Three days had passed since we landed on the beach, three days of trudging through salt water marsh in new boots, three days of hungering for something to eat.
Our guide was a local man who had promised to help us find our way to the hills and mountains where we could build up an army to storm the country and rain down a new life, a more human life, for the countless, nameless, faceless poor people of the land.
That guide disappeared the night before as we slogged through the wet bramble and thicket, simply disappeared, as if we closed our tired eyes to rest for just a moment and then opened them again and found him gone.
At sunrise we came to the edge of a sugar cane field beside a dense, dark wood.
It was a point called Alegría de Pío, Joy of the Pious.
Ah, life is a paradox.
The place would better have been named the Despair of the Cursing, for we were lost, we were exhausted, we were starving.
We collapsed.
I fell to the warm, wet ground.
It held me as if it loved me.
It rocked me gently and firmly as if I were being rocked back and forth, up and down, around and around by arms and legs, hips and lips.
I poured myself into that ground until there was nothing left inside but colors and breath.
By mid-afternoon, the sun reached the middle of the sky.
It's heat woke me with a start.
The first thing I felt were my feet through my tight, soaked boots.
They never before had been worn until I covered my humble feet with them as I disembarked the boat three days before.
They never before had been curved and creased to the contours and crevices of my humble feet that had carried me across the farms and fields of my childhood and over the cobbled streets into the halls of the medical school in the capital.
I was the doctor for the troops.
The ground was the floor, the leaves of the trees the ceiling of my first aid station.
One by one, my compañeros limped to me, sat before me, peeled off their own tight, soaked boots, and showed their blistered, bleeding feet to me.
Have you ever held someone's foot in your hands?
You can learn a lot about people by their feet.
When I was a medical student, owners of mills and plantations would come to our school because of problems with their feet.
Once, the American owner of a sugar mill sat in tears before me.
"My foot," he wept, "I don't know what's wrong with my foot. I didn't sleep during the night. Even the light sheet against my foot made me cringe and cry out. Please, please help me."
I explained to him that he had gout, a build up of uric acid around the knuckle of his toe, a shard-like growth that cut into the flesh of the toe and caused the excruciating pain.
"This medicine will help," I said, "It will help break up the uric acid and shrink the growth to nothing and soothe your pain."
I pushed him back to the waiting room in a wheel chair and remembered his foot, so white and delicate, so soft and tender, and I knew that he was a man of business and not a man of the land, that he was a man who walked the floors of merchandise and commodities in cotton socks and leather shoes and not a man who roamed the countryside of sugar and tobacco fields in bare feet.
Gabby sat before me.
She didn’t have to explain the problem with her feet, for it was the problem with all of our compañero's feet, it was the problem with my feet.
She held in her hands the shoes she could no longer wear.
We lost almost all of our supplies when we landed at the beach, almost everything except the shoes on our feet.
They were brand new boots.
We put them on our feet with pride as we dressed to leave for our country.
For most of us it was the first time in our lives we owned a new pair of shoes.
"Look at me," Fernando shouted as he lifted a newly shoed foot into the air and hopped around in circles. "Now I’m a respectable man and not a lowly peasant because I got shoes!"
We laughed at Fernando and admired each others new social status in the world - the status where you are able to wear shoes, and new shoes at that.
Gabby's prideful moment with her new shoes turned into painful hours of open blisters and fungal infections on her feet, as all of our prideful moments turned into those painful hours, after our long slog through the salt marsh.
"Do you know any jokes about feet," she smiled as she placed her foot into my hands, "Because I sure would like to laugh right now."
I raised my hands and made a great sweeping gesture and exclaimed, "Something is afoot!"
She smiled and rolled her eyes at me.
I held her foot and saw that it was unlike the foot of the man of my medical school days, so dark and tough, so calloused and hard, and I knew by her feet that she was a girl of the soil and has become a woman of the land.
Her feet were tools used by men like that American owner of the sugar mill.
Her feet were used to break the hardness of the land and now the hardness of the land had broken her feet.
She did not cry but I cried a little for the hurt in Gabby's feet.
I washed her feet, gently washed away the blood and dirt until they were cool and clean.
I rubbed salve over them until the threat of serious infection was gone.
She opened her eyes, for she had closed them as my hands worked to heal her, and leaned forward and kissed the top of my head.
This moment between patient and doctor, between soldiers, between compadres, was silent and still.
It was beautiful.
The beauty in that moment, in that community, in that communion, was the reason I chose to become a doctor.
In that silence and stillness, we heard a soft buzzing sound on the horizon, a buzzing that grew louder and louder until we looked up and saw six planes in the sky circling around us.
Some of our compañeros continued to cut and eat sugarcane in the open field, not knowing how exposed and vulnerable they were to the pilots above.
Gabby and I leaned against a tree and ate our meager rations - half a sausage and two crackers.
Suddenly a shot rang out and splintered a tree beside us.
We dropped to the ground on our stomachs and a hail of bullets poured down on our tiny rebel army.
After the initial round of shots, we jumped up and ran through the woods, looking for our compañeros and listening for orders.
After 200 yards, I stopped and doubled over, my constricted lungs wheezing and gasping for air.
I was in poor health due to a severe asthma attack during our ocean voyage.
Because of my poor physical condition, I chose the worst rifle among our cache of weapons so all of my compañeros could have straight and true ways to attack the army and henchmen and defend themselves and the poor people around them from guns and bombs.
"Leave me," I gasped to Gabby, "Go on...please."
I sat down and rested my back against the trunk of a tree.
Gabby knelt beside me and raised her rifle toward the thicket from whence we came.
"No," she said simply.
The surprise of the gunfire had been too startling, however, and the bursts of bullets too great for us to know what to do.
Why do we try to bring clarity and order into war?
In the middle of a battle, there is only confusion and chaos.
So it was in this first battle in the war of liberation for our people.
There was confusion.
Juan, who was a captain, walked around aimlessly asking for orders but there was no one to give them.
Later we would learn that our commander had tried to gather us in a cane field that could have been reached by a short walk down a path that was beside me.
There was chaos.
A considerably corpulent compañero tried to hide behind a single stalk of sugar cane, his face squinched tightly until his eyes were closed.
It was as if he thought that by not seeing the enemy or their bullets then the enemy and their bullets would not see him.
Another compañero kept running from tree to tree yelling, "Silence!" as if the battle, the war itself, would follow his command.
It was there in that confusion and chaos that I was faced for the first time with the dilemma of choosing between my devotion to medicine and my duty as a revolutionary soldier.
A compañero dropped a box of ammunition at my feet.
He did not say a word, but his anguished expression said, "It is too late for ammunition boxes."
He ran off to try to find his group in the woods.
There at my feet were a knapsack full of medicine and a box full of ammunition.
I could not carry both.
They were too heavy.
I asked myself a simple question, for there is a time when life breaks down our most complex questions into their simplest forms, and this was one of those times for me.
Should I as a doctor work to heal the effects of disease and poverty on the lives of the people, the human beings, those with faces and hearts and names around me?
Or should I as a soldier work to destroy the causes of disease and poverty in the structure built around those people, those human beings, those with faces and hearts and names around me?
I picked up the ammunition, leaving the medicine behind, and started back toward the cane field.
One of our compañeros, Jésus, appeared at our side.
“I will run ahead to join the battle," said Gabby. "I will see you in the evening," she promised.
Silently and stealthily she moved through the brush until she was gone.
I looked into the face of Jésus.
Just a few hours before, I had washed his feet and had seen how tired and worn out he had looked.
He smiled a weary smile at me.
A burst of gunfire hit us both.
I felt a sharp blow on my chest and a slicing pain in my neck.
Jésus was bleeding profusely from a wound in his abdomen made by a .45 caliber bullet.
"They've killed me," he whispered.
"I've been hit!" I yelled.
Who could help me?
I was the doctor turned soldier.
Ammunition can wound but it cannot heal.
I closed my eyes and remembered an old Jack London story.
The hero knows he is going to freeze to death in the Alaskan wilderness so he calmly leans against a tree and prepares to die with dignity."
"Let me die with dignity," I whispered.
"Today is not a day to die," answered Gabby.
She kissed me tenderly on the cheek and wrapped her bandana firmly around the wound on my neck.
Someone on his knees shouted, "We need to surrender!"
"Nobody surrenders here!" yelled Gabby.
"You must move," she said firmly.
I crawled forward, as if I were a baby again, learning to use elbows and knees together to get from one place in the world to another on my own.
The pain was excruciating, but Gabby's voice, her words, her life, pushed me on.
We came upon other compañeros, some unhurt, others wounded, and we all moved forward, slowly but surely with Gabby at our lead, until we reached the safety of the deeper woods.
As darkness fell, we all fell together on the ground.
We huddled in a heap.
We were plagued by wounds, hunger, thirst, and mosquitoes.
But we were together.
We had survived our baptism of fire.
We were soldiers.
