Studying the Kisii, the ethnographers found a streak of sexual puritanism and sadomasochism. Women who initiated sex were seen as prostitutes; faced with a male overture, they were expected to demonstrate serious reluctance, a practice that obscured distinctions between consensual sex and rape. On her wedding night, the bride mounted a show of resistance while the groom’s clan mates tore off her clothes and forced her onto the marriage bed. In a kind of ritualized contest, she would have stashed a piece of knotted grass under the bed or a piece of charcoal in her mouth, magic amulets meant to render the groom impotent. Multiple sessions of intercourse were expected of him that night; it was cause for pride if he injured the bride so badly that she couldn’t walk. There was also a form of ritualized rape (still enduring in the late 1950s, though growing less frequent) called “taking by stealth”: On the occasion of annual initiation ceremonies, boys were permitted to sneak into girls’ huts, where “a few boys achieve a hurried and fearful act of coitus with girls who pretend to be sleeping.”
As in the midwestern farmland of Kaiser’s youth, cows were ubiquitous in Kisii country. Along with the number of wives he managed to collect, cattle was the mark of a man’s wealth and status. They were a dowry for a daughter and an insurance policy, convertible to cash in emergencies that required payments to a witch-smeller or medicine man. And as in the Midwest, the rhythms of life in Kisiiland were dominated by the seasons, the rain and the crops, and survival depended on how well you read the signs. The year began with groups of women entering their little fields, their infants bound to their backs, their panga knives slashing the underbrush, their hoes pulverizing clumps of dirt in preparation for the broadcasting of millet and corn. Then came the long rains and the weeding and the waiting, and by August the granaries would be depleted, and the families, when they ate, survived on sweet potatoes and bananas. In the months that followed came the harvesting, and with it the initiation ceremonies, including mass clitoridectomies, the culture’s central ritual for girls. To an outsider, the rite involved bewildering dramas. Girls expressed great eagerness for the painful procedure in the face of older women who mockingly discouraged them. By this playacting, girls were signaling their mental readiness to enter the hut of the surgeon, who waited with a harvesting knife or razor; to flee the ceremony, once it had begun, was a disgrace to the family and an affront to the spirits.
Despite the vast cultural differences, Kaiser felt a kinship with his parishioners. They reminded him of the Scandinavian farmers he’d known as a boy in Minnesota. They were “tenacious and stubborn, yet warmhearted and generous, tightfisted and grasping, superstitious and religious—perceiving the influence of the spirit world in every occurrence,” he wrote in a memoir late in life. Kaiser came to respect native medicine men who used herbs and leaves to rescue people from the throes of mental breakdowns after modern medicine had failed. A sick Kisii saw no contradiction in treating his affliction with both a pill and a sacrifice to an offended ancestor.
This, then, was the land that Kaiser entered in his early thirties, the place he would spend much of his life. He came to regard himself not just as an African generally but as a Kisii in particular.
THE COUNTRY, WITH its fierce light and impenetrable dark, its jumbo maize rows and seasons of starvation, was immense, large enough to contain his clashing selves: the priest and the paratrooper, the healer and the hunter, the collar and the gun, the man of obedience who chafed at authority. The duality of his character had been obvious since his childhood, and partly a function of it. He was born in November 1932, the second of four children in a devoutly Catholic family in Otter Tail County, a backwoods patch of wild Minnesota where the children worked the farm and wandered deep woods of ash and poplar and basswood, and where learning to shoot was both survival and a poor boy’s central entertainment. The young John Kaiser, thin and sandy-haired, evinced a penchant for solitude, and he thought it would be a fine life to live as a trapper. He spent dark winter mornings roaming with his .22 rifle or single-barrel shotgun, hunting for muskrats and inspecting traps he had set. He became renowned for the speed with which he could detach a skin from the carcass. Animal fur earned the family a few dollars for a day’s work.
Religion, like firearms, saturated the Kaiser farm’s rhythms. Prayers began on awakening. Mom and Dad drilled their children in the proper responses to the Latin Mass. Their small, white, steepled church had frosted glass, plain wooden pews with uncushioned kneelers, and a wood furnace under the sanctuary. At the pulpit, a German-born priest named James Mohm upbraided parishioners by name for their sins and for their ignorance of the faith. He was opinionated, confrontational, deeply involved in the life of the congregation, and widely loved, a man Kaiser would later describe as a strong influence.
One Christmas at his one-room country school, Kaiser drew a nativity scene on the school chalkboard, carefully detailing the three kings, lovingly texturing the wool of the sheep, scrupulously shaping the halo around baby Jesus’ crib. Nights at home, he sat with the family around the kerosene lamp, creating images that might have sprung from the covers of a boys’ pulp magazine: horses, sheriffs, gunslingers, elaborate battle scenes. In one image of men at war, he lavished detail on the soldiers’ uniforms, on the sights of their M1 rifles, on their anguished faces as bullets riddled their bodies.
His capacity for concentration was married to an impetuous streak. One winter morning as a high school freshman, he and his elder brother, Francis, were exploring the deep woods with their rifles in search of mallards. Coming upon an ice-sheathed pond, the boys approached on elbows and knees, waiting silently for ducks to cluster in the pond’s melted center. They fired; the birds shuddered and lay floating. John Kaiser plunged into icy water above his waist to retrieve their prize. He emerged trembling uncontrollably and unable to speak. He ran home, a good mile’s distance, to be wrapped in a quilt and warmed by the potbellied cast-iron stove.
Rheumatic fever came on quickly, confining him to his bed for months, the vibrant sandy-haired boy shrunk to the bones. From his bed, he tracked animals with his rifle through the open window. The seasons changed around him, sending their messages: howling blizzards, snowmelt trickling from the eaves, the scratching of june bugs against the screens.
He would never forget his body’s capacity to betray him. During the slow recovery and afterward, he hardened it against another possible mutiny, steeling it with endless sit-ups and barbell curls, pushing it beyond endurance.
For years, people noticed his hand fluttering up to his heart involuntarily; in photographs of the period, people remarked that he stood like Napoléon. The habit lasted through his years at St. John’s Preparatory School, where he grew tall and fast and strong, catching footballs one-handed and setting a class record in pole vaulting, and through his two years at St. Louis University, where he competed formidably on the wrestling team. It survived well into his army career.
Kaiser had enlisted, following the example of his brother Francis, who had fought in Korea. What survives in official army archives is scant. He served from April 29, 1954 to April 26, 1957, and was discharged as a corporal at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was part of the Eighty-second, also known as the “All-Americans,” a celebrated elite airborne division that fought in some of World War II’s decisive battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, and participated in the invasion of Normandy.
Kaiser joined during one of the hotter periods of the Cold War—the armistice that brought a cease-fire to the Korean conflict was just nine months old, and an uneasy peace prevailed. The Eighty-second had been kept in strategic reserve from the conflict, poised to repel Soviet invasions elsewhere. Ready to fly, ready to jump: That was the unit’s raison d’être, its outsized pride, the justification for a training crucible that made the men swagger even in the company of marines. “We were much more disciplined than the Marine Corps because of our unique position,” recalled William Meek, the son of a Kentucky coal miner, who roomed with Kaiser at Fort Bragg and trained with him in Company D, a heavy-mortar platoon in the Eighty-second. “We were to be prepared