The
biting winter wind in southern Lebanon cut straight to the bone that December
in 2006, and Private First Class Hendro Kusuma—though we’ll call him what his
mother called him, which was simply Dri—had begun to suspect that cold
had a personality. Not weather-cold, not the statistical temperature-drop that
the meteorologists in Jakarta were probably charting on their clean, warm
computers right now, but something older and meaner than that. Something intentional.
It came
through the glassless windows of the four-story concrete shell like it owned
the place. Because it did. The building wasn’t finished—it might never be
finished, Dri thought, in the particular way that Lebanon itself felt
unfinished, like God had started the project, gotten a phone call with bad
news, and simply walked away from the drafting table. Raw rebar jutted from the
ceiling like the fingers of a buried giant. The walls were the gray of old
teeth. At night, when the wind really got going and whistled through the gaps
in the tenting where the men tried to sleep, it sounded almost like language.
Almost
like someone laughing.
He
reached into the pocket of his camouflage fatigues—stiff with cold and smelling
of the particular diesel-and-dust perfume that had replaced every other smell
in his life—and thumbed a short message to his wife.
Ma,
I’ve been posted to a high-risk area.
He sent
it and waited, breathing vapor into the dark. He was thinking about her hands.
The way she pressed them against the sides of his face when she was worried. He
was thinking about his daughter, who had recently learned to run and apparently
could not be convinced to stop. He was thinking about warm rice and the
particular sound of Jakarta traffic, which he had once found maddening and now
understood was the most beautiful music he’d ever heard.
His
phone buzzed.
He
looked down.
Don’t
talk nonsense. This isn’t a high-risk area.
The
number was anonymous. The Indonesian syntax was correct but sterile, the way a
language sounds when it has been translated by a machine that understands
grammar but not longing. He read it twice. Then a third time. Then he
looked up, slowly, the way you look up when something behind you in a dark
house has made a sound you can’t explain away.
Through
the glassless window, across a strip of frost-hardened ground, past a six-foot
barbed-wire fence that the moonlight turned into a line of silver stitches on a
black wound, he could see it. The Israeli bunker. Underground, mostly, like an
iceberg—like something that didn’t want to be fully seen. But the surface
structures were lit and humming. Communication towers. Surveillance cameras
mounted and swiveling with the slow, patient intelligence of creatures that did
not need to sleep and did not need to blink.
They
had been reading his text message.
He sat
with that for a long moment. He had faced certain things in his
service—physical hardship, the boredom that is its own kind of suffering, the
ambient dread of operating in a place where the ground itself remembered
violence. But this was different. This was the feeling of reaching into your
own chest pocket, taking out something private, something meant only for your
wife’s eyes, something saturated with homesickness and love and low-grade
terror—and finding, when you opened your palm, that it was already slightly
warm from someone else’s handling.
Israel
can understand the language of animals, let alone Indonesian, Major Muhammad Irawadi would
tell Tempo magazine a few months later, and he said it with a short,
hard laugh. But there was nothing funny about it, not really. It was the kind
of thing you laughed at because the alternative—sitting with it in silence,
following it down to where it truly led—was not something you did on a
deployment. Not if you wanted to stay functional.
After
that, the men began encrypting everything. Numbers for letters. Letters for
numbers. Manual ciphers that felt almost medieval, almost absurd, scratching
coded messages on paper in an age of satellites and quantum computing, like
pressing a wooden shield against a tank. But they did it. Because a wooden
shield is still a shield. Because the act of resistance—even symbolic,
even partially futile—is what separates soldiers from hostages.
This
was the reality of the Garuda Contingent. This was what it meant to stand at
the edge of the world on behalf of a country that was eight thousand miles away
and a UN mandate that sometimes felt less like a legal protection and more like
a name tag. Hello, I am a PEACEKEEPER. Please don’t shoot me. Standing
at the junction of two war machines, one ancient and one gleaming, while the
frost turned your breath to ghosts and the cameras across the wire tracked your
every move, and somewhere back in Jakarta your daughter was running and
laughing and could not be convinced to stop.
---
Indonesia’s
commitment to UN peacekeeping had begun in 1957, which was eleven years after
independence and felt, to the men who understood the full weight of that
number, like a particular act of crazy courage. They had barely stitched
themselves together as a nation—still raw around the edges, still figuring out
what it meant to be Indonesia and not merely the former Dutch East
Indies—and they sent soldiers to the Sinai Desert.
There’s
something almost reckless about that. Something you have to admire, the way you
admire a kid who’s still got scabs on his knees from learning to ride a bike
who volunteers to carry the younger children across the street.
The UN
Security Council needed neutral mediators. It needed countries that had no skin
in the game of the Cold War’s larger chess match, no alliances that would curl
the edges of their loyalties. Indonesia answered. Garuda I. Thirty-one hundred
Indonesian soldiers spread across the Sinai’s blinding white sand, standing
between Egypt and Israel and the next war.
What
the world didn’t fully appreciate—what the bureaucrats in the UN’s glass
buildings in New York perhaps didn’t fully register—was what those soldiers
brought with them. Not just rifles and logistics, though the logistics were, by
every account, exceptional. They brought something harder to quantify. A
particular philosophy of the body in space that was almost architectural: when
you enter a room where people have been hurt, you rearrange yourself so that
you take up less of it. Weapons go behind backs. Convoys slow down, reroute
around local markets, because a line of military vehicles is a particular kind
of trigger in a traumatized nervous system, and there are enough triggers
already, and you are here, ostensibly, to reduce triggers, not add them.
A smile
costs nothing. They gave them freely.
In
Cambodia in 1992, Garuda XII moved through a landscape that was a kind of
museum of human cruelty. The landmines were everywhere—not just the physical
ones that hid under topsoil and jungle mulch, patiently waiting, but the
psychological ones. Every adult in the country had been mined in some way. The
children had been mined. The very idea of a soldier—any soldier, in any
uniform—arrived loaded with detonator-charge associations.
The
Indonesians understood this in the particular way that people who have
themselves known colonial violence understand it. They were patient. They were
consistent. They showed up and smiled and did not demand that trauma behave
according to a schedule. And slowly, by degrees, the locals began to trust
them. And when locals trust you in a post-conflict zone, they tell you things.
Quietly, as if the telling itself might be dangerous. Over there. Behind the
old school. There are mines there. Don’t go there.
Hidden
mines. Cluster bombs. The war’s ugly inheritance, buried and waiting.
“These
mines appear to have been used to defend this complex,” Lt. Gamal HP noted
clinically in his official report. But stand in that field and say it out loud
and the clinical language falls away and you are left with the raw strangeness
of it: a place that had been designed, by human beings, to kill other human beings,
and was now being painstakingly unmade by different human beings who had come a
very long way at considerable personal risk for reasons that did not include
personal profit.
The
math of peacekeeping, when you really do it, is brutal. Between 1957 and 2020,
38 Indonesian soldiers died beneath the blue-and-white UN flag. That’s not a
small number. That’s 38 families. 38 sets of hands that will not press against
someone’s face again. 38 daughters who run and laugh and will run and laugh
their whole lives under a particular shadow.
Most
succumbed to accidents. To illness. To the body’s own slow rebellions against
heat and cold and bad water and the grinding physical tax of operating in
extreme environments. But some—not most, but some—died the way soldiers die:
violently, suddenly, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, in the gap between
the theory of a peace mission and the shrapnel-reality of an active war zone.
---
The
thing about the Khmer Rouge crisis of 1992 is how it illustrates something
important about the relationship between story and reality in a
conflict zone. How the story can take on a life that the reality cannot keep up
with.
A UN
spokesperson announced—confidently, with the particular confidence of someone
who has sources—that 46 Indonesian soldiers had been taken hostage. The
BBC picked it up. VOA. Reuters. The story moved with the beautiful, terrible
speed that stories achieve when they confirm what people already feared. Of
course. Of course they were taken. Of course something terrible has happened.
This is Cambodia. This is the Khmer Rouge. Of course.
The
reality was Captain Robert Lumampaw’s troops, sitting in the dark, talking to
guerrillas.
Not at
gunpoint. Not in fear. Talking. The way men talk when it is dark and
there are minefields in every direction and nobody is going anywhere until
morning. Sports, probably. Families. The strange universal currency of boredom
that cuts across ideology like nothing else on earth. They had been delayed by
darkness and landmines while negotiating the return of a stray UN vehicle—one
of those absurd operational facts that never make it into the heroic
narratives—and the overnight stay had been, by all accounts, not pleasant
exactly, but fine. Manageable. Human.
“If we
drove at night, we couldn’t avoid the mines,” Lumampaw said later, with the
shrug of a man who had done the reasonable thing and found himself briefly
famous for a crisis that hadn’t occurred.
The
real crisis, when it came, was quieter in some ways and louder in others. Six
UN observers. British. New Zealand. Filipino. Taken hostage in Anlung Ran—a
place whose name would not appear in Western newspapers for more than a few
days, and then would be forgotten, filed into the vast archive of atrocities
that the world cycles through in its news feeds and then releases like breath.
The
French tried first. A helicopter. The sound of rotors in a place where the only
things that flew were birds and violence. Gunfire. A wounded officer who would
carry that wound for the rest of his life, would feel it in cold weather, would
explain the scar to grandchildren who could not quite imagine a place called
Anlung Ran.
The UN
turned to the Indonesians.
Lt.
Col. Ryamizard—a name that will come up again, in larger theaters—understood
something about the Khmer Rouge that the French assault team had not been
briefed on or had not believed: that they were not simply a military force but
a belief system. That you could not helicopter your way into a belief
system and expect a good outcome. That the approach had to be oblique.
Respectful. In the key of the thing’s own logic.
He sent
Major S. Noerdin. Not with a gun but with a conversation. To General Menh Ron,
who had his own logic, his own grievances, his own sense of dignity that the
war had not managed to fully destroy. They talked. Noerdin listened. Ron wanted
to be treated as someone whose conditions mattered—a human desire so basic it
is embarrassing that it requires noting.
The
General agreed to release the hostages. One condition: only Indonesians could
enter the minefield.
Captain
Fransen Siahaan walked into that field. Think about that for a moment. A
minefield. In Cambodia. In 1992. Every step a negotiation between your weight
and the buried patience of metal and explosive. He walked in. He brought the
hostages out. Every one of them. And he did it without firing a single shot.
There’s
a particular kind of courage that doesn’t photograph well. That doesn’t
translate easily into the clean narratives of military valor. It’s the courage
of the careful step. The courage of the conversation. The courage of the smile.
It is, in its own way, the most demanding kind—because it requires you to stay
human in a place that is working very hard to make that difficult.
---
Time
moves strangely in these places. In the narrative, two decades pass in a
sentence. But time doesn’t actually pass like that. It passes one hot afternoon
at a time, one encrypted message at a time, one careful step at a time.
Sergeant
Major Rama Wahyudi was killed by ADF militants in the Congo in June 2020. He
was a real person. He had a rank and a name and presumably he had people who
pressed their hands against his face when they were worried. The machinery that
responded to his death—the posthumous promotion, the diplomatic lobbying
through France, the push to classify the killing of peacekeepers as a war
crime—moved with what was described as modern speed, which is to say
faster than before but still not fast enough for anything that mattered to the
people who loved him.
And
then came 2026. Which is not history yet. Which is still raw.
---
On
March 29th of that year, an Israeli missile struck a UNIFIL position in
Lebanon. Private Farizal Rhomadhon was inside it.
The
fragments of tank shells found at the scene pointed in one direction with the
cold specificity that physical evidence provides. Less than twenty-four hours
later—twenty-four hours that must have felt, to someone with context, like the
world repeating itself in real time—an explosion hit a logistics convoy in Bani
Hayyan. Captain Zulmi Aditya Iskandar. First Sergeant Muhammad Nur Ichwan.
Three
names. Write them down. They have a way of becoming numbers if you don’t.
The IDF
described it as an “active combat zone” incident. Which is true, in the way
that technically accurate things can be monstrous. The zone was active. There
was combat. The incident occurred within it. All of this is factually
defensible. None of it touches the reality of what it means to be a peacekeeper—to
be wearing blue, to be operating under a mandate, to be a human buffer placed
in the space between two machines—and to die anyway. To discover that the
shield you believed in was made of paper.
This
had happened before, in 2024. Two Indonesian peacekeepers wounded by tank fire
from an observation tower. The same refrain then. Active combat zone. A
phrase designed to absorb culpability the way concrete absorbs water—slowly,
thoroughly, until the culpability is simply gone, evaporated,
distributed into the porous structure of geopolitical necessity.
---
The
bodies were being prepared for the journey home from Beirut. Someone was doing
that. Some set of hands was preparing them, wrapping them in the careful
rituals that civilizations have developed for the purpose of honoring what
remains when a person is gone.
President
Prabowo Subianto was in Tokyo for state business. This is not, by itself,
unusual. Heads of state travel. The world does not arrange its crises around
scheduled visits. But there was no televised address. There was an Instagram
post. Brief.
If you
want to understand the modern world’s relationship with grief and
accountability, study the gap between what is owed and what is offered. Study
the distance between a televised address and an Instagram post. It is not a
large distance in characters. It is a very large distance in everything else.
The DPR
was angry. The NGOs were angry. The public was something past angry and moving
toward something that doesn’t have a clean name—a kind of exhausted, mournful
fury that accumulates over years of watching the same pattern repeat.
Send
our sons.
The
mandate will protect them.
The
mandate did not protect them.
Send
condolences.
Send
the next son.
Calls
grew for withdrawal. For bringing the Garuda Contingent home, away from a
region that critics now described—not without justification—as a proxy war into
which a UN mandate inserted Indonesian soldiers and from which the UN mandate
could not extract them when the missiles came.
“In a
scenario like Gaza, the risks are even higher,” said Probo Darono Yakti, a
lecturer at Airlangga University, and his voice had the particular quality of
someone who has been saying the reasonable thing for years and has only
recently been in danger of being heard. “Without a clear mandate, our forces
could lose their status as peacekeepers and become parties to the conflict.”
Parties
to the conflict.
That
phrase. Sit with it.
These
men who went to stand between. These men who slung their weapons behind their
backs and smiled at traumatized civilians and walked carefully through
minefields and encrypted their homesick texts to their wives and brought
hostages out of danger without firing a single shot—these men, by simply being
there as the lines of the conflict metastasized around them, risked
becoming parties to it. The peace mission eaten by the war it was meant
to prevent.
---
The
cold still has a personality. It knows where to find you.
Somewhere,
right now, there is an Indonesian soldier standing his watch. He is looking
across a fence at something that is watching him back. He is composing a
message to his wife in his head, and he is choosing his words carefully,
because he knows by now that words can be intercepted. That the private
language of love and homesickness and fear is legible to machines that have no
interest in love or homesickness or fear but find the information useful.
He is
standing on the edge of a mandate that may or may not hold.
He is
standing in the old tradition of his nation’s strange, costly, admirable
commitment to showing up for the world’s worst situations with a rifle slung
behind a back and a smile and a willingness to walk slowly through minefields
on behalf of people who are not his people, on behalf of a peace that may or
may not be achievable, for reasons that are impossible to fully articulate but
which have something to do with dignity. His country’s. The mission’s. The
basic insistence, in the face of all evidence, that there is still a difference
between war and peace, and that difference is worth a human life.
Thirty-eight
human lives.
And
counting.
The
cameras turn. The winter wind moves through the unfinished concrete like
something with intentions. And the soldier—whose name you do not know, whose
daughter you have never seen run, whose wife is waiting for an encrypted
message that will arrive garbled and small and insufficient and will somehow,
still, mean everything—
—keeps
his watch.
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