Chapter One

America’s African Rifles

With a Marine Platoon

African Sahel, Summer 2004

In the early summer of 2004, just as the United States was dismantling the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, sending home its effective proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces were in various stages of deploying to the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, one of the few battlegrounds left in the Global War on Terror for the U.S. military to enter, as it was already deployed in so many other parts of the world.

Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops have been a traditional means of projecting power at minimum risk and fanfare. This was true of Rome even in regard to adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of France and Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies.* As Tacitus writes, “We Romans value real power but disdain its vanities.”1 Taking Tacitus to heart, I went to

* See Sallust’s The Jugurthine War, composed between 44 and 40 b.c., and Douglas Porch’s introduction to the Bison edition of Col. C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (1896; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996). These are but two examples of a vast military literature about how imperial powers used their influence.

the Niger River region of the African Sahel, or “coast,” a belt of savannah and scrub on the Sahara’s southern edge, to witness a version of America’s reach that was radically different from Iraq, certainly more modest, and hopefully more suc