A captain’s double life in Kenya and in Iraq - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

A captain’s double life in Kenya and in Iraq

Fallujah police have two suspects in custody for the murder of the prominent sheik who chaired the city council. One is 15. The other is 11.

Marine Capt. Rye Barcott’s colonel says the younger boy is an especially pathetic case: “Eleven years old and his life is already behind him.”

In contrast, Barcott has already lived at least a couple of lives.

While an ROTC undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, he lived briefly in 2000 in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. His visit led to his co-founding Carolina for Kibera before he entered Officer Candidate School while getting over malaria and receiving the Iron Mike Award for highest physical training score.

He speaks Swahili and can get by in Arabic and Serbo-Croatian. He was a human intelligence officer in Bosnia, the Horn of Africa and Iraq, has an MBA and a master’s in public administration from Harvard, was an ABC News Person of the Year in 2006 — and is only 32.

His book is part memoir, part acknowledgment of an “incipient bloodlust,” part love story — and wholly engaging, amazing and inspiring.

His father, a sociology professor and Marine veteran of Vietnam, and mother, an anthropologist and nursing professor, named him Rye because of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” in which Holden Caulfield is “standing at the end of a cliff in a bountiful field of rye,” ready to protect children playing in the field.

Whether trying to protect his Marines or slum residents’ ability to help themselves, Barcott survives doubts by believing “the military fundamentally promoted peace” and by wanting “the best practices of each world to inform the other.”

During OCS, for example, he realizes “the stress of life in Kibera was real. The stress at OCS was artificial. If I could make it through Kibera, I could make it through OCS.”

His combat experiences “allowed me a glimpse into the abyss and its seductive, slippery force.”

He is able to “keep my morality intact” in part because of a sense of honor influenced by conscientious mentors. His penniless friend Tabitha Atieno Festo started a clinic in Kibera with Barcott’s two “one thousand shilling notes,” the equivalent of $26 — the cost of Barcott’s book. A portion of proceeds from sales will go to CFK, he writes, and in reading pleasure alone, the money is well spent.