I was just about to give up on the rest of the day and call for my driver and head off to the closest foreigners’ market that sold scotch, when downstairs called and said I had two military officers who wanted a meeting.

Some activity that day was better than none, so I told one of my people to get the officers.

As Communications Director for the United Nations Warlord Disarmament Programme, I was used to dealing with just about any requests from outsiders.

(The UN used a different name for the group and also my position but those communicated little to the outside world of what we and I did so I had arbitrarily renamed everything. It  really irritated the bureaucrats when I did that.) 

I met with most outsiders mainly because the true leaders of the place really had too high a view of their own importance, and quite frankly did not understand everything that they were supposed to.

Two officers walked in and unlike every other officer in Theatre (military speak terminology) at the time they were in full proper uniform. Working officers in the field, or in Theatre, all dressed in combat fatigues done up in a bewildering variety of camouflage styles according to what their home countries thought best.

Since there were some 15 national armies in the Coalition trying to keep the country stable while a new and perhaps better government than the ousted Taliban flailed around trying to learn how to govern, there were a lot of wild and varied camouflage uniforms around.

My deputy, who had gone to meet them at reception, introduced them as captains from the Army of South Korea.

At that I was flummoxed. As far as I knew the South Koreans had shown no interest in being part of the international coalition holding the country together and they supplied none of the humanitarian aid that the country’s millions needed.

It didn’t take long to find out why they were in my office.

They wanted to buy my thousands of tanks, rockets, and other heavy weapons.

The Heavy Weapons Collection Programme was a countrywide effort to collect the thousands of tanks, armed personnel carriers, rockets, anti-aircraft machine guns and other weaponry from the dozens of private armies and warlords throughout Afghanistan. Most were rusted junk, but some of it could still level a city.

“But they are not mine.” I said. “They are part of the United Nations disarmament programme and technically they belong to the Government of Afghanistan.”

Broad smiles all around and knowing nods.

“Yes we know,” said one of the captains. “but we can help by getting them out of the country.”

“Why do you want to buy heavy weapons?” A question that I never got answered during the next half hour of increasingly opaque and twisted conversation.

My Afghan staff took it upon themselves to deliver coffee and tea along with trays of pistachios and Peak Frean cookies. I sighed when they started to bring that stuff in because it meant that I couldn’t just stand up and briskly wish them good luck and lead them out of the door. No, we had to sit there and make small aimless talk.

Part of my problem with their visit was that I was not sure at all that these two were who they said they were. Kabul swarmed with intelligence people. Each nation in the coalition had their uniformed intelligence officers and an unknown number of civilian clothed operatives. The most obvious, in and out of uniform, were always the Americans. For some odd reason they all seemed to think that wearing a dark beard, elaborately pocketed vests, a pair of dark Ray-Bans or Oakleys, and an air of coiled violence made them invisible. True intelligence operatives, and I have known a lot, are as unnoticeable as true ghosts. American spies come across as the comic book Caspar, The Friendly Ghost.

The best invisible spooks were the British. They just seemed to drift aimlessly through the country without drawing attention to themselves. The funniest were the Bulgarian spooks. They all but walked around with a cloak covering their faces as they lurked around corners.

“If you don’t mind, Mr Rick,” said one of the officers. “How many tanks do you have?”

I repeated that they were not mine, and I had no control over them, but I didn’t press the point because they were unfailingly polite and smiling in their disbelief. “About ten thousand in compounds now and another few thousand on their way.”

“Any how many are operational?”

I could only repeat what my bosses had told me over and over, but I had never believed what they said. “None. They have all been demobilized by removing their fuel pumps, coaxial machine guns, and making the breech blocks inoperable.”

“But they can be loaded on truck trailers, no?”

I guessed so. My ignorance of how heavy weapons were handled was vast.

“And the anti-aircraft weapons? The rockets? And so on?”

The CIA supplied air to ground Stinger missiles to Afghan fighters in the war against the Soviet Army. But many went unaccounted for and the fear was always that one could be used on a civilian airliner.

“Well, I’ve been told that they are also inoperable.” I had my doubts about that. And there was more than one story about how operable air-to-ground Stinger missiles left over from the fight with the Soviets had quietly disappeared from the United Nations collection system and changed hands for huge amounts of money.

“We would very much like to buy as much of the material as we can. I imagine that there are various officials in the government and the United Nations that we would have to negotiate payment with. And of course, we would certainly compensate you well for your help.”

So there it was.

A bald bribe. I knew that they could easily cut a corrupt deal with whatever United Nations and Government of Afghanistan officials they had to, but I had seen the inside of the Pul-e-Sharki prison not five kilometers away and I was far far too much of a coward to ever chance getting sent there.

I also knew the head of the Afghan Secret Police, a terrible alcoholic who I had drunk much scotch with, who had been more than a little too graphic in his description of how the Afghan methods of torture were so much more effective than what the effete Americans did with their silly water-boarding and such.

It took some effort to get them out of my office gracefully, but it had helped that I had been able to get them an interview with a cabinet minister in the government to discuss the matter.

I never heard any more about their weapons buying trip but I heard an odd story about how some tanks and other heavy weapons had been pulled out of secure compounds at night and loaded on flatbed trucks for Pakistan, and presumably the ports.

Perhaps the value of scrap steel was that high, or perhaps the South Koreans, if they were even that and not, let’s say, North Korean, had other plans.

I kept my speculations to myself and watched to see if any of the people I dealt with suddenly could afford six star hotels in Dubai and high end vacations.

I also didn’t mention my meeting with my bosses. When it comes to weapons and money, it is best to keep one’s mouth shut. And, I did not trust them.

Mallacoota, a small coastal town in the state of Victoria, was isolated from the rest of the country when a devastating bushfire destroyed much of the area on New Year’s Eve 2019, destroying homes and cars, and cutting off the one road in and out.

The Australian Navy sent in some supplies for the residents but when it was learned that one and only pub in the cut off town was out of beer a special delivery of 800 gallons was donated by a brewery.

“The pub is at the heart of regional communities, and after what Mallacoota residents and firefighters have been through the least we would do is make sure they could enjoy a beer.”

The news item recalled for me the time that the Canadian Navy came to the rescue of CARE Canada relief workers in the midst of the invasion of Mogadishu in the early 90’s.

The hallucinogenic savagery and chaos of Somalia following its civil war had finally reached the point where the international community could no longer stand-by doing nothing as an entire country murdered its way into the stone age. As a result, just before Xmas 1992, an international coalition of various militaries, led and dominated by the United States, came ashore on the beaches of Mogadishu City where I was working with the relief group CARE International, also led and dominated by the United States.

The shore landings were quick and under a dense cover of helicopter gunships and F-18 fighter bombers from an aircraft carrier beyond the horizon.

The city came to a halt as Marines, Seals, Rangers, SAS, and god knows what other military units plowed ashore and just dared, dared, the local Somali thugs and gangs to start something.

We didn’t dare anything either and stayed in the walled CARE compound.

The mad mixture of both — untrained Somali fighters and their left over Soviet era weapons, high on the amphetamine like drug from the khat plant they constantly chewed, and the visibly nervous and trigger happy coalition troops, made for a highly dangerous situation. It was what I thought the old lawless wild west must have been like.

And although most of us didn’t look anything like the midnight black Somali fighters and perhaps could have hoped for some protection from the whiteness of our skin, we all had first hand knowledge of what had happened on the morning of the landings.

Aerial view of the Port of Mogadishu. Three cargo ships, large, medium and small sized vessels are moored to the docks. A tugboat is heading out of the port. A US Marine UH-1N “Huey” helicopter flies left to right at the right of the frame. The port played an important role in the support of Operation Restore Hope.

Most of us had been on the long concrete docks of the port as the troops came ashore there. With us were about a dozen or so foreign journalists, camera people, and producers.

One very well known and respected New York reporter had been on the main docks in the port when the first wave of hard running and storming American troops swept out of the sea.

A U-S hovercraft beaching at Mogadishu. The is capable of speeds of over 40 knots and loads of 60 tons.

In seconds, one teenage soldier, whether Marine or otherwise I couldn’t tell had rushed up to the reporter, put one hand on the side of her neck and threw her to the concrete. His other hand held some sort of Star Wars looking piece of lethal gun which he shoved into her face.

“Don”t you move, you motherfucking fucker!” He screamed this and the rest of use just froze in our spots feeling our bowels loosen.

But then another loud, (I think soldiers get voice training for this) booming voice, the kind of voice I imagine has been heard in battles since the time of the Roman Legions, silenced the dock.

“Let her go you asshole! Does she look like a Somali? How many Somalis have blonde hair and are WHITE!”

Another reporter, a white man from New York, gets thrown face down onto the dock and spread eagled by a Marine using the barrel of his specialized “blow them away” weapon to push his limbs further apart. “You move one fucking inch and I’m going to blow your fucking head off! Sir.”

Then the squad leader did his job and the soldiers pulled back.

Sure, it was all apologies and friendly pats from then on but none of us wanted to be anywhere near our liberators until they had settled down so we headed for our armed compound. And that was another problem for us.

All of our guards at the compound were locally hired Somalis. Some of them were even members of the local warlord’s army who we were forced to take on and pay as a form of protection scheme.

Obviously, the foreign troops would take them as targets and we relief workers simply did not like the idea that we might be sitting at the centre of an F-18 launched missile strike to take them out.

So, for a bunch more money we paid them all off and sat behind our not very strong concrete walls and waited for things to calm down.

Through the next day, a day of utter silence, so unlike the months of cracking gunfire and whomps of far off explosions as the gangs fought each other over what was left of once a major African city, we waited for . . . well we didn’t know what we waited for.

The coalition soldiers we knew were out securing various parts of the city and key road installations.

Already the contingent of French Legionnaires brought down from Djibouti had made a name and a legend for themselves in the hours of the invasion by trotting from the landing beach in full gear and in daytime heat of about 40 degrees Celsius up the long hill to a major intersection where they stopped every bus and truck carrying people, women and children, and pretty well did them all in with fist punches and rifle butt swings just to show Mogadishu that the Legion was there.

They had no real choice to act like that though because as a military unit the French Foreign Legion has built itself a reputation of being out and out sadistic psychopaths and they needed to remind everyone of that.

Without guards for our compound we foreign relief workers were well and truly scared stiff of getting a visit from the Legion.

And eventually we got a visit but it wasn’t clear for a while just who they were.

None of us could identify the military unit since all the troops seemed to wear the same sort of shapeless camouflage clothing.

They came in what we knew to be American military vehicles but without markings. Since the Foreign Legion hated the Americans more than any other nationality on earth we knew that they would never drive in American vehicles and we breathed a little easier.

As Team Leader, and as a former British Army officer, Rodney strode out of our main building and stood in the courtyard while the vehicles parked. The rest of us managed to cower without looking entirely like the spineless jellies that we felt like as we waited to see what was going to happen to us.

I couldn’t hear Rodney talking to the officer and I felt my heart stop entirely when he turned around and beckoned me over to them.

One thing about being a coward. You are usually more afraid of being found out as a coward than acting like one. It’s odd I know, but true. You can have shaking knees and liquid bowels from fear and fright but you will do everything to look more like Sir Galahad in front of your friends than a mewling coward.

I walked forward to be greeted with a wide smile from the officer. “Canadian eh? Where from?” he said as he reached out his hand to shake mine.

I said Ottawa, and we played the “Do you happen to know so and so, and, I have a cousin in . . “

In a few minutes we were all in the main living room, more than a dozen of we internationals and about half a dozen of them.

They were Canadian Navy off the resupply ship Preserver sent to support the Canadian contingent of the coalition.

HMCS Preserver was one of two resupply ships, the other being HMCS Protecteur, used by Canada for many years. They are being replaced.

We offered them water at first but they had lots of their own so someone suggested a beer.

“It’s pretty warm.” I said. “The refrigerators aren’t working. The generators have failed.”

Loud laughs from the Navy.

“That’s why we’re here. We’re checking on all the Canadians and other internationals to see if we can help out with stuff like fridges and generators.”

With that, two of the sailors got one of us to take them to the generators. Two others disappeared back to their vehicles.

“How are your computers? Need any cooking gas? We can let you have some Tim Horton’s coffee beans if you like.”

At that we Canadians with CARE gasped with pleasure. At the time, before the company got taken over by a Brazilian hedge fund and run into the ground, Tim Horton’s coffee was as Canadian as maple syrup and adored from coast to coast to coast.

And then the two sailors that had gone out to the trucks returned pulling two hand trucks loaded with Canadian beer.

“It’s still cold from the ship guys. Pass them around.”

And that is how Canada won the invasion of Somalia as the nicest military of all.

Too bad that several months later a Canadian Army unit got done in for torturing Somali prisoners at a forward base in Belatwayne up country.

HMCS Protecteur, sister ship to Preserver which resupplied troops and relief workers during Operation Hope in 1992 in Somalia

Dateline: Kabul Afghanistan, the early years of the occupation

This place has become as dull and boring a place as Wa’kaw Saskatchewan, or Ottawa, or any rainy Tuesday morning in Vancouver. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We still have the daily threats, the warnings, the alerts, and the roads are still full of menacing men whose beards are just a touch too long and too ragged for fashion’s taste and who drive Toyota Surf’s with every imaginable chrome gewgaw festooned front and back and of course, fully blacked-out windows.

The Dusty Kabul Jalalabad Road East — typical driving conditions

There is the occasional explosion in the distance at night as some terrorist gets his red and white wires mixed up while working through the do-it-yourself bomb making kit, and most nights you can hear the high off scream of US Air Force jets plunging down on the mountains east of here as they continue the bad guy hunt. So all of that is still here. But the trouble is, it has become normal, routine, unremarkable, and boring.

So, just as a story without a plot, or a sentence without a verb, is meaningless, so too has been any rationale I might have had for writing up a Boy’s Own Thrilling Tale of life in the Hindu Kush amid the Panshirs, surrounded by Pashtuns and Tajiks, menaced by Taliban, and bemused by a military bureaucracy which doesn’t seem to realize that there are real people with guns out there.

The other problem is that as this place becomes more psychologically routine, its reality appears increasingly normal to me. The whole lot of the rest of the world is becoming a rather insubstantial, drifting ghosts in another dimension who may or may not exist.

Metaphysics from Kabul, you say. Well, it goes with the territory. There is something about desert countries that triggers alternate views of reality, I cannot imagine the Quran, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or any of Thesiger’s works ever being conceived of, let alone being written, under the rain showers of the British Columbia coast, surrounded by the flames of a Quebec autumn leaf explosion, or beside the shores of a mountain tarn in the Pallisers. I think deserts, whether here or in the High Arctic, or wherever they may be, are a form of physical meditation. The mind travels to strange realms when freed of visual stimuli and that is what happens in Afghanistan.

If the things that go boom in the night are no longer of interest then what is? The oddest things I assure you. One day last week there was a change in the weekly menu at the Global Guesthouse. The Afghan chef introduced scalloped potatoes instead of roasted potatoes to go with the under cooked fatty-tailed sheep. This resulted in equal amounts of violated conservative values from the ex-pat Brits and exuberance from the liberated food adventurers sick to death of roasted potatoes. The discussion went on for two days and we still haven’t restored peace at the table.

Fatty-Tailed Sheep, imitation scotch made in Pakistan and sold in bottles with misspelled labels, jars of Canadian ketchup (fiery chilli sauce only we five Canadians will touch), and cans of Pringles crushed flat in shipping are the highlights of our diets.

I believe that if we did not have access to the Canadian mess hall at Camp Warehouse we would all have come down with those ugly diseases that only ever seem to exist in the pages of medical textbooks, the books that feature photographs of long annelid creatures deep in the body, ugly flaking skin rashes, weeping sores, and refer the reader to the exhibits in the London School of Tropical Diseases Museum, Restricted Section, Special Admission Required.

The only food I have found here to rival the Canadian food is at Camp Souter, the British Camp just down the road by the airport. Most of the troops are Ghurkhas but the food is cosmic international fine cuisine.

I’ve been told that the British Army used to serve food worse than the Germans, (I shudder at the thought), but over the past few years there has been a deliberate effort to improve the food and morale along with it. I would have thought that when Caesar was a young centurion this would have been an aged adage even then but apparently not and quite a number of nations serve their disgruntled troops crappy food. And at the head of that list have to be the unfortunate Germans and the even more unfortunate Americans whose Meals Ready to Eat, known better by their designation MRE, are out and out dogfood.

At Camp Souter there are always three hot meal choices. Each is displayed behind a Red, Yellow, or Green card. If you want the greasy unhealthy vitamin-less but great tasting choice you take it from the Red. If you have a conscience but cannot quite enter into holy orders about your food you can take the Yellow. And of course for the Vegan, dainty eater, k. d. laing, crowd there is the genetically perfect Green choice. And so it goes through the desserts and other food groups. It is amazingly good food no matter what color group you take it from.

The Global Security Guest House. Most of the inmates were former British SAS and other Special Forces. The building itself was guarded by former members of the Gurkha Regiment, a fiercer bunch of soldiers one couldn’t find.

Earlier I talked about increasing security problems in the Kabul area. It is getting a little Wild Westish but nothing like most of the other places I have been. Still, I hate having to drive a vehicle around that has NATO ISAF plates and markings on it because of all the attention it draws. We live downtown and the key to a quiet life when there are guys around who don’t like to shave is to be as unobtrusive as possible. Until recently this was not a problem because we simply removed the plates and stickers and only displayed the plates when we entered a camp.

But a directive has come down from some minion or other of Mars and we are forbidden to drive without the markings.

The answer of course is to get civilian vehicles and that is what is going to happen but it has been a long struggle to get approval, in fact it went right up to the Chief of Staff for ISAF. The COS (that’s mil-talk for the likes of you) is a pretty busy guy who really shouldn’t have to bother himself with the doings of people like us.

Anyway, after much to’ing and fro’ing during which I established that precedents had been set by allowing the Spooks (Intel guys — more mil-talk) to drive civilian vehicles, and allowing the Canadian military to take the plates and markings off their white 4×4’s, he changed his policy.

There has been a delay in delivering the three new vehicles because the Transportation Section forgot to order them. How one could forget an approval that came down from the stratospheric heights of the Chief of Staff is beyond me but when a military bureaucracy decides to be inefficient the absurdities can take your breath away.

So you see? It is all rather mundane these days, one sunny Afghan day drifting into another, the afternoons passing with their parade of wind djinns, the evenings sinking into a sick yellow blaze of sunset through the billows of dust, the dawns starting like jewels then tarnishing as the smoke from cooking fires rises, and the mornings brisk and breathless as the temperatures climb astonishingly from below 0 to above 20 or 25.

If I get around to it I’ll get someone to take my picture as I wear my Massoud Tajik hat and with my djellaba across my face. I look quite menacing if I say so myself. All I need is a midnight black Toyota Surf with four extra hi beam headlights, a truck horn, and an arrogant insistence on the right to pass every car on the road on the wrong side and I will fit right in, talk about being unobtrusive.

Thursday Sept 24/92  Wilson Airport, Nairobi

Wilson is said to be the second busiest airport in Africa after Johannesburg.  It’s busy because of the profits to be made from the dying in the north, and profits in supplying the drug Khat to the living in the north.

It’s a small airport, the sort of place you’d find in any town of less than a hundred thousand anywhere else but the tarmac parking areas are crammed with Cessna 402’s, 185’s, Caravans, Twin Otters, DC-3’s, A Beech 18 and even an old C-119 Boxcar.  When the wing heights allow they’re parked with wings overlapping. The scream of turbines and the rattling roar of pistons engines goes on continually from dawn to the quick setting of the Nairobi sun.  The line-ups for the active runway would be more expected at Chicago or Toronto than mid-Africa.  The waiting room of what was a small country airport is crammed with relief workers, drug traders, and Somali relatives waiting for those who have the hard currency to buy a flight out.

There are planes owned and operated by most of the relief agencies.  Some like the Red Cross stand out across the heat shimmer of the distance, the Red Cross symbol standing fiery against the white of the fuselage.  The letters UNICEF splashes down the length of a twin engine loading supplies. The UNHCR and other United Nations organizations has their planes, all painted dead white.

A great part of the United Nations’ air force is made up of former Soviet aircraft. This Antonov 32 was under charter to the UN in Somalia in 1992

Other agencies charter as they need it for the flights to Wajir, Bardera, Mogadishu, Baidoa, and a dozen more places noted for the depth of their tragedies.

The charter operators make a killing here.  It costs about five thousand dollars to put an eight seat light twin into Mogadishu, a bare three hour flight.  Some of the cost is the danger, but a lot is demand driven.  There’s so much demand and so much money to be made that planes registered in the United States and Britain are here. They’re forbidden to operate on Kenyan routes but that doesn’t matter because the big money is in the land of death to the north. And they pay local officials huge amounts in bribes, and in cash at that.

The lottery winning amounts of the relief operations is nothing compared to the profits in the khat trade. Khat is a plant which produces a chemical which acts like amphetamine.  Users strip the leaves from the stalks and chew them in a large wad inside the cheek. Those who use it become inattentive, reckless, and highly nervous.  A taxi driver on khat is dangerous, a technical on khat is murderous.

Khat isn’t illegal so there’s no barrier other than transport.

It’s not used in Kenya.

It’s devoured in Somalia.

The planes from Wilson fly into Ethiopia where the crew cram the cabins with the best type known as myraa and fly it into Somalia.  There it’s traded for American dollars.  If there are people with the money they’re also crammed into the cabins now smelling strongly of fresh khat and flown to Kenya.

About one hundred thousand US dollars in profits flows into Wilson each day.

From there at first light the endless sky parade of khat planes takes off for Somalia. At any normal airport anywhere else in the world aircraft are cleared to taxi and take-off on a first come first served basis. But not at Wilson during the Somali crisis.

“You pay your money and you get to go.” The World’s Shortest King Air Pilot told me. “If you don’t pay, and none of the relief organizations will pay the bribes, then you wait and wait and wait some more until finally a bored controller lets you go.”

The Khat, people smuggling, arms dealing, aircraft race each other to Mogadishu West, a soft red dust airstrip 50 kilometres outside Mogadishu. It’s known as K50Moga and boasts the best security of any airport outside Israel.

K50moga is lined with heavily armed technicals belonging to the drug dealers and clan leaders. Each technical is equipped with at least one heavy 50 calibre machine gun mounted on a tripod welded to the roof of a Toyota Land Cruiser, the most highly prized vehicle for use as a high speed mobile gun carrier.

With so much weaponry manned by highly agitated teenagers chewing on khat, things are always a slippery hair away from general slaughter. A person would have to be beyond clinically insane to start anything at the airstrip.

For several hours each morning the airstrip if enveloped in a billowing cloud of dust as aircraft after aircraft land, dump their cargo and load their money. There is no air traffic control and planes will touch down with dozens of feet behind newly arrived planes while others dart into the landing traffic and blast full throttle off the ground.

The road leading from K50moga to the highway in name only is lined with ancient Bedford

Somalia was littered with these ancient and barely functioning trucks. They were the only things available to the relief agencies because the gangsters had all the new vehicles

trucks and Italian gravel trucks ready to take the khat into the city for sale.

This is a daily scene and has to be. Khat does not last longer than a day or so before losing its effectiveness so there is no way to stockpile or control the supply and it has to be flown and delivered each day.

In the meantime the relief planes loaded with food, medicine, health professionals and relief workers head on to the main international airport in Mogadishu or one of the other cities in the country. And at every one of the landing spots there will be heavily armed Somalis waiting for their landing fees.

Today we are leaving Wilson Nairobi for the southern city of Bardera in southern Somalia.

It is a nasty violent place reeking with the stench of overripe decomposing bodies. The death toll is like something out of the European Plague Years. But, it is relatively calm compared to the hallucinogenic hell of Mogadishu and I am glad we are not going there.

Our well aged twin engine Rockwell Aero Commander is clean and I hope that is a sign of decent maintenance.

The Aero Commander has internal combustion engines like most cars do instead of the much more reliable and much faster turbine engines used by other relief groups. It will take us much longer to get to Bardera than I would care for.

Mount Kenya rises so slowly out of the clouds as we climb north from Nairobi that at first it looks only like a lumpier than normal cloud, but gradually its swelling erection pokes into the washed blue and it emerges from the cloaking clouds with its three peaks gleaming cream with snow.

It’s the second highest mountain in Africa. The highest is on Kenya’s southern border, the fabled Kilimanjaro.

On a later flight I will see it standing softly against the horizon.  It and Mount Kenya are so tall that either can be seen on just about any flight near Nairobi.

Kilimanjaro looks nothing like the wonderful symmetrical pictures taken from across the Serengeti plain. Instead, it’s a lopsided double breast of a mountain.

Just about any day of the year there are many many tourists trudging away years of inactivity, cigarettes and booze on a three-day trek to the top.  I wondered whether there are the frozen dried bodies of tourists on the eastern slope alongside Hemingway’s dried out snow leopards.

It’s a two-hour flight to Bardera over gradually opening scrub, the everlasting acacia thorn.  The Acacia Tree must be the oldest tree in the world.  Only something ancient before the times of evil could ever have survived in the dusty hell of northern Kenya and southern Somalia.

It is all long sharp thorns and unbreakable twigs and branches. It was designed in an evolutionary war to survive anything. But oddly, giraffes and camels can feast nicely on it without hurting themselves.

The strip at Bardera is dirt, now getting badly rutted from the impact and runout of military Hercules flying in from Nairobi with tonnes of food.

The so-called short rains are starting.  If they start to come regularly the strip and the roads in this region will become impassable.

The landing approach is a slow steep left turn, first along the river, and then back toward the town.  The strip is wide, long enough, and wet brown in the middle. A wet spot is seeping from the center through the ruts.  It doesn’t look that bad but underneath there is no strength to the ground.  It turns to a mush of sand and dust on impact.

Nice gentle touchdown, no bounce, but then suddenly the sickening sink of the left main wheel as it catches in a Hercules rut. A swerve, then a violent kick of rudder and  we are straight. Sheets of sandy mud shoot along the sides of the little plane turning the passenger windows opaque.

“I thought we were going to buy it,” the pilot says with heat in his voice, “Somebody is going to get killed if they don’t fix this.”

That shocked me. As a pilot I have never heard, not once, any pilot ever admit out loud that they had been frightened. To do so in front of my colleagues who were not pilots and had no understanding was beyond belief.

The heat in the cabin rises. We scramble out of the low-slung cabin through the single door and come under the eyes and muzzles of a jeep full of technicals sporting loaded automatic weapons.                    

The strip is the only way in for food.  No food convoy could make it over from the Kenyan border without being looted within miles of crossing.  The same applies for any trucks trying to move into the southeast from Mogadishu.

Without the strip there can’t be any seeds and tools relief program either.  It’s a British attempt to fly in enough seeds and enough hoes, mattocks and whatever to give the farmers a chance of putting in a crop for the coming season.  Some still live on their land but there are many in places like Bardera that are condemned to the sub existence of the feeding centers and the camps unless they can be reequipped.

They’ve lost everything in the civil war and then the chaos of the clan wars, the outright genocide and murderous campaigns by warlords to establish their own fiefdoms.

While getting enough food has always been a problem throughout Somalia, war and clan violence has brought never ending famine.

Without war, there is almost never a chance for famine.

With a few weeks of food supplies, seed grain and the tools then the people can leave the camps and return to their land. And with their land the chance that they will be able to support not only their families but also turn out enough of a surplus to feed a few others.  It’s the only real chance of easing the swarming crush of the refugee camps and it can only work if there is peace.

Farmers cannot work their land if there is fighting.  All they can do is head off into the bush in the hope of saving themselves.

“There’s no problem getting people to fix the ruts,” says the Australian team leader to the still shaken pilot, “but they don’t have anything to fix them with.  When this place was taken by Aideed’s forces in June the retreating Barre forces looted everything.”

“They didn’t leave a shovel, a hoe, or any hand tool behind.”

Without hand tools a farmer is under a sentence of death for he cannot plant and if he can’t plant then the only thing to do is start a foodless and waterless trek through the Somali desert to towns such as Bardera and Baidoa where the aid agencies have been able to get food in.

“Without hand tools there’s no way to fix the strip.  It’d be half an hour’s work with a small grader, days with shovels and hoes, but it could be done.”

The self-styled general Aideed, the architect of Somali hell is here in town and we will meet him in what I am convinced is complete and utter waste of time. It also feels deeply mind dirty like contemplating a meeting with Hitler to talk about Jews. I have been in a state of disgust about this meeting since it was proposed, but I must go.

Find food, water, shelter, no matter what it takes. And, find some way, any way, to get some money. The big international aid agencies, most notably the World Food Programme and the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, look after the basic needs.

But developing sources of income requires individuals to get creative. If sometimes it means criminality then so it is. Life is stone age brutal in war, famine, and disaster areas.

There are many tales of relief supplies going adrift, of donated supplies being sold in the back alley bazaars, of corrupt officials and politicians. Rarely do they have any proof attached but they are so colourful that they defy debunking and are widely believed by the wandering global tribe of relief workers when they gather for drinks after a day of dealing with death and destruction.

Bangladesh is a small overcrowded country tucked into the northeast corner of the Indian sub-continent. It is very low lying and frequently suffers from flooding.

The Great Bangladesh Cooking Set Scam is among them.

In the wake of one of the huge typhoons which sweep across the low flats of Bangladesh somebody came up with the idea that one of the things the disaster riddled people needed was some way to cook their food without having to use cut open oil cans or pesticide drums.

Committees were formed, plans drawn, contracts given, and pretty soon the first sets of nested aluminum cooking pots were coming out of a Bangladesh factory.  The first run was twenty thousand sets.

The United Nations World Food Programme tracked the project carefully, ever alert from years of work in disaster areas to the ways that people can make money out of suffering.  The twenty thousand cooking sets were stamped with registration marks.  The metal was tested to make sure it met the contract specifications and there was an elaborate paper trail which required the manufacturer to provide proof that pots were being produced and tested.

Bangladesh has several million people but even so the aid workers began to get a little suspicious when they didn’t see too many of the cooking sets actually in the villages.  More than a hundred thousand sets should have been distributed by then and according to the manufacturer they were and he had the paperwork to prove it.

Sure enough there were neat stacks of reports from the company showing production runs of around twenty thousand and test results.  But then someone noticed that some of the results were a little too consistent and the numbers of cooking sets produced too similar and there were faint marks on the photocopies which looked like whiteout had been used.

In the end the manufacturer admitted it was all fake.  The first set of pots had indeed gone out the front door but they’d come in the back way just about as fast.

The disaster victims first reaction at being given an absolutely new set of cooking pots for absolutely nothing was essentially, “Gee thanks, already got some pots, maybe a little smelly but hey, they work.  I can turn a good buck with these things.”  So they sold them back to the company and the company with this suddenly acquired cheap inventory found it all much easier to play with the paperwork and invoice the UN for pots which just did an endless circuit.

As I said, I have never seen any documentary evidence or heard from a primary source about this incident. It is however a widely told tale among relief workers when they are sitting around having a beer. It is one of those wonderful tales that are just too nice, too inevitable, too good to be false. And that is how legends are started.

As I was working today on the draft for The Disaster Tourist — How Journalists and Relief Workers Survive and Thrive in War Zones I came across a photo I had taken in Kukes Northern Albania during the Kosovo War when tens of thousands of refugees flooded into Albania.

I was working as a spokesperson for CARE Canada and the team had rented this house not far from the border. The family that owned it was more than happy to move out and live in an underground shelter in exchange for hard currency, and they provided the meals.

Well, getting food in War Zones and Disaster Areas can be a problem and in Kukes, unless you had a lot of money you had to make do with what you could get your hands on.

In this case, it was chickens. Our landlords had a lot of chickens in their back garden and that is what the team ate. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day after day, for about a month, we ate baked chicken.

We could get other food but that would have meant buying off the black market, which was probably stolen relief food so that was out of the question. But we got lots of offers including many from a local hoodlum who was trying to move up in the ranks from sometime hitman to crime boss.

But beer was cheap and plentiful so all was good with life.

Remembrance Day. It was called Armistice Day in the beginning, but times changed and the Armistice decayed.

The holidaying atmosphere does more harm for the memory of the dead than not bothering to remember at all. For the majority of people, November 11 is a day off with nothing much to do. For others who have been fed through the school system, colouring God knows how many pictures of Flanders Fields and spending the Eleventh watching the cenotaph services on television out of a sense of obligation, the day is nothing except tradition.

Remembrance Day does not mean feeling sorry for the dead but instead actually trying to understand the horrors of war. To spend the day feeling sorry for the dead puts a premium on dying for the glory of a political system that ceased to mean anything years ago. We have become so full of the idea that to die for your country in a war is the highest form of honour that we become almost eager for another so we too can make the “noblest sacrifice”.

I remember that after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments. Many of these were detached from a heavy, barbed-wire fence which had surrounded the position of the factory and from the still existent portions of which we picked many of these detached bits which illustrated only too well the tremendous energy of high explosive. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

Remembrance day originated as a vehicle for showing people the horrors, futility, and wastefulness of war in any form.

Instead, we have transformed the dead into heroes, while they aren’t anything except dead. We have supported the idea in movies and books that war is a time of great adventure and wonderful romance when in fact it was quite a bit different. We forget the manner in which people die in a war, we forget the destruction of culture and industry, we forget the waste of young men, and we forget the complete destruction of the world’s civilisation,

Men do not on a whole want to die. So why did they die?

The answer is that they were forced to die against their will. They were caught up in a machine that was a product of their times, A machine built of political ideology, national pride, flag waving, and rampant nationalism.

“It was thus, without any of the pre-conditions of war, that those prosaic midwestern names of Edmonton, North Battleford and Saskatoon tumbled into that deep sub-strata of history which holds all the dark misery evoked by the mention of Lidice, Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima and Vietnam. – Ian Adams “Trudeau Papers”

 

They went, for the most part, willingly to war because they did not know any better. They did not know the horrors of the battlefield and as a result they were dead before they knew it.

They died in the mud of France, the sands of Africa, the seven seas, and in the skies. Their deaths were not pretty. Few of them were able to die with the noble dignity portrayed by Hollywood. Even fewer of the civilian victims died with dignity.

How for example can a child of two feel the romance in glorious combat when his city is firebombed and a shower of phosphorous eats into his body? How can a man feel the honour of saving democracy from the foe when he is trapped in the hull of a ship sinking into the depths of the ocean? How can the residents of an insignificant German village feel proud of their fight against the enemy when a pitched battle between two armies reduce the place to rubble?

How can you feel proud of our glorious dead when you know the permanent harm they and the survivors did to our civilisation?

When the last post sounds on Remembrance Day you could do worse than refuse to honour the fallen.

The only people who should honour the dead are the living who came through the wars with the knowledge of what it was really like.

For those of us who have not had the experience of being part of a world destroying machine the day should be spent in trying to learn what really went on during the wars. We should be forced to watch films of men dying, cities burning, and the terrible destruction of war so we will not be so eager to join when some power mad leader sounds the call to arms.

“It has therefore never been possible to establish the exact death toll taken by the nuclear explosions. But on that night, and in the following two weeks, it has been estimated that more than three million died. At the same time the population of the three cities of Edmonton, Saskatoon, and North Battle were calculated respectively at 750,200, 140,000 and 25,000, a total of 915,200 people. As far as it has been possible to tell, only 143 people survived from these three cities, and only twelve were traced from what used to be the metropolitan area of Edmonton. – Ian Adams “Trudeau Papers”

 

Most of us have seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the American Air Force dropped the Atomic bombs. We saw the bomb itself go off with its awesome power and we saw what it did to the cities. We saw the survivors and the ugly burns they had. We saw the dead and the dying, the blinded and we saw what was left of their homes.

What we might not realize though is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not alone in that type of horror. Dresden was firebombed by the allied air forces and totally destroyed. There were no vital Nazi war industries in the city. Dresden was killed as a symbol to the German people what would happen to them all if the Nazis didn’t surrender.

If only a small part of each child’s education was devote to the horrors of warfare instead of memorizing “In Flanders Fields” it would put a greater depth of meaning into Remembrance Day.

Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead get larger each day until they sometimes get too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

 

Perhaps if more of us had the opportunity to talk to the ageing warriors in the Legion we would get a better perspective of what the wars were like. When you sit across the table from some old man and buy him a beer and get him talking you hear about the great times he had in France during the first war. You hear about the time they had a twelve hour leave from the trenches on the Marne and they went to Amiens to get drunk but the town was dry so they spent the day looking for women but there were none. You might near how it rained for three weeks and the trenches filled with water and they slept in the mud and had a great time playing cards.

After a while, when he has had his third beer and the memories come back you can drag out of him things he has forgotten for forty years. The stench of the trench that he learned to ignore after a few months. The time his best friend was killed five yards out from the wire and it took him six hours to die and they could not drag him back to safety because the bullets were too thick. The time he was trapped under a crossfire in a shell hole for a day and he had to share it with the week old corpses of a mule and a German.

The first thing that you found about the dead was that, hit badly enough, they died like animals. Some quickly from a little wound you would not think would kill a rabbit. They died from little wounds as rabbits die sometimes from three or four small grains of shot that hardly seem to break the skin. Others would die like cuts; a skull broken in and iron in the brain, they lie alive two days like cats that crawl into the coal bin with a bullet in the brain and will not die until you cut their heads off. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

 

Even then you have the feeling that things were worse; they don’t say it but you get the feeling that the constant terror of death and the hopelessness became a constant companion.

They don’t tell you about the times they broke under the strain, of the times they hid in a shell hole instead of facing the enemy because the horror became too much.

They don’t tell you of what it was like to have your youth wasted and warped through years of war. Nor can you ever fined out what six years of death and killing did to their minds.

For today’s generation the remembrance services are of little relevance in their present form. There are too many flags, too many trumpets, too many speeches that amount to little more than “We should be sorry because its the Christian thing to do so bow your head and let’s get back to making this country safe against attack.”

It is clear there is not an Armistice among the world powers these days but a state of subdued, judicial killing under the guise of what is called “bush wars”. Suez, Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Hungary – the list is long and will get far longer before people kill themselves off, or mature enough to realize that war is no solution to their problems.

We agreed too that the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

 

November 11 is a time to remember that war is wrong and never worth the cost.

Time to remember the dead, only for what they are, not what the histories and the speeches say they were. They are nothing more or less than dead.

Time to remember that you would not want to die and that it is possible to do something about future wars.

Time to remember and feel sorry for the people that are living, who will live in years to come, and who are going to die violently because of a war..

You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard that terrible double snick of an automatic weapon being cocked and pointed at your stomach.  It’s a real tonic for tired blood let me tell you.

Twice I had the wonderful pleasure of an idiot’s company which resulted in that double snicking.

Thomas, and of course that’s not his real name, was on a tour of relief operations in Somalia after the civil war had ended, well actually it is still going but “officially” it is said to be over twenty some odd years later. 

He had one of those wildly friendly exuberant personalities and he’d switch it on at full power any time he was around a Somali.

  Normally, with the rest of us world dominating white people, he was short and surly and just a nasty important person.  Put him in front of the light of Somali youth, usually one with the dirty Kalashnikov, and you’d think he’d found a brother separated from birth.

I was doing the Bank Crossing in Mogadishu, the long silent walk across no-man’s land and Thomas was with us. 

Photographs aren’t normally allowed during the walk but I’d managed a couple by just pulling the lens up out of my shoulder bag and shooting blind.  Thomas was going on and on with the suspicious guards at the crossing as we waited for our truck to arrive.

He had this theory that if you take a Polaroid picture of someone and give them the picture it will instantly make them friends.

  I’m sure he’d never seen those old adventure movies where the natives believe that a camera will capture their souls so they kill the idiot with the camera.  If he had he wouldn’t have been so dangerous.

In this crowd of armed guards from five Toyota technicals and bunch of bystanders, Thomas talked some kid into posing for a picture.  I’m not sure the kid understood the wild old American but some of the crowd did and there was a lot of angry shouting.

“Thomas. Back off. They don’t want you to do that.”

“No no, it’s okay, they’re my friends, they’ll love it.”

I stepped back two paces. Time was starting to slow and that’s always the way I know I’m in danger because the body will pick up the signals faster than the conscious mind and start speeding up the metabolism so that when you finally do understand that you’ve landed in a pile of stinking doo-doo, the body is ready to run like hell.

“Thomas!  These guys are getting angry.  Back off!”

He wasn’t paying any attention.  He was too busy grinning and laughing and generally acting like a gorilla on amphetamines as he practised his theory that you can get to be friends with anyone by acting stupid enough.

I should have taken a few more steps back but this terrible tendency of mine to walk up to bears and pat their heads took over and I moved forward.

I grabbed his shoulder, “Let’s go Thomas.”

He swung out from under my grip and raised the Polaroid to take the picture regardless.

“Snick snick.”

I swear that all four quarts, or however many there are, of blood in my body came to a shuddering freezing halt. 

Everything got one hell of a lot sharper. 

I got the impression that I could smell each individual person in the crowd, that I could hear each individual sound as though they were the only sounds in the universe.  My eyesight, already better than twenty-twenty went telescopic. 

I could actually and suddenly read the serial number of the grenade strapped on the gunman’s belt, the guy who’d just cocked his Kalashnikov and was now pointing it at us from a distance of ten feet.

I’d like to be able to say that Thomas got justifiably blown apart and I walked away with a song in my heart, but unfortunately, after a few tense moments and some very quiet words from the two of us, he allowed Thomas to live for another day so Thomas could try to get someone else killed.

“The Disaster Tourist – How Journalists and Relief Workers Seek Danger, Booze, and a Reason for Life”

Part One

Four hours north of Resolute and nine o’clock at night. 

For the past two hours I’ve been aware that the sun has been getting higher in the sky.  The day is reversing itself as we climb the latitudes. Reversing and climbing, going in and leaving behind, am I going back to something?  I don’t know yet, but there’s a metaphor for this trip that is hanging somewhere just out of sight of my spirit.

I suppose that the main feeling I have now is returning, returning to the High Arctic, to Ellesmere Island and those fabulous mountains, the cream white of its glaciers, the pure cleanliness of its vastness.  I’ve missed it.

Hawker Siddley 748. They were the natural successor to the venerable DC-3 Dakota and serve to this day in the Arctic

The weather is clear and the H-S 748 is riding smoothly at 18 thousand feet.  Imagine.Fflying in a pressurized turboprop with two flight attendants, hot meals, cognac, Molson beer, Dewar’s Scotch, and shirt sleeve warmth.  The arctic has changed so much in the last few years.  The last time I was by this way was on the Uemuera trip in that bucket of fatigued aluminum of a DC-3. 

The DC-3 Dakota, designed in the 1930’s flew for many decades in the Arctic. A few still work but it getting hard to find the fuel they use because most aircraft in the Arctic use a type of fuel better suited to jet turbine or turboprop engines

No meals, no cabin heat, and a cruise speed of a limping caribou.  But instead of flying co-jo in the right hand seat and desperately trying to remember half forgotten flight procedures I’m a pampered passenger in a 30 seat Hawker

Siddley operated by First Air, and earning Aeroplan Points for the whole North Pole flight.

The power has been pulled back, descent started for Eureka.  There’s a hell of a ground wind blowing.  With these mountains we’re in for some big turbulence on the approach.  Some of these passengers who’ve been stupid enough to drink and party all the way are going to get pretty sick.  What a way to arrive on Ellesmere Island with your head in a white bag.

Jamie Biggs, the pilot is good, damned good.  He’s got this bird real tight and tamed down.  This guy has flown through a lot of crap weather I can tell.  He treats this thing like a two month old baby with gas pains, tender oh so tender.  You’d think he could see the turbulence the way he anticipates.

Here comes the approach.  The wind is dead down the airstrip, good.  Lots of high hills around, the sea ice is fading in an out under the blowing snow, lots of good cross light, power back to idle, little shaking from the flap buffet, going to be a smooth one….. can’t believe this, he practically greased it on in what has to be a thirty know wind, hardly felt the wheels hit at all, guy’s good for sure.

      * * *

80 Degrees North, Eureka

Eight men and one woman are stationed here for six months to run the weather and radio station.  They’d get on each other’s nerves except for the fact the buildings are so big.  There is enough accommodation for at least sixty people in half a dozen buildings and except for the summer months when Ellesmere fills up with ice scientists, muskox counters, caribou counters, and in the last two years, dinosaur hunters, this is a ghost town.   

The mummified forest isn’t too far from here on Axel Heiberg Island.  The Cretaceous crocodile fossils were found just a hour’s flight inland.  It’s hard to comprehend that the High Arctic was once tropical when the present temperature is minus fifty.

It’s three o’clock Tuesday morning and we’re supposed to have wheels up at five for the flight to NP-28, the Soviet ice island 60 kilometres from the pole.  I’m having doubts though.  The weather around Alert is poor and that’s our alternate.  Jamie is already worried about the fuel for the flight over the pack ice.  He needs Alert if NP-28 closes in, or the fuel runs short.

Ten a.m. and we’re still here.  The lack of sleep keeps creeping up on me.  Can’t sleep in this atmosphere.  Thirty people in the main room and the radio scratching every few minutes as the pilots talk first to Alert then the ice island.  Things are looking real bad for the flight.   

Noon. 

Joe Wormersley and the two vice presidents from McDonalds organized a pool to see when we would leave Alert.  For five dollars anyone could buy a ten minute time segment.  If the wheels leave the ground in your segment you get somewhere around 160 dollars.  There is also a ticket for a North Pole Run sweatshirt donated by Joe.  But the big prize is the Reichmann jet, a prize that Albert was most definitely not sure of at all.

Whomever it was that suggested we throw a tag into the hat for the jet meant it as a joke but Albert is not as comfortable with english as you’d think a billionaire who owns half of Manhattan should be.  I was looking at his face when the suggestion was made and you could see him trying to figure out whether this was serious or not.

Would be a nice jet to have.  23 million dollars worth of Gulfstream for your own private use.  It had been waiting for us at Iqaluit when we landed on the sched from Ottawa.  Reichmann and his son had flown up from Toronto to meet us and board the 748.  What a gorgeous plane, all flash and gleam.  It looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line.

Anyway, the jet got raffled.  Everyone drew a ticket out of the hat.  I got such a ridiculously early takeoff time that I threw the tag away, someone got the sweatshirt, and the jet….. Well, who would have believed that at odds of thirty-to-one the billionaire would draw his own jet.  I said something to the effect that luck like that is what makes billionaires and got a laugh out of the guy, first time I’ve seen him smile.

To Be Continued . . .

I spent something like six months in Somalia in the run-up to the arrival of foreign troops in a failed attempt to restore order. Those six months in 1992 and 93 felt more like six years, or perhaps the entirety of my life. When every day is a fever dream of madness, time stretches out.

I suppose some people must think of Mogadishu as their dearly loved hometown, but for me it will always remain a city dreamt of by a terminal drug addict, and Somalia a rough first draft for the end of the world.

Every aspect of life in this sadistically tortured country has been twisted so grotesquely that more than one aid worker has wondered out loud whether we hadn’t so much come to a land of unfortunates as we had died and arrived in the waiting room for the pits of hell.

Mogadishu was once called the Paradise of the Indian Ocean.  Well sure, perhaps once, but it has become clear over the months of civil war and famine that some metaphysical planning board has re-zoned it as a bedroom community for hell.

On this Sunday in the late November before the international armies arrive and arguably made things worse I’m sitting in the back of a massively armed Toyota Land Cruiser on a short errand to the docks and then the main market, or as I’ve come to view it, the Looted Goods Recycling Center.

The Toyota is called a technical for some vague reason having to do with Italian terminology left over from Italy’s occupation of the country for much of the century. There are other theories of how the term came about but they all mean the same thing. A looted heavy duty SUV or truck to which a heavy calibre machine gun has been mounted. They will also frequently have three or four men armed with light machine guns hanging onto the outside and usually at least one inside. The term and the idea of arming a four wheel drive vehicle has spread since its introduction in Somalia in the early nineties and now can be found in just about any war zone or disaster area around the world.

The two guards on the roof of the Toyota that I am in each have an AK-47 in addition to the heavy machine gun bolted in front of them.  Inside with the two of us are a driver and two more armed Somalis.  You could tear a house apart with the firepower these guys are carrying.

There’s a neat little system at work here.  Any non-Somali who walks anywhere outside of an armed compound, no matter how short the walk, runs an extreme risk of being beaten, robbed and killed.  And since the only vehicles available are in the hands of Somalis who have acquired them from god knows where, you’re pretty well stuck with having to pay upwards of a hundred dollars a day (cash in uncreased US 20 dollar bills please) to go anywhere.  If you refuse and try to walk, the same people will probably shoot you down just to maintain their business position.

Newcomers make the mistake of feeling at ease as they speed through the littered streets protected by violently trigger happy guards until they learn that the weapons and the gunmen are only there to protect the vehicle.  The guards won’t lift a finger to protect their passenger unless it’s a question of keeping the poor bastard alive long enough to collect the day’s hire.

Technicals come under attack frequently because the battle wagons are the most highly prized of looting tools and that means all vehicles are potential targets for freelance hijackers.

There’s a tremendous amount of status associated with weapons and technicals.  The teenagers who make up the bulk of the technical guards are at the top of the swagger list.  They get the women, the drugs, the fearful respect and anything else they want just by a negligent wave of a gun muzzle.  They’re dangerously violent at the best of times but horribly and psychotically murderous in the late afternoon as the effects of the amphetamine like plant they chew takes effect. Khat, in all of its spellings is the drug of choice in northeastern Africa. Most of it in Mogadishu is flown in daily from Nairobi in specially charted light aircraft. It is grown mainly in Ethiopia and has to be transported to the buyer in not much more than 24 hours otherwise it loses its potency.

The highest sport on the status list is reserved for the few even more crazy who ride around in trucks converted to carry such Somali sport hunting weapons as recoilless rifles which are a kind of baby tank cannon.  On a couple of occasions I’ve seen trucks sporting rocket clusters ripped out of abandoned Somali MIG fighter aircraft.  No one seems to know whether they could be fired but really who would want to doubt.  An air to air missile fired at close ground level range would go through a block of buildings like a sword through a mouse.

You should see the destruction the warring factions have inflicted on this town.  There’s hardly a building without a shell hole in it, there’s no electricity, no water, no businesses.

The scale of looting and extortion is astonishing.  Except for those homes and buildings that were fortified and defended constantly throughout the civil war, everything has gone.  Windows and frames, plumbing fixtures, doors, electrical wiring, all stripped out of the buildings and sold somewhere else, mostly in Yemen across the Red Sea or south in Kenya.  All of the above ground telephone and power lines have gone, even some of the buried cables in the downtown have been dug up and shipped away for resale.  It’s a city of concrete and cement and nothing else ­ a rotted corpse of a city.

The arrival of international aid groups has given the looters the best time they’ve ever had.  Shiploads of highly valuable relief food and tonnes of equipment meant for the refugee camps disappear with depressing regularity the moment they arrive in the country.

Some of the worst offenders are the very guards who are supposed to stop it.

A word about the guards.  They’re supplied by General Mohamed Aideed, the leader of the faction which holds control of most of Mogadishu and a fair part of southern Somalia.  These technicals might be hired and paid for by the international aid groups but they still work for Aideed and Aideed is the top dog in the looting food chain.  Foxes guarding hen coops have nothing on technicals guarding relief supplies.

The technicals are used to guard Mogadishu port.  Well that’s what they’re hired for, but mainly they hang around helping their relatives steal food.

CARE employs 900 technicals at the port.  And whether they show up or not, whether the port is operating or not, they demand payment, some twenty thousand dollars every four days, (in uncreased 20 dollar bills please.)

The International Red Cross also operates from the port and oddly enough they too employ exactly 900 technicals.  They are of course the same people being paid twice for doing not much at all.

Every once in a while, about twice a day really, technical units at the port will get into arguments with each other and start firing.  They might be well armed but no one has given any of them any training.  When the arguments start the bullets spray wildly all over southern Mogadishu and only coincidently is the actual target ever hit.  We’ve learned rather quickly to get under cover when the firing starts to avoid the 7.62 millimeter lead rains.

Things settle down when the sun sets and the Khat chewers slump into inactivity. But, then there is a second wind towards midnight and for no particular reason the various factions will fire off rockets and heavy artillery at no particular part of the city so sometimes the night sky just blossoms with fireworks and booming explosions.