without water for a long time...

...Maybe you won't need to," replied one of the men, his eyes incessantly sweeping the dark, brush-covered hillside...

...What would they do now, I asked...

...or the Soviet Union...

...I looked down at the machine gun in my lap and said, "I'm afraid...

...Look," I explained to a young woman leaning on the stalk of her machine gun...

...I'm getting in...

...From a guardia," I was told time and again...

...Where did you get your gun...

...There were no buses...

...All were in their early twenties, although the leatheriness of their skins and wariness in their eyes made them look much older...

...Sabina came in with a pistol stuck in her belt...

...She had been in Costa Rica for treatment of a wound—nothing serious, she said, pulling back the collar of her shirt to show me a bandage, but infection was a danger...

...Families piled on top of household belongings piled on top of old jalopies cheered and called out to each other: "Can you believe it...

...He proudly handed it over for my inspection...

...It used to be my father's...

...He's like a big brother to us...

...Los Vie-jos, they know what to do next...

...Jubilant teen-agers wearing black-and-red scarves and berets tilted rakishly over dark, bright eyes laughed and shouted and chattered like high-school kids celebrating a football victory...

...such an easy target...

...I had a feeling that hunting and being hunted had become more than a daily activity...

...What's the matter...

...She asked me why I was going to Nicaragua and I answered, honestly enough, "I don't know...

...I'm not sure, now, that I could go back...

...She held up a list carrying names, dates of entry, and passport numbers...

...From infection, after they amputated his leg...

...Certainly not the U.S...

...There could be terrorists among them...

...He died two years ago...

...Sabina asked to be let out at a barracks where she was to rejoin her regiment...

...Yes, yes...

...He's gone...

...The bus was jammed with wounded kids...

...I stood in the aisle, clinging to the back of a seat in which sat a boy, one eye heavily bandaged, who must have weighed all of eighty pounds...

...Then a jeep stopped...

...Tilting the pistol to his abdomen, he carefully wiped the spittle off its barrel with the tail of his T-shirt...

...It isn't over yet, you know," said the driver...

...Tell me about these guardias who had to be killed for their guns, I asked...

...Okay, okay," I laughed nervously...

...Don't forget us...

...I had not expected to see anyone else on the jungle road so early in the morning...

...But she waited, and when I was outside, I heard her say, "We have to let them in...

...Certainly no one on this bus, including the driver, seemed old enough to have been in college...

...Anyway, it was a promise Rosa Jordan is a free-lance writer in Mal-ibu, California...

...You're the first Sandinista I ever met...

...Minutes passed, and no one answered...

...A bipartisan group met with Central Intelligence Agency officials and decided that, instead of funding such an embarrassingly public military conflict, it might be more economical to destabilize the San-dinista government by putting money into covert political operations: strong propaganda support, funds for opposition parties, and—well—whatever victories money can buy in a poverty-stricken country...

...The problem is that we don't have a model," he said, speaking in a voice so low, in Spanish so rapid, that I had difficulty following...

...There was a purposefulness in the way Sabina walked, firm and man-like in her green fatigues and combat boots...

...Don't you know the difference between a guardia and a Sandinista...

...they cried...

...Nicaragua's enemy is not its people...

...And you...

...They looked at each other uncertainly...

...Only in the central market did people look harried...

...What if someone asked me when it will end...

...We love Fidel, you know...

...The Nicaraguan spirit is too free...

...Who were they...

...Poor people who didn't have enough to eat, so when Somoza promised them a gun, and boots, and lots to eat, of course they were willing to fight for him...

...Yes...

...I left the capital, walking north...

...it had become their sensory reaction to life...

...Did they know, even, that they needed help...

...Embarrassed for having offered be-careful advice to a child who carried a gun, I added, "Guns have to be kept dry or they...

...Look what our children have done...

...But like most North Americans, I pictured student revolutionaries as university students...

...I went inside to find someone to stamp my passport and discovered why the long line of traffic was not moving...

...they rust, don't they...

...The few cars that did pass were usually full...

...There are guardia in the mountains around here who still haven't surrendered...

...They belong here...

...Look, it's hot, and there's still no place to get water...

...The road was jammed with overflowing cars and pickup trucks, all headed north, as I was, from Costa Rica to Nicaragua...

...They had been issued that day, from supply depots abandoned by So-moza's national guard...

...Sometimes I would get a lift from one roadblock to the next, maybe twenty miles down the highway...

...Come on," she said...

...They've got the easy part," giggled one girl who had left school three months earlier, during Easter break, to join the Sandinistas...

...You find a clean place in the passport and hit it there with the stamp...

...You want a gun, you must kill a guardia and take it...

...It has to be typed...

...But very dangerous...

...I don't know...

...Most of them weren't old enough to have finished high school...

...My twin," she said...

...Only one youth, an eighteen-year-old named Felipe, remained silent...

...I went to Cuba for training last year, and I learned, oh, I learned many things...

...The driver knew Sabina and motioned us aboard...

...The hiker about to overtake me was bringing my first lesson...

...With babies...

...But what about these children...

...Night had fallen...

...I took it gingerly, saw that there were bullets in at least four cylinders...

...But the war isn't over and each year I imagine more of them dead...

...On its side was painted, This will not be the future of our children...

...Who would help them...

...She added a line which I had already heard many times...

...It had not occurred to me how few university students there are in a place like Nicaragua...

...The Israeli-made machine guns they carried were like their uniforms-clean and new...

...What about them...

...I thought he wasn't going to say anything more, but then he did...

...They're all Nicaraguans coming home...

...Los pobres...

...I handed her a poster of Sandino I had bought at the border...

...I was not a war correspondent...

...It wasn't until sunset, on a lonely stretch of road in the north, that I began to worry...

...She was seventeen and had been a Sandinista guerrilla for three years...

...At the door, I saw that the line of vehicles from Costa Rica was still there, still going nowhere...

...Americana...

...I didn't yet know about children's wars...

...Thirteen...

...Nicaraguans love their independence...

...They're the same as Nicaragua was under Somoza...

...But there, as often as not, some of us would be put out to make space for someone whose need to travel was more pressing...

...she had made to her brother: that if she got wounded, she'd try to get to Costa Rica, where they had antibiotics...

...they hadn't been married...

...I'll do it...

...I found myself asking young people, "Where did you get your gun...

...I don't know how to use this...

...I waited half an hour, but none of the dozen youngsters in the room seemed to know what to do...

...You must give me your autograph," I said...

...Los Viejos—the old ones—were, my traveling companions explained, that handful of Sandinista leaders in their late twenties, thirties, a few even in their forties, who were, this very day, in the capital organizing a new government...

...No, thanks...

...Soon I knew the answer before they told me...

...He looked up at me, grinned impishly, and asked a question that made me wonder if he'd read my mind...

...We want to come and go as we please, dance all night if we like...

...I guess I just wanted to see the victory...

...When will it be over...

...Revolutionaries don't act like macho pigs...

...The center of Managua was jammed with people, the air filled with a vibrancy of youth and optimism...

...So suddenly did two of them leap out of the jeep, guns in hand, waving and shouting, that I thought for a second I was being assaulted...

...the enemy is ignorance and poverty...

...It carried four men, not in uniform, but by the red-and-black scarves I saw they were Sandinista soldiers...

...He plopped a heavy Israeli machine gun in my lap and turned away to scan the dusk-darkened mountains...

...We won...

...But there were plenty of other travelers, which meant, I reminded myself, that I wasn't really alone...

...Would they stay in the army...

...Why don't you just let them in...

...President George Bush and Oliver North probably remember why it is important, if not to keep this particular war going into the next decade, at least to subvert Nicaragua's political process...

...their pulse-beat...

...Myself, I only remember a day ten years ago when kids all over Nicaragua thought the turmoil was over...

...As a result, alternatives were examined...

...As I got further north, travel was slower...

...Thirty-five," I said...

...I turned back to the group inside...

...At the border, the bus stopped...

...Refugees who had fled Somoza's destruction of their villages and bombings of his capital were going home...

...Finally, I went behind the counter, found a passport stamp, and adjusted the date on it...

...Salvador...

...I asked...

...Above the door someone had hung a shoe-shine kit, the sort little boys carry, running after you in Third World countries...

...The main point was clear enough...

...Give me something to write on...

...I asked...

...She took a stubby pencil from her pocket and in Spanish wrote, "From Sabina to my companion of the road...

...But for a woman, it's not safe to go anywhere in the night with four men...

...Viva Sandino...

...Anyone who had followed media reports on this war knew that many Sandinistas were students...

...she asked...

...the driver called sarcastically...

...Even for the good of the country, we couldn't stand that much control of our lives...

...Elsewhere, despite the rubble, there was euphoria...

...As we rode toward Managua, I asked the others in the car whether there was anyone in the movement making plans for what to do, now that the war was over...

...These soldiers, I saw, weren't high-school kids...

...Hold this...

...How would they run a country...

...They had been fighting in the mountains, they said, for the past five years...

...So the money keeps flowing...

...It's over...

...They've won, they really have...

...I asked...

...I don't know why she slowed to allow me to keep pace, but she did, and her presence comforted me...

...I asked, as much to make him take the damned thing out of his mouth as for an answer...

...he shouted...

...Who will we be like...

...They were just ignorant...