Up Close and Personal: A Essay on Travel Tension

by Lance Mason

Scrambling off the plane at Jomo Kenyatta Airport—isn’t Economy always a scramble?—I was pleased it wasn’t a steambath afternoon, the cliché of tropical climates. Nairobi was halfway through my round-the-world journey from New Zealand, my home at the time, with stops in the US, the UK, and Spain along the way. Such a trip might have been adventurous, exciting, and/or enthralling, but not so with this one.

Michael met me at Baggage Claim and we shifted my streamlined luggage through an expedited Immigration exit, sans Customs inspection, and into another cliché, a waiting black SUV with driver. Michael’s verbal welcome were his usual business-like remarks, asking about my flight, my stopover in the UK, and so forth. It would’ve been stupid or self-absorbed, or both, for me to expect more, given what he and Carmella had been through.

Michael got into the passenger-side backseat, and I took the one behind the driver. As we left the airport grounds, I tried to merge my mind and emotions into where I was, the situation I’d entered, while also trying to get visuals on the landscapes around us. The side window, though, was a bit blurry, translucent but darkly tinted. Running the back of my fingernails over its inner surface, I felt the drag of a rubber-like coating.

“Mike,” I said, “that feels weird. What’s on the window?”

“Kevlar,” he said. “Bulletproofing. It was Madeleine Albright’s vehicle when she was here in August after the bombing.” His answer carried more than a hint of concern, not exactly a caution, but verbal notice that I shouldn’t expect normalcy to define this visit. I’d soon find out the essential details.

*****

Michael and I had met as college roommates in September, 1965, both of us raw onions a couple months out of high school. I was a bit wary of the unknown, but looking for friends, and unsure about my next step, though dental school had been my intention since late adolescence. While a good student, I wasn’t driven, a bit lazy, and a sandlot athlete, at best. Mike, on the other hand, was accomplished at sports, at Loyola on a mathematics scholarship, and full of confidence, direction, and purpose. This would all change for him in barely a year’s time, but come back to him in full when the chips were down. For me, back then, it was going to take a couple of years before I got my feet on the ground.

Still, this situation of how we met has always been curious to me. We didn’t know each other, and I didn’t have any friends attending Loyola, while Mike (though he prefers Michael) had at least two friends with whom he’d played sports and studied, excelling at both. Yet the school, a Jesuit institution in Los Angeles, had put us into the same room in Rosecrans Hall—two single beds, two desks, two chairs, and two bookshelves.

I’ve always treated this crossing-of-our-paths as a random roll of the dice, though incredibly fortunate for me. Why hadn’t Mike signed up for a dorm room with Dan Claffey or Bob Hulse, both at Loyola, both guys he’d grown up with? It took me all these decades to make an educated guess—Mike had bigger fish to fry than stewing about a college roommate. Maybe he was waiting on a scholarship offer from Stanford or Harvard or Columbia that never came. Also, shortly after Mike began at Loyola, his parents and a flock of his younger siblings moved from Santa Barbara, California to Connecticut when his father received a job transfer. Perhaps that had been on the cards when Mike was contemplating Loyola, and he had considered going with them.

Or maybe—just maybe—by the time these hypotheticals played out and Mike chose the Loyola scholarship, Dan and Bob had already agreed to room together in the dorms, so Mike had to take potluck—me. Whatever had been his decision cycle, we ended up as roommates in one of the great strokes of luck in my young life.

However, early in our second year, Mike would hit a rough patch, lose direction, leave Loyola, and move to Connecticut to join his family. He spent a few months in school there, met some locals, and joined the Marine Corps, graduating top-of-the-class out of OCS. He soon made captain, youngest in the Corps, and enrolled in a 52-week course in Mandarin Chinese, again graduating first in his class. This was 1968, before all but a very few Americans imagined that the official language of The People’s Republic would have any importance in our future.

After military service, Mike married Carmella, whom he’d met in Connecticut, and they moved to Santa Barbara, where Mike aced his undergraduate studies and got an offer to do a PhD in Asian Studies at Yale. No, he decided. Time to go to work. He passed the Foreign Service exam first try, and spent nearly 35 years serving America’s Foreign Relations interests, advancing through the Department of State (D.O.S.), finishing as US Ambassador at our Embassy in Hanoi. (Not incidentally, while on the East Asia Desk in D.C. 20 years earlier, he had helped rehabilitate our diplomacy with Vietnam.)

On his “road to Hanoi,” however, Mike had taken on some tough assignments, including Consul General, Moscow in the mid-‘90s, and Deputy Chief, Beijing in 2000, where he helped negotiate the release of an American spy plane and its crew forced down on Hainan Island in 2001. However, between these posts in Russia and China, he was serving in the US Embassy, Nairobi when it was bombed in August, 1998. I arrived two months later to assess the damage—to my friend, not the building.

*****

There are myriad details to recall about these Kenya experiences as the guest of the head of a US Embassy recently attacked by committed terrorists. There had been hundreds of deaths, thousands wounded. (Did I say “head of an Embassy?” I’ll get back to that.) And the dead—were they all  Americans? Alas, no. Twelve Americans were killed in the Embassy, and three times that many Kenyans, and nearly 200 Africans in total died outside the Embassy, mainly in an office building next door. How did that happen, when most of those victims had no connection with the US or with Al Qaeda’s act of extremist insanity? To the degree that it can be explained, I’ll try.

Picture an aerial view of the scene, a street intersection in downtown Nairobi, the main road running east-west, the secondary street running north-south. The intended target, the American Embassy, squats on the southwest corner, facing the main road, the side street on its right. The 3-4 story building has a ground-level parking garage beneath it, with a large, open car park at the back that is entered by a left turn off the side street, about 50 meters before the intersection. That driveway entrance has a barrier manned by Kenyan guards, no doubt armed, as they are employed by the US Government in a region not known for political stability.

If you stand at that barrier, the parking lot in front of you, the Embassy is to your right, and on your left stands an eight-story office building housing the operations of a large bank, among other businesses. On 7 August 1998, at the peak of this working day in urban-and-bustling Nairobi, that building is full of people , including our Ambassador who is inside meeting with a Kenyan diplomat.

As events unfold (as clearly as Michael knows, describing it for me two months later), the Islamist murderers (a benign term for them) attempt to drive a small truck laden with explosives through the entrance into the parking area, no doubt headed for the garage beneath the Embassy. However, the Kenyan guards, brave as lions, refuse them access through the driveway barrier. As part of their backup plan, the killers set off a stun grenade or other low-explosive device, killing the guards and pulling many of the victims-to-be to the rear windows of the Embassy, and the front windows of the bank building. The killers then trigger the truck-bomb, causing huge ballistic damage within the Embassy, killing dozens, but also collapsing, like a house-of-cards, several stories down the front of the office building, killing many more.

The fatality count in the Embassy is 46, mostly Africans. In the bank building, at the time of my October visit, the death count is 168. The wounded are many multiples of these numbers. Among them is the US ambassador.

*****

When the attack happened, I had been living and working in New Zealand for 10 years. At the news of the bombing, I could get little or no reliable information from the US Consulate in Auckland, so decided to travel to Kenya myself, with a stop in Australia on the return. So, here I was, and Mike had taken me to the site and was providing details of what he knew.

The next morning, as Mike was leaving the gracious old Victorian house where he and Carmella lived (inside a guarded compound), he said that he expected a busy day, but that we might see him at lunch. Barely grasping what I had seen the day before in Nairobi, I spent the morning with Carmella at an enlightening lecture by an Anglo-African farmer who had taken a degree at Cornell in Rangeland Management. He spoke on the radical advantages of converting from cattle-farming in Kenya to various species of antelope, as they require far less water, eat native vegetation instead of artificial grassland, produce low-fat, high-protein meat, and defecate material far more harmonious to the soil than cattle do. Still, he was making little headway with the entrenched cattle establishment.

Yet he provided some shocking statistics on African population trends. Reliable research showed that the population of mid-19th century Kenya was less than 1 million, estimated in 1950 to be 6 million, with a recent census (c.1998) showing more than 25 million. (The 2025 estimate is 57 million.) This illustrated the near-impossible task of feeding (much less employing) such an exploding population without radical changes in the country’s economy and agricultural production.

As it turned out, Michael didn’t return for lunch, and Carmella, with our driver, took me to Nairobi’s open city market, where I scavenged at least a dozen pieces of local art and handicraft, from carved masks to gourds incised with tribal designs, from textiles to stone, wood, or clay figurines. At the prices I paid, I felt like a thief.

That evening at dinner, Mike explained why he hadn’t come home for lunch. As I recall it today, this would be an approximation of his account:

“You may have heard about the significant unrest in Sudan.” That country had seen a devastating famine in 1998 related to an ongoing civil war. “We were supposed to meet with the leaders of one of the factions to discuss a possible movement toward peace. Instead, another of the factions showed up, and there was a confrontation, not quite a firefight, on the steps of the International Hotel.”

Earlier in this telling, I referred to Mike as the “head of the Embassy,” and said that I would explain why. His official title at the time of the Al Qaeda attack was Deputy Chief of Mission. DCMs are second-in-command when an ambassador is on duty at that embassy, and, by pattern, are State Department career employees. If an ambassador hasn’t been assigned yet to that embassy, or the ambassador is not on site due to travel abroad or similar absence, the DCM becomes chargé d’affaires (CDA), effectively head of operations.

From how things looked in October, Mike certainly seemed to be fulfilling that role, not that an unranked visitor skating in from New Zealand should expect to encounter the big boss. However, I interacted socially with perhaps half a dozen of Mike’s D.O.S. colleagues, and twice that many spouses in activities with Carmella, and heard no mention of Prudence Bushnell, the US Ambassador and Head of Embassy, in reference to embassy operations. I would later learn that, though injured in the bombing, she continued as Ambassador to Kenya until reassigned to Guatemala the following year. 

However, considering the scale of the crisis, it made complete leadership and organizational sense (to this layman) that Bushnell may have been back and forth to Washington getting Nairobi Embassy operations back on track, with all the diabolical complexity and rigorous dedication that would involve. During any such episodes, possibly swathed in secrecy, Michael would have “simply” been doing his job as second-in-command, and may have had the role of chargé d’affaires (CDA) in Kenya during my visit. (Ambassador Bushnell left Nairobi for her new post in May, 1999, and her replacement arrived in September, so Michael would have been CDA during that time.)

A great deal of controversy grew out of Bushnell’s repeated and well-documented notices to the D.O.S. before the bombing, backed up by CIA reports, that the Nairobi Embassy was not only vulnerable to attack, but likely to be targeted by Al Qaeda, who had a malicious presence in Kenya. Friction in Washington and State Department circles would later arise as a result of Bushnell’s warnings being ignored, or at least not being heeded, by those in roles of authority for such things. Madeleine Albright, as Secretary of State, was Bushnell’s boss and overseer, and would become the target of criticism, including allegations of willful ignorance.

In any case, by October, from my vantage point, Mike was directing embassy operations as they were relocated to an isolated building on the edge of town, the regional headquarters for the USAID, United States’ Agency for International Development. These folks, needless to say, were not overly excited about sharing office space with such a high-level terrorist target as the US Embassy. On the day he took me there, it was like being in a Mel Gibson cum Denzel Washington war-movie set in some combination of the outskirts of Baghdad and… the outskirts of Baghdad. The guarded roadway into the place was a gravel-and-dust serpentine lined with cement-filled oil drums, with heavily armed US Marines spread across the landscape.

The interim building itself was a block of charcoal gray concrete, perhaps three stories. Nothing was pretty, no gardens, no tended vegetation, no personnel on public reception duties. It was in a state of high-alert lockdown, where putting your hand in your pocket could lead to a fatal misunderstanding. Looking back on it now, I don’t wonder that I have no photographs of the place or its personnel.

Michael and his overworked team were running America’s interests from this “position of transition” as he negotiated with the Kenyan officials for a permanent location outside the city center, where the US would build a new embassy with far better protection, matters Bushnell had harangued Washington about for a year or more. This is how the Michael I had known had always worked (and still does today, in retirement): You do what you know to be right. You deliver more than what’s expected of you. If you have to cut corners, you don’t compromise what’s right, and you don’t tolerate people who do.

*****

Earlier, I mentioned that a close friend of Mike, Dan Claffey, whom he’d known in grade school and high school, came to Loyola at the same time. After a few years in another career, Dan followed Mike into the Foreign Service of the D.O.S., and would have challenging, rewarding postings from Malaysia to Australia and Fiji to Africa. In addition to Africa, I’d visit both Dan and Mike in far-flung ports-of-call around the world (Martinique, Borneo, Fiji, Hanoi, Mauritius, London, Kuala Lumpur), and occasionally met coworkers in Dan’s company who had worked elsewhere with Mike. Invariably, they told various versions of the same story: “Michael is a demanding boss, but fair. If you do your job well, he’ll give you the best write-up you could imagine. If you don’t, don’t expect any favors.”

During this time in Nairobi, Dan was with the US Embassy in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria. Ten years before, he had taken his first State Dept. posting not far north of there, in Gabarone, Botswana, and I had visited him and Roz there in 1988 as I was immigrating to New Zealand. We’d had a fabulous time together in Botswana, and would again when, on leaving Kenya, I headed to Pretoria. On the way, I’d go tiger-fishing on the upper Zambezi River in Zambia and, due to timely negotiations by the host at a backpackers’ lodge, I’d narrowly avoid being fleeced for bribes by armed soldiers on the highway. I’d also pay my second visit to Zimbabwe, marking its continuing collapse in the 10-year decline under Robert Mugabe since I was there in ‘88. These were the things—the knowns and the unknowns—that I was trying to prepare for in the day or so before boarding the flight out of Nairobi to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital.

Yet there was one more adventure, one more encounter to mark my brief but intensive Kenyan experience.

In his executive role in Nairobi, as the Clinton administration tried to get a grip on managing its diplomatic mission there, Michael had constant, unrelenting demands on his time and attention. Carmella, as spouse of the DCM (or chargé d’affaires) in Kenya, was equally under demand for uncountable tasks in her so-called spare time. On the last night before my departure, Michael was expected to attend a reception for political and military officials at the Intercontinental Hotel, along with Carmella. However, she’d agreed to another obligation, so I substituted as Mike’s guest at the reception.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about our arrival—black SUV, driver, cloistered parking, side entrance into a large, well-guarded meeting room. It was the atmosphere and the personnel in the room that gave one the heebie-jeebies. Half of those present were a mix of African establishment political functionaries, mostly Kenyan but a scattering from elsewhere, who, almost by definition, were allies of the US, or at least not her sworn enemies. The rest were representatives of various American government agencies and institutions: embassy employees, officers of US Air Force Intelligence (a shadowy, barely recognized spy unit), and other visitors from D.C. centers of power and related spook shops. At least, that was my impression.

Standing to the side, except when shaking hands with someone whom Mike was polite enough to introduce me to, I scanned the crowd. As a newcomer to the city, and a superficial observer of the post-attack landscape and climate, I realized that I was up-close-and-personal, inside an enclosed building, with many of the people Al Qaeda had tried, and failed, to kill two months before.

Would they try again tonight?

*****

No, they didn’t try again that night. They had, however, attacked our Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on the same day as Nairobi, and Al Qaeda affiliates would continue to direct or contribute to attacks on American assets – the USS Cole in 2000, the World Trade Center the following year – as well as deaths and destruction across Europe up to the present time.

The D.O.S.’s self-appraisal of the 1998 bombings should have been a paradigm of truth and clarity, but was instead plagued by controversy, finger-pointing, and blame-laying. Far in advance of the attack, Amb. Bushnell had sent unequivocal urgings to Washington for more preparation and protection, and other US agencies had echoed these or related threats. Hubris, however, seemed to have held sway in some quarters of the Department, reflected in blame being laid by some at the feet of Secretary Albright.

The US is not always blessed by unerring leadership in times of crises. Bureaucracy and politics form the very nature of governments large and small, and are sometimes the enemy of efficient response. The more sway they hold in the higher echelons of authority, the less agile critical decisions can be. The most valuable assets of the US Government are not the power-brokers and pontificators of elected office, but those who have dedicated themselves and their lives to the betterment of our country, its people, and our future. People like Michael and Dan.

Nairobi was an illustration of why it is incumbent upon Americans to choose their leaders wisely, because history is not done with us.

BIO: Lance Mason's writing reflects both his farm-town origins and his extensive travel abroad. He has explored, lived, and worked overseas for decades, traveling the world by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, train, tramp steamer, and dugout canoe, about 15 years of which was spent living in current or former Commonwealth countries. These experiences that have both enhanced and interfered with Mason’s writing life. His work has appeared in 50+ journals, collections, anthologies, etc., was included in Fish Publishing's 2025 Memoir Prize (Ireland), received a Silver and 2 Golds in the 2024 and ’25 Solas Awards, and his fiction recently appeared in ShortStoryStack (Palisatrium), Eerie River's BLADES, and Cowboy Jamboree's PRINE PRIMED.