My Career as an International War Arms Dealer

It was a dry, dusty, sharply cold afternoon in Kabul.

View of the mountains to the south of Kabul Afghanistan showing the snow on the peaks.
Early winter in Afghanistan and the snow has begun to fall on the Hindu Kush mountains seen here from the Intercontinental Hotel on the south side of Kabul.

The wind carried the faint reek of human excrement from the vegetable and melon fields a few kilometres away. Human waste is widely used in Afghanistan as fertilizer.

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 go and 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 at that time 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 a bit 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.

Impounded former Soviet tanks held in a compound north of Kabul.
Some of the more than ten thousand tanks, rockets, armed personnel carriers, and ammunition collected from the armies of Afghanistan’s warlords after the NATO coalition ousted the Taliban

The Heavy Weapons Collection Programme was a country wide 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 Peek 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 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.”

Former Soviet tanks being held in United Nations supervised compounds in Afghanistan. None of these are operational
Former Soviet tanks being held in United Nations supervised compounds in Afghanistan. None of these are operational

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?’

Scrapped anti-aircraft guns held in an Afghan Army compound in Kabul
Some of the many thousands of anti-aircraft guns and ground to air missiles collected from Afghanistan’s warlords and held in secure compounds.

“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 missles 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 is was.

A bald bribe. I had no doubt whatsoever 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-Charkhi  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 and 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 did hear an odd story about how some tanks and other heavy weapons had been pulled out of secure compounds at night and loaded on flat bed 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 Koreans, had other plans.

I kept my speculations to myself and watched to see if any of the people I dealt with all of a sudden were able to 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.

Bored to Death in a War Zone

Extract from The Disaster Tourist (in production)

Dateline: Kabul Afghanistan, during 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.

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

An aerial view of mountain ranges in central Afghanistan
Much of Afghanistan is mountainous and rugged beyond belief. It would not be hard to believe that there are uncontacted groups of people who have been living in this chaotic landscape unsuspected for decades.

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?

External view of the Global Security Guesthouse in Kabul
Global Security was renowned in Afghanistan for having not only the best protected guesthouse in the country but one of the finest bars in Central Asia. Most of the people staying here were former members of the British SAS Regiment. The security guards for the guesthouse were former members of the British Gurkha Regiment. No one messed with Global

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 Gurkhass 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.

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.

Sun
Sunset over the mountains that ring Kabul.

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.

Somalia – It’s About Drugs And Guns

An excerpt from The Disaster Tourist by Rick Grant (in production)

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

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.

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

The road leading from K50moga to the highway in name only is lined with ancient British Bedford and Italian trucks, decades old. There are newer ones but they are carefully hidden from opposition clan members who would steal them.

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.

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.

Excerpt From “The Disaster Tourist” (in production)

I spent something like six months in Somalia during the civil war 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.

A Toyota Land Cruiser war wagon
A Toyota Land Cruiser stripped for wa and bristling with gunmen who probably don’t even know how to use their AK-47’s

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.

A US Marine Light Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle and Italian Soldiers in a Fiat-OTO Melara Armored Personnel Carrier (right) guard an intersection on the “Green Line” in Mogadishu. The line divides the northern and southern part of the city and warring clans.

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.

Top Techniques for Writing – Part One

There are some pretty specific techniques and practices you can pick up from the world of serious journalism, in particular newspaper, magazine, and broadcast journalism, that will elevate your analytic and writing skills far above the average.

They will work for any kind of writing you do, be it Fiction, Journalism, Non-Fiction, Plays, Daily Journals, whatever.

I am a product of the journalistic world, and I still use its tools and practices in my non-fiction and fiction worlds which of course have nothing to do with daily journalism.

They are founded on attitude, consistency, and simplicity.

They do not require much if any work on your part. But, they will, absolutely, improve everything in your writing life.

The first thing you have got firmly grasp is that you will forget some, part of, or all of a thought or observation you have unless you get it down in physical form.

Memory is as fleeting as summer lightning. It is all too common to forget the very fact that you had thought of something in the first place. You have no hope of hanging onto more than a few fragments of an idea if all you rely on is memory.

And be aware that the mind is far too quick to make up details, recreate false statements, and utterly mess up anything that has been in your head in an incomplete manner for more than a few minutes. There is a reason why police offices, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and many other detail oriented professionals get issued a notebook before anything else.

The second thing is that no note-taking system can be too simple. And the simplest is pen and paper.

If you need to stop what you are doing to open an app, or fish your phone out of your pocket and enter its security code, or stop to find your special pen, or fire up a voice recorder, your thought is in danger of disappearance. At best, your thought is subject to corruption as your mind tries to fill in details it does not have.

The third thing is, as much as possible try to use one system only.

Don’t use Evernote, One Note, Google Keep, Zoot, or any others indiscriminately and simultaneously. You will lose notes.

Here is my system. Others will have better and perhaps worse, but that’s okay as long as you pick something and stick to it, making no changes to it without long and hard thought.

One of the writers I greatly admire is James Rebanks (A Shepherd’s Life) who says he and his fellow shepherds in England’s Lake district are pathologically opposed to new ways of doing things. “If you have done something on your farm for generations the same way, and it works, then that is a good reason not to change.”

Now generally, I am not a follower of that philosophy. I am the type who is always the first kid on the block with the latest technology, the latest software, the latest gadget. But, when it comes to writing, and more specifically the recording of those ideas and other elements that go into writing, I am a purist.

So, pick something and use it without modification until you are unequivocally sure that a change will help.

Telescoping Fisher Space Pen. It also writes underwater and upside down
Telescoping Fisher Space Pen. It also writes underwater and upside down

I carry a softcover notebook of about 60 pages that fits into a hip pocket. It is with me all day, everyday. With it I also have a telescoping pen that also sits in the hip pocket. The Space Pen is the right size but there are others. You could also have a cut down pencil if that is your preference. But the point is that the notebook and the pen are always together and always on your person.

The Procedure

  • Date and time your thought.
  • Write it in one simple sentence, or a decent sentence fragment.
  • Only when those two things have been done, and it doesn’t matter how fragmentary your recorded note is, do you then tag on any context, color, or subsidiary thoughts.
  • Don’t worry about handwriting, in fact it is good practice not to even look at the paper while you are jotting. When you open your notebook, don’t try to find the next available page or section of page, just open it at random, give it a quick glance to make sure that you have a clear space to write, and then charge ahead. You can indeed write without looking at what you are doing.
  • You must always try to make sure that nothing gets between the still bubbling thought in your brain and the words on the paper.

The next step, and it can be done quite some time after the actual note taking, is to make a Table of Contents entry.

I number all the pages in my notebook. When the note is done I flip to the first page and on its own line I put down the random page number where I dumped the note. Then, I give it some sort of title so I can refer to it later. A primitive TOC will make finding and using your note a lot easier. Having to flip through dozens of pages looking for something or other is no a good use of your time.

It is really important to get these notes into a more formal record keeping system before they turn into cryptic messages from an alien underworld. So, as soon as you can it is best to put them into your favourite computerized data system, be it Evernote, Zoot, One Note or whatever. It really doesn’t matter what you use as long as you only use one. If you scatter notes across recording systems you will lose them.

For longer notes, or perhaps even full scenes in a book manuscript, you can use a portable voice recorder and then import them as text files using one of the Dragon Naturally Speaking editions that supports transcription, not all do.

Using a voice recorder is superb for describing a location you might want to use in a story, or to get down as much complicated detail that you think you will need.

A variation on that technique is to hit the video button on your phone and visually record your surroundings as you describe the scene.

A different system might be necessary when working right at your computer. It may be best to pop open your database program and type out a note, but be wary that you don’t get shunted down a rabbit hole. I keep my little notebook right next to my mouse, or I reach for the voice recorder.

Remember this at peril of losing your thought; your note taking system has to be one-step simple.

A lot of people have asked me about the idea of learning shorthand for note taking. My answer is, don’t bother.

I learned shorthand as a young reporter and use it still, but it is of limited use to the fiction writer. There are rather simple techniques outlined on the web and in instruction books for what is called Speed Writing and you could look into them if you are interested.

The main thing is, have a way of getting that thought out of your head as quickly as possible, with the least technical effort so you don’t run into this common scenario:

Find app,

Open it,

Menu, select Make New Note   

At which point you forget what the hell your were going to say.

Covering the Arctic

Here’s a snippet of what I might slip into The Disaster Tourist.

“I should take some lead pencils with you.  Bloody cold where you’re going and pens freeze don’t you know.”  Parting advice from my Managing Editor in CBC Radio News as I was being happily packed off to the eastern arctic to set up the first radio newsroom there.

Dear old eccentric Eric Moncur had about as much knowledge of what we now know as Nunavut as I had— absolutely nothing.  We both had to look at a map to see where he was sending me.

Oddly enough that advice about pencils was spot on.  Many many times over the years that I have spent in the arctic, first as a bush pilot, then reporter, and now media consultant, I have yet to find a pen that doesn’t freeze.

But pens are the least of the problems facing a reporter in the arctic and more particularly in Nunavut.

First of all there is no such thing as being a  journalist in Nunavut.  Such pretensions are reserved for fly-in foreign correspondents and southern media types on short-term swings to vacuum up interesting features.

To cover the arctic one has to be a reporter first and last.  Reporters must talk directly to people to find out what is going on, they have to record their comments exactly, and they have to tell the stories fairly.  As a journalist, and I was one of those for a long time too, you can afford the lazy luxury of doing analytical pieces formed from your own opinions, interpretive insight pieces, and just generally a lot of writing that requires more thumb sucking than anything else.

Journalism by journalists just doesn’t work in a region where the people demand to know just what the hell is going on and to hell with the editorial spin and gloss.

There’s also a strong cultural problem in trying to do southern trained reporting in Nunavut.

The Inuit as a people dislike direct confrontation.  Any questioning that has to be done for a story must be indirect, respectful, and non aggressive.  On Parliament Hill in Ottawa we are used to the full speed bulldozer approach to news gathering.  In Nunavut one needs the slow careful attitude of a palaeontologist.

When I was sent to Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, to set up the first CBC radio news operation, I had the largest beat of any reporter in Canada.  It crossed three time zones, encompassed a quarter of Canada, and took in western Greenland for good measure.  At the time I think that only four of the 26 communities in Nunavut had long distance phone service.

Have you ever thought how difficult it is to conduct a broadcast radio interview with someone at the other end of a snapping, crackling, and fading short wave radio link?  Throw in for good measure that the person you are interviewing has english as a very limited second language and you begin to understand why some of the stuff we put on the radio was utterly incomprehensible.

All of the communities now have superb satellite phone links, email, fax, and in some cases video conferencing facilities, but the old job of reporting is still exactly the same.  Reporters in Nunavut have to get out and talk to people otherwise they won’t have a thing to put into their broadcasts or newspapers.

I’m fond of saying that 90 percent of reporting is simply knowing that something is going on — the rest is just mechanics.  But in a region where there are precious few news releases, fewer news conferences, no wire services, and a general reluctance for people to phone you up and offer a story, worrying about what might be going on turns into a huge dark monster that haunts every northern newsroom.

The best way to find stories is of course to talk to people as much as possible.  That’s fine if the reporter is based in Iqaluit and wants to only cover that community.  But to discover the weird and wonderful goings on in places such as Pangnirtung, Resolute Bay, Arviat or any other community, a reporter pretty well has to go there.  Very few news operations can afford travel to even the closest communities except in rare and unusual circumstances.  It’s cheaper to fly from Ottawa to Australia than it is to go from Iqaluit to let’s say Cambridge Bay or Resolute.

Any Ottawa journalist who accepts a freebie flight pretty well guarantees a snarky and career deadening conversation with a humorless news manager following policy. A reporter in Nunavut, or anywhere else in the Arctic for that matter, who doesn’t learn the fine art of hitchhiking by aircraft, piggybacking on charters, and playing the “send us the invoice” game, is never going to do much in the way of providing decent news coverage.

This once reached an extreme for me when I wanted to cover the start of Naomi Uemuera’s solo trip to the North Pole in 1978.  His DC-3 Dakota aircraft was leaving Resolute Bay for Greenland and then to the last bit of land in Canada before the pole.  The trouble was that the flight was being paid for by National Geographic Magazine.  They were not about to let any reporter on board at any ticket price.

I got on the flight and covered the story (surreptitiously) by talking the charter airline into allowing me to fly as co-pilot, out of date ratings and licenses be damned.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had very strict rules against this, and still does.  Fortunately there were more than a few managers with at least one blind eye.  I hope there still are.

The Disaster Tourist – Life in War Zones — soon a book

While I continue to work on my Adventure Thrillers such as Cobra Flight, I am also developing some Non-Fiction projects.

In active development now is a quirky, irreverent, and most likely scandalous look at how relief workers and journalists conduct themselves in war zones and humanitarian disaster areas. It also turns a jaundiced and withering eye on the criminals, politicians (often the same people) and the celebrities who make huge money out of human suffering.

I’ll be posting excerpts from my outline as I move ahead with the project.

But keep in mind, this is Non-Fiction and although it may read as Fiction it most certainly is not.

Overview

The Disaster Tourist

 

The Disaster Tourist is about the wild and often hallucinogenic world of aid workers and journalists caught in the huge disasters of our time.

It’s about the strange state of frenzied insanity that develops among reporters and relief workers amid death, starvation and mass murder, a state which allows them to always know where to find beer and a good time, even when millions can’t find water.

A Canadian military Hercules aircraft delivers relief supplies to East Timor
An international aid effort to rebuild East Timor after the Indonesian Army had trashed it came from as far away as Canada. This C-130 Hercules transport is delivering the first Canadian aid following the return of international aid workers in 1999. (Converted from 35mm slide)

It’s about how the people who run aid organizations are more concerned about publicity and making money than the lives of their aid workers or the people they are supposed to be helping.

It’s about media bosses in North America, Europe, and Australia being more concerned about the impact and ratings of news coverage than the conditions under which their reporters have to live.

The Disaster Tourist tells how aid groups are more concerned about appearances during a disaster than helping people and how they try to engineer the best coverage possible.

Through a highly personal and controversial style, Rick Grant, tells of his experiences as a foreign correspondent, consultant, and as an aid worker following the Ethiopian civil war, through the fall of Somalia into savagery, and amid the debris left following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Kosovo War, and many years amid the ruins of Afghanistan.

A refugee camp in Northern Albania
Northern Albania suffered greatly from the influx of refugees during the Kosovo War. And no town had it harder than Kukes which lies directly on the border with southern Kosovo. These refugees were housed temporarily in tents by CARE before being moved further south by UNHCR

The Disaster Tourist relates tales of amazing ineptitude by the world’s aid organizations, about senior officials endangering the lives of their field workers, about how combatants in disaster areas now know that the arrival of aid means vast riches for them.

It tells how the world’s media helped to create the debacle that led to the death of US troops in Mogadishu and the retreat of the UN Force from Somalia. How senior news anchors such as Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel, and Geraldo Rivera conducted themselves in war zones, sometimes very badly.

It shows how once famous Hollywood celebrities prostitute themselves for media exposure in disaster areas and endanger aid workers doing it. How major aid donors are given free “tours” of disaster areas at the expense of money that could go to famine victims.

It contains accounts of aid workers dealing in the black markets of Bosnia Somalia, Afghanistan and other countries. How one United Nations worker looted museum artifacts, how another bought automatic rifles for sale back in the United States, how a major aid organization fed its workers on looted food and used looted equipment.

It’s about the vast drug trade that fuels the Somali civil war, the mafia operations in Bosnia, how the people of Sarajevo had to survive both the shelling and their own criminals.

The Disaster Tourist is about what it is really like to live and work in a disaster area and how knowing where to find the beer is sometimes more important than worrying about the dying.

 

I don’t have a tentative publication date yet. That depends on how some of my Adventure Thriller novels in the pipeline go but I hope to get it out in eBook form in time for Xmas 2018 and in paperback and audiobook shortly after.

In the meantime, if you wish to keep abreast of this and other projects then why not sign up for the newsletter through the link in the main menu at the top of the page.