EL FASHER WAS A ONE-CAMEL TOWN. There were a few miles of paved road and only one or two buildings taller than one-story. There’s an airport and the regional military headquarters, but at its core it was the hub of a neglected, distant province in a country where power and influence were distributed in direct relation to proximity to the national capital.
There were only or one or two restaurants to speak of. The largest and best known of these—it had three plastic tables and a handful of chairs—sat at the principal intersection in the town proper, near the small pond that had served to attract caravans for millennia and remained a source of both life and death, providing water to drink and mosquitoes to spread malaria.
The restaurant served grilled chicken. There may have been other dishes, but we stuck with the chicken. We would get chicken and pommes frites, a bottle of cold water and lots of napkins before the place closed just before the call to evening prayers. It was more or less the only game in town, so we went there a few times a week when we grew weary of the contracted kitchen food at the African Union peacekeeping mission headquarters.
Because I had spent nine months based out of El Fasher in the previous year, I was the local guide for the team of UN officials I had taken up with. One evening, after dinner, I was driving back from the restaurant to our guesthouse when my colleagues asked me to show them a bit more of the town. I decided to drive by the animal market. It was simply a field next to the road out towards the south of town where buyers and sellers of camels and goats, sheep, cattle, and horses could find each other.
I parked the truck near the edge of the field, upwind, if I judged correctly. The stink was inhumane. The dust and scurf were mixed with the shit of innumerable animals that had been festering in the sun for a generation. Fecal matter blowing in the air gets on your hands and face and lips and in your eyes and is ingested through the soft tissue in every exposed orifice of your body. The next thing you know you’re spending half your day in the toilet and the other half begging the doc to try something new to make the puking and shitting stop. We all carried small bottles of hand sanitizer and used it liberally. Not always to good effect, though.
While my colleagues wandered through the market, laughing and posing next to and atop camels, I stood a bit apart, watching a smallish, grey-bearded man in a stained thawb sitting splay-legged on a woven mat under a scruffy tree. The man was cutting, stripping, and stitching small pieces of leather into pouches of varying sizes, and then stuffing small pieces of paper, folded or rolled, into the pouches. I’d been looking for this guy for months and had finally stumbled onto him. He was the hijab man.
Among Arabs, the word hijab refers specifically to the veil or scarf observant Muslim women wear, or more broadly to a modest style of dress. But in Darfur, the rebels call the leather talismans they wore hijabs. Further west, in western Chad and beyond, they are called Gris-Gris. In the U.S. and UK, people carry a rabbit’s foot or wear their lucky socks for the same reason.
In Darfur all the rebels wore hijabs. I had been told all Sudanese do. Many rebels wore them by the dozen, strung on cords around their shoulders. They usually contained folded paper on which were written Koranic verses, although I knew at least two rebels that carried bullets that had been extracted from their bodies inside hijabs and others who kept bones, ashes, herbs and other shamanic offerings in theirs. Some rebel drivers kept dozens lying on the dashboards of their Toyotas as a blessing for their vehicle, and I had even seen them hanging around the necks of camels, donkeys, and goats.
A rebel commander named Mubarek had given me a small one as a gift during the Sudanese Liberation Army election conference in Haskanita. When I explained that I was an infidel, he said it didn’t matter. “God and Allah are the same,” he said, smiling, “it is we who choose to worship them differently.”
I carried that one in my small backpack. I kept a bag with me almost all the time filled with notebooks, pens, a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen, hand sanitizer and a packet of toilet paper—essentials all. I also carried a book. You never knew when you would be stuck somewhere waiting for someone or something over an interminable period of time. I had learned long before to carry something with me to read and pass the time. This was not my first rodeo.
Since I nearly always was seriously deficient in my knowledge of the history and politics of any area I worked, I usually carried some sort of history book. But after spending almost a year previously in Darfur, I had decided upon my return to alternate my education with some literature. At that point I had in my bag one of each: W.T. Massey’s The Desert Campaigns was my history, and Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger was my literature.
Massey, a correspondent with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, was an early adapter to the embed process. His book was pretty good if a bit dated—he wrote it in 1918. He said in the introduction that he decided to write the book because someone told him that he should leave the desert and go to Europe to see what real war was.
Like Massey, I had been in wars in Europe and in the desert. They were both violent, terrible examples of creative inhumanity and testaments to political folly. At least in Europe the press showed up to cover the war and you could get whisky.
The Salinger book contained nine short stories including “Pretty Mouth and Green Eyes,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” In retrospect, the Salinger stories weren’t such a good choice.
“A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” was also in the collection. At its end, a veteran pulls out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic and shoots himself through the right temple. “For Esme—With Love and Squalor” was also in the book. It details the descent into near madness of an American soldier in the Second World War. As screwed up as I was, maybe something a bit lighter would have been smarter.
I was standing at the edge of the animal market, looking at the guy who would make my own hijab. I had to decide what would go inside. I’m not religiously observant, so Koran, Old Testament or New, none of that seemed relevant—nor were any of those close to hand. I decided to put some scrap of literature inside. By chance alone, J.D. Salinger would be my protector.
I gave a quick glance over to the field to locate my colleagues, and then walked closer and took up a spot in the shade of his tree. The hijab man looked up at me and then quickly back down to his work. I reached into my bag and pulled out Nine Stories. The spine was broken already, so I didn’t feel badly about yanking out a couple of pages from near the front, probably out of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”
I folded them into a small, tight square and passed them to the man sitting under the tree. He unfolded them, glanced at the script, which he presumably couldn’t read, then huffily re-folded them and stuffed them into the small, square pouch made of camel leather he had been stitching. He pulled a small strip of leather through the folded eye he had left at the top, tied that off, swabbed a daub of glue onto the flap, closed and sealed the flap, and handed it to me. I paid and we were done. I stuffed the hijab into my bag and met my colleagues at the truck.
I was in El Fasher in support of a United Nations mission to organize and run a training exercise for the African Union peacekeeper staff. I was the scenario writer. The three scenarios I had written were roughly like this: (a) a humanitarian emergency develops into a security crisis, deal with it; (b) a security crisis develops into a humanitarian catastrophe and includes significant press interest and bad weather, deal with it; (c) the kitchen sink of problems arrive sequentially, deal with all of them. The AMIS staff had an officer on the UN team who had helped with the details of the scenarios. He had the plots and knew the solutions. He also gave these to his colleagues on the AMIS staff. They still failed.
Personally, I was failing, too. I was falling apart, in some ways worse than I had in Afghanistan. I was deep into a bad PTSD episode. I was drinking myself into a stupor every night—in an Islamic republic where alcohol was banned—and I was carrying on a clandestine affair with a UN official. The genocide was actually diminishing, but we had no way of knowing that at the time. What I saw around me was 300,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced.
I had no real safety net to catch me, nor anything during the day to hold me together. I had very few actual responsibilities. Since the scenarios were already written, I was mostly along for the ride with the UN team. Despite this, I was managing pretty well until one really bad day.
The woman with whom I had been having an affair for a couple of months asked me what would happen after our work together ended. We had been at it for a few weeks, first in Nairobi, then in Addis, now in Darfur. We were having fun in nice hotels in Kenya and Ethiopia, and dodgy guesthouses in Sudan, drinking and playing. But when she started making noises about next steps, that set off alarm bells in my head, dragging me back to the realization that I had a life outside of this little war zone bubble. Soon I would have to go back to that life and the reckoning.
I obviously wasn’t rational. Nonetheless, I was functioning at a pretty high level: writing intricate scenarios for a modern-ish fighting force operating in the midst of a complex emergency; continuing to collect information about the status of the rebel forces’ disposition and actions, the Government of Sudan’s response to the insurgency, and writing reports for the embassy about what I’d learned; at the same time I was carrying on this illicit affair.
But in my head, I was convinced that my life was fucked up, and that all I was doing was hurting other people. I had failed to stop the fighting in Darfur just as I had failed to do so in Kosovo and in Zaire. My writing sucked. My mom had just died. My marriage was a failure. I was a failure. Everything I touched brought pain to others. I wasn’t getting better. I was getting worse. The dark stuff in my head triumphed over the rational, work-a-day reality.
I decided to kill myself. I think I did so quite rationally. I thought about it through the morning, scripting the steps and timing, mentally locating the tools I would need and sorting out their acquisition, thinking about the aftermath—both immediate and longer term. By lunchtime I had a plan. By mid-afternoon I had acquired all the tools. Late that afternoon I began work.
I grabbed a couple of beers out of the icebox, wrapped them in a shirt, and put them on the seat of the Toyota. Earlier in the afternoon, I had gone over to the U.S. team house and borrowed a pistol from the Special Forces team sergeant. He loaned it to me, no questions asked, because we had worked together for six months or so previously, and he had no reason to suspect that I was anything other than a competent, professional career officer.
I drove out of town to the west, somewhat dramatically I realized, into the setting sun toward the reservoir. I pulled off the main road to the north side, toward some small villages—just clusters of huts really—and stopped the truck on a low rise just high enough to see the sun falling toward the desert. I opened one of the beers. I started crying but I don’t really know why. I was filled with a sense of failure and frustration, a sense of conclusion. Nothing I touched succeeded. Nothing I did was good. I had been through five wars in ten years and done nothing to stop the killing in Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Darfur. It felt as if I had reached a logical place in my life to end it.
I opened the second beer, and picked the pistol up off the seat. It felt good in my hand. I felt surprisingly deft with it. I pointed it out the windshield with the magazine resting on the steering wheel and curled my finger around the trigger. I imagined pulling the trigger and the immediate pull the weapon would make as the round fired. There wasn’t anything to shoot at out there, so I would have just blown out the windshield. But even if there was something to shoot at, I was holding the pistol in my right hand—I’m left-handed—I probably couldn’t have hit it.
I put the pistol back on the seat. I remember a momentary flash of clarity. Who else could I hurt if I did this? My wife, certainly. Anyone else? My sister, maybe. I thought that what I was getting ready to do would leave a hole in some lives. I even thought about someone having to clean up the truck afterwards. Maybe I would do it outside and leave less of a mess.
But the clarity passed and I was overwhelmed with a sense of futility and sadness. I had failed to stop the wars; so many people were dead because of my failures. Images were rushing at me: the forty-five dead from Racak, the raped nun from Bunia, the man with the red-rimmed eyes and his mutilated family near Senik.
I picked up the pistol and charged it—loading a bullet into the firing chamber. My hands were shaking. I put the beer down and took the pistol off safe. I was sobbing and talking to myself, to the spheres, to no one. The pistol was ready. I shifted it to my left hand. I looked at it in my hand, lying partly on my lap pointed down a bit. I took a deep breath to calm myself. I was ready.
Then the phone rang.
It scared the hell out of me and I jumped, startled. I almost pulled the trigger. Which would have been highly ironic, to shoot myself in the foot while preparing to shoot myself in the head. I looked at the phone lying on the seat of the pickup and saw that it was my wife, Maureen, calling from Washington, DC. Was this serendipity, karma, luck, or just uncanny timing?
With my thumb, I put the pistol back on safe and laid it on the seat. While I talked to Maureen for a few minutes, I stared out through the windshield and watched the sun setting over the rocky brown desert of Darfur. The ringing phone had broken the spell. After the crying and shaking, the moralizing and justifying, the calming of hands and nerves, the intense focus on the immediate act of charging the weapon, and then taking off the safety and preparing to put the barrel in my mouth, the ringing phone pulled me back from the brink. After the phone rang, I could no longer pull the trigger.
I drove back into town. I stopped to return the pistol to the American sergeant who had lent it to me. I went back to the UN guesthouse. That night I read some of the remaining Salinger stories, among them the one titled, “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” There is a point in the story when the protagonist has tea in Devon with a precocious, teenaged girl—the Esme of the title. As she is leaving the teashop, she says, “I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.” A few hundred words later, in the immediate postwar, readers realize that Sergeant X’s faculties are most assuredly not intact. It is pretty clear that somewhere along the way my faculties had become somewhat less intact as well. The Salinger story appeared in The New Yorker on April 8, 1950. When I read through it today, I see in it so much of what PTSD does to people: the tics, the anxiety, inability to focus, a quickness to anger, etc.
Salinger, famously reclusive, had gone ashore in the D-Day invasion, and had fought through the Battle of the Bulge and the Heurtgen Forest campaigns with the 4th Infantry Division. Nothing I had done in my wars can approach that type of combat. Which of course makes me feel incompetent and weak. Nothing in my writing will likely ever approach what Salinger had achieved, either.
Over the next week or so, we completed our tasks with the African Union mission. I gave somewhat vague assurances to my UN girlfriend that we would indeed see each other again. I flew out through Addis Ababa and Frankfurt to DC.
At Frankfurt, going through the security checks to board the U.S-bound flight, I pulled my laptop out of my bag and the new hijab tumbled out with it. I thought about the intent of the hijab—as protection—and I guessed it had done its job. I had survived another trip into a war zone, one where I came perilously close to dying. J.D. Salinger had somehow protected me. If I had been reading Hemingway or Vonnegut, I wonder, would Robert Jordan or Billy Pilgrim have been as effective as Uncle Wiggily?
When I got home I admitted the affair to Maureen. It wasn’t the first, so it was kind of a last straw for us. We began sorting through our things and dividing up our life together. I started looking for another assignment and found one at the embassy in Khartoum. I was going back to Darfur.
On September 28, 2005, twenty years to the day after we were married, Maureen and I signed the separation agreement. I flew out to Khartoum that night.