"OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE"

Brigadier Carl Alfonso would have followed Prime Minister ANR Robinson's famous command to "Attack with full force!" if he had been in charge of the Fighting and not the Support and Service battalion during the bloody Muslimeen attempted coup in 1990. The Defence Force, he says, had the "guns, bullets, will and wherewithal" to resolve the crisis militarily and, had he heard ANR Robinson's words himself, the 1990 coup would not have ended the way it did. To this day, Alfonso seethes when he thinks that the Muslimeen escaped unpunished and, far harder to bear, undefeated.

On 27 July 1990, almost every soldier reported for the duty for which they had all been trained: the defence of their country. The military did not want to negotiate with the Muslimeen, "the enemy of the state". Alfonso is certain that the military could have shot their way into both hostage centres and captured or totally defeated the enemy. When he heard that they had been permitted to surrender and were walking out of the Red House and Television House, he thought it had to be a joke.

He was in charge of the makeshift prison at the National Fisheries buildings in Chaguaramas where the Muslimeen were incarcerated, though, and he took his own style to that command: while many civilians worried that the old US army base administration buildings were not secure enough to hold the Muslimeen, the first order Alfonso gave was for the outer doors to be removed. He set up a machine-gun nest opposite each door and advised the Muslimeen, whom he considered prisoners-of-war, that they were not permitted to walk outside. They never tried to, he says, happily, if a trifle wistfully.

Carl Alfonso has spent most of his life in uniform. He became a cub scout at the age of seven, a full scout at ten and a cadet upon entering secondary school; and even those first seven non-uniformed years could not be called a civilian life, since he was the son of a police chief. His father, Lancou (whom he still calls "Daddy" 21 years after his death) was the Commissioner of Police of St Kitts. (In the old colonial days for which Alfonso still occasionally hankers, there was, he says, greater freedom of movement in the Caribbean.)

Marriage runs in the Alfonso family almost as strongly as uniforms. His father was married twice before he married his mother, who was herself married once before. (His mother, aged 92, lives with Alfonso now, as does his wife's mother, Jean, aged 78: Carl's Golden Girls.) His wife, Lesley, was also married twice before so he says it is a case of third time lucky for two; and every good military parade, he points out, must have at least two rehearsals. Despite his multiple marriages, Alfonso considers himself a fairly good Catholic, an assessment with which Catholic Archbishop Anthony Pantin must agree: Pantin himself officiated at Alfonso's marriage to Lesley Villain in the Archbishop's private chapel last year.

Alfonso gained media attention shortly after his appointment as Chief of Defence Staff when he declared that homosexuals had no place in his army. He was unprepared for the question, he says, and, on the back foot, responded with the prevailing military attitude to (though there is no official policy on) homosexuals. He is not anti-homosexual, he says, just skeptical that a softly spoken soldier could be effective. A favourite anecdote involves two soldiers at a roadblock, one with a high-pitched voice and the other gruffly spoken: the soldier with the girly voice was laughed at by the occupants of the car he was meant to search; the gruff one commanded respect simply by his rough manner.

Until he was a big man, he says, he didn't know that there could be such a thing as a manly homosexual. He expected them to appear effeminate. He almost died, he says, when he found out that Rock Hudson, Montgomery Cliff and Errol Flynn, who all played tough roles in films, were homosexual.

In 1979, as a captain, Alfonso sat on a regimental committee that firmly rejected the notion of female soldiers. Today, he accepts that he was entirely wrong, and might have been chauvinistic back then. Female soldiers (who are now admitted), he says, tend to work harder than males because they have more to prove. He cannot, however, bring himself to consider that he may be as wrong about homosexuals in the army as he was about women. For that, he says, he would need time: in ten years, maybe. He considers homosexuals to be "generally speaking, bright and talented people" but nevertheless thinks that a declared homosexual would find it difficult to enter or exist in the army. US President Bill Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" approach, he says, is the best for Trinidad and Tobago for now.

Alfonso has never had something so mundane as a resume because he has never had a job (though he imagines he will have to prepare one fairly soon). He deliberately joined the Harvard Club as a preparation for making the shift to civilian life; it won't be easy. In a pick-up basketball game one day, a teammate cussed him. In the army, saluting goes up the ranks and cussing goes down and he outranked everyone. He walked off the court, fighting his knee jerk response to have the man who cussed him arrested and confined to barracks.

Alfonso is an old-fashioned man. (He consented to his son wearing an earring on the condition that Alfonso himself bore the hole, with a hammer and nail and his son's earlobe pulled taut on a two-by-four; his son perhaps understandably declined.) It may be difficult for him to adjust to the brash new ways of doing things. His greatest asset for dealing with the changes may well be his wife, whom he calls his American Express card, because he "never leaves home without her."

Their romance grew out of a friendship that began with her comforting him when his second wife left him for another man. He goes quiet when remembering the difficulty of the period, and expresses regret that his wife also had to leave someone to come to him because he knows firsthand the "pain and trauma' of separation. But that is no reason, he says, for men to hit women.

Alfonso condemns and detests the growing domestic violence in the country. He cannot understand why any man would have to hit a woman, and is particularly unforgiving towards those who do it out of jealousy or because of infidelity. He knows the old Trinidadian saying that "Men can't take horn" but does not accept it. When his soldiers come to him for advice when their marriages are breaking up, he tells them what he has had to learn for himself: it's horrible but it's not the end of the world; let her go in peace and something better will happen. Life goes on. Bad memories, like old soldiers, may never die; but they will fade away.

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