TWO OF THE boats donated to the WFP lay in various disassembled parts of polished and painted aluminum at the mouth of a hangar at the airport, looking like pieces of wreckage and suggestive of the initial re-creation of a plane crash.
One was a small eighteen-foot open red runabout to be equipped with an outboard engine, and it appeared ideally suited to the task; put a couple of seats in it, a case of beer, and we could all go bass fishing. The other, donated by the Norwegian government and built in Finland, looked like something out of Star Trek, a toy of the space age that bespoke an ineffaceable arrogance. The sleek metallic-blue aluminum craft, low slung with sharp pointed bow, was built to skim over the surface at forty knots, near the highway speed limit in some places. Absurd metallic decals of cartoon characters with big popping eyes and a garish splash of the manufacturer’s name festooned the sides. This was something a 1950s Hollywood film director might have used to pull some ski nymphs past a reviewing stand in his water musical. It seemed hardly the kind of craft for any mission other than to escape pursuing narcotics officers in the Caribbean. Certainly not designed to deliver relief supplies to the starving and dying, to rescue the homeless stranded in trees and on top of roofs. Either the contributors of this type of boat had been misinformed or there had been some dark money passed from one hand to the other. If our mission was anything like it had been described, I remember thinking, I might find myself a little embarrassed. The local reaction should be interesting; probably out there these waterborne rocket ships would be regarded with the same curiosity as the more educated would regard the arrival of extraterrestrials.
I was to drive one of these things.
Matt Wolff did not want the boats modified. Leave the seat and console and the cartoon decals with the manufacturer’s name on the hull untouched. “The donors will want to see their boats on television. They’ll see they’re being put to good use,” he said. We would not only be saving lives but spinning for the United Nations and its contributors as well. Over a sandwich at the airport, I suggested to him that the extra seat and console took up space needed for supplies or those we were to rescue. “Word from on high, mate, is to leave them as they were sent.” For a critic of the management of relief programs, Wolff seemed very much in lockstep with those at the top.
Why not at least replace the cartoons with a stenciled UN on the side of the boats?
“Then you’re sure to be a target, to get shot at.”
“Shot at?”
He cocked his head with a look unmistakable: Maybe this guy’s too much of a pussy for the job. “The UN has not got a good name in Somalia. Memories are long. Somalis considered Operation Restore Hope in 1992—an operation that restored nothing—foreign intervention, even though we were there to save lives. You know how that ended. So no need to show the flag.”
“Sounds thrilling.”
“Somalis are a volatile lot.”
I wondered, who would they think we were, zipping over the floodwaters of the Jubba River on these obscene ski boats? Tourists?
It did not take a military strategist to see the potential of this rocket sled. Remove the extra seat and console and bolt a steel base plate and tripod on the bow for a machine gun and you would have one effective little war toy. The dream come true of every warlord: king of the Jubba Valley as well as one of the swiftest pirates on the East African coast. In the Somali civil war and the battles for territory, this kind of power could mean a lot of additional turf.
I was bent over the big Yamaha 55 outboard, wrestling with a stubborn connection, wondering what I was getting myself into but glad to have some purpose, when someone from behind announced: “I will drive this boat. Then I want to keep it.”
A shirtless, wiry man in khaki shorts and flip-flops stood behind me, looking thoughtfully at the speedboat. He ran his hand over his bald head and grinned. “I have a camp on the Tsavo. You know how the UN quits a job and leaves behind all its equipment?” I nodded. But I didn’t. “I can use these—I will have the only safari camp on the river with ski boats.”
This was Mario, a genial, leathery bush guide of Italian descent, a self-proclaimed white hunter who, I was to learn, probably would have been more at ease tracking anticolonial rebels on the Zambezi than catering to fickle tourists seeking snapshots of wildlife. Mario, whose mother was born in Somalia during the colonial era, his father in South Africa, had a no-nonsense manner of command, apparently honed by years of employing Kenyan laborers and servants. With a quick catlike intensity, he came on as the sort who seemed eager to confront, ready to challenge.
“Yes, this one will be perfect,” he announced. “Biltong?” He handed me a piece of stringy sweet-tasting leathery meat, cured, he said, from a wildebeest he had shot on the Masai Mara.
“Then this baby is all yours,” I said. My needs were not great and my ego did not need the speed trip. I was not sure I even wanted one of the inappropriate go-fasts. “I’m taking it to Kismayo, probably tomorrow. You going there?”
“Haven’t been told—they’ll probably want me to help get the others out of Customs. Maybe even—” He looked up at a van that was approaching the hangar.
Five oddly dressed Europeans piled out. The leader of the group, a man in his early thirties with a soft, almost pretty face, introduced himself as Papa Alpha because he said we’d never get his name right: Pele, he said, like the soccer player. He and the others were the Swedish contribution to the international flood-relief effort: two paramedic firemen and three members of the Kustbevakningen, the Swedish Coast Guard, all young soldier types. They wore outfits that even I, of scant African experience, found ridiculous. The Scandinavians, with wintry skin the color of old yogurt, had clad themselves with all the knowledge of city boys arriving at a dude ranch. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hollywood could not have decked them out more elegantly: freshly pressed multipocketed khaki pants and safari vests, combat boots and khaki slouch hats with patches on the crown that proclaimed AFRICA SAFARI.
* * *
That evening during a briefing in a private room at a hotel/casino restaurant, the upscale watering hole for most relief workers, pilots, and crew on leave, Matt Wolff spoke candidly of the security issues, acknowledging that there was some danger in the work. It was, he admitted later, all that he thought we would need to know before being sent into the field.
Standing at the head of the table, hands jammed into his pockets, he began: “For those of you unfamiliar with Somalia, the country has been in a state of civil war since 1988. It has no government, hasn’t had one since their president was run out of town in ’91. Somalia is divided into six major family groups that can date their histories back hundreds of years. Kids learn their ancestors’ names by heart back to twenty generations. A Somali does not ask another where he is from but whom he is from. As you might imagine, these people do not like outsiders.
“These families—clans as well as any number of subclans—are run by warlords who have made it a business to kill each other. There is no longer a civil war with political goals but a deadly free-for-all piss fight between subclans and sub-subclans over territory, drugs, and control. The warlords are businessmen with armies. I suppose they are like your American crime bosses,” he nods toward me, “except these guys have tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, all the weapons to fight a war. Many of them have Swiss bank accounts, European and American passports, and villas on the Riviera.
“Nothing in Somalia is as it seems—it is a mess. For example, yesterday, General Morgan, the Majerteen warlord of Kismayo, personally helped off-load one of our cargo planes. Today, he and his militia were nowhere around. Maybe he’s been pressured—possibly a deteriorating situation.”
“Who is this guy Morgan?”
“General Mohamed Siyad Hersi Morgan is known as the Butcher of Hargeisa. He is, or was, the son-in-law of Somalia’s last president. It was Morgan who ordered the bombardment of Hargeisa, which was the heart of the opposition movement. Fifty thousand civilians were killed in that bombing. An upstanding human being who, at this time, is working for us. Or at least he was until this morning.”
“Friends like that . . .” someone muttered.
“It is our policy that the host country is responsible for the security of the staff. Without a government, we have to rely on the warlords—we are paying him to be our friend. Now, a few suggestions when you go out to the field.
“Somalia is Muslim,” he continued. “Their Fridays are our Sundays. We have to respect their traditions and behave as we would in any Islamic country. No short pants in the towns, take no photos of the women, don’t give out any magazines, and PLEASE, no obvious alcohol.
“The wildlife have been displaced and all are unpredictable; snakes—green and black mambas and pythons—are a problem. So are crocs and especially the hippos. Hippos are the most dangerous animals in Africa. They have killed more people than lions. Be damn careful when driving those boats.
“There are no rules in the bush—except definitely no waterskiing. Anyone caught waterskiing or drinking beer in the boats will be sent home. Questions?”
“Weren’t the peacekeepers in ’92 sent in to protect the relief workers?” asked one of the Swedes.
“Yeah, they were—and to make sure the food got delivered where it was supposed to. The warlords were stealing what we were bringing in and selling the stuff to buy more guns.”
“So what is the difference now?” I asked. “There are still warlords. Not stealing the food? No need for peacekeepers?”
The administrator’s face darkened and I reddened.
“No one is saying it is going to be a cakewalk. But we are assured by the clans that they will help us, protect us, and make sure we get the job done. We have solid guarantees from them. Warlords, I promise you, are not going to be your problem—but hippos and crocs might be.
“Now, one last thing: We have a policy about speaking to journalists. We field all journalist queries back here—without exception. You are aid workers, not spokesmen—leave the press to us.” This was especially important, he said, in these early stumbling days when the mission was being created. Mario dismissively suggested that we should “just tell the journos that everything is great and tell them to piss off,” which triggered an unexpected angry response from Pele.
“We won’t lie! If you ask us to lie, we leave tonight. We go back!” Silence around the table. Even his colleagues looked taken aback.
I could only imagine that the outburst stemmed from exhaustion. They had traveled for two days and they had slept little since Sweden.
This briefing on militia, on wild animals, in a posh city hotel, required a bit of realignment. To the north lay a violent and dangerous no-man’s-land that we were being sent to. We listened, we nodded, we tried to take it all in, put it into some context, but I, at least, had no idea. Looking back, I could not be faulted for being so naive—this dry recital had as much impact as the reading of a shareholder’s report. I had no history to place this against. So improbable were the visions it created—displaced hippopotamuses and armed militiamen—that I could not have expected such warnings to mirror the experiences we were about to face. Possibly in part because of this disassociation, I found myself taking notes.
After the meeting, one of the Swedes admitted he was scared to death to go into Somalia. I then began to realize that I might have a misshapen impression about what was out there.
* * *
The contract with the World Food Program is a no-risk in-your-face thirty-day agreement with the United Nations. Basically it states that you obey the rules and do what you are told. Subscribers, as we were called in the contract, were independent consultants who only would be paid “subject to availability of funds.” What a proviso! The U.S. had not paid its billion-dollar debt to the United Nations because Congress was worried that the money would support abortion. What about us?
Marching orders: I was to take one of the assembled water-ski boats to Kismayo on a C-130 Hercules the next day and set up the base from which to launch the delivery mission. Also, I was to report on security in the port city. I remember the odd reaction of some of the staff at the WFP office when I was there to sign my final papers and I mentioned that I was going to Kismayo; a sort of apologetic sympathy clouded their eyes. Try to get sent out to the bush, one of them suggested. “Why? What’s wrong with Kismayo?”
“Safer in the bush.”
Frantic last-minute outfitting with little idea or guidance what to bring: an aluminum pot and pan, a plastic plate, a plastic cup, a fork, a spoon, tins of bully beef, dried beans, rice, a liter of Kenya Cane—the local rum—towel, bar of soap, mosquito net, panga (machete), all hurriedly stashed into a new cheap tin-lock trunk, which, I was told, was standard kit for safari trips.
During my last evening in Nairobi, I joined the Swedes at the hotel bar. Pele, an ex-submariner, a diver, and a licensed pilot, said that he had sat on his flak jacket while driving trucks in Srebreniza to protect his balls from rolling grenades. “This is much more dangerous,” he said.
“It is?”
“Much more. Then it was a war and you had some idea of the dangers. In Somalia, you don’t know who will kill you.
“My government has told us that the first time the bullets are near, we withdraw, we go home. All of us are scared, and that is good or we could not have a good team.”
The others related some of their own “war stories,” the type of tales that since I was a child always put me in some awe of heroes—Medal of Honor winners, men who sacrificed for others, to whom war was manageable, a challenge. I had known armed conflict as did most others—from television, movies, news, and books. I had even thumbed through Soldier of Fortune magazine. I am like these people—in my fantasies. I see men with hairy arms (I am hairless) and large hands (my wrists are like gnarls on twigs) and developed biceps (I am not very strong), and I am dwarfed in their presence. A sort of middle-aged mix of Tom Hanks and Gene Wilder. Not to deny that I’m beyond a little bravura myself, at least inside my own head.
I recall that the last evening with the Scandinavians was one of laughter too quick, too whimsical, too forced. We joked about setting up a Somali water-ski school, one way to win the hearts and minds of the locals.
“If one of the gunmen points his rifle at me and demands my boat, I’ll just hand it over to him,” Pele announced. “I’ll teach him how to drive it and even give a water-ski lesson.”
The Swedes had been well outfitted by their government. Nothing had been left to chance and they would not suffer from lack of equipment. Pele took me to his room and laid out neatly on the floor were the tools of the trade. I was impressed. Despite my requests to Matt and Saskia, I had been issued no tools, told that until they could get them to me, I should find what I needed in Kismayo. In the event the outboards needed repair, or the boats sprang a leak, or something even more serious occurred while under way, I was supposed to make do. Spread out on the hotel carpet were not only shiny new tools—sockets, wrenches, a volt meter—but a satellite telephone, night-vision goggles, a flak jacket, several powerful torches, a laptop, even colored satellite maps of the latest flooding of Somalia downloaded from the Internet.
The Swedes were volunteers and were contracted by their government. I was a consultant, contracted by the international community, and I was equipped with bugger-all. But I got paid more—possibly to buy my own tools.
“We may be forced to evacuate in the middle of the night,” my host said, handing me his night-vision binoculars. “We will be prepared.”
“I have no tools.”
“Nothing?”
“Even forgot my Swiss Army Knife.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a shiny red pocketknife. “Here, you take this one. I have another—my government says everything double for this mission.”
The Swedes’ equipment defined the seriousness of the assignment. Night-vision glasses? Flak jackets? Still it hadn’t sunk in why they were taking this thing so seriously. Or why I wasn’t. Their government also had issued them one very strict order: They were never to be separated from one another. They must drive the boats as a team, travel and bunk down together in the same compound, and never be out of sight of the others. Their government was watching over them, was concerned for their welfare. I was an individual contract worker recruited off the street, not a representative of any government. Still, I was certain that the UN looked after its own.
At the cargo terminal the next morning, I paused at the foot of the back ramp of the Hercules and waved farewell to the Swedes, who were assembling the little ski boats nearby. Pele motioned for me to wait. Leading the others, he joined me at the ramp, gave me a warm hug and a slap on the back. I had a feeling I would never see these guys again.