John Ben-Younes: Mercenary & Psychologist

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2005-05-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

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2005-05-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

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Hi all

2005-05-20T04:20:00.000-07:00

I've moved websites, and I'll now be regulary blogging (daily, at most once every two days). I'm now at http://diaryofamercenary.com. See you there, leave a comment, link to me. This website is going down soon.

In hospital

2005-02-22T10:24:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I've been lying in a hospital bed for a while now. I just got a laptop, but cannot blog unfortunately, because it is way too slow and expensive. I'm using a mobil phone internet connection which is kinda crappy.

I've got multiple gunshot wounds to my legs, so I think I'll be lying here for a while to come. I'll continue writing when I am out. I mean, it had to happen sooner or later, did it not? A soldier gets shot, it isn't that big a deal. I'm just happy I did not die.

By the way, I've been writing a book. I'm already about 30 pages into the book. Yeah, it is crap, but at least it is giving me something to do while I'm stuck in here.

The vulture

2005-01-27T07:19:00.000-08:00

I was in my bed yesterday morning when my telephone rang. Before it rang, my primary feeling was one of desperation. I was bored and tired of guarding banks, and I absolutely hated the endless waiting, with nothing happening. There was so much private work I also had to do and all this work was not getting done. I was drying up, my energy was sipping away, and my life evaporating into nothingnes.

I picked up the phone, and heard the clipped Afrikaans accent. You have been invited to the Presidential office. Please appear properly dressed to meet the president.

I dropped the phone, and lay in my bed for a few moments. I stood up and got under the shower. I brushed my teeth, and only then did it begin to strike me that something was going to change in my life. A meeting with the President. I wondered what I had done right.

I stood in the waiting room, in a crowd of about 10 men. A good number were police officers, some in uniform, some in plain clothes. You could tell from their judging eyes that they were men of the law.

The vulture was also in the crowd, but I did not acknowledge him. Professor Steyn, tall, thin, trembling lips, a large nose and a stare like a vulture makes as it circles around the corpse, and waits for the humans to go before disturbing it. He was a pathologist, well known because he worked in the field also, and not just in the hospital. I had met him before, and we were not the best of friends. He looked across at me, I saw from the corner of my eye. He did not acknowledge me either.

The door opened and we were ushered into a large office. Thabo Mbeki was sitting, and waited for us to file in. Then he stood up, came across and shook our hands. He greeted everybody by their names. When he came to me, he said „John Ben-Younes“. I replied „Mr. President“. Okay, there is something a bit goosebump inducing about a president speaking to you like he knew you.

Then we all sat down, and he proceeded to tell us what he called us in for.

Jazz

2005-01-24T04:16:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I walked the streets of New Orleans. When I think of those days, they are dark and unclear, shot in brown and white, with long hovering shots of old black men lining the sides of the streets. I walk through the streets in slow motion, wearing a heavy black coat, and dark spectacles. My head is bent towards the ground, my footprints snake through the streets, following me.

You cannot listen to Jazz, you can only feel it. And you can never explain it, if you do not know what the piano thumping signifies, if you cannot touch that wail floating through the air with your hands, if someone has tell you why the trumpet moans and why that eletric guitar cries, then there is no need that you ever be told, because you will never understand.

I sat in a square in New Orleans with my guitar and I played the blues. I could not sing, but I could hear my voice in my head. I could hear the rusty groan that my Jazz voice would be, I could hear the words I would be saying, the hope that would shine through the despair. Jazz made me smile, it made me laugh.

I remember the Jazz in New Orleans, but there was also the death. We were following a man who we were told was going to kill, and I remember his face well. I sat next to him in a music cafe, and I listened to him speak. He spoke slow and sad, he had weight on his shoulders. He spoke of destruction, and he spoke of war, he spoke of murder and he spoke of terror. Though he spoke without fear, he spoke with gravity and a sadness that was terrible to hear.

There was Jazz in that man. There were feelings; when I listened to him, it was like hearing the blues.

I could see him walking to his family home, having been out of his country for several years, and seeing a burnt and bombed ruin with dying trees and poisened plants. I could see him looking around, his heart in his stomach, his mind unable to understand what he was seeing. And I would watch his brown eyes as they settled on the mounds of earth, I could feel his hand tearing into the cold earth, and his heart realising that there was nothing left to love, and that he was alone in the world.

And the fear in his heart congealed and changed him into a creature of sadness, a gestalt like that one can only find in old Jazz records, scratching way on an old record player.

He spoke on his phone, and I sat beside him, and I felt more than I had ever felt. I looked into my drink, and saw the reflection of the blue helicopter appear in the rippling water. I saw dark cars pull up to the cafe, heard footsteps as heavy men rushed towards where we sat.

I turned around and looked at him, and he looked up with an expression difficult to describe. I've seen it before, on old black men who sing on the cold streets, I've seen it on women on stage, I've seen it in the mirror.

He looked at the men rushing towards us, he watched me stand up and pull out a pistol and point it towards him. He sat down silently, looked around at the frozen faces of everyone around. Then he looked at me, and I understood that we were very similar.

We had both seen the misery, we had felt the low notes, we had felt the high notes also, and through all those Jazz clubs I had tailed him into, we had felt the same emotions, we had been joined by the music.

They took him away in a flurry of screaming activity, and I stood there in my long coat, my guitar hanging on my shoulder, and my gun drooping from my limp hand, Billie Holiday crooning from the Cafe speakers. I loved that moment, because it was a moment of true emotion, true sadness, a moment of true Jazz.

Something in the air

2005-01-21T07:19:00.000-08:00

Don't depend on me for this one, but a couple of men have told me that some people they know have heard from other people that it is being rumoured that some groups from the middle east are currently based in South Africa and are planning on doing something or the other.

It is not being said what that "thing" is, but they are offering to hire men, one of those jobs where they do not tell you what it is, but they do tell you it is high risk. They are giving preference to muslims.

My estimation is that something is being planned outside Iraq and that whatever it is, it is going to go down within the next two to three weeks.

Don't quote me on this one, the info is rather vague....

Whores

2005-01-20T15:27:00.000-08:00

I spoke to this young girl, and she wanted a job from me. She did not know what I did, all she saw was my good suit, my car, my watch, and she let me know everything she was good at.

I pretended to be interviewing her, I pretended I was considering her abilities, and would spring a suprise job offer on her. I manipulated her thought process, and I could read her mind.

She knew I was not going to offer her any job. She knew it, yet she did things for me like I was going to. She searched me out, she almost treated me as her boss. She lied to herself, I saw.

I wanted to sleep with her, but I could not. I could only see the prostitute in her, I could only see the girl who wanted to please me because she thought I could offer her something.

I mean, that girl was not planning to sleep with me. When I touched her, she pulled away. However, she let my hand linger as long as she could without appearing impolite. She did that because, in my later perception, she was a woman who would sell herself for profit.

It disgusted me, all the girls that surrounded me and tried to sell themselves to me in one form or another. It spoke to me of a general decay in society, of a society that was broken, and spilling its morals into nothingness. When there are no more morals, that society shall break down into a hurricane of violence that will reinstall moral values, but in an extreme form. That is what history teaches us.

Please women, cover yourselves up. It is not worth it, I'll take what you offer, and I'll give you nothing back.

Robbery

2005-01-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve been working for about 3 months now as a security guard. I work for a big security company, and we guard high risk targets. For example, when the president is going somewhere, the company is hired, and sends people who walk around in the crowds (with concealed guns). When rich men are going to dangerous places, they usually call us up.

Anyways, I was working on valuables transport. What we do is sit in black cars and speed through the country carrying “things” in the car. Everyone is armed to the teeth, and usually, nobody knows what we are carrying. Apart from like 3 guys, only one of which is outside the main car where the thing is being transported.

Anyways, a couple of weeks ago, we were heading towards Pretoria from the cape when the car at the head of the convoy suddenly slowed down. Then it started banking to the left and slowly rolled to the side of the road, and slowed to a halt.

The Jeeps sped around the car, and stopped in a sort of protective circle. We all jumped out, everybody pointing guns in various directions. I looked over at the small car, a black Toyota sedan, and there were bullet holes in the windscreen. By this time, the crowd of armed men were slowly approaching the car, walking cautiously and slowly.

Some guy approached the car, and looked into the window. There was a burst of gunfire from the window, and it smashed into tiny pieces, which fell to the floor. The man who was shot grabbed his face, took two steps backwards, stumbled and fell. As he fell, I saw that half his face was missing.

We all ran back towards our cars, threw ourselves behind the cars, taking cover first of all. When I turned round to look, I saw that someone with a gun, one of the security guards, was running down the road, trying to shoot backwards over his shoulder towards us.

There was a single shot and he stumbled. Then there were roars of tens of guns shooting the man. He fell on his knee, and even as he fell, I saw chunks of his flesh being ripped out by bullets.

After 5 minutes, we were back in the cars, and speeding onwards. As my car drove past his body, I saw that his entire body was in a pool of blood. He was ripped apart.

I never heard the full story of who he was, what he wanted, or why he shot. All I heard was that he was a robber, part of some larger group.

What I think of sometimes is how he felt when he was running down that long straight highway. There were no bushes on either side of the road, there was nowhere to hid. All one could was run, but there was no hope in running. I wonder how he felt, knowing that in a few moments, bullets would tear into his body. And I wonder why he even ran.

Summer, summer

2005-01-16T03:05:00.000-08:00

_The sun is shining, the weather is sweet._

I found myself a new woman. Her is jael, she has long black hair, is slim, smiles a lot, and likes to walk around the house barefoot. She reads a lot, and listens with fascination to my stories. I rather like her.

I bought myself a piece of land in karoo, and I'm planning to make a small thing there where I can sit with my friends and relax. Like a pool, tennish court, gardens, that kind of thing.

I've been playing a lot golf lately, it is quite relaxing. I never thought I'd get to like it, but apparently it is possible. It really depends on whom you play it with, I think.

7 men in the woods

2004-11-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

We buried four men, not because of any moral obligation towards their bodies, but because of a more practical concern - they were starting to smell. We then picked up their guns, and continued our trek through the bushes of columbia.

A crack team of mercenaries. Hand picked by the best recruiting officers in Cape-Town, carrying tens of thousands of dollars of high-tech military machinery. And this team had just lost four men in a poorly planned ambush, with more than 50 kilometers from our target.

I understood that the men were angry. Either they were not talking at all, or they were growling and snapping at each other. Everyone marched quick, breaking through the jungle towards the enemy base. We all wanted to reach there, and start shooting and killing.

The betrayal

2004-10-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

We walked into the jungle, and we spent a lot of time with each other. As happens with any other group of people living together, we got to know the habits of the others. We did not get to know ourselves, we just got to know how we behaved. And as usually happens in groups, I liked some, and I disliked others.

A fellow called Saensi became the person I hung around with the most. He was an Israeli, and had scars all across his back. He had been in the army, he had fought in narrow streets, and after breaking free, had discovered that the only thing he could was fight. He had been a soldier too long, and had become a soldier. So he came out here, and he killed along with us, but killed like a machine, killed like an exterminator would kill insects - without emotion, in silence, and efficiently.

I rather liked Saensi. He did not say a lot, and did not believe in meaningless chatter. He spoke about boring things, but spoke without force, so you could listen easily to him. We chatted as we walked into the bush, and a simple companionship developed.

I didn't yet know it, but Saensi would betray me. Let me tell that story, the story of a man I called my friend, and how he would turn against me.

We walked into a village, and the few villagers put us up. We ate their food and drank their water, and they sat and watched us in resignation. When night merged into the darkness of the jungle, we entered their huts and lay down to sleep. In the morning, we woke up, and there were no villagers there. Three of our men were also no longer there.

We stood up, wondering what had happened, everyone holding guns and dressing up at the same time. I would not call it fear that I saw in the faces of the men, it would better be described as nervous puzzlement.

Saensi was not there either. As we moved, there was accompanying movement in the bushes. Then a yell from the bushes, and the familiar harsh metallic sounds of heavy automatic guns. There was accompanying thuds of bullets hitting objects.

We all ran, a few of us managing to put some shots in the general direction of where the ambush was. I saw at least two of our men fall, but did not stop to look further. I simply held tight to my AK and ran into the bushes. Beside me, other men were puffing and running, one stopped behind a tree and started shooting back. I ran on.

The man in front of me stumbled, fell to his knee, stood up again and continued to run. The back of his shirt turned red quickly, he fell again, stood up again, ran a few more steps and collapsed to the floor. I ran around him, and did not look. He called out as I ran away, and I imagined his arm outstretched towards me.

10 minutes later, I stopped where two other of our men had grouped up. We positioned ourselves and waited. We radioed about, and managed to get one more person in. When night fell, we navigated back towards the village, and saw Saensi and some other guy burying corpses. We walked in, and they came towards us, arms outstretched to greet us.

They told us they had woken up as it was still dark, and seen lights in the bushes. They had known there would be an ambush, and figured out that trying to wake up everybody would certainly lead to discovery and a gunbattle, and so had decided to simply walk away.

After I heard this story, I turned to look at saensy, anger in my face, my hands shivering, and a particular cold dread in my soul. He did not look at me, but looked down at the ground, and kept his gaze fixed there. He was drawing a picture in the sand, a picture of a small girl skipping rope, drawing his daughter, another one of his boring topics.

I hated him, I felt betrayed, I felt anger, but most of all, I felt fear.

The profound reverence of Mr. Petrus Peter

2004-10-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

My home is silent, only the tap-tap of my fingers hitting these keys dares to challenge the morbid stillness.

I am just as silent, my soul stopped moving a while ago. And now, my body is also decaying, sores are opening on my skin, my back is drying up and flaking off, a bit like dead fish. And like a dying fish, when the weather changes I begin to gasp and wheeze. It has been my property for so long, this body, and I have hardly regarded it, I have always worked hard to destroy it.

When my body dies, will I continue to live? I hope not, because if there is a life after death, there will be lot of people who currently are in that 2nd life that I would not want to meet. I hope I just vanish.

It is growing, this pressure in my head. Maybe it is a brain tumour, maybe it is something else. I sway when I walk now, yes, even my instincts have started to decay.

These are not important pieces of information, these words here about my health. There are billions of people, and most could replace me.

Mr. Peter screamed out in the church day before yesterday, he spoke in tongues, he saw god, he met god. Then he collapsed on the floor, and started to cry. I watched stiffly, amazed at so much emotion available for use by such a dull man.

Blind faith, that is the talent he was born with. He is small, ugly, quite stupid, not in the least entertaining, yet he has faith in various and everything. He has a passably goodlooking wife, mostly because he is not aware how unattractive he is.

Petrus will inherit this earth once I have rotted away. He is the meek, and I am arrogant in my need to categorise him.

Interlude

2004-10-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

Beeep. Static on the radio. The camera zooms out, and we see a wretched hut in the middle of a dry plain, on the porch there is a young but frail man sitting and looking out into the nothingness. It is the interlude, the time when you don't just look, but also see (for a short while).

The problem is not about what to do, the problem lies in purpose. As in, why do I do it? What is the point? And even more pressing, why do I not do it?

You fail to understand what I mean in the third question, but it is the answer to the first. Why do you do it, why do you do grind the grind? Well, you don't have to, and then I ask you (and you ask yourself), why do you not do it? Why do you not break free?

Do not ask me, I do not have the answers. But I have a statement: freedom is not somewhere else. It sounds banal, it is a useless intellectual morsel, a piece of meat that the housemaid has already sucked of its nutrients before she puts it in your meal, but it is true: freedom is in you.

I went to the places I thought would show me freedom, and it was not there. How could it be? I knew before I went, I knew as I walked the soil, I still know it. Freedom is within me.

But where! How! What do I mean! What do they mean! If freedom is inside me, how exactly do I get to it? Where do I meet it?

I've worn my rubber slippers thin, dragged them across the cement floor for several hours, listened to the heavy raindrops hit the zinc roof, ignored the creaks and squeaks of the ceiling fan, waited for the occasional thud of a mango hitting the roof, and the sound of it rolling down the roof. The mothers have screamed for their children, the car drivers have hit their horns.

I knew before I started thinking what the answer was. Yet I thought for many hours, through that dreadful storm, thought in the deep silence, thought in the lonely house with a bustling maid and an echoing TV. I thought for long, and arrived at the same conclusion: Freedom is the lack of fear.

Part 2: A longer block

2004-09-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

I've decided to write out the columbia trip in the form of a small book. So it will take a while, but when I post it, it will be long.

The price of precaution (part 1)

2004-09-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

I walked into the small columbian village, small dirty houses, children peering out of windows, men sitting at the front of their homes, doing nothing. The women shuffled about, and everybody seemed to be very busy at being idle.

The faces of the people were open, there was none of the hardness I had seen in new york. The people suffered here differently, they suffered with innocence, they kept their eyes open as they were tortured, and afterwards, they felt anger and hate, but they did not become bitter. Their eyes did not stop smiling, their faces might have worn out, but they did not collapse into bitter despair.

We walked in slowly, dust raised by our tramping boots. The people looked at us, interested, afraid, but they looked at us without curiousity, and without fear. The sun was bright, but shone in a disinterested manner, the wind was weak, and tugged through without caring for the people. It was a different place, a place where people noticed our faces but not our guns.

My face would have smiled, but it did not. Laughter had become difficult, my smile, when it did come, was strange.

Things were falling apart everywhere, I did not trust anyone, and I felt at the mercy of other people, people I was not sure I really knew. Left and right, walking with me were men with guns, men with beards that masked their faces, lenses the hid their eyes, heavy boots that pounded the floor, minds that had been trained to kill. I did not know them, but I knew they were dangerous.

In the end, I'm not a mercenary. I'm a doctor, I'm an analyst, I'm a technical operator. I push buttons, I handle radios, I ask questions. But this time, I was a soldier like every other of the men, expendible, deletable, if I were killed, none of this strangers would mourn.

I questioned how many of them actually knew what my name was. They had told me their names, but I had mostly forgotten. And I did not really care, I had been alone in the concrete jungle too long.

In the real jungle, I had been alone, but never isolated. In New York, there had been people, people everywhere, but not a soul to speak to. And now that I had left, I had no wish to speak with them any longer. I felt as if I had left society for a bit, and I had been able to observe it from that park bench, and I had not only looked this time, but I had actually seen.

And what I had seen was indescribable, but unforgetable. I had seen the dishumanity of the human, I had seen how unworthy they all were. I had seen them naked, seen their souls, and I had hated them.

Their disregard for me had made me hate them, and it was easy for me to not speak to those men. As it would be easy for me to kill them.

Johnny was

2004-09-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

Woman hold her head and cry
Cos her son had been shot down in the street and die
from a stray bullet.

A month ago, I sat on a bench in the middle of New York, people walking by me. They walked in slow motion, I look at their shoes moving by, some dull, some shining, some brown, some white. Military boots, sneakers, high heeled shoes of ladies, ugly torn shoes with gaping mouths, other shoes small and cute.

How can you be sitting there, telling me that you care.
When everytime I look around, the people suffer in the suffering,
In every way.

I was my character. I could probably had more money than many of those people would ever earn in their entire lives, yet I felt their disdain for me. The clothes I wore were making me into the person I looked like, I started to find it hard to look people in their eyes. I started to hate them, and the more I hated them, the more I was irrelevant to them. But my hate mixed with fear of them, fear that maybe they were actually that much better than I was, fear that all I had ever been capable of was my current wretchedness.

I felt defiance surge through me, and jerked myself up, about to scream out to the owner of those shoes, that I was worth as much as they were. And there was a man standing before me.

He was dark, wore a dark suit, and a pair of elegant shoes. He stretched out his hand to shake mine, and I grabbed his clean hand with my grubby hands. I sat back down, and he sat down beside me. He spoke.

"Johnny, you know we are having a lot of problems back home at the moment. A lot of the fellows are under investigation, and men are behind bars. Strings are being pulled, but the press is not making things easy for any of us. It is impossible for you to come back for a while, if anyone were to discover who or where you were, it would make our case a lot more difficult. You have been in direct contact with Jacob and the rest. Johnny, you are a direct link between our boys and real violent activity. We need you out of the way for a bit, and as it happens, we can offer you a job. Johnny, we'd like you to do something for us in columbia, in exchange, we will get you out of this situation, and work towards clearing your name from the files."

He continued, and told me about what I was to do in columbia. Then he gave me information on a group that would help me leave to Cuba.

Three days later, I was in Cuba, having ridden on coastguard boats for a bit, and finishing the trip on an engine fitted small fishing boat. I received a cuban passport, and proceeded to make my way into Columbia.

There, I received a pseudo-uniform, and heavy army boots. I sat up for 3 hours polishing those boots, and when I stepped out into the streets, I gave 10$ to the first begger I saw. It was a 19 year old boy, sitting by the side of the road and staring at the shoes of the people passing by.

Insomnia

2004-08-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

I still cannot sleep. The streets stench, there is an awful smell of fish. I vomited yesterday in my alley, and I was too tired to clear it away. Yet I did not sleep.

This morning, the police came to move us away. We shuffled away, our heads down.

There is a fellow I hang with out here. He is a crack addict, his name is Wesley, and he talks all the time about getting a job and finding a gal. He looks at all the women and proceeds to hold long discusiions about their features.

Sleep, sleep, Sheep, dance, shoot, run, freedom, swim .... home.

Smacking the bitch

2004-08-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

I grabbed her and punched her in her face. She looked at me, tears brimmed up and ran down that ugly face. So I hit her again. I lifted my chair and slammed it against her head. She fell to the ground wimpering. I kicked her in her stomach, made a fist and slammed it against her stomach.

She began to wail, a loud and dragging siren. I hit her again, this time hard. I heard teeth crack. So I hit her again.

Her shirt ripped, and she stood up to run. I watched her. She moved, but slowly. Then her left leg buckled, and she fell towards the ground. She held herself up with one arm, pulled herself up and took two more steps. Then both legs buckled and she fell to the floor. She wimpered pityfully, and it filled me with rage.

I pulled out my pistol and pointed at her. But my hand shook, and my pistol was not steady. I never shoot when my arm shakes, it means I cannot deal with the consequences. Years of training made me put back the back the gun.

I wore my bullet proof vest, slung my ak47 with the small blood stain across my back, stuck the pistol and left the room. She was no longer making a sound, and there was blood coming out from her head. She was face down on the ground.

What a diff'rence a day makes
Twenty-four little hours
Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain

I walked slowly out of the house, poppa sat on his chair and watched me. He spat into his tin, brown tobacco. His teeth were brown and dirty, and I hated him, I hated them all, I hated the country, I hated New York.

I walked to central park, took out my phone and selected Jacobs name. It beeped a few times, and an answering machine came on. He was not in, and I had done what I was not allowed to do. I had called him.

What a diff'rence a day makes
There's a rainbow before me
Skies above can't be stormy
Since that moment of bliss, that thrilling kiss

I felt the cold metal tapping my back. I felt the familiar weight of a gun against my back. I saw the trees, and imagined I was back home. But there was this heavy weight pressing against me, a weight of many cages, the crushing stare of hundreds of people. There was no freedom here.

I called a cab and went to the airport. I bought a single one way ticket to Jamaica. Name: John Younes. I walked out, and threw the ticket on the way out away. Hundreds of cameras, hundreds of uniforms. This evening, agencies all over the world would be handed pictures of Mr. Younes, new pictures, current pictures, photos showing how I looked now.

Trying to board a plane would be the same as walking into prison. I'd disappear, and I'd never be seen. I'd be somewhere, in some country, I'd be in isolation, I'd answer different questions with the same answers every single day, and in 10 years I'd be raving mad.

I walked and walked, and the people got darker and darker, and the city lights became brighter and brighter. Some boys tried to sell me coke. I bought one of their coats, large and torn. I entered an alley, took a large plastic bag and filled it with scraps of nothing. I dropped a pistol into the bottom of the bag.

I made myself a small hump in my coat, greased my hair with oil from an old sardine tin, dusted my face with sand, and filled a small bottle with water. I put the bottle in a paper bag and swigged at it.

I went out to the boys I had met an hour earlier, and I asked them for a dollar in a slur. One kicked me, and I fell to the floor whimpering. I dragged myself up and walked away.

My large phone is stuck in a sardine tin, but I can still type with it.

I entered another alley, where some crackheads were sitting, and I joined them. I took out a small bag of flour I had made, and proceeded to smoke it. Some bitch offered me smack, but I refused it.

The death

2004-08-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

I have a half-written entry in my draft pages. I cannot finish it because I'm not normal. I'm failing, the past few days have had me doubting my sanity, doubting my control, doubting myself.

The latino girl is lyingin my bed and watching me. She knows I do not love her, yet she continues to love me unconditionally. She watches me read local papers on the internet, waiting for the article that will tell me that they have found the dead bodies. I do not find it, and my fingers tremble the more everyday.

It is hot, and I'm sweating all day, it drips and drips, and rolls over my lips, and tastes salty. Like her tears yesterday night, and the night before that. I licked them away in my perversion, the vampire in me feeds on their emotion, fear, pain, hope, joy, I come in and feast, grovel in their attention.

Oh, it is quiet in here. Listen well, listen close. Nothing. Not a sound. Then the gentle beeps that signal my phone. Ligh beams shine from it, lighting up the room and lighting up my eyes. I grab at it, and do not hear the deep voice of a man in control. I hear the nasal whine of a chinese deivery man.

Jacob, call me. I'm in trouble.

The cuban girl smiles at me and lazily stands up, her clothes falling from her. I look away, and I dislike her. I only feel lust for her, and I wish she would simply go away after we had slept together. She is boring, she is irritating, and I hate it that she loves me.

The mirror shows me my face, unkempt beard, red eyes and a weak mouth. I'm losing my nerve, and what I observe in that mirror is a death. My death.

A chronic lack of sleep

2004-07-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

The city that never sleeps. Burning lights, moving cars, human beings moving. I have not closed my eyes in two days, my leg is stiff, my back hurts. The lights burn my face, I'm stressed, my fingers are trembling, my thoughts wander and wonder about irrelevant things.

The blues club is empty. The rooms above it are lighted, that is where they live. I call, and the door is opened some 10 minutes later. Yellow light floods out, and that smell that has always been peculiar to this cuban family drifts out.

I carry my bags in, and greet the old man, hug the old woman and kiss the girl who smiles broadly at me. We all know each other very well, they have seen me naked, they have watched over my bed as I lay near to death. I have seen them cry as their son died on that night so long ago, that night I lay with a bullet in my chest and watched my best friend dead with a bullet lodged in his heart.

Like so many things this day, tragedy is the string that ties our hearts together. And they see in my face that I do not come alone, I come with problems that they do not need. They do not ask questions, and I do not say anything.

The girl looks at me with adoration in her eyes, and I look back with lust in my heart. The father looks at us, looks away and spits tobacco into a bucket. I can still remember her saying but I really do love you, John, shortly before I left the family those many years ago. I remember the shame, I remember the self-loathing that followed. I felt I had slapped the family in the face by not staying, and by not loving their daughter.

I was shown up to the small room with scanty funiture and torn posters hanging on the walls. I opened the closet and saw old clothes. I wore them on, the shirts were a little bit large; their son had been bigger than me. I put on the panama hat we had always worn, that one had been mine. The other one was light brown with the dust of years.

I went downstairs and was given a cigar. It was supposed to be like old times, but they saw in my face that the times had changed, and that things had started to fall apart.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood dimm'd tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Country roads

2004-07-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

Rain splattered on the car, mud sprung from the roads and hit my windshield. The wipers scrunched and squealed as they fought against the downpour. Occasionally, bright lights of other cars appeared in the windshield, creating many pinpoints of stars along the water droplets clinging on the windshield.

I hardly noticed all that, I was talking to Laura. Laura was a hitch-hiker I had picked up about 50 miles back at a crossroads. She was from france, she was tanned, she had an infectious and loud laugh; she was one of those girls that you feel you would do anything for.

Keith Urban was playing in the radio. Slow country songs about lost love, sad banjo strumming about being lost.

Well, I don't know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain't right
Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you
And I'm wonderin' what it is I should do

It's so hard to keep this smile from my face
Losin' control, yeah, I'm all over the place
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
Here I am stuck in the middle with you

The rain enclosed me and Laura in that small car, the music crafted an atmosphere you could feel, the warmth in the car made it a home. Outside the car, everyone was hunting for me. Outside the car, men in black suits and hats were standing in a line; each of those men had a gun buried somewhere within his clothes, and if I walked where they could see, I'd be ripped to shreds by their combined gunpower.

So I flung myself into the moment, I let my problems go and I spoke to Laura with controlled abandon, I opened my soul to her. She must have felt it, because she replied in kind, and soon it was like we had always know each other. We liked Paris, we liked travel, we liked lemon juice, we liked country music.

Maybe it was the moment, maybe it was the stress, maybe it was something else, but I felt something I have not felt for a woman in a long time. That french accent mixed with the southern twang, the small dimples when she smiled, her way of touching my arm all combined together and became a mighty sledgehammer of affection that procceeded to crush my reason.

I told her who I was and what I had done. She asked me to stop, bundled her things together and stepped out into the teardrops from the sky, illuminated only by the sad smile of the moon. I drove on down those country roads, and realised that they would never take me home.

The madman dancing on the fence

2004-07-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

We took Kirsty back home, and I dressed her wound. She woke up the next morning with a smile on her face, and I looked at her, my face expressionless, my eyes grey. My reflection in the bedside mirror looked around coldly, I looked at myself with hate.

Kirsty shrunk when she saw me, and when I saw fear in her face, a dreadful coldness crept through my body. My stomach tangled itself up, my muscles contracted, and for a short moment, I felt even more fear than she did. Whoever she was, she knew who Johnny boy in the pin striped suit was.

I pulled out my gun and held it to her head.

"You will die, Bitch. Who the fuck sent you? Who the fuck is paying you to be a prostitute, and to inform them about me? Your information is to lead to my death, and you have destroyed your morals for money. I have killed, but I have never been near to the depth you have sunk to"

She cried, I lifted my gun and slammed it against her head. She fell back, yelling and bawling. I hit it again, this time hard. Blood spurted and she passed out. I ripped her dress and tied her hands and legs with it.

I called Pedro, told him to come watch over her, and went out to buy some chemicals. I needed her to talk, but this is America, you cannot simply shoot people and walk away like back home. People die "naturally" here. I could not beat her till she talked, I'd simply make her talk with chemicals. Brain damage might occur, but I didn't care at that point.

-------

Roughly two hours later, I came back to Pedros place. He was not in the living room, so I walked over to the bedroom. I heard it before I saw it.

As I came in, her arms were untied, her legs were untied, and Pedro was licking her pussy. She was moaning with pleasure, and he was muttering in spanish.

The world spun in a circle, pressure built in my head, I felt my eyes turn red as the veins cracked. I blinked slowly, and Pedro turned towards me. Rage gripped me as I looked at the traitor, as I looked at the bitch.

I saw my gun in front of me gripped in my fist, I saw flame jump from the snout, I felt the recoil, I heard bangs. I felt sweat in my palm, I heard a ringing in the small room. I smelled burning cloth, dead bullets and then a thick smell of blood.

I saw two people lying naked on the bed, bleeding. Pedro was still gasping. I placed the pistol on his eyeball and pulled the trigger 3 times. His head jerked to the left each time, and I heard his neck snap.

I saw sweat fall from my palm, saw water fall from my face. Maybe a teardrop, maybe sweat.

-----

4 hours later, I had wrapped both bodies in plastic bags, filled the bathtub with water and put both of them into it. I switched on the TV and left. I had between a few hours and few days before someone noticed that they were dead.

This is America. That was murder. A few moments of madness had turned me into a hunted criminal, and I had to leave. As soon as possible.

So I left, hired a car and started driving towards New York. Towards my old life, towards the small dark blues club in Harlem, and towards people that would help me escape this madness.

The woman in the mens warehouse

2004-07-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

Around 5 in the evening, the door of the warehouse was flung open, and a thick beam of sunlight cut through. Dust slowly floated across the beam. The man operating the planing machine switched it off, and the screaming whine slowly died out. Spots of molten metal glowed on the floor.

The three of us were turned towards the door, looking to see who would come in.

A man came in, speaking loudly in spanish to someone who was still outside the door. Then a second man came in, carrying someone across his shoulder. They hurried in, closed the door after them and dropped the person being carried on the floor. Blood crept out from the person and moved slowly across the floor.

We were all watching, none of us moving. Then Pedro stood up slowly, and in his heavily accented english, asked them what they were doing.

"She is dying, the gal is è dying"

We moved over to her, and I was profoundly shocked. It was Kirsty, the callgirl I had fucked in Los Angeles town. Where did they find her, I said loudly. Where did she come from, I repeated.

She had been in the area, I was told, and people had started shooting. One of the two men had seen her before the gunbattle, and thought she was cute. So her wanted to rescue her.

Take her to a hospital, Pedro said.

No, no, P, I said. You do not meet the same people two times in this city. Something is strange here, let us take her back home, I want to question her.

I looked over her wounds, and I did not think they were too serious. She had a hole on the right side of her chest, but she was not spitting blood, so I thought her lungs had been hit. I would look more carefully when we got home. I have seen many gunshot wounds, and I did not think this one was serious.

We wrapped her in a sheet, dumped her in the car and drove home.

Electronic tags

2004-07-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

I went with Pedro to a warehouse, where we spent all day placing electronic tags in cars. The technology is complex, because it uses the body of the car as a frequency modulator, and exact measurements have to be made between locations on the cars so that the tags work. If the car is taken apart, it is very difficult to locate each part of the tags, because they are so wide apart. And if you do locate any part of the circuit, it will not work on its own. If you located all the parts of the circuit, you still would not be able to switch on the tag, because there was a special machine that had to placed on the roof at a particular location to provide power to the tags. Each car had to be customized, and they needed me to help them do this.

A lot of clients had been waiting for my arrival with the neccesary information, which Jacob had given me as I left South Africa.

We had to strip off the roofs of the cars, and make sure they were conductive. Then we had to pinpoint locations on the car which would always guaratee us an appropriate distance to the other components, even if the doors were opened or some minor part of the car was removed. Then we had to start measuring distances, and welding the components on the inside of the cars, at various locations, and then plane the surfaces. After that, the cars would be taken for internal paint jobs, then driven off.

That way, the various bosses could monitor the positions of their cars at predefined intervals, and even if the cars were seized by the cops, they would not only stop broadcasting, but they would be no way to discover if such a car had tags without taking it apart.

It was a lot of work, but interesting.

I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth

2004-07-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

The boy was dragged into the room screaming, and flailing his legs. He tried to punch at the men holding him, but they were hulking and efficient, and had done this many times before. He was dumped in a chair, and I heard strap buckles klink. Then I heard his gasp and the creak of leather as the straps were pulled tight.

I turned around holding a syringe in my hand. He stopped moving and looked up at me, his eyes round and big like those of a little boy. He was afraid, probably the most afraid he had ever been in his life, even though a lot of that life had been spent escaping death on the streets. And of course, bringing death, because he was a member of a gang. It was tattood across his bare chest.

I was grim, and my face was furrowed in concentration; he saw that I did not care about him. So he shrunk back in the chair that was nailed to the ground, trying to get away from me.

I squeezed his strapped arm and drove the needle into it, drew a small amount of blood into the syringe, and let him watch. I waited for him to stop jerking around, then emptied the syringe into his body.

He screamed and panted, moving up and down in the chair. I smiled and filled another syringe from a second bottle and injected it into him. Then I inject the contents of a 3rd syringe, this time a green thick liquid into him. Then I connected a computer to his arm, biting the leads into the flesh, and we both watched the graphs run wild.

I spoke.

"You will die the most terrible death you can imagine. Your body will rot, your flesh will start to fall off, your penis will die and decay, your toes will break off, you tongue will turn to slush. You will feel pain in a manner you have never felt before, and you will rip your own flesh off your body. You are doomed.

You have one last chance. In exactly 3 minutes, the chemicals will reach critical mass and from that moment on, you will surely die. Till then, I can inject you with this other chemical, and it will destroy the catalyst, meaning nothing will happen to you. Now, will you tell us what we want to know or not?

If you tell us, your gang may kill you. If you do not tell us, you WILL die. The choice is yours."

He blubbered and drooled and cried at the same time. A streak of blood ran from his nose, he was so nervous a pipe had burst somewhere. And he spoke.

When he was done, I injected him with the last syringe, and watched him being carried away, crying like the little boy he was. He was 16 or 15, an easy job.

The syringes I threw away, the bottle contents I emptied, it was all just water. Torture is a bit like magic, the trick itself is not important, it is the show that makes it worth its while.

America

2004-07-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

I landed in the LA International airport, and checked into my room at the holiday inn. In a few hours, I got a call telling me that my Jeep had arrived, and was parked in the lobby.

An hour before then, I had called up an escort service, and a pretty and slim blonde, called Kirsty had made her way to my room. She had a nice diamond shaped face, wore blue jogging trousers and a pink shirt, and she didn't have anything on underneath the trousers. I spent a nice time with her, spoke a bit about her while watching Fox news.

I bought some bottles of whisky at the bar, took them up to my room, went to the Jeep, pressed a button underneath the dashboard. A part of the engine unlocked, I went over and took out a couple of pistols, an Isreali Uzi, and an AK47 with foldback handle and a small blood stain in the corner. I dropped them into a specially prepared suitcase, and stopped at the hotel shop.

I bough a white shirt with small stripes, bought some cigarettes and went back to my room. Kirsty was still there, so I went into the bathroom and put one pistol in my footstrap, wore a thin bulletproof vest I had brought along from SA, then stuck the other pistol into the shoulderstrap (which is part of the vest). I wore a white shirt on top of that, and put a grey suit on top of that. I stuck on a small hat.

I went back into the room, lit the cigarette and watched Kirsty watch television. I poured some whisky, put some coke inside, and drank.

I switched on my laptop and waited for it to link up to our satellite. We have dedicated channels on some South African satellites. They claim that those channels are used for deforestation work, but some fellow in the tech ministry is getting very rich by allowing us use those channels. Communication is encoded, and it is only with special software that the channels can be used. It takes about 15 minutes before the computers can link up, since they have to wait for some key or something. This message that it is waiting for a "key" is always on the software for ages, before it suddenly starts working. The antennaes are very small.

After I was connected, I referenced a fellow and asked him to provide ID for me. In a day or so, I would get a contact address where I would get fake passports, registered numbers for my guns, police IDs, and the neccesary software to receive relayed American police channels on my computer. The info is not reliable, since it depends on our russian hackers to crack the codes in order for us to be able to observe their satellite broadcasts.

I went down and bought myself a cell phone. I went back up and gave Kirsty $4000, kissed her and told her to leave. I took a photo with her, just to put in my diary. I like keeping my memories in paper. She was a nice girl, a nice lay, and I like her voice.

I went downstairs into the Jeep, took off the hubcabs, scratched the body a bit, made it look a bit old. Then I drove out towards wilmington, called a contact I had been given called Pedro. I landed at his home, a flat in a 3 story building, and went in. He greeted me at the door, and I went in.

We didn't speak too much, he just showed me a room, and I'm sitting in here now, typing this.

Guns & Sunglasses

2004-07-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

Colonel Jacob called me this morning. His voice was hoarse, and he sounded harder and little bit changed. Maybe prison has changed him.

3 hours later, I was sitting in an ice café, watching children kiting and sticking my tongue into a vanilla and chocolate coned ice. I like the mix; it is my small contribution towards racial tolerance.

A black jeep Grand Cherokee stopped in front of me, and obscured my view. The car wasraised from the ground, just a little bit tipped towards the front, and it looked menacing. The low growl of the engine switched off, and the door swung open. A dark green military boot came out,
followed by a large man with a hard face in a Hawaii shirt. Colonel Jacob, the man who had time for everyone, even though he controlled half the security services in southern Africa.

“Roger”, Isaid, stood up and grabbed his hand. “Johnny boy”, he smiled and pumped my hand. When he was done, I had keys in my hand.

“The car is yours, you’ll need it.”

I smiledand thanked him. After some mild pleasantries, we got down to business. I had sent him an email about a job, and he had told me he had one available. And he proceeded to tell me even more.

It is a job in America this time. I expressed surprise, because so far as I knew, Jacob had never done any job in America. Times are changing, he told me. People are no longer fighting here in Africa, they seem to be settling down, and after the fiasco in Congo, tactics have to change.

He gave me the details about the job in America. I bought him an ice cream, and drove off in the Cherokee. Through the rear view mirror, I saw him enter a car that had been parked in front of the café all the while I had been there. I continued, and drove the car to the airport. I handed
it over to some guy, who apparently was expecting it.

Then I went and bought myself 5 pairs of suits, went home, picked up my toothbrush, had a
bath, and then went to the airport.

I’m sitting in the airplane right now, heading towards America. I’m wearing a suit, my guns
are in the Jeep, and my sunglasses are in my pocket. I can select the songs on the seat. I’m
playing “I feel good”, by James Brown.

The laughter from the outside

2004-07-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

I was sitting yesterday in my compound on my rocking chair, reading From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury. It was a warm day, and the leaves on my trees were swinging along with the slow breeze. I had some music playing on my small radio, it was some soft song about love.

I heard a peal of laughter, it had jumped over my fence, rode the winds and entered my soul. I knew who it was, my neighbour Alexandria. She laughs with genuine emotion, she smiles from within, and transforms herself with her personality.

She is good looking, has a nice body, but she is no extraordinary beauty. Till she laughs, that is, at which time she turns into a being of splendor; just as the personality of cleopatra was an integral part of her beauty, so is the sense of humour of Alexandria the gust that lifts her into the realms of godess-like loveliness.

I called out to Alexandria and her friend, and invited her in for a drink. She came in, and we chatted, We spoke about the Russian Revolution, about her, about my journies, and about a lot of other things, significant or not. It got late, and she left and with her the shine out of my eyes, for the sun had sunk below the trees.

I went back into the house and switched on the television. I watched the news for a bit, stuck in Resevoir dogs and watched a bit of it. After 10 minutes, I switched it off and went to the bar counter, got myself a bitter lemon, stood at the door and drank it. The palm leaves of the neighbours rustled and whispered to themselves. My cat appeared at the top of the fence, in stark profile. It walked slowly up the fence and away.

Home was peaceful, but I was bored. I had nothing to do.

A group of young boys spoke loudly outside, and one of them made some joke, and they burst into laughter. They laughed from outside my fence for a long time, expanding on their joke. Then they left.

I went out and stood by the gate. A few solitary figures strolled along, a child rode a bicycle up the road. From the clubhouse down the road, I heard a group of men roar with laughter, and heard a clink of beer glasses.

I closed the gate, went back into the house and sent an email to Colonel Jacob.

A small rough diamond

2004-07-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have this little diamond that I carry around sometimes. I do not wear it, no, I've never worn jewelry, I just carry it loosely in my pocket. It was the diamond I wanted to have cut to give to, and marry the girl I was in love with.

I had been in the diamond mines of Angola at the time, working in security. I got a diamond from one of the workers, who had probably smuggled it in his through the control posts. It was rough and uncut, but one could see that it was a good one, it shone with a special clarity.

I bought it on a whim, and decided that since I had bought it already, I might as well get it cut into a ring. And once I had a ring, I might as well just marry the girl.

After a few weeks, I came home to South Africa, and called up Katie. She did not reply. I called several times, and she didn't reply. After a few days, she sent me a text message saying that she had met someone else, and that she was sorry.

There is no moral to this story, there is no poetic justice, there is no grand ending. In real life, stories do not end on a grand note, they finish with a whimper.

Life writes the beginning of the story, and you make the ending. If I had taken a gun and shot Katie, it would have been a terrible act, but a good story. If I'd have bothered to find out who the man that stole her was, there might have been something interesting there that would make the story interesting.

You see, the stories that life provides us with are like this small diamond - rough, uncut and unspectacular. You decide what decisions you will make, and you can always decide to make the diamond into a jewel.

The story about Katie is not over, life has written the beginning, and I shall finish it up.

Panic

2004-07-12T15:33:00.000-07:00

I woke up last night and jumped out of my bed, shaking with terror. I was in the middle of the dark room, and I could hear movement. There were people in here trying to kill me, and I was defenseless, standing there naked.

My heart pumped, the veins thickened with blood, the thick liquid rose into my head, and swirled about in my mind. The stench of fear drifted from my body and permeated the room, it wafted slowly from me, became heavy and dropped towards the floor. My head swung to the left and to the right, searching in the dark, and the humid air was pushed by the swinging, it oozed over to the left, then oozed over to the right.

My nostrils widened, I expanded my eyes, and tried to see. My ears became sharp tips, they swung around to follow every movement. My pupils flicked all around the room at high speed. My hands were folded up into thick fists, ready to punch into the air. I was crouched, my back bent, my legs quivering. The muscles on my back jerked with the tension. My arms tingled.

But it was nothing. There was nothing in the room. There had never been anything in that room. It was empty, it was safe, it was not dangerous. It was a normal room, with normal funiture, normal closets, my shirts hanging over the chair, my computer sitting idly on the table.

I went back to sleep. Everything in the room was absolutely normal. But not me. Not yet.

Cape of Storms

2004-07-08T04:06:00.000-07:00

I arrived yesterday at the airport, and tasted the air. It was warm and had the special smell that is South Africa. I came out, my rucksack over one shoulder, and stopped for one small moment as I stepped out on the ground.

Everything was so normal, things were moving normally, people were smiling and laughing, nobody looked at me, and there was no fear.

Johnson, my driver was waiting for me at the gates, and smiled broadly when he saw me arrive. He was so happy that I was back, he always was, and I’m not sure I understand why. He is going to have to work now, and not just laze around like he does when I am not there. But he didn’t seem to think in those terms, he just chattered on happily about all the changes that had happened since I had been gone.

He remarked on how I had lost weight as we drove. The air conditioner was on, and that special feeling came across me, that feeling of peace. It comes when you lie back in a large SUV, the air conditioner on, and a driver taking you home. It is the feeling of normality, the feeling that everything will be alright, that nobody will be dying, the feeling that you can relax.

We drove into the gates, and my gateman saluted as he opened the gate. He is old and simple, a little bit strange in the head, but he is dedicated. He seems to live for his work, I have never seen any family, and even though he is not supposed to stay till late, he does so anyways.

He cackled loudly as I drove in, and I waved to him.

We got the things out of the car, and placed them into the house. I live in a bungalow in an estate, reasonably high classed, good surroundings, with a gate, a shared pool, and a clubhouse. It is nice.

I went in, tore off my clothes and threw them into the rubbish bin. I went and took a loose pair of trousers and a Hawaii shirt. I grabbed my wallet and left the house. Outside, my cat spied me and slinked over to rub across my legs. It is a black cat, and we are not particularly close.

I walked out, across to the clubhouse, pulled up a chair next to the pool, dropped myself into it, and ordered a drink. I took out my cell phone, and started calling people I knew.

I was home.

Isolation

2004-07-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

I’m alone. Even as I speak to the people I know, I feel the gap between them and me. They see me laugh and chatter happily, but I believe they also see that even as my face and eyes smile, my soul lies in weary and savage mourning.

I’ve seen too much. Some of the people I have spoken to have seen just as much, many have seen worse, but I believe that they have not _felt_ it quite as bad. They have not touched their lower mental limits; they have not seen the hell that can be produced only in their own minds.

I’m being attacked by my own soul, it is waging a battle against my reason, and it is winning, it is slowly grinding me to dust, to a husk, to a bitter man devoid of feelings. Those same feelings on which I have ridden to high peaks, and sunk into sullen depths, it is those feelings that I have grown to despise.

Winning the battle against my mind will turn me into something I do not want to be. It will turn me into a being without emotion, a cold person. I do not want to be that person, but it seems to me that I cannot continue to be controlled by emotions that despise me, and seem to seek to wreck me.

I have come out of the jungle, I have come out of the situations where I was near my end, where I could have lost my mind, but the situations changed me. They thrust upon me this feeling of isolation, this loneliness of unfathomable depth, the feeling that there will never be anyone who can understand or share my experiences.

Out of the jungle

2004-07-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

I hitched a ride with some soldiers and rode into town, from where I made my way home over the course of a week.

The small men

2004-06-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

I walked along the yellow winding path, deep in the jungle. Monkeys swung and chattered in the trees above, and the morning dew slowly fell, gently caressing my face. A bird cried out above me, it screamed a beautiful melody, its voice rose high into the sky. The animals stopped to listen for a bit, and then wandered on in the search for their meal. The jungle would feed them, and give them everything they needed. It was their mother, it kept them safe, it provided their meals, it taught them.

The path continued, winding around hills, continuing across fallen palm trees that bridged the deep streams that occasionally ran through and watered the forest. I followed the path, drank in the streams, and looked around for something I could eat. Soon enough, I saw mango tree.

The thicker branches had been stripped by the monkeys, but the smaller branches still had a few fruits hanging on them. I threw sticks at them, and was soon sucking at the fruits. I felt content. I was going somewhere, I had food, and I had water.

After an hour, the foliage started to thin out. Not by much, but one still had the sense that ahead was a cleared area. And sure enough, within the next hour, I started to see small farms. They were no longer tended and were running wild, but cassava is a plant that is mostly spread by man. And there were cassava plants out here. I was approaching human beings.

The path suddenly widened into a street, and I was in a village. The village was enclosed in a fence constructed of bamboo and the houses were made of mud. Several of the houses seemed to not have been used for a long while, and their thatched roofs had collapsed inwards. I could see that there was at least one inhabited house, because a blacked metal pot steamed on the side of the house.

However, I saw nobody. So I walked towards the pot, though the village was too still.

I looked into it, and I saw meat cooking. It was an arm, a human arm, and the flesh had mostly fallen off. It had been cooking for a long time.

I fell to my knees, and raised my hand to block the sun, because it felt like a light was burning through my head. But the light did not come from outside, realisation seared and tore me from within, and my hand could not block it.

I realised that this was a pygmy village. I remembered that the rebels I had worked with regarded the pygmies as half-human, and killed and ate them to become immune to the bullets of the enemy. I saw the brown blood that stained the walls of the hut. I smelled the stench of death about the place. I saw the small footprints in the sand, tiny and delicate between the treads of military boots.

I heard the terrified shouts of the small men running from the big men, I heard the screams of the women and the children, I heard the machetes hit flesh, I heard agony.

I dropped to the ground and cried.

Jungle Fever

2004-06-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

The red of the dying sun pierced through the dark green palm trees, and lit up the brown earth of the congolese jungle, changing it to a murky yellow. I felt the soft flow of a gentle wind touch my neck, an evening breeze, scented with the pecuilar and thick smell of the queen of the night tree.

Then in the distance, I heard the coughs of a jungle cat, and the answering roar of some big animal. It seemed like the air suddenly chilled by a good number of degrees, and I felt fear creep into my consiousness.

I was all alone in the middle of a large forest, without any weapons, nowhere to sleep, and wild animals were yelping around me. I started to laugh hysterically, because somehow it seemed like it was always me that these things happened to. What was I doing here, and would the money I get paid for this take away the nightmares?

But I knew that even though the cat was a threat, the larger dangers to me were much smaller. They were creepy, slithery, crawly and lay in wait for the unwary animal. It would be the snakes, reptiles, spiders and bugs that would get me long before the animals would.

I shrugged and continued through the forest, using a staff I had made off the branch of a tree. The forest was thick, and almost all the vegetation had serrated edges. My legs were streaked with thin lines of blood, and small insects were hovering over them, rushing in to suck greedily at my legs. Mosquitos buzzed around my head like a halo, no, more like a crown of thorns. And I felt like I was walking towards my golgotha. I knew I would not survive the jungle.

After a few hours of tramping, heading in a general western direction, I started to get hungry and a bit desperate. I was in the congo for heavens sake, there are thousands of kilometers of untouched forests, nobody lives here, I could walk for years before I would see another human being. If the entire jungle did not seem to be growling and wanting to eat me, I’d probably have stopped walking, and simply given up right there. But the chirping of the crickets, the intermittent calling out of the frogs, the occasional screech of some animal I did not know did not allow me stop walking. I continued, even though it felt my legs would drop off at the knees.

At about 4am, after I had been moving for about 13 hours, I stopped. I unslung my bag, dropped it on the ground and sank into the grass. I saw a small ladybug-look-alike run from my shadow as I sank, and escaped just in time to avoid being crushed by my weight. I felt like that insect. I could have very easily died back in that village, but I did not, and now I was running in the jungle.

I watched it run, and I imagined it was some wierd twin of mine, everything I did my world, it would do in its insect world. When I fell in love with some pretty face, so would it fall for some pretty insect woman. When I escaped near death, so would it. When I died, so would it.

I smiled at my special lady-bug, and I saw a large insect a bit like a black cockroach jump out from underneath a stone, grab my twin-insect by the head and crush it. I jumped and shivered. I looked up instinctively, looking to see if maybe some kind of insect would also be jumping down on me. What I saw was worse.

The tree I was sitting under had snakes on it. 4 or 5 snakes, moving slowly, the moonlight reflecting off their skins.

As I looked around, I realised that most trees around there had snakes on them. I slowly stood up, carried my bag and continued to walk.

The sky become light before the jungle did, but I did not care. I was tired, more tired than I could remember ever having been. But I continued to walk. For several more hours, till the jungle was sliced in half by a thin path.

It was a footpath. A path like that meant that there were people somewhere around. But there was grass growing on the path. Where people walk regularly, grass does not grow. This path was no longer being used. But still, I had no choice. I would walk on it.

The sound of congolese music

2004-06-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

I was listening to music. It was a gentle song, a song about love. I had headphones on, and I lay on a mat in a room. Then there was a muted crash, and liquid raced underneath the door, closely followed by a blood red streak of flame. The floor burst into flame, and there was a gutwrenching stench of petrol, smoke and fire in the room.

I dragged myself out of the way, and grabbed my gun. I pushed open the shutters of the hut, and jumped out, my arms shivering and my teeth chattering. There was a woman crouched beside my hut, and I shot her twice in the head.

Immediately, there was an answering roar of a large gun. I hid beside the body of the women, and struggled to insert the chain of bullets into my gun. As I did so, I heard the gunfire increase, and it seemed to me that there must be an army in the village. There wer gunshots coming from everywhere. I fitted the bullets into the gun, and held the gun in front of me.

I ran out into the street, and started shooting at every moving thing I saw. I saw 3 soldiers, and gunned them down. I saw two more run out of a hut, and I shot them. Smoke rose from the sides of my gun. A few villagers ran out of home, and I shot two of the children before realising that there were not on my side.

Then I heard a machine gun roar behind me, and saw bullets hit the ground around me. I felt burning sand hit my legs. I turned around, and saw corpses on the ground, and then saw soldiers behind me. There must have been around 50, and they were all shooting at something or the other. There was a large vehicle with a machine gun mounted on it, and the gun was pointing directly at me.

I grunted, dropped my gun, and started running. The gun roared again in my direction, and I saw the mud wall of the house in front of me shatter. I ran, ran as fast as I could, and yet it seemed so slow.

I jumped over a shrub, running towards the bushes.

From the left corner of my eyes, I saw two soldiers running towards me, shouting and holding automatic rifles in their arms. I felt like an animal being hunted down, and I felt my slipper tear. I jumped, bounded, and reached the forest. I ran into the undergrowth, and felt it tear my trousers. I felt thorns enter my legs.

The men continued to shout, and then one of the them started to shoot. The clack clack of his gun sounded so near, like the voice of death whispering into your ear. I continued to run, and ran into a farm. I saw blood on the leaves, and saw a body on the floor. It was a man, and he was crawling, and dripping blood.

I jumped over him, and he looked up for a moment. There was blood between his teeth, and his eyes were dripping with tears. He looked at me like I was not there.

I ran into the dark jungle, and continued running. For an hour, I continued to jog through the bush, till it got too thick to run anymore. But still, I could hear the distant banging of guns being fired in anger.

And I stopped running. And as I stopped, I noticed that I could hear music. I felt on my head, and I still had headphones on. The song had changed, and now it was the deep drums of the congo playing, a primal beat mixed with the screams of a woman.

My headphones were connected to my computer, which was in my bag, which was still strapped to my back. But I had no electricity, and my batteries will only last for 20 more hours.

I have no food, I have no shoes, I have no compass, I have no gps device, but I have a computer with a satellite internet connection. And I have some money, and everything else that was in my wallet.

I have to somehow figure out how to use my satellite radio connection to discover where I am. I'm sure it is possible. Then I have to get out of here, this is a jungle, and it is getting dark.

Is it OK to Kill a child?

2004-06-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

Last week, patrolling a little town, a boy jumped out of the bushes holding a gun. I shot him, and he started wailing loudly. He cried like children cry. I was not sure what to do, and since his gun had fallen far away, I walked up to him.

My bullet seems to have hit him somewhere in the stomach. The boy would die, I knew. There were no hospitals in the area, and I was not going to take him in my jeep to the nearest one (30km on). If it was not a child, I would have left him there.

But he was wailing and shouting out loud, so I dragged him out of the road (so no car would smash him up, that always looks nasty). I pulled the tiger grass to cover him, walked out to the middle of the road so I no longer saw him, and shot into the grasses. He stopped wailing, but I didn't go to look.

The congo is a disgusting place. Equitorial Guinea is also not a nice place. The coastal waters of Sao Tome are rough and brown. It is hot, humid and sticky. The grass is long and green, my uniform is heavy and stinky. The men are uneducated, uninformed and thieving. The houses we stay in are dirty, and there are cockroaches everywhere. Outside the houses, it smells of shit. There are clumps of shit in the bathroom. There are only two brands of cigarettes one can buy out here, and the ones that are menthol are disgusting.
As are the prostitutes, fat women with flopping breasts, or thin women with dripping diseases. They are loud and cheery, laughing with their friends, and shooing of the children that hang around them. Those whorehouse children, they do not know who their fathers are, and some may not be sure which of the women their mothers are. They are usually under ten, yet they steal like grown men, they shoot like hunters, and they curse worse than sailors.

There are three mulatto boys in our local whorehouse, and they swagger about like they own the area. They tell tales about their fathers, tales they cannot know, tales about rich men and miners. Their soft curly hair grows wild, their mothers do not let them cut it, because that hair is their status symbol. They are called the white boys, and they dance down the streets together.

The local alcoholic drink burns. The alcohol content is high, and it varies in quantity. One always has to touch it with the tongue before gulping it down, lest you roast your stomach and throat. Or vomit and lose your meal, a worse fate.

The meals here are monotonous. It is the same rice with beans from the same sweaty, old and fat woman. She is dirty, her wooden spoon is dirty, her bowls are encrusted with the meals of yesterday. She is constantly screaming obscenities towards the prositutes, always in some fight with the one woman or the other.

Bullets are getting hard to find, and I am getting constantly ripped off. Nobody wants to sell bullets to us, because we are the foreigners.

We are not going to be here for much longer, the government is coming in. We have burnt the roads, but it will not hold out the troops for long. We have mapped our route through the forests already, and the batteries they have here can hardly pwoer my gps device. I have bought 30 AA batteries, and they will only last about 3 hours. I keep needing to switch my device on and off. The batteries are chinese.

In a few days, we will be at the coast, and I will jump into the atlantic and get this dirt out my body, out of my clothes, and maybe out of my soul.

The closest thing to crazy I have ever been

2004-05-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

I’d like to take a moment to talk about a crazy time in my life. Days full of crazy dreaming, a crazy passion, a crazy girl, and I in the middle.

I was never crazy on my own. But now I know that there is a link between the two. Being close to crazy, and being close to you.

K. Melua (2003)

I held her in my arms, and I looked into her eyes. She did the same, and we knew we were crazily in love. A passion that would never end, a feeling so strong that nothing would ever affect it.

But if the camera would zoom out, it would see walls, a lot of them, a barbed wire fence would appear, soldiers wth guns would wander into the picture. It would show a prison, and you would notice that the crazy girl wore a uniform, and that I was in a brown prison garb. The writings on the walls would scream for cars to stop moving, and they would be written in hebrew.

She fell in love with a prisoner, and I’m not sure I fell in love with her. But maybe I did, because I still feel a bit of that crazyness when I think of her. I remember that musty smell of the thick uniform, still feel her body straining beneath the heavy garment, remember the softness of her palm as it brushed across mine, and the coldness of the metal between us.

I was thin back then. I had hardly eaten in my run across the desert, and when the helicopter had appeared behind me, I had only lain down and looked at it. I remember the sand forcing itself down my throat. I remember being dragged across the floor, and being dropped into the ungiving floor of the machine. I remember groaning as I was rolled into the prison, and I remember opening my eyes, and looking into soft brown eyes. I remember smiling, and saying in yiddish that I would smile on the day I died. And then I remember her smiling.

She came to give me a meal a few days later. She asked me if I could still smile. I proceeded to demonstrate a smile, and threw in a few jokes. She laughed, and went off.

She came back often, and it seemed to me that we flirted. I joked and laughed with her, and I looked forward to her visits. It was crazy, and though it felt like my body and soul had died on many days, I never doubted that my heart would continue to beat. And to feel.

One day, she reached into my cell, and took my hand. She said I had hard hands. I smiled, not because it was funny, but because I could only smile when she was around.

We talked one day for several hours. The next day we talked again. On the next day, I was taken out for exercises. She sat on the watch bench, an assault rifle in her arms. She smiled and looked away. I walked about, feeling the sun burn across my tanned face. I smelt the desert air, felt sand in my lungs.

Then I felt a hand touch my back, and turned around to see her looking up at me. I felt something crazy in me, and I saw something crazy in her eyes. Then she walked away, and another guard took her place.

That night, she came into my cell. The next night also. She did not have shift the next few days, but in 3 days she came back, and came into my cell again. It was unexplainable, but I was mad at the time, and so was she.

After 7 days of our crazy love, men came and told me to leave my cell. I was taken to the entrance, and I had to sign a paper. She sat at the counter, and she looked up into my eyes. Then she looked down, filled out the paper, and then slid it to me. I signed the paper, then was dragged away. She didn’t look at me again.

But I saw that a corner of the paper was wet. With a teardrop, her signing off of our crazy love.

Assasination

2004-05-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

We drove the last 100 kilometers in dirty workmen clothes. Underneath our torn coats, we had army camouflage, pistols and grenades. We were hired to go out and murder a few people, but we followed the moral obligation to only do so in a uniform.

Our old Peugeot sputtered along, whining everytime we tried to exceed 120km/h. It would have been a bad idea to drive faster anyways, the potholes in the road had left more than a few burnt out wrecks on the sides of the roads. One or two still had the brown stains of drying blood around them.

20 KM from our target, the road became wide and perfect. This was were oil money started, this was were westerners were to drive on. The roadside became swampy, dead hulks of trees dotted the landscape. The water had once been fresh, and the trees had carried birds and the forest had sang. But one day, brown muck from deep in the earth had been spilt, accidentaly, of course, and the trees had struggled to breath. But they got less and less air, their food was covered in grime, and they died. Their souls moved on, but their bodies still stood in the swamp, dead branches pointing upwards in to the sky as if they were calling out to the heavens to come rescue them from the crude oil.

The language of the men I was with was crude. They were trained killers, men who lived off death. They did not care why we were here to kill, they only cared about the money they would make of these deaths.

Our car squealed as it entered the smooth road. It screamed as the driver spurred it on. We sat inside, silent, our clothes smelling of grease.

Then the car slowed down and rolled to a stop by the side of the road, shortly before a small bridge. The bride was in the middle of deep valley, the road sunk for about a kilometer down to the river we stood before, and rose up for another kilometer after it.

We removed everything we came with, our driver started the car with the door open, revved it up, driving towrds the swamp, wrenched the steering, and jumped out of the car. It shrieked one last time, and fell into the swamp. The men cheered, and the car spluttered, moaning softly as it sank in. The roof stayed visible, shortly below the water level.

I felt abandoned.

The men shouted out cheerily, and parted the swamp grass, sank into the muddy waters, and disappeared. I was the only one left, and I heard a low hoot of some day owl. I walked up the road, and positioned a small camera by the side of the road. I calibarated the camera, tested that the up-link to the satellites was okay, and then switched it on. There was a short blinking of some lights, and then it became silent.

I walked silently up to the road, gathered together the palm-tree heads we had brought, and sat down beside them. I could imagine the scene as one would see it from the road – a poor farmer waiting for the next bus that would take him and his fruit to the next town, hundreds of kilometers away, where he would sell the fruit for enough money to live for a week. I sunk my head, and watched drops of sweat fall from my forehead to the tar.

The road up ahead was blurry with the heat. And I saw the first bus come. I picked up my small binoculars and tried to make out what the car was. I saw the green-yellow markings, and a sign saying “God is great” on the front of the car. That was not our target. It was just local people moving between the towns.

5 cars and 3 hours later, my binoculars picked up a large white bus. It was moving fast. I saw the yellow and red shell blazoned across the front. A few seconds later, I could make out the words written on the front: “SHELL”.

I spoke, and the other men heard me: “Prepare, 1 minute ETA.” This swamp was old and silent. I was able to clearly hear bullets being pumped into breeches, hear the men preparing to kill.

“30 Seconds”

“20 Seconds”

“10 Seconds”

“Incapacitate in 5. Implement original plan”

And I waited five long seconds. The sweat that fell from my face was no longer just a reflex to the heat. It was also fear. Terror.

The first shot hit the tire. A voice screamed from within the car:

“Driver, DRIVE. Driver, DRIVE. Driver, move the motor! They are attacking us!”

The next 3 shots hit another tire, and the car swerved off into the grass by the side of the road, staggering wildly. The naked wheel hit the edge of the road, and the car bucked and stopped.

The door flew open, and the driver jumped out, running, with his slippers in his palms. The men, who had not yet left the bushes shot him. He ran two more steps, then fell, shouting in some local language.

From the back window, a pale white face peered out, and a shot rang out. I didn’t quite see what happened, but I saw the hole in the glass at the position where his head had been, and the blood marks on the window.

There were at least 3 other people in the bus, I estimated.

Then I saw feet on the other side of the truck. I grabbed my gun from behind the palm head mount, and proceeded to fire towards the feet. He fell, and I saw him lying on the other side of the bus. I shot a few more times at his feet, and hit them a few times.

Two more were in the car.

The other men had made their way out of the bushes, and were gathering on this side of the road. We fanned out, and slowly approached the car, guns held at ready.

Barry, the smiling man, signaled us to move back. He had seen bullet holes in the car. The car was not bullet proof.

We pulled to the other side of the road, and started shooting into the car. The car rocked and swayed. A man screamed inside, then stopped abruptly. It was an execution. I felt sick.

When we were done, we turned away. A car was up on the hill, stopped, and looking at us with fear. It turned and scuttled away.

We blew up our 3 dinghys, and dropped them in the swamp. We paddled away, the GPS device telling us which way to paddle. In 5 hours we would reach a large river, and with the strong current, we would be on a beach in 10 hours.

The night fell, and the sun burnt red. We paddled amongst the dead trees, and their raised up arms made them look like they were wailing. That more living beings had had to die because of that crude and brown oil.

Xavier is crying and dying

2004-04-17T02:28:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, someone from our group killed somebody. I didn't even notice this, because there was always a lot of random firefights happening without any serious consequences. It turns out that this person who was shot was the son of the chief of the village we were staying in.

When we arrived at the village, the people in the village knew that they were at war with us, but we did not know so. All the same, they gave us a house to stay in, presents and made us feel comfortable. We didn't realise that there was some type of grudge against us, because frankly the dead boy was just some passer-bye to us.

Xavier went out to pee yesterday night, and I was sitting here surfing with my laptop (I have to mention that I charge it with an electricity thingy in our GM truck), when the entire youth of the village gathered up behind the hut, wanting to sorround it, set it on fire and keep us inside with gunshots.

However, they did not notice that Xavier was outside, and when they saw him, someone shot at him. This was a shot from quite a distance, and he was hit, but not fatally. I continued surfing, posted my last entry with my gun in position, and wanted to leave the room.

Xavier fell in, and splashed blood across the room. The villagers shot him with a hunting gun, which shoots out hundreds (or maybe tens) of small steel balls. Xaviers arm was pierced in tens of places, and the bone looked to be cracked at some point. His mouth was tight, and gasps were escaping his mouth. For one second, we simply looked at him, shocked. Nobody said anything.

Then training kicked in. We swapped the pistols we were holding for our machine guns, frantically digging through our gear. We aligned ourselves against the window, and tried to loook out into the darkness.

There was a spark over on the right, and a wooden stick rose into the air, hurtling towards the thatch of our roof. We started firing into the bushes where the fire was coming from, and suddenly, there were flaming sticks coming from everywhere.

Then roars of locally produced guns. Raw gunpowder packed in front of metal pellets or rusty nails. I saw the cement wall crack.

Xavier lay on the floor, jerking his head from left to right, and not saying a word.

--- I'll tell part two tommorow, I have to go eat right now ----

Oh my god, something is wrong

2004-04-15T04:27:00.001-07:00

Someone is yelling in the bushes, and I'm hearing gunfire. Talk to y'all sooooooooooooooooooooooon!

This is no war!

2004-04-15T04:27:00.000-07:00

It is a camping trip with 5 good friends sitting around and buying local beer. I came out here to fight, and I am fighting against boredom.

We are now 5 people:

1. Johnny (me)
2. Xavier (Radio man)
3. Bobo (dunno what he is, soldier?)
4. Rich (mechanic)
5. Johnson (driver)

Whooooooooo! I'm stil a bit drunk from yesterday night. We left the bush, and are now in a small "hotel" in a small town.

Yesterday, we hired 3 local girls to entertain us. They sat around and gossiped with each other, and every once in a while, one would wander off for a few minutes with a man to the single room, and then come back to resume the discussion like there had been no interruption.

The head of the village came to us yesterday, and brought us a small chicken. He came to us 5 armed men, with his son holding the fowl, and said in English

"I'd like to offer you my cock".

And we started giggling like girls. I've noticed a lot of gayness developing amongst the other men. Thank goodness there are no bulletholes around.

So we still are absolutely in the dark about what the other team is doing. We have decided to drive the 1500 km out to where the others are to be, and find out what happened to our mission.

Almost all our soldiers are gone

2004-04-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

Something is happening that we have not figured out yet. We have not heard from the other team in more than a week now, the rebel army that we were to work with has left us, our commander is dead. We are about 15 men and 10 boys left over from the hundreds we had just two weeks ago.

People are getting sick. The most disturbing thing is the stink that is coming from something here. I think it is the river. We threw vj, our ex-commander into the river, and it carried him away. Nobody was in the mood to bury him.

I do not think we are in any state to fight a war. I've been trying to get through to the other team, but they are neither replying their mails nor picking up their phone.

I'll wait exactly 24 more hours, and I'll advice the men that we should leave this place. We still have 2 pick-ups left, and it might be a bit tight on them, but we'll make it.

VJ died today

2004-04-04T04:25:00.000-07:00

and we are sitting out here with nobody calling us. it is gettin wierd. this place has started stinking. of rotting

Our men are leaving

2004-03-31T04:25:00.000-08:00

For some reason i do not know, the local "rebel" army has started disappearing. Yesterday, we had about 200 men, today, I doubt there are even 100. There has been talk about witchcraft, mostly because veejay is in some kind of delirium, and foams every now and then at the mouth.

And the nearbye river is covered in small insects and death-flowers. Those small flowers the grow on rotting meat. It is because of the corpses that were dumped there.

Yesterday, one of the locals shot one of our men, maybe by accident, maybe in anger. I was not there, I just heard a shot.

He was taken out of the camp, and I think they executed him. The shot fellow, his name was patrick, was on the floor screaming, and rolling from left to right. The whole situation is a bit sick.

It is this damn forest. It is so wet and drippy and slimy. In the nights, the sound of crickets is overpowering. And the frogs honk and honk, and then go off for a while. a few minutes later, they restart.

The forest does not want us in its belly. It is trying to vomit us out.

I've not heard any word from the other team - and they are the ones that are supposed to direct us to where we are to go to. My communications are working fine, my radios are working, my satellite links are okay. But no signal, nothing.

People are getting bored and loud here. The SA men are playing cards and gambling.

A dead man in my hands

2004-03-30T04:24:00.000-08:00

Blood on my shirt, and fear in the air. I saw a boy yesterday under a tree, still alive, but had been there for days. He must have been shot 3 or four times. His eyes were swollen, and when someone opened them, he seemed to have only pupils, and no eye white.

He died as he was carried away to be treated. Or maybe not to be treated, maybe to be buried. Or to be shot. He was not a human being anyways, he was just a rebel. A rebel is evil.

Veejays face is pasty white, like dead bread. Unbaked dough, with small black spots on it. Maybe it is not the malaria that is eating and enjoying his heart, maybe it is another evil that sings to us from this horrible forest we sit in. Maybe is it ghost? The men ran from the river, because a worm stuck himself in somebodys fist. His battle fist, the fist he want to save the world with. And the worm consume the fist, and now it is swollen, and his finger cannot enter the trigger hole any longer.

Maybe he will die, but we do not care.

There are too many trees here. they are not green and happy tree, they are not tree that we pay money to save, this are brown and dirty tree. The body of the tree is covered in small parasite plant with dirty brown leaves, the tree is sick and dying because of too many parasite.

We are parasite in this country, and we will suck all the life, put it in our bullet chamber and carry it out with us. The soul of this country will be changed for the soul of the bullet.

The people are weak, and we are weak, but we are a little stronger than them. So we shall beat them till they call us 'uncle'.

First attack, and more info on my mission

2004-03-29T04:23:00.000-08:00

Sorry that I cannot write in my usual poetic style, but I do not have enough time for that. Maybe later, when I have some space to breath.

Okay, so I've found out a bit more about why we are here. I don't know the details, but it has something to do with destabilization, which is somehow or the other related to oil. I have a guess as to what we are doing, but I do not want to speculate prematurely.

Anyways, so we landed on some tiny air strip some 7 days ago. This is in a country where the national airports have subsized runways, and this strip we landed on was not even in use. It was tiny. The pilot jammed his brakes like he was jam master j, and some fellow chipped a tooth on the seat of his neighbour.

The plane stopped okay, and we went out and started offloading. About 30 minutes later, about 7 GM pickups arrived. These are those extremely wide american trucks, with pickup backs, and space for about 10 people in the front. We offloaded large machine guns into the pickups, as well as some smaller combat gear. It was mostly anti-personal weapons, no anti-aircraft, and not even mortars.

Okay, so some south african comes up, and his is apparently our major. He separates the group according to race, and the black and coloreds are to take the trucks inwards into some town. The whites jump in one of the trucks (empty, and blue instead of black like the others), and leave. Some half-indian guy is placed in charge of our group, and I am made his leftenant. The titles don't really matter anyways, everyone does their job out here.

Anyways, we start off driving. Everyone has to drive in shifts, and we are not so many. So I'm driving this heavily loaded pickup through village streets, offroad and all for hundreds of kilometers.

About 200 km before we reach our destination, the truck out in the front came on some police checkpoint. Someone had a machine gun or something, on any case, those police men were shot. As I drove past, it seems to me that they had been shot to shreds. Apart from that, we didn't meet anymore police.

What was interesting is that often, a car would appear on the other end of the road kilometers away, would see our convoy, and then stop. It would sit there like a frightened animal, and as soon as we were near enough for them to see the machine gun mounted on the back of the truck, they would scurry off, and disappear into the next side road (which was sometimes kilometers down). In one case, a bus full of natives stopped by the side of the road, and the entire bus ran off into the bush. That was funny at the time.

So after about 3 days of driving, we arrived in some city that apparently had been taken over by either our people or our allies. The town was a normal town, but the huts and houses were armed caches. A bit scary, the amount of ammunition in this town was. Anyways, we stayed there for a while, and rested.

Then we drove out into the capital, with a number of our allies. We directed the attack, and our orders were not to win, but to frighten. The battle went well, but some african idiots had to jump around like monkeys and get captured. Let me tell you how to shoot: POINT, AIM, SHOOT. Do not SHOOT, POINT IN GENERAL DIRECTION, and forget all about the AIM.

I got a bullet lodged in my helmet.

I'm going to contact the other team and see what we are to do next. Our leader, Mr. VeeJay, seems to have Malaria.

I've just driven 900 kilometers

2004-03-26T04:22:00.000-08:00

And I'm as tired as hell. Thin roads, green grass, more green grass, and yet more green grass.

Leaving South Africa

2004-03-18T04:19:00.000-08:00

I've been told the destination where we are going to go to. It is an African country, and though I know exactly what we are going to do, I cannot mention it at this time. It is a bit of a secret mission, but I will tell you when the time is right.

In any case, we are now in a comfortable charter plane, and are high-high in the sky, cruising towards our possible deaths. I'm feeling very good, frankly :)

I'm not yet feeling fear, but maybe that will come later. The early morning clouds are drifting by, and this cabin is darned cold.

The fellow beside me (currently asleep), has my same name "John", but they call him Bushman for some reason. His face is a bit droopy on one side, he told me that it is because of some operation gone wrong that paralysed his face. The nerves are rebuilding though, and in a bout a year, it will be fixed.

Did you know that from this altitude, you can pick up the signals of near to 100 satellites? And that you can pick up flashes of ground walky talky conversations?

Well, I'll keep y'all posted, and if I get the opportunity, will post a diary when we land and arrive safely.

Now, back to watching my green mile DVD, I love that film. There is so much pathos in that film. I identify with that big black man.

Whoah, we are moving today

2004-03-16T05:56:00.000-08:00

I got a call about 30 minutes ago from Jack, and he said that I had not only be accepted, but that I would have to fly this night out to the Free State province, and that I'd meet the rest of the crew there.

I'm currently in a twelvy flyer, and my satellite reception, though flickering every once in a while seems to be okay. I'm posting this from up in the clouds.

From what I've been told, we are going to ship tommorow, and the men have actually been pending for two weeks or so, and have been waiting for some guy.

Not me, I'm not so important. They were waiting for some sort of science fellow, something to do with poisons or chemicals or something. Jack just mentioned it in passing, and this is the sort of thing sometimes we never find out, even after the mission os complete.

So actually I'm quite lucky to have gotten on this team, and hearing that they are not going to do anything particularly dangerous, and nothing undercover, that is good. I hate undercover, because I'm usually the guy selected to blend in with the local men.

So what do I have on this trip?

Well, my old equipment mostly:

1. My army grade laptop (I bought the same model again after burying the last one in the desert). It has an integrated satellite receiver and transmitter, and has about 10 different satellites it can choose from, mostly in Europe, but also a few Americans.
2. A small flat transmitter. A 1 cm cube, with boards printed with transparent chrystals. It is difficult to find out what it does without training in espionage electronics. It can be wrapped in many things
3. A PDA. Yes, I finally succumbed to the passion and bought one. Also added a GPS receiver and a map software.
4. Radio flares. These radios can pulse signals for 24 hours. Either to satellites or regional
5. A mobile gsm/satellite phone. The most useful equipment ever.

So I'm travelling light this time. They did not request me to bring anything else, so I didn't.

I'll meet up with the fellows in about 2 hours, and in 10 to 15 hours we should be on a plane moving towards our destination.

I'm finally employed again

2004-03-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

Like I've been talking about, I've not been doing aynthing useful for the last few months. After Iraq, and a lot of middle-east hopping, I settled down, and tried out a number of jobs. But I don't really have much of an interest in normal jobs. So I've been looking around for a job in the field again.

I scouted around, and someone must have mentioned my name somewhere, because this fellow called "Jack" called me up. He said that he knew I was good with computers, and that I had access to a lot of underground information channels (from my time in the U.N, as well as contacts to the russian hacker underground). There is a mercernary information channel I am part of, but they also have access to that. That is one of my assets.

Also, they know I play with high-tech toys, and that I have good contacts in hong-kong and malaysia that can be covered up over my fathers companies, as well as Jasmines business in Lebanon.

He has only given me a rough sketch of what we are going to do, but it has something to do in an African country. I do not think it has anything to do with equitorial guinea like those other mercenaries who got captured. They won't tell me yet.

Anyways, so he called me up to capetown yesterday, and I drove up down there. He had a nice house up on waterfront, quite large, and he called me in. He was a large sort of fellow, quite soft, so I he must be some type of recruiter or something, he does not look like he does field work.

He explained the details to me, and offered me 400 000 rand for a couple of months of activity, nd prhaps a bit more later if I conitnue working witht em.

He said that I would get standard guns and all, but that this would not really be a warfare mission, but something a bit covert, even if a bit open.

I'll keep you posted.

Dirty Love

2004-01-16T00:41:00.000-08:00

When I was in Sierra Leone a while ago, deep in rebel territory, I met a girl. She was dirty, wearing a single uncut cloth about her body, and holding a bucket. She was standing at a river, watching us approaching in our Toyota Land Cruisers, hardly moving. She just looked.

I didn't notice her. She was just another spectator, one of the hundreds of villagers we had driven by, just another two of the hundreds of eyes that had watched our heavy cars roll by, and just another face that would be dirtied by the dust kicked up as our cars rolled through.

But the car ahead of mine stopped, and someone poked his head out of the window to ask her some question. Somebody else decided he needed to swell the river a bit with his water, and the stop-for-directions became a general stretching of legs event, with about 20 armed men either shooting streams of water or creaking as they stretched their limbs.

I walked up to the girl, and as I approached, I saw that she wasn't normal. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. Her body was lithe and strong, her carriage tall, graceful and strong, her body muscles accentuated in a way only physical hard work can create. She was like Grace Jones in the James Bond film, but her face was as beautiful as her body.

Her eyes were soft and gentle, yet burning with a fiery sort of rage. She looked like she would kill to protect her land, the land we were driving through.
A bit astonished, I tapped her shoulder, perhaps wanting to know that I could be as irressitable to a simple village girl I was to the women back in Paris, and started to ask her her name. Two words had hardly escaped my lips when she flung her head back and swung around in a quick motion, and hit me in the middle of my stomach. I saw the glint of metal, and looked down in astonishment to see a knife buried through my body armour. I felt a small pinch as the tip of the knife touched and scratched my stomach.

The man beside me dragged her from me, pushed her away, aimed his sub-machine gun at her, and squeezed the trigger. She screamed as the bullet hit her, and fell to the ground thrashing. I shouted that the shooter should stop, and luckily he did. She lay on the ground, shouting and yelling words in a language I could not understand.

I bent over her, and examined the gunshot. It had passed through the right side of her stomach, near the edge, and would not be a fatal gunshot. Would not be, if there were a hospital around here. But there was no hospital here. Out here, people either were alive or they were dead, there were no dying people.

On my directions, the men picked her up, a doctor bandaged her up, and she entered my car, and we drove on. I said we would drop her by in the next town we got to.

We sat in silence in the car, the smell of perspiration and agitation in the air-conditioned air.

I started talking to her in English. After an initial period of silence, she started replying in mono-syllables. To my suprise, she spoke english with a british accent. She had problems understanding a bit of my strong south african accent.

A few hours into the trip, we were conversing like old friends. She had been born in England, and lived there till she was ten, when her Sierra Leonan born father came back. He was a doctor, and had dropped her in his village, where he believed her to be safe. Then he had left, to go doctor the wounded in the battlefields, and he had never come back.

She lived with some old people in the village, most of the youth either having left it in fear of death, or left it because they were not afraid of death, and wanted to fight.

We talked, and chattered, and gossiped. She was one of those rare people who can talk to me without any self-consiousness, who can simply say what they think with thought to etiquette, or social status. She looked like a wild cat from the bush, and spoke like something wild, but brought up in a zoo.

I unconsiously slipped into the charm-mode, grabbing her hand, stroking her arm, doling out compliments. She reacted like a normal girl talking with a normal boy would react, flirting a bit, teasing me.

The situation was surreal, a girl with a bulletwound, drugged on painkillers, being driving hundreds of kilometers away from her home, and flirting with one of the mercenaries of the group that had just shot her.

The green foilage slipped by the dusty windows, changing to brown savannah, merging with red hills. The dust path became grey tar, the grey tar changed to a deep red as the sun fell. We stopped at a small town, and searched for a hotel.

I asked if she preferred to sleep with the group of the other men,or if she would stay in my room. I mentioned that the men slept 6 per room, but I slept alone in my room. She looked up sharply, then looked away towards the horizon. She looked down at the ground, and said she would stay with me. I took her hand, and it squeezed mine. I felt her racing pulse, and felt the damp sweat on her palm.

I left her sitting in the front seat of the Land Cruiser, and went to my room, undressed, and lay myself in bed. Several hours passed, and I drifted between wake and sleep, but still mostly awake. Then the door opened with hardly a sound, and I heard her prepare to sleep. I was now awake, and felt her enter the other side of the bed.

I stayed silent for a while, before slowly reaching over to touch her. My touches became bolder, and I felt her body respond. But she stayed silent, and stayed on her side of the bed. I continued, till at a point, she was pulled up again me, and asked me if I loved her. I said yes. She said she loved me also. She was 17 years old.

I climbed over her, pulled the sheets over us, and switched off the light. Soon, she started to sigh, then those sighs became soft squeels of pain. She panted, and I could tell that she was feeling pain, and not pleasure. But at that point, I could not stop.

After 15 minutes, I rolled back to my side of the bed, and dozed off.

Early in the morning, the drivers of the cars tooted 3 times, and the men struggled into their clothes, and appeared one by one, and seated themselves in the car. I also woke up as the horns sounded, and picked up and pulled on my clothes.

As I turned to look at the girl, I saw that the bed was covered in blood. Bullethole blood. It was not the fresh red of a clean wound, it was not the dried crust of a long-dead man. It was a dirty dirty brown, ugly blood, the blood itself witness and victim of a night of lust, pain, weakeness and hate.

She lay there, breathing deeply, a deep but dry wound in her tummy. Her face was grotesque, twisted in remembered agony, yet peaceful and content at the same time.

I turned away, burning with fear and self-hate, and wanting to get away from the room and the stink of sperm and blood. I ran into the car, and shouted for the men to enter the car, that we had to be somewhere. The men quickly filled up the car, and as we left, I gave the gateman a small bundle of money, and told him to get a doctor for the girl in the room. He looked at me, and slowly winked.

As my car drove out of the gates, I turned and saw a pair for dirty brown eyes looking at me through the protective grills of the room I had slept in. I saw it again in those eyes, that same old dirty dirty love.

2003-12-29T15:18:00.000-08:00

Lordy, my connection is flakey.

Momma, I killed a man

2003-12-29T14:59:00.000-08:00

The day before yesterday, I ran into the streets with my AK47, that old gun with the old blood stain in the corner, a series of scratches on the handle, foldback handle, and a brand new notch on the rust splattered barrel. I squeezed the trigger as I ran, my white robe chasing after me, jumping playfully into and out of the mud puddles on the street.

Fire flared from the snout, people screamed and ran from the streets, their terrified shouting seemed to be the echoes of my yells. I got myself a new set of prescription glasses recently, and I saw clearly as the American sitting on the top of the heavy sitting vehicle turned towards me with a shocked expression.

It was a young black man, and his expression was like that of a little boy who just realises that he just did something wrong. He started to swerve the machine gun he was sitting on towards me as I squeezed out 3 more bullets in his direction. I didn’t see the bullet hit him, I didn’t see him jerk. I saw him slide outwards, and drape across the top of the car.

Then the car jerked into motion, and I saw him start to slide gently off the car. Then I was in an alley, tucking my gun into my robe, and running.

As I ran through the narrow and muddy alley, I heard explosions and more gunshots. I heard the roar of a machinegun. I heard a mortar land and bang. The machine gun stopped. I also stopped, and bent over, gasping for air.

A lone rifle chattered in the background. After a few seconds of lonely firing, that last sound died out also. There was about a minute of utter silence, in which time I folded my legs, and sat myself down on a mat. Then the slow piping of a siren started.

I thought about that young black American, and thought about the letter his momma would get. Momma, I killed a man, my life begins today, Momma, your son got killed, your life ends today.

2003-10-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

Why can I not display the bloody side pics?

2003-10-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

John Ben Younes has dug himself out of his grave, and comes back to haunt you.

The retaking of the bridge

2003-04-23T23:07:00.000-07:00

I stood with the 3 young men, and we looked at the tank sitting on the Saddam bridge in Baghdad, and pointing its snout towards us contemptuosly. It sat like a big ugly fly, flicking its head to the left or the right every now and then, and spitting fire.

On the wall across the street from us, there was a large uneven splash of red brown blood, and a crumpled shirt below the wall. A man had been running away from the fire, but had not been able to run faster than the beast could shoot. As we had watched him run along the wall, the bullet holes had marked the walls behind him, following him, and racing faster than he could run. In the last moment, when the bullets were a meter behind him, he had jumped into the air, almost as if he wished he would be taken by God into safety. Born by the wings of angels away from the desperate panic. But that didn’t happen. The large caliber tank bullets hit him, and flung him against the wall, splashing blood all over the wall. He jerked as he fell, and twiched for several minutes.

That was 30 minutes ago, and at the moment, the 3 men beside me all had rocket propelled grenade launchers in their hands, and were about to go swat the large and ugly fly off the bridge. They wanted to attack that huge piece of death metal with its massive gun with their little weapons.

The young man beside me was called Sam. An all american name, but it was the short form of some arabic name. I had stayed with him the night before, and we had talked deep into the night. He was gripped by the rage of the 22 year old against the injustices of the world, and he believed that he would save the Baghdad, Iraq and the World in the morning. We will fight, and will die in Baghdad, he proclaimed loudly every now and then. Nobody will ever capture Baghdad without killing the 5 million residents.

His non-violent ambitions were modest – he was working at the zoo, and hoped to become the animal keeper when the old man retired. He spoke with tenderness and humour of the funny camels, the loud lions, the donkeys, the monkeys. He was a story teller, and that night, when we were not talking of the battle outside, and when the bombs did not drown out our voices, it was like one night of the thousand and one Arabian nights.

But today, the time had come for him to fight the fight, and to save the world. I did not bother telling him that I had once wanted to save the world, but I had now decided it was more practical to simply save myself. He was young, and he would find out soon enough that the fight was not a glorious task.

“God will lead us to victory,” the men yelled as they burst out and ran in the direction of the tanks. A camera man ran with them. They ran under the bridge, and shortly afterwards, after heavy fire from the tank, I saw them run out. The first man to come out was limping, and collapsed soon. Blood spread from him into the floor. 3 other men came out from under the bridge. They were running, and a hail of bullets was hitting around them. Their weapons were gone.

They reached us. “Where is Sam!” I asked, because he had not come back out. Wounded, and lying under the bridge, they indicated. “Go get him!” I exclaimed. The men turned away, and they glanced at the walls cracked by the hail of bullets. I saw they wouldn’t go, and my lip curled in contempt of these freedom fighters.

I ran across to the police car we had used to reach the area and drove up under the bridge. Immediately I entered their view, the tanks started firing heavy caliber bullets at my car. I felt the heavy thuds in the body of the car, and panic gripped me, flooding my mind with senseless fear.

I reached the body, grabbed Sam, pulled him into the car, and reversed out of the area under the bridge. The car was peppered with bullet holes, and it was a miracle that I hadn’t been hit.

Sam lay in the passenger seat, and he was crying. It was not because of his wounds that he cried, he cried because the bullets that had shattered his leg has also shattered his belief and faith in God. He cried because he had fought a battle, a David against Goliath battle, a fight for freedom against an invading enemy, and Goliath had won. Sam had not even been able to shoot the single grenade from his gun before he was shot.

The hospitals were full, so Sam was taken care of at his home by his sisters. They were 10 and 13 years old, and they cried as the bathed the open wounds of their brother.

But a lot more was wounded that day. And some of those wounds may never heal.

My blogging almost gets me captured

2003-04-02T11:57:00.000-08:00

Like I mentioned previously, I am now in the syrian desert. I’ve got my laptop and some lesser equipment with me (which were in the humvee I drove to the british camp), and I’m living off some ready made meals, and hope to get to some life sometime soon. But how did I get here, and why am I not in Iraq? Well, it is this damned blogging that I do.

Everybody wants to leave their mark on the world. I go off to fight in places that I probably will never come back from, and I want my story to be written down somewhere. It is more than a journal, my very thoughts are represented by each one of my comments, and were I to get eaten by a bunch of vultures tommorow, my words will stay forever on this ol web. Well, at least till the blogspot server crashes.

And that is why I try to post my stories daily. If I do not have internet access, I send emails to my bodyguards in france, Yusuf, Jose or Jamal. Those are all pseudonyms.

I blog of things that are past, and only when I am out of danger. But Yusuf made a mistake in posting an article while I was still with the British, and some reader of the blog decided to contact the authorities, and they ran a routine test and discovered that I indeed existed. But let me start from the beginning.

The day after I arrived, I stood up, and went out looking for nurse Jasmine. I am a charming sort of chap, and it had been a while since I had female company, so it was only natural. I detected her shortly, sitting in a trench and drinking tea. I joined her, and we spoke a bit. She was from Kuwait, and had volunteered to join the British squad as a nurse because they were short of medical personel. It soon turned out that she had been to Tunisia, and even visited the area where I spent my childhood days several times. It was an nice distracting conversation in arabic.

I soon turned on the charm, and got a promise for a date later that night, supposing nothing came up like a bunch of dead and dying soldiers, or a rain of falling bombs. I wondered where I would take her off to, but there is always the date at a ridge where one can see the stars. And we would see a lot of shooting stars that night, yes, shot from Iraqi guns.

But alas, missfortune struck me a heavy blow. As I walked back to the camp, a commanding officer summoned me and demanded to see my papers, having apparently been contacted by some people from london. I told him they were missing. He immediately ordered my arrest. I was grapled, and didn’t resist, and my hands were tied. All my gear was stuffed into a rucksack, and I was thrown into the back of a van, and the van started driving off towards the south.

My guard was Private Tom from london city, with whom I had just the night before had the long entertaining conversation. We continued the conversation, and while just as entertaining, it was about other things, like me being a traitor, and him wanting to shoot me like the dog he claimed I was.

I waited till we were at a location roughly halfway between Basrah and Um Qasr, then I displayed what several years of fighting with South Africans teaches you. I hopped to my feet, implanted my boot between his teeth (afterwards, I had to remove a tooth from the sole), and then knocked him out with a head butt. The driver did not notice, because the window between the back and front of the truck was small, dirty, and grilled.

I then looked for a sufficiently sharp corner in the truck, which wasn’t all too hard, and 5 minutes of friction caused the rubber holding my hands to snap. I slung on my rucksack, took Toms' gun, gathered up Toms’ teeth and placed them in a strategic location where he could locate them easily, and dropped off the back of the truck.

I lay still for a while, till the truck disappeared over the next dune. Then I started trecking towards the Syrian desert. I purchased a camel at the next village, and 2 days later I arrived at the edge of the desert.

2003-04-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

Syrian desert is blazing hot

2003-04-01T08:42:00.000-08:00

My equipment

My team is being paid close to $4 million for the mission we are to perform. I have been careful not to be specific of the mission, and I will only talk about those aspects of the mission when I am out of the region, and all my men are out of danger.

With that budget, we were able to stock ourselves up with the latest high tech equipment. Here is a description of some of them.

1. A laptop. This is a small laptop with a foldback satellite dish for internet access on the back. It is preconfigured to use up to 3 different satellites, and we have got access to russian military channels. The laptop is so sturdy that it can set on fire and come out unscratched. The keyboard is foldeable and made of cloth. It has got a tiny printer inside, but no internal drives. Cost: $11 000

2. A watch computer: This is a largish watch with a big LCD screen, somewhat like that of a mobile phone. It uses an operating system based on symbian OS, and apart from the normal calender and time functionality, it also sports a plug on the top where you can attach a small light that creates a virtual keyboard on any surface. It pulses to measure where your fingers strike. Without this attachment, it is merely a watch. Once the pulse keyboard is attached, the screen changes to a one line word processor. It has got 128 MB of memory. The most valuable feature however is the signal capability. It pulses signals across many frequencies at high speed, so even if there were a radio detector nearby, it could not detect that the watch was sending a signal. The downside is that there has to be a retransmitter within 5 kilometers of the watch. I usually have mine in my backpack, but it can easily be detected because of the signal strength it gives of, and because it does not go across multiple frequencies, so I cannot infiltrate with the booster. The watch can passively receive radio signals, and indicates to me that it has received a signal by vibrating a small panel at the bottom. When I receive a critical signal (which I have not, up to now), and I do not touch the watch within 30 seconds, it sends a small electric shock. If I still do not respond to it, it switches itself off within 15 minutes, and cannot be reactivated again without a dongle. Cost: $37 000.

3. A heat masking trenchcoat: This was designed by an Israeli firm for the Israeli paramilitary, and was copied in China. The coat masks body heat by measuring ground temperature, and regulating temperature of the coat to the ground temparature. It is powered by battery strips, and needs to be recharged ever now and then. When the ground is very cold, there is an additional trenchcoat you wear before the heat masking to keep yourself from freezing. Cost: $250.

4. Night vision goggles.

5. Terrain exploring software: We run this on our laptops, and it uses satellite signals to tell us exactly how the terrain in front of us looks like. We can cut through mountains and ridges. When access is not blocked, it can use current satellite pictures to actually show us 3 dimensional pictures of enemies hiding behind obstructions. Cost: $90 000

6. RPGs: These are specially constructed rocket propelled grenades that are only slighly large than bullets. They are placed in special guns, and demolish anything they hit. Very useful indeed.

7. Radar detectors and radar devices

8. Personel detection flares: These are small rockets that scan the enviroment for movement using cameras, and send back information to the software on the laptops using frequency hoping radio signals. They work up to 5 kilometers

9. Terrain mapping flares: These are like the personal detection flares, but they use radio echo as well as light to map the terrain up to 5 kilometers ahead. However, one has to shoot multiple to properly scan the enviroment.

10. Shut down 'grenades': When we are compromised these shut down grenades are activated, and all our equipment immediately stops functioning till they are reactivated with dongles.

11. Light ray guns: These shine a bright light ray into the eyes of enemies, blinding them for a while

There are others, but those are the major stuff we have.

Death by bomb

2003-03-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

I stood with the British, and watched them bomb my friends on the other side of the city fence. I watched the sergeant place the rocket in the launcher, hoist it on his shoulder, saw the puff as he released it, and watched it rise high into the sky, spewing flames, and racing to destroy lives and homes.

I wished in that moment that I could stop time, and walk into the town, and save the people that that missile would hit. I would slave away, carrying their time frozen bodies into safety, then I would carry the items they had worked their entire lives to buy out of the building that the missile would hit. When time resumed, the missile would hit an empty building, and there would be no sorrow that day.

But that could not be. The missile rose high into the sky, turned itself downwards, and raced towards a house. I imagined the child, standing on the balcony, and watching the star falling towards him. He would point at it, the sort of terror in his heart that no child should ever experience, and the star would hit below him. The building would collapse, and he would grasp at the falling balcony, gasping in the dust, his eardrums smashed by the explosion. He would land on the floor, for a moment alive and screaming. Then the roof of the house would fall on him, crushing him. The sharp metal pieces in the building would rip of his leg, but he wouldn’t feel that, because his brain would be crushed, no longer able to house his soul.

I turned away, because I could not watch the missile land. But I could not turn away from my thoughts. They filled in the gaps all too well, and I cried inside for the child I would never meet, and never know. My heart broke for his friends, who, as they hid in terror from the rain of bombs, would forget their own fear for a moment, to weep for their dead friend. I died inside that day. I died inside for his mother, who would see her life, and her reason for living dead and battered on the floor, for a crime he never commited, and never understood.

I felt hate for the people I stood beside, and when the bomber joked about the number of people he must have got, I felt like smashing his face in with the butt of my rifle. But I did not. I laughed with him, and that laugh was the most difficult thing I ever did in my life, because I laughed as my heart drowned in tears. I laughed although my mind was stunned at the brutality of the man.

But I laughed because it was the only way of saving the next child. I laughed, because my laugh of today, though it kills a part of me, could save my people tommorow from the speakable brutality of the men who stand beside me, and laugh with me.

Nursery rhymes, sung in Arabic

2003-03-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

As we drove towards the british camp outside Basrah, I noticed blood on the floor of the car. Much blood. Then I noticed blood on my hands. And on my arms. I raised my head up, which suddenly felt very heavy, and I saw that my shirt was drenched in blood.

I looked up, and looked around, and I was walking through the desert. There was a chair in the middle of the desert, that I was walking towards. I needed to get to that chair, so I could sit down. Sitting down was important, very important. But as I walked towards it, the chair started sinking into the sand. The chair was in the middle of quicksand, and I stopped because I did not want to die. Just 3 meters away, and I would never reach the chair.

I felt hands lift me out of the car, and as they dropped me in the stretcher, it turned out that it wasn’t actually a stretcher after all, but a dark deep hole. I had been terribly tricked, and I grabbed into the air, trying to cling to the sides of the hole as I fell. There was screaming and shouting around me, and as I looked down into the hole, I saw that it was a well, and it was filled with blood. The blood was frothing and foaming. I heard huge whoops of someone taking their breath, and I saw the face of a man shortly lift itself out of the blood, take a last gulp of air, and then sink into the blood.

I heard a song, an arabic melody that my father had sometimes sang to me. My father was a busy man, but sometimes, when he came home at night, he would take me and my brother Khaled up on his knee, and sing this song. The song was about the man who had lived in the belly of a fish for 3 days, because he had been afraid to fulfill the mission that god had appointed him. He had ran away when he should have stayed and fought his personal Jihad, but as my father explained to me, God had given him another chance to win, but only after making him suffer. My father always completed his missions, and he taught us never to be weak.

The song continued, and I started to come to my senses. I drifted into and out of sleep, and when I finally woke up, I saw that I was in a hospital tent. There was another man on the matrass next to mine, and he slept quiet. I hardly heard him breath, and as I watched him, I felt he was near death. He muttered to himself every now and then, and his talk made no sense. His face and upper body were blackened, and his eyebrows seemed to have been burnt off.

The door of the tent was ripped open, and a soldier was carried in, groaning. He was dropped on the matrass next to mine, and a doctor and two nurses started fussing around him, slicing open his uniform, and then slicing open his arm to remove some chunks of metal.

I was getting more alert by the minute, alert enough to notice what a lovely backside the nurse next to me had. I looked myself over, and concluded that my injuries were minimal, a large number of bloody cuts, probably by all the flying metal from the mortar, and my blackout and hallucinations had most likely been because of loss of blood, and not because of any major wounds. To be safe, I checked that my important appendages were still attached. The medical personel saw me stir, and the nurse I had previously noticed turned to attend to me.

The nurse looked arabic, and she was stunningly beautiful. I was already weak from my wounds, and the sight of her finely moulded features made me even weaker. Had I been standing, I would probably have needed to sit down. And I noticed that I was dressed in a dress, some kind of hospital gown. Where my skin a bit lighter, she would have notice me blush.

“I’m Nurse Jasmine”, she said, in arabic accented english, and in the very same voice I had heard sing my fathers song in the middle of the night.

“I’m Jeff Steinberg”, I said, in a perfect American accent. “What happened?”. She proceeded to explain the details of the battle up till then, and I didn’t hear a lot of what she said, I was too distracted by the movements of her perfect lips.

She left soon with the other personell, and I looked across at my new neighbour. He turned towards me, and smiled.

“Hey, I’m Tom Thompson.” We went through the introductory formalities, and started chatting. He was from london, and spoke with an awful accent that I could hardly understand. He was a funny chap, andd I actually enjoyed his company, enemy though he might be.

I’d been to london a few times, and we talked about many banal things, all the better to get our minds of the war. He gave me tips about clubs, I told him funny stories about my orthodox Jewish parents, and our family voyage into a comedy club that turned out to be borderline pornography. He told me about his father, whose major battle in life was to save the London doves from the London cats. He had me in stitches time and time again, or rather, almost had me bursting my stitches. Literally.

He was a nice friendly chap, and I almost felt bad that I was not fighting on his side. But my thoughts turned with increasing frequency to the lovely arabic woman who knew the nursery rhyme my father had sung for me, and which he had always told me he had written just for me.

2003-03-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

this is posted by yusuf ,the friend of john .john sends this by email .

An American for the day

As daylight dripped through the dusty air, I watched the other men stir, and open their eyes. I was dressing up in my American uniform, gathering the neccesary papers, and changing them to reflect the name tag on my captured uniform. Here in the desert, we had planted a small signal amplifier, and my mission was to infiltrate the British ranks, and with my computer, a radio link and the amplifier, keep the Iraqi troops informed about what was about to happen. The troops in Basrah were getting badly hit, and they needed more information about the positions of the British troops on the outside.

My infiltration computer is my watch. It has got a small device you can attach to the top of it, and this device shines a light to the table, and the light is shaped like a keyboard. You can type on this keyboard, and it is saved in the memory of the watch. Every now and then, it transmits the signals. The range is good for a number of kilometers in flat ground.

Apart from this watch, I was standard American. I don’t usually use an American accent, but I can adopt a bronx accent when I want. My face, my name and my voice had become American. In my Humvee, I would not have any trouble infiltrating the troops on the other side of the river. Or so I thought.

15 minutes after dawn break, I started off, and the other members of the team also prepared to leave, but in the opposite direction. I drove slowly, heading down south, so it would appear as if I was coming from the convoy, and had somehow managed to get across the river. The guns were silent behind me, and I felt the peace of the desert. It was quiet, and so devoid of life. I wondered why people lived here. I’m a city boy, and the rural life seems to me to be the most boring life possible.

A bullet hit my tire.

The humvee sagged and swerved, and I panicked, and wrenched at the steering, grabbing for my small M16 at the same time. The car was hit again, and firing started in earnest. I cowered down in the car, and saw the metal plate in front of my face dent with a loud crack as a bullet hit it. After a while, the shooting stopped, and I saw shadows appear in the dust through the door crack, gradually taking form as they slowly moved towards the car. I stayed crouched, even when I felt the cold muzzle of the gun press against my neck.

I looked up, and Iraqi militia men were in a group around the car, their faces grim, and their gun barrels aimed at my heart. One grabbed at my gun, and disarmed me. They dragged me out, stripped me of my knife, my pistol and the keys of the car. They tied my hands, threw me in the back of the humvee, and we started driving back north, between a small convoy of two other jeeps. I had been ambushed, and very cleverly. I should not have been daydreaming.

I saw the futility of trying to say that I was fighting on their side. I had nothing to prove that, apart from my halting arabic. So I went along with them, hoping that I would come across someone who had heard of my group, and could confirm my story.

30 minutes later, we entered Al Basrah, and after a few meters, a number of local people gathered around the car, waving Kalashnikows in the air, and yelling. I was propped up so I could be seen by everyone, and I started getting afraid. The people had hate in their eyes, and the teenagers were trying to hit at me. Someone threw a stone, and it hit my helmet with a painful thunk. The guns started off by being waved in the air, then they started shooting in the air. I started getting afraid they would aim at me, and shoot me.

So I decided to speak in arabic to my capturers, and explain to them who I was, and that I was fighting on their side. But immediately I spoke in arabic, the men in the jeep, started screaming insults and curses into my ear. They screamed that I had come to kill them, and that they would kill me first. A man started screaming that I had killed his mother, and that he would tear off my balls for what I had done to him. I gave up talking after a while, because nobody listened. I sunk my head, and ignored them.

Then a house two blocks away blew up. The crowd screamed and ran, tripping over stones and themselves, and everybody jumped out of the vehicle. I was dragged out, and pulled into the next house, together with about 15 other people. We were all crowded into this small front lobby. I noticed that there was blood on the floor. Much blood.

A young boy was peeking out the window, and would yell shortly before we heard a bomb land. The room was quiet, almost as if they hoped that by staying silent, the bombs would not hit them. The a bomb hit something very near, and the wind was sucked out of the room, and we swayed, and some people stumbled. I heard beams creak, and concrete crack. There was a lull in the bombing, and people started dashing out of the house, down the street and away. After a short while, when the bombing restarted, but in another part of the town, I was dragged and hurried out, down the street to some kind of official building. Someone said that the Americans would bomb that building, and that they would kill me, in a hopeful voice.

But in the building, there was a bunker, and I was led inside, my hands were untied, and I met with some local leader. He seemed to be some political leader, probably Baath, and not a military commander. I started to explain to him what my situation was. In the middle of my sentence, the building was bombed.

We were flung like ragdolls against the walls, and I quickly collected myself, and threw myself towards the stairs. It seemed like I flew up the stairs, so fast did I run, and dashed into the street. I started running up the street, and seconds later, the heavy clacking sound of a kalaschnikow started behind me. I felt the air trail of the bullet pass by my face, and quickly veered off into a compound, jumped over the fence, and ran round to the back, planning to escape into the next compound.

The gunfire from the front was getting intense. I saw bullets hitting the top of the fence, but still grabbed it, and threw myself over. There was glass stuck on the top, probably to prevent burglers, and I cut my finger badly as I performed the stunt. People had already gathered on this side of the fence, however, and as I landed the bullets where already hitting. I veered off to the right, and burst into the house. There was a scared looking boy holding a gun inside, and probably wondering why his people were trying to kill him. I grabbed the gun from him, broke open a window, and started shooting outwards. There was a yell, and someone fell.

We started a gunfire exchange, and after a while, their gunning reduced in intensity. Then there was a roar of mortar, and the building shook in its foundations. A few seconds, and another one, this time a hit. A wall broke at the top, and concrete flew in the room. I ran to a back room, and the next few mortar rounds did not do much damage. Then they got a direct hit, demolishing the front part of the house.

I was about to run out, shooting for my death, when an RPG hit the position of the person firing mortar, and blowing the device and man apart. Further large caliber bullets hit their positions, apparently coming from the british troops a distance away.

I didn’t need to be begged. I ran towards the back, jumped over the fence again, ran up the street, switched on the Humvee with the emergency lever, and hit the accelerator . I squeelled around a corner, took a detour away from the fire, and roared towards the british positions. They took a few pot shots as they saw me approach, but someone must have pointed out the make of the vehicle, because that soon stopped. They watched me approach, and I stopped, and collapsed out of the vehicle.

They approached me, and lifted me up, and took me into their camp. I couldn’t speak, and they didn’t ask me any questions. But I saw the admiration in their eyes. They had rescued a Real American Hero.

Torture helps

2003-03-25T12:33:00.000-08:00

As we drove away from the dead Usman, the wind started to decimate the mound of sand that buried him. Shortly before the grave passed out of sight, his hand was uncovered, and his curled fingers gave the appearance of a final grotesque wave. I turned away, and fear gripped coldly at my stomach for the first time.

I felt anger seep into me. Anger combats and destroys fear. When one would be afraid, one can be angry instead.

We drove for many more hours and came near to Basrah. British and American troops were on the other side of the river, and we were about 20 kilometers away from them on the east side of Basrah. We parked the Jeeps, and I and two other men entered the American Humvee we had previously taken, and made a big detour towards the American lines, which were across the river. A massive duststorm had gathered at this time, which made our mission so much easier.

We drove to within 2 kilometers of the troops, undressed to our underwear, carrying rifles and knives, rowed across the river in small boat, and walked up a few kilometers behind the troops, then walked into the camp.

Many people were occupied, and the few people who saw us must have thought it strange to see dust covered men in green underwear, but they did not question us. We walked into a tent, where two americans were sitting, looking totally worn out. I walked up to the nearest man, grabbed his head and covered his mouth. James, my companion, ran up to and stabbed the other man in the neck, cutting his windpipe. He dragged his head backwards toallow air from his lungs to leak, and disable him from shouting. The man died after a few gurgles.

I let the man I was gripping watch this, then I broke his neck. He was young, maybe 24, and he didn’t look important enough to be worth questioning. To lower moral amongst the american troops a bit, and to announce our presence, I removed both his eyes. James decapitated the other man, and put his head in a bag. We then placed both men in sleeping bags, sealed them, and placed them to cover the blood on the floor.

We preened a bit, and decided that we looked like American soldiers. I played a bit with an American rifle, but it didn’t have anything that my modified Kalaschnikow did not have. So I kept my AK, though the possibility existed that it might raise suspicions when we went out.

And go out we did. We walked out, into the midst of the troops, and joined them to fire towards the town.After about 30 minutes, we began to advance. At this point, I had made out who was in control, and we both neared the man. At an oppurtune moment, when guns roared, and the swirling dust served to obfuscate, James shot him in the arm.

He screamed a high pitched girls scream, and dropped. I and James ran towards him, hoisted him on our soldiers and started taking him towards the camp, apparently to help him get medical attention. About half way between camp and front, we veered off, and ran towards the shore. The man resisted, and I knocked him so hard on the head, he might have fractured his head. I heard something crunch, but it might have been the piece of wood I was holding.

James, who is a large man, hoisted him on his back, and we ran the kilometers to our small boat. We dropped the man inside, and quickly roared back. Some more running, and we were at the Humvee, in full American camouflage, and with an American unit commander in our posession.

We were totally exhausted, and when we arrived where the rest of the team was, we had to rest for a long while before we could do anything more. When I finally felt fit again, the American was tied up, and stripped down to his underpants. Awaiting my mercy.

I felt a joyful glee. I felt that power that goes to your head, and corrupts your morals. The power that makes you want to watch others suffer at your hands, that makes you enjoy seeing them flinch when you raise your hand to remove dust from your face. My eyes gleamed.

“Curtis,” I read from his name tag. “You do realise you are in enemy hands, do you not?”. He looked at me with a mildy stubborn look on his face, and did not reply. A strong one, it seemed. I was going to enjoy this.

“You are not a prisoner of war. You are a war casualty, who just isn’t dead yet”, I explained to him. “You can either die quick, or Enrico Callan is going to make you die slow.” He blanched as he heard my name. “You know my uncle Tony, do you not?”, I spoke, smoking a thin cigarette. “You killed him. I am him, reborn. But I understand our inherited mental disorder because I studied it. And I know better than to fight it. I enjoy it, and Callan the elder never did.”

But the man still did not speak. I stripped him naked, and proceeded to surgically remove his finger nails. When he kept silent through that process, I saw that I had a hard nut. So I crushed his little finger, forced his mouth open, and made him swallow it. He choked on a splintered bone, and coughed blood. He started crying.

I explained to him that I would remove his eyes, and he could spare himself that pain by telling us all we wanted to know. But he didn’t. So I injected him full of drugs, and bound his eyes. Then I started speaking to him, explaining to him the horrors that awaited him. The drugs enhanced the fright, and gave him the don’t-really-care attitude. He pooped in his pants at the moment, and the shit ran down his leg. I kicked him, and he went sprawling on the ground. Limbs bent and loose. He babbled, and told us battle strategies and the names of his cats, and his birthdate.

Then I took him to edge of the camp and shot him. When I came back, someone had vomited on the floor.

We left, in possesion of 3 American uniforms and an American vehicle. We drove about 5 kilometers away, and set up a small camp. We started working on our plan for tommorow, when we will start the demoralisation campaign.

I feel satisfied and fulfilled. My agony and craving is gone, stilled and dampened. Torture helps me feel better.

Dying in the desert sand

2003-03-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

Usman turned green about 12 hours ago. His cut arm swoll up, and watery red pus oozed out of the wound, dripping on the floor of the Jeep. It dried in the desert air, but still managed to infect the air with a sickly sweet smell.

I held a small desert flower in my hands, and it appeared so small and fragile in my large hands. Then I crushed it, and it stained my palms red. Red with blood. Hands that had killed, that had crushed a life, and which would forever be stained in the terrible colour of murder.

Usman sank into the corner of the car and start to cry. We could not hear him crying through the roar of the car, but we could see the tears run down his cheeks. A strong man, a man that was sent to fight and bring destruction on the heads of invaders was crying because of a cut arm.

We looked away, because we were also strong men. We would all cry like he was crying when our times came. When we lay by the roadside in a time to come, our life flowing our of our bodies, our eyes and minds open and willing, but having lost control over our bodies, we would cry like he was crying.

The jeep was throwing up huge clouds of dust and dirt and small objects that were landing at our feet, hitting our faces, and infecting our wounds. I idly wondered if it could have been a relative or friend of that small flower that I crushed that might be attacking the man with its poison.

Usman vomited, and the juice flowed between our legs, mixing with the dust on our boots, and forming small clumps of sand. Lines of blood streaked through the vomit, and I saw a half digested bean dance to the rhythm created by our car bouncing on the desert road.

We stopped, and doused the jeep floor with sand. It absorbed the liquid that was Usmans life, but would not gain any life of its own by doing that. The desert thirsted for liquid, and maybe that was why it beckoned to us, invited us to come and die in it, so that it would drink our blood. And we came, and we died, but it always seemed to want more.

We carried Usman out, and made him a bed in the desert. He vomited again, and the vomit disappeared into the dry desert sand. We gave him our water to drink, so he would not dehydrate, but his stomach rejected it, and the desert lapped it up.

We did not have much more water, and we were 100 kilometers from the next town. Usman started coughing, trying to get the sand out of his dry lungs. The sand was entering his lungs with each breath. The sand had come to claim him, to attack and ravage him, consume and absorb him, and finally, turn him into just more sand. It gleefully wrapped itself around him, sticking to the water dropplets on his face, and painting his face gray.

And with that grey face, sand clinging to his beard, him gasping for air, yet breathing sand, the desert absorbed his life.

In that moment, I saw years pass, and saw as he decayed in that spot, slowly collapsing into rotting flesh, and then into clumps of dirt, and finally became part of the desert. The desert that is growing larger by the minute, and which will eat us all, one day or the day after.

The battle of An-Nasiriyah

2003-03-23T12:37:00.000-08:00

We arrived at Nasiriyah at roughly the same time that the Americans arrived. We came in from the north, while they came in from the south. We slipped into the town shortly before the Americans started to encircle it, and contacted the guard that were in control the city. We were given rations, electricity to recharge batteries, clean clothes, and ear plugs and a bed in a bunker.

When I woke up, it was pitch dark, and there was the muffled booming from above that indicated that we were being attacked. I groped around, found a torch, and switched it on. The bunker was completely empty. I dressed up, grabbed my gear walked up the stairs. As I walked, my boots stuck to the ground - I shone my torchlight downwards, and saw that the ground was splotched with blood.

I came out of the bunker, and the building over the bunker was a burnt out shell. A soldier gestured from across the road. I ducked and ran across the road and joined the other soliders, who were aiming their rifles up the road. On inquiry, I learnt that the Americans had tried to enter the town, and had bombed a number of buildings. The building above the bunker had caught fire, and they had forgotten all about me. I was not pleased to hear that, but hey, they had things on their minds.

I started radioing my team, and 10 minutes later, we were gathered together in a trench, and formulating a plan. Our mission was not in Nasiriyah, but further on down. We had to get to the Americans at Basrah. The problem now was that Americans were surrounding our town, and with their helicopters, it would be difficult to get out of the town with vehicles. They were bombing everything mechanised that moved. So we made a plan.

We told the Iraqis to gradually cease fire, making it seem like the resistance was dying down. We placed a number of troops in two buildings, and told them to keep firing steadily. Pretty soon, as we expected, the Americans blew up both buildings. Our 'resistance had been crushed'. 2 hours later, American tanks and armoured carrriers rolled into the town, with troops running behind them.

When they were in the middle of the town, we sent two guards to surrender to them. They approached, and as the Americans reached to disarm them, the guard shot the commander. Immediately, all the americans focused on them, and literarily gunned them to shreds. Brave matyrs, those men were.

Immediately their attention was diverted, we ran towards them with grenades, and threw them below the tanks and personel carriers. From above, the guards opened machine gun fire, and threw molotov cocktails. The American troops ran and died, and lost about 30 of their vehicles in the town. As they ran, we pulled together the Iraqi army, and fought them back out of the town. They called for backup and the copters that were hovering came to the south suburb of the town, leaving the east relatively unprotected. My crew picked up a couple of jeeps, and an American humvee, and drove out at high speed, exchanging fire with the occaional company, but easily making it out.

We drove about 20 kilometers east, then started driving back southwards, passing through small Iraqi towns. The townspeople came to wave at us, the men who would sacrifice them to save them from the aggressors who wish to invade and occupy Iraq and steal its wealth.

After about 50 kilometers, we saw an American vehicle parked in the middle of the road. Some personel was working on it, changing a tire, I think. We immediately dropped into formation, and started firing and advancing. The fired back, and a battled raged for about 15 minutes. They did not have arial backup, and they were fighting against a really crack team. Soon, about half of their number were dead, and the other half were either wounded or sitting on the ground with their hands in the air.

We went towards them, mindfull of an ambush. Sure enough, as we reached, a soldier shot at our legs from underneat the van, and splinterred the ankle of Rahimi. As he howled in pain, We shoved our guns under neat the car, and let lose a barrage. Because of his massive armour, he was still able to sent lose another shot, which luckily did not hit anyone. He died soon, and we dragged him out and dumped him behind the truck.

"Let the vultures eat him", a comrade said. We packed the other prisoners on a jeep, and drove quickly towards south. In the next town, we contacted Iraqi guards, handed over the prisoners, and let the wounded man be sent up to control for treatment.

Then we continued southwards, having lost a man, but having gained valueable experience about how the Americans fight. We are still crawling downwards through the bad roads, hoping to hit a highway soon. I'm checking up on radio intercepts, which are being done by non-gov organisations, and which we paid for, and are receiving. Sat pictures are harder to get, but occasionally, they land in my email box. The internet is winning this war for us, I'd almost say.

The blood of the Americans stained the desert sand

2003-03-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

The news we are hearing from Iraqi soldiers heading north is that there are no oil wells on fire. The fires are all from oil PIPELINES, which were lit by American missiles as they fired at the troops in the towns. The fires are going out now that the oil supply has been turned off by the Americans.

And a colonel told me before we left that leader Hussein is not going to talk to the people for a while, because he wants the focus of the war not be him. He wants the war to be between the Iraqi people and the Americans, and not between Saddam and Americans. I see why he is a survivor. He is an excellent strategist.

Since yesterday night, we have been driving southwards. At the moment, we are between An Najaf and As Samawah. We are planning to coordinate attacks on American troops who we hear are in the Basrah area. One ‘exciting’ incident happened so far.

As me and 14 other men were driving in the night, we could hear the planes booming across our heads. About 8 men are non-Iraqi arab, like myself, and they got all worked up every now at then, and hurling classic insults like “evil imperialist donkeys!” into the howling air. I was collecting information from internet sources in the back of a jeep. Then I saw the picture.

The picture of the American soldier raising a flag over an Iraqi town. I felt angry, but that was small compared to the fearsome rage the picture transformed the men into. They started talking and shouting, screaming that the Americans would never take Arab land or oil, and went on and on. Then one of them must have reached a level of rage that he could no longer humanly control, grabbed a rifle, and started blasting at the planes passing above. We tried to stop him, but he continued shouting and shooting.

Now, we are riding in a specially heat shielded car that can only be detected at low heights, for example, with helicopters. Planes cannot read our heat signature. But they will read the gunshots clearly.

We were not sure if the Americans would send attackers to us or not, but just to make sure, we got out the car, switched it off, and took a rest. I couldn’t use my PC because of the radio signal.

30 minutes later, we were about to go on, when we heard the intermittent buzz, carried by the desert wind, of a vehicle. So we stayed put, dug ourselves into shallow sand trenches, and waited. Then the headlights came down the highway, and raced up towards us. We were sure it would be an Iraqi car, but to make sure, we drove our car into the middle of the road. When the driver saw that happening, he swerved, parked sideways, and started shooting in our direction. We didn’t reply, but tried to make contact on Iraqi radio frequency. There was no reply. The car reversed, and drove away.

We stayed put, wondering if those could be the Americans. 10 minutes later, we were attacked from the air, probably by an unmanned aircraft. One of our chaps, Usman was hit by some rock or something, and got a nasty cut in his arm. He wasn’t in a trench as he should have been.

I concluded that it must have been Amerian special ops. We decided to go get them.

As the bomb hit, we had all ran away from our car, carrying our backpacks with equipment. A few minutes later, it exploded, like we expected it would. Our trenchcoats absorb and disperse heat, and if we do not run together, it is impossible to detect us on the ground. Also, the radio we use is one of these new multiple frequency things, which change the frequency every minute based on a preprogrammed arrangement, so we could not be tracked by radio.

We organised, and moved a few kilometers up the road, and shooting detection flares up the road. These are very small missiles, which can go about 5 kilometers horizontally, and scan the ground for movements by taking multiple snapshots. So our computers can detect who is moving up to 5 kilometers ahead of us. Luckily for us, and unfortunaltey for the Americans, they were parked about 10 km down, waiting for us to die and let them by.

We formed our plan, and started a large encirclment movement. In about 30 minutes, we had formed a large circle around the enemy vehicle and we started moving towards them. From about 500 meters, Usman locked their metal vehicle with his radar guided small missile launcher. This is like an RPG, but smaller, and with smaller bullets. But the power is much larger.

He shot off the missile, and we dropped to the ground. A few moments later, the boom, and a confused clattering of semi automatic rifles. Then the shooting stopped. We moved in slowly, scanning the area with night vision goggles. We saw the car burning, and at least one dead person beside. As we neared, and were about 100 meters from the position, shooting started from behind the car. We dropped to the ground, and I radiod the man that was coming from that direction to take care of them. A few minutes later, a barrage of shooting from one of our guns (which are pretty large caliber), and the area seemed to be clear. We walked in, and 3 dead Americans together with 1 wounded one were lying around their smouldering vehicle.

Before we could stop him, Usman ran up to the American, and started shouting in Arabic at him. He was looking confused up at him, and then Usman grabbed the net of the helmet of the American, pushed his face against the muzzle of his rifle, and shot him.

Like I mentioned, we are using guns that are roughly equivalent to elephant guns in caliber, and the mess was horrific. The man was headless, and brains and skull was sprayed on our trenchcoats. We stood there, shocked, looking at the carnage.

But we had to get moving, so we grabbed the bodies, threw them into the truck, retreated, and blasted it again with the RPG, setting it on fire again, and leaving the bodies to burn.

Then we radiod the next town, and asked for a replacement jeep. For the next hour, we slept, and I dreamt of a blood stained desert, reaching as wide as the eye could see, and of which there was no beginning and no end.

2003-03-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

Driving to the front
We left about half of our men in the town, and drove towards the south about 3 hours ago. The invasion has starting southwards, and we plan to do what we came to Iraq to do, since the Iraqis seem capable of defending their towns. I'm sending this from the back of a rover, and as soon as I get another chance, I'll update this blog.

2003-03-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

Entering Iraq
We arrived in Bagdad late afternoon on the day after the first bombings. We met with our contact, an elderly and very calm soldier called Bakar. My troops is a high skill troop, with about 10 heavy artillery pros, a few reconn/planners/strategist like myself, some chemical guys, and some other misc.

We were separated from one another as we arrived in the city, and I and three of my men were taken to a house in the outskirts of Bagdahd, towards the north, where we received plain green uniforms, and rank stickers. I was placed at major, but it was explained that I was major only to the troops under our control, and was not allowed to order Iraqi troops that were not assigned to us.

To make it clear, my team and I are a specially trained team, what Americans would call Special Ops. Our job is to do the dangerous stuff that the Iraqi army will not or cannot do. We are being paid well, and the money has been deposited in an account in Jordan, and will be released upon our return by the Iraqi officials. If the Americans would pay us more, we would work for them, but it is pretty clear that they won't hire us. So the Iraqis trust us. We have a reputation, mostly being mercenaries from the defunct EO/Combat Solutions.

Late in the afternoon, we received a soviet style tracer (anti-aircraft gun), which the artillery guys were to look over. The other two chaps I arrived with showed me how to handle the gun.

Basically, it is a big metal, mounted on springs and swerveable to about 180° in all directions pointing upwards. I placed the catridge bag in the gun, and tested the trigger. The gun is very powerful. Before you shoot, you have to lock it into position, and in spite of that there is a great heat and clattering as it bounces on its shock absorbers. And it was so old, it felt like it would explode any minute.

Later in the day, we lifted the gun to the back of a dusty open back range rover with a rusty skin. I cut my hand on the back of the truck, and it seemed absurd to draw first blood in such an undramatic manner. We drove the Rover into the town, and joined an array of anti-aircraft guns, and dropped into the fox holes and trenches beside. Later in the evening, American planes came up in the sky. I was in control of the gun, just for fun.

How do the Iraqis do it? A plotter shouts out the coordinates of the plane when he gets it on his radar, and eveyone winches their gun into that general coordinate. Then he starts shouting out the coordinate movements of the plane, and every tracer is to shoot around the plane, based on his position. For example, I always had to shoot 0.05 behind the plane.

Then the bombs started dropping.

The Americans have missiles, and you can clearly see the fire burning in the sky, racing towards you. When they are high in the sky, it looks like they are coming right at you, and my heart jumped into my mouth whenever I heard the hiss and boom, and saw that death star racing towards the ground.

But as they drop, they race towards other targets, and we all smile nervously. Survived .. for now.

Later in the night, however, it got serious for us. We were moved to the bottom of a high rise ministry building, so that our backs would be covered as we shot towards the skies. This is a dangerous task, because big buildings get hit. But our open traces at the other location were being machined gunned from the sky with large caliber, so that area were getting a bit too dangerous.

At about 8pm, when it was already dark, I was sitting, and drinking tea while my companions, Jorg from South Africa and Rajid from Madagascar were handling the trace guns. And then, a huge explosive slammed into the side of the building, and the air displacement lifted us up into the air, and slammed us around. If you’ve ever been in a wave, you will know what I mean.

Debris was falling all around, and men were shouting. The hair on my skin felt singed, and I grabbed my rifle and ran out of the area. Most men cleared the area, but even as I moved away, I saw Iraqis driving army jeeps into the area. They lifted the anti-aircraft guns, and heaved them into the jeeps, even as chucks of cement fell on their heads.

I entered my jeep with Rajid – I did not see what happened to Jorg, and drove away from the scene. The building was empty I think, and there was a single ambulance driving into that area as we left. What surprised me was that the street lights were still on as we drove away.

2003-03-21T10:47:00.000-08:00

Fighting for Iraq
I’m a professional soldier, and Iraq is picking up soldiers at almost any price. If you have creds, contact me, and I can hook you up. I’ve been negotiating for the past 2 weeks, and together with a number of ex/current merenaries that the new south African laws against our groups hit as hard as they hit me, we’ve come to Iraq to do special operations. The men are all special forces – i.e, men with special skills, and we are going to do reconn, site placement, sabotage, mixing, etc. We are getting paid good because we all can produce fluent American accents, so we can infiltrate groups, if need be. I’ve never done infiltration, but I have done civilian spying, as well as worked for American agencies, so I am one of the best men for this work.

And how am I going to continue to update this weblog from Iraq? Our crew is hightech, and we have got 10 suitcase satellite dishes, and I’ve got a PocketPC as well as a small laptop. Whenever we rest, I will type out the stories of the day, and when I can connect, I will do so and send them. So do not be suprised if there are multiple posts at roughly the same time describing events far apart. Also, I will have to delay sensitive stuff till it is no longer dangerous to publish.

I’m not sure if the Americans are going to block radio signals, but I hardly think so. Iraq has given us a large sum of money, and it is safeguarded in Jordan right now, and when we come back, we will collect. So I plan to return.

2003-03-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

Test post over satellite.

2003-02-14T07:24:00.000-08:00

On the run. Part 2

Actually, there is no real part 2. I lived, and met a friend of mine Raed, and he gave me his passport, which I used to go to South Africa. We did a classical passport swap. Basically, it works this way - you find someone that has a certain similarity to you in coloring and size. He grows a beard, and gains glases, you do the same. You work towards making yourselves look as similar as possible. When the convergence has occured, you take passport photographs, give him, and he registers himself as lost, and renews his passport with _your_ photographs.

And you are free.

2003-01-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

On the run. Part 1

In Sept. 2000, I was ordered to return from Europe to America. When I arrived, I was imprisoned and questioned for several days, and then released without explanation. Shortly afterwards, I was fired from the CIA, and according to my sources, a proccess was being initiated against me for treason. I illegally left the states and went to Israel, where I stayed for 3 months with my cousin in Haifa. And then, the Israeli secret police took me in, and questioned me. Unluckily for them, they did not do this officially, but appointed a freelance gang headed by Dr. Friedman (yes, that one), to perform the interrogatoin. But unfortunately for them, I was lucky, shot the Dr. and escaped into the Palestinian territories.

From there, I travelled back to Tunisia, but unknown people were already watching my father's house. I stayed with my lawyer for a week, and then left Tunisia. I had money, but I didn't have anything else. I couldn't use my American passport, I couldn't use my Tunisian passport, so I could not travel with plane, or cross any borders legally. I needed to get a passport, and I needed to put myself in safety from these people who were looking for me.

I had contacts in South Africa, and I had spoken to a very good friend of mine, Colonel Jacob, who lived in South Africa. I needed to go down there, but it would have been impossible to go through the entire African continent without being noticed. So I decided to go to Europe, get a passport, and then take a plane to the safety of South Africa. But I could not enter Europe by plane.

There was a way. A risky way, but it was a way. I would join the African asylum seekers, who ride small dingies from Morroco to Spain.

I bought a car, and drove to Morroco. There, I hung out with the Nigerians and Ghanians, who were so ultra confident that Europe would turn them into millionares. They wanted the better life, and I would have told them that they were risking their lives for a pipe dream. But I didn't, because I needed their help.

I waited for two weeks, and then secured a place on a raft. I payed almost a thousand dollars for this chance to almost kill myself, but hey, what else could I do? The night came, and 9 of us went down to the shore. a small yellow lifeboat came up. This would be our transportation device across the high seas.

We clambered in, and the raft sank so low in the water that I was sure it would collapse and sink even before we had left the beach. But somehow, it didn't, and our journey started. We went off around 11pm, with the seas relatively calm. After 30 minutes, the first person vomited. It started a chain reaction of vomiting, and someone leaned over to vomit in the water. The raft bent under his weight, and watter came in. It would have been alright if some other fellow had not grabbed at him. As he did so, the weight became too large on one end, the raft overburdened, and overturned. We fell into the water, a few lucky people holding on to the edge of the raft, the swimmers dogpaddling, and one poor fellow sank like a stone.

We made it back in, a fellow called Uche was crying, and shouting that God was punishing him for his sins by putting him on this raft. Well, God decided to make another point by switching on a cold drizzle. Teeth started chattering, and tears ran freely. All this while, I sat and watched impassively, but I was scared shitless. I felt like shitting my pants, but that would not have been nice for my fellow passengers.

Very soon, the waves started. It was like a nightmare funpark ride. The raft slowly lifted itself on the wave, and then crashed down the slope of the wave. Everytime that happened, Uche shouted out loud. I've never seen a bunch of grown men as scared as those would-be Europeans.

After many hours, we neared the Spanish coast. Our guide explained to us what to do if the coastguard got us, and explained how we would get off. He was hardly done when a search light illuminated our raft. We heard the chop chop sound of the coastguard coming up to us. Uche started thanking God loudly.

I am a good swimmer, and I decided to try out for the shore. One other man said he would also do it with me. We took 2 of the 3 liferings, and jumped into the freezing water. I've never swam that far in my life, and I was sure I would die before I finished that trip. I swam, and I swam, all the while hearing the calls of the other men, and the coast guard boat.

20 minutes later, we reached the shore, dropped the rings, and burst into a run. We ran, walked, ran, walked, slept by the sides of the road for two days, till we reached a medium sized town. We were ragged and dirty by this time, and I have actually never felt as miserable in my life. I was not sure what lay in front of me, and I had nothing to go back for. My companion, Mensah, was utterly the opposite. He whistled, and made jokes in strongly accented english, and spoke of finally being free.

2 weeks later, we had met up with Mensah's contact, and he had found us a place to stay. Our 'home' had become a couple of matrasses in an abandoned building site, under a half completed roof, and covering ourselves with carton paper. Mensah had stopped whistling, and was talking about how he had been a well to do and respected fisher in Ghana. I didn't say anthing, but I tell you - those paper bedsheets were mighty uncomfortable.

The losing of Man

2002-12-30T02:53:00.000-08:00

Background: Like I mentioned previously, I was one of those fighting in Ivory Coast for the government against the secondary rebels. I got shot, and was shipped back to the country I am now in. I left with two assistants, Jamal and Yusuf. However, Jamal went back to fight, leaving me with Yusuf. The town we were fighting for was called Man, and when I left, the town had not yet been captured. However, it was captured a few days later. When Jamal went back, he went to that town with the rest of the company. And then, the fighting restarted, the town was lost, and about 10 of our men died. I didn't know what happened, I just read this in the news, and I've been trying to find out what was wrong. I phoned, and they told me that Jamal was in hospital. So I went over to South Africa for a two day trip, and he told me what happened. This is the second hand account.

When Jamal arrived, he got assigned a Toyota 'Taliban', and drove to Man with 4 other government soldiers. Jamal is a black American, and I have never seen anyone so racist about Africans. He fucking hates Africans. Everytime we fight with government troops, he is constantly complaining about how ignorant, useless and untrustworthy they are. Hence, he hated that 4 hour trip, and by the time they arrived, he was quarelling loudly with the government troops. Out of spite, I think, they told him to join the men that were occupying the town itself (about 30 men), and not stay in the camp on the outskirts.

So Jamal drove into the deserted town, with the occasional frightened person hanging around in front of their door. He drove to the control post, a 5 story building (the highest in the town), and joined the other troopers (20 mercs, 10 gov troops).

They stayed there for a few days, without incident, and the townsfolk started trickling in slowly, and the town seemed to be returning to normal. Unfortunately for the homecomers, everybody who came back was forced to dispose of corpses for a number of hours before being allowed to go home. You don't expect us to do that, do you? We are fighters, not garbage disposal.

Our mercs have become lazy motherfuckers. They are in the middle of a fucking warzone, and they post just two men to guard a town at night? And those men are smoking fags? Well, I understand it somewhat - we were fighting a rabble of armed civilians, and not soldiers. This mission was for us childs play. A small number of well trained soldiers, with the artillery we had, and with a nice mix of strategists, trained interrogators (like myself), heavy gun specialists can usually deal with a large army of not properly trained troops. But things are not always the way they seem.

Around 2am, heavy guns started firing. All the soldiers woke up, grabbed their guns, and looked outside. Someone lit a torch, and immediately, the windows were shattered with gunfire. A bullet richcoteted off some metal on the wall, and gave someone a flesh wound. We had searchlights on the roof, but they were not on. It turned out that one of the idiots on the roof had been shot dead, and the other was bleeding to death. The rebels had shot at their cigarrete lights.

What we found out later is that some liberian trained militia had joined the rebels. And these militia have been fighting for years, and they were good. They were about 50, but they were backed up by a number of local troops. Our men were trapped in this buildiing, with the rebels standing outside with at least two machine guns, and a good number of automatic rifles. We had another group in two other houses at the other ends of the town, and Jamal and his group soon heard the firing as they were driven back by other rebel troops.

In the meantime, Jamal and his group were lying on the floor. The officer commanded the men to spread out in the house, and to start attacking from different windows. Jama was ordered to take over the halogen searchlights on the roof, and point them downwards. These lights are heavy, and cannot be moved, but they are bullet proof. They were not sure however, if the caliber of machine gun could penetrate the light's bullet proof glass. Jamal was ordered upstairs, and told to wait till the guns had been destroyed before switching it on. He crawled out of the room, and made his way dowstairs. Some men were posted to cover the frontdoor from the starwell. Jamal went up and waited.

Another soldier I know, a german with a harelip, Stefan, threw a timed flare from a window into the street. As soon as they started shooting, our men opened fire with a chinese constructed custom gun we have that shoots small explode-on-impact grenades. One gun was destroyed, and the person who was handling it was impaled on the barrel. A horrible sight, according to Jamal. Then, the flare went out, and the shooting stopped. Stefan shot a few more flares from other windows, but there was no replying fire. Jamal called for backup, and they primed from the roof. The halogen searchlight was switched on, and the street was visble again. There were no rebels to be seen.

In the meantime, someone was burning tires in the streets. I don't have any frickin idea why Africans always burn tires whenever anything happens. Are there so many tires that they can't dispose off? And do they wait specially for conflicts, and then decide, yoohoo, lets grab this oportunity to dispose of our tires! I always think that when I see burning tires in the streets during a fight.

Our men waited for 15 minutes, and nothing happened. The officer set priority to escaping alive, since it didn't seem like they would be able to drive the rebels out of the town. But the group was about 2 KM from the base camp, and they were not sure what was happening at the other ends of town, and in base camp. They all got commands to prepare to enter the trucks, and fire-and-drive their way out of the town.

And then, boom, a mortar landed on the roof, blew off the search light, killed one of the men Jamal was with, knocked the other one off the roof, and jamal was hit in the face by some flying object. The roof caught fire, and Jamal was barely able to make it down the stairs. A portion of the cement roof had collapsed in, and some of the top floor rooms were on fire. Another mortar landed on the roof. Then another hit a truck. A few others fell on the road and compound. Immediately, the rebels stormed out from some nearby houses, shooting at all the windows, and carry burning sticks. They flung the sticks into the house, and tried to burst in through the front door. Luckily, the two men there were able to keep them off, and the other men started firing from the windows again, and drove off the attack.

At that moment, the officer told them to start escaping. 3 men rush out to a truck, under cover from the men at the windows, started it and drove to the door. Then that truck was hit by some explosive device, and caught fire. One of the men made it out, and ran back into the house. The rebels finally raised enough firepower to drive our men from the windows.

Our men were in trouble. The liberian soldiers were good, and they had good firepower and weapons. They also had men much in excess of our men.

Jamal went down to the officer, and proposed a scattered retreat. The officer gave permission. Then Jamal went and told the governement soldiers that they had received radio that our men had almost arrived, and that we were to hold the house for about 15 more minutes, and then we were safe. The government soldiers were utterly relieved, since they were sure they would die. The house was burning, and people outside were waiting to shoot everyone who came out. Jamal asked them to cover the street, and not to let anyone show his face.

Then he met the other mercs, and gave them the order for the disorganized retreat. Jamal, the officer, and two other mercs went to a side window in the fourth floor, and chose that way to make their escape. Stefan went with the others, and decided to fight their way over the back door out.

The 5 story building Jamal was in had a concrete roof. The building beside was 3 stories high, and had a zinc roof. Thus, it was not possible to directly walk across the roof. However, as builders will tell you, zinc roofs have got wooden beams holding them. You can know where the wooden bean is by the nails on the roof. Our men are trained for such excersises, and they actually did this stunt. The jumped from the fourth floor window, unto this zinc roof, and landed on the wooden beams, then ran quickly across the roof, taking care to tread on the wood. They jumped, and ran across, with the roof noise masked by the gunshots from the front, and dropped from the 3rd floor to the ground. From there, they ran across the small compound, crouched behind the small hibiscus bushes. They didn't enter a truck, but simply ran on the open road, pistols drawn.

They saw someone in the street and shot him. He was a civilian, but hey, if you live in a glass house, don't throw stones. They ran for a few hudred meters, and then reached a largish highway, which luckily had tiger grass growing by the side. The ran crouched, till the were about 100 meters from a rebel roadblock. The rebels had these small kerosine lamps on the roadside, stupidly, and they could be seen.

For covert operations, you really shouldn't mess with our mercs. They crawled up to the post in the grass, came out, and shot 5 men with pistols. The rest of the men didn't bother trying to fight back, they simply scramed. Jamal and the others continued running, and as they went around a bend, someone shot at them. They backed up, and the officer bumped into another man, and he fell, stumbled across something, and landed in a burning tire. Rubber burns are not nice burns, and he got his arm burnt badly. The group waited a bit, then peered around the corner.

And luckily for them, it was their own men standing there. They were now in radio range, so were able to radio for them to halt fire. Then they walked over to safety.

All the government soldiers in the house were killed. The other group of mercs made it back over some backstreets, but lost some of the group. Jamal and the burnt arm man were taken to hospital, and then Jamal was sent back to SA because of some eye complications. He is still there, but seems to be doing quite well.

A dramatic event, but a humiliating loss for our men. That is one of the biggest men losses in West Africa, and may cause us to lose our contract.

2002-12-09T02:35:00.000-08:00

Park guarding in Kenya

As regular training excercises, we were often sent in pairs to join the park wardens in Kenya to battle the poachers. I've made this trip about 5 times. Usually, nothing happens, as we hardly ever meet any poachers. But once, one of the most exciting event of my life happened there.

I was walking with Tony, pictured here

and a single Kenyan park warden. We were following boot marks in the ground, trying to see if we would come across anybody who was not allowed to be there. About 20 kilometers from the park borders, the foot steps veered off into the scrub. We parked our jeep, and followed the steps.

I and Tony were armed with semi-automatics, and the park warden was armed with a hunting rifle. The area we were walking in was badly eroded, and there were gullys everywhere. Because of the high grass, one hardly saw the gullys till you were about 2 meters from them. However, the grass allowed us to follow the pathways of the people who had walked there previously easily.

We walked for about two kilometers, and then saw a dead Elephant lying on the ground. A pack of lions was lying around it, and one of the males was chewing on some meat. We were surprised, because the Elephant still had its tusks on, yet we knew that it must have been killed by humans, since Lions don't kill Elephants usually. We wondered what had happened. It seemed to me that it would one of those mysterious stories where you never knew exactly what happened.

Then Tony turned pale and pointed at the meat the lion was eating. I looked in the direction, and I saw that it wasn't a part of the Elephant it was eating, it was a man! The Lion had killed a poacher, and was eating it.

The warden immediately started trembling, and crossed himself. "Mad Lion", he said, and gestured that we should get out of there immediately. As we turned to go, the Lion raised its head and looked at us. It stood up, completely still, watching us, and then started moving slowly in our direction. The warden started wimpering, and burst into a sprint. We joined in, though it seemed futile to want to outrun a Lion. Then, Tony veered off to the left, and I followed suit.

Tony had seen a somewhat deep gully, and he ran towards that. We both ran there, dropped in, and started running down the gully, hoping to find an overhang where we could defend ourselves from the lion from only one side. Tony ran ahead of me, turned a corner, and I heard a single shot. I saw him stumble and fall, but I didn't see who had shot him. I stopped and held my rifle in position, pointing towards the corner.

And a heavy blow hit me from above as the Lion swapped with its paw at my head. I fell to the ground, and pointed my gun at the sky above me where the Lion was, and fired a burst wildly. The Lion was not hit, but moved out of view. A series of gunshuts sounded from above, and the Lion came crashing down into the gully with me, blood splashing wildly from its body. It fell in front of Tony, and I sprang back, firing wildly from the hip. I hit it again, and it disappeared around the corner.

I forgot that there was a belligerent there, but chased after the animal to finish it off. As I turned the corner, I saw a man being mauled by the wounded animal, and a boy and another man running off down the gully. I started firing wildly, unfortunately hitting both the poacher and the lion. They both died.

I climbed back up, bleeding from the clawmarks in my head, and saw the game warden a short distance away, frantically reloading his rifle. I signaled that the animal was dead, and the visibly shaken man walked over to me.

We called for backup, and sat there in the hot sun drinking from a small bottle of distilled palm wine till the heavy duty Jeep arrived to take us home. Tony had died on the spot, and we didn't bother going after the other poachers who had run off. Hell, I actually felt sorry for them.

Executive Outcomes and the mercenary life

2002-12-07T04:09:00.000-08:00

Many people wonder, how exactly do mercenaries live? The image they have in their head is of a bunch of half-wild criminals and thugs dressed in colourful disarray, and armed like Rambo in First Blood II.

Actually, the reality is very different. Mercenary armies are mostly legal. They also often pay higher than normal armies, so we get really talented professionals applying. Training is important and mandatory, but one has a lot more free time than if one were in a traditional army.

In my first SA stint, I was posted with Executive Outcomes, a private South African mercenary army. Let me describe briefly how it looks like.

The base I lived at was in a South Africa ranch in the middle of about 10 kilometers of wildland. The ranch had a large number of small bungalows, and each bungalow had 16 inhabitants : 7 footsoldiers each in two rooms, and a sergeant and his aide in the other room. Meals were doled out at a central location, but one could eat anywhere, usually in the TV room. Outside, there were the usual outdoor training equipment, like crawl-barbs and logs. Inside was a very well equiped gym. On the left, about 1 kilometer distant was the shooting range. On the right about 5 kilometers distant, and confined with barbed wire to a 3 kilometer square was the warplay zone. If you went in there without authorisation, and got shot, nobody would care. In other words, you always had to register to enter that zone because of the risk of flying bullets. It was dug into the ground about 2 meters deep to prevent bullets from hitting camp.

The daily routine mostly consisted of morning training, lunch, and then you read a book, go for a conference, or go off into town. You could also go off to practise shooting or something. Every few weeks, we would get a job.

Mercenary Jobs are of different kinds. There are open missions, such as when we fought in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, or Ivory coast. In these cases, the government invited us, and we go fight on the side of the government, using local troops as backup, and it is known openly that we are mercenaries. In such cases, almost everybody would go, and only the 'crack team' would stay behind.

The 'crack team' was usually sent when the second kind of job came up. These are covert missions where we do not openly pose as mercenaries. For example, in Columbia, we have fought for both the government and for the rebels. We go there and fight in plain clothes. Mercenaries are usually not called in for banal tasks such as taking a town, but for specific tasks, like killing a certain leader.

And why are mercenaries so succesful? It is a combination of skill and some really bad-ass weapons. EO had some of the best bp-vests I have ever seen. They were very very light, and almost as thin as a normal shirt. I saw them stop .375s easily. EO also had RPGs with heat tracking grenades. They had a few copters, but I never saw those being used. They had a single spy plane, and it was used all the time.

Against that arsenal, it is no wonder that an army of 40 000 surrendered to a group of 300 mercs in Sierra Leone.

2002-12-06T11:20:00.000-08:00

The Bullet in my chest that sent me home

I've got a number of people asking me what happened. Well, it was all very unspectacular.

I was going out with a group of mercs two days after we started taking Man. We entered a Toyota 'Taliban' (those Toyota trucks that have pick-up backs, and seat 7), with a machine gun mounted. As we entered town, we came under fire from the roadside bushes. We returned fire, and a friend of mine - Akamba - started shooting with the machine gun. I automatically assumed that the enemy was on the side towards which he was shooting the gun, so I jump out of the truck and took cover on the other side, aiming my rifle at towards the fire. And got shot from behind.

It turns out that they had people on both sides of the road.

My merc troop dropped me in the Toyota, and retreated. There were too many of the enemy, and we were too few, anyways.

Lil Was' from Sierra Leone

2002-12-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

Writing about the the taking of Man in Cote made me remember an incident that happened in Sierra Leone many years ago. I was in Sierra Leone, but as a psychologist, not as a soldier. I don't know however a degree in criminal psychology made the Agency think I would be the perfect interrogator, but it somehow turned out that way.

Anyways, Government troops captured a rebel boy, and asked me to find out from him where Mosquito was hiding. Mosquito was some kind of never-seen, but always talked about leader. So I get this 12 year old boy sitting in the chair opposite mine, and he is supposed to be some key figure.

"What is your name", I asked quitely.

"Lil' Was'", he replied, nodding his head wierdly.

"Little Wasp", I wrote on my block. "So 'Wasp' is your family name". He smiled that child soldier smile. When they smile, their face somehow seems to not have moved at all, and their smile is not an expression of joy, but of contempt. Child soldiers want to be men. Every man who does not carry a gun is not a man to them. He is an object of contempt.

"OK, Little Wasp, do you know where General Mosquito is?".

"Yessa"

"Where is he staying?"

"I don't know, sah"

The officer standing beside me slapped the boy. Tears welled in his eyes, and he squeezed his mouth tight. He was angry, but seemed used to that emotion. He did nothing, and showed no tension in his body.

I told them to take the Wasp away. I knew he at most knew vaguely where Mosquito was, and what he knew he would not tell. He hated us in the uncomplicated way only a child can hate. The rebels had probably killed his family, raped the womenfolk, and burnt down his home, but they where somehow his allies, and we where his enemies.

The next day, I called Wasp back. I explained to him that he didn't need to go back to the rebels. I told him that we would use the UN provided refugee funds to find him shelter in one of the shelter villages, and we would give him an education.

But Wasp didn't want those things. The Sierra Leonan child soldiers never wanted to go back to school. They never stayed in the camps for long either. So I decided to simply give him money and send him back to the village he told us he came from. I gave him the UN amount ( ~$20), and offered him a further $50 from my pocket. He collected it, then said that he wanted to buy something from me. On my questioning look, he pointed at one of my green army t-shirts. He gave me the $50s back, and took the shirt. I offered it to him for free, but he insisted.

Wasp left that evening, walking off into the town.

3 days later, I was walking with the company into town. On the outskirts of the town, I saw a familiar piece of cloth on the floor. I looked, and it was my green t-shirt. Beside it was a blacked heap of coal and the metal rings from the inside of tires. A cross was stuck in the ground, and "rebel" was written on the cross.

The townsfolk had killed Lil Wasp for being a rebel.

2002-12-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

Fighting in the Ivory Coast

I'm home because I fucked up. I got shot in the chest, and they sent me back to South Africa. Once in SA, the shit really hit me. I was fucking killing people back on the Coast. I requested to be flown back to the semi-permanent base I call home. I'm now here, wrapped up in badages, and having trouble breathing properly.

The one thing I really remember was the house-to-house in Man. The government troops are so fucking incompetent. You know how they fight? The run into a house with AK47s, and just start shooting every single wall till everything living is dead. My mercenary company is really good, and we showed them how to properly take a house. Theoretically, one should break the door open, and expect someone to start shooting. It usually happens that way.

On the second day after we arrived, and wanted to take Man. I went along. King broke open a door, and we stood by the side. A local sergeant burst into the house shooting wildly. I actually heard the single shot that killed that man. His submachine fire stopped, and we knew there was at least one belligerent inside. I peeked in, and saw nobody.

King entered, threw a fast acting low density smoke/stun grenade inside, and we charged in. It turns out that there was a second door on the left, and the fighter was shooting from the inside of the door. He peeked out, and started shooting King with a semi-automatic gun with a fold back handle. He handled the rifle as if it were a pistol. He just kept shooting King, giving me extra time to target and shoot him.

It was my first kill, and it is not a nice sight when someones head caves in. He dropped to the floor, flailing his arms and legs. Some local army soldier started shooting him with an automatic. The bastard is dead!, I wanted to scream, you can stop now! But he just kept shooting. It was a young man of maybe 18. He didn't look like he had been fighting long, and on his face was this intensly concentrated look.

We searched the house, but found nothing more apart from a few civilian corpses upstairs. I didn't join the rest in the attack, but went back to the squat. I felt sick. I kept thinking of that caved in skull, and his arms flailing as he was being shot the second time.

2002-12-02T04:40:00.000-08:00

Formatting fixed. My lunch has been brought in, so I will depart to have a meal with Yusuf and Jose, my bodyguards.

2002-12-02T04:01:00.000-08:00

Johnny comes back from South Africa.

I don't think any m*fucker is still reading my blog any longer, but who the fuck cares anyways. I've been through some hard few months, and I've got to settle down a bit before I can post a longer story about the shit that happened to me. K5 my beloved, I'll soon be visiting thou, so that you may cradle me, and sooth my troubled bossom.

2002-08-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

Read here the comments by various Zimbabweans to the crisis there. Notice the difference between the African stance and the Western one. The fact of the matter is that Zimbabweans want land reform. Fin.

Mugabe is not pressuring the people to take the land - he is holding them back as they rush to grab the land. Don't believe the propaganda.

2002-08-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

We've all heard about the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda? But have you heard about the Arpatheid by the Tutsis on the Hutus? I'm currently researching this, and will soon post an extended article.

2002-08-02T01:44:00.000-07:00

Capitalism is destroying Africa.

There is absolutely nothing worse than genetically modified food being imported into Africa. Read this. Let me break it down simply:

1. GE corn grows only once. The seed of the offspring do not grow.
2. If a country that has a famine accepts this type of corn, and plants it, then in the next year, they once again will have to buy corn, since their offspring will not grow.
3. Since it is a famine in any case, the country is poor, and will at some point not be able to afford the corn.
4. Mass starvation.

That is what is happened in Ethiopia. When Robert Mugabe refused to accept GE food from the US, unless it was ground, he was decried by half witted geeks all over the world as being racist. Actually, he made a very wise desision, and I am glad he made it.

2002-07-31T01:10:00.000-07:00

I just got trusted at Kuro5hin. In case you are one of those wierd people who actually visits my blog without having clicked on a link in my sig at K5, let me explain what K5 is. Kuro5hin is a collection of people in various degree of mental instability, and who are 'special' in that anyone can produce arguments out off their ass, and they don't notice the stink. It is mostly made up of white 20 year old geeks with little social skills, but there is a vocal minority of trans-sexual 26 year olds, and overweight 32 year olds.

Anyways, I got trusted, meaning that I can make the comments of people disappear. You only get trusted if you are very popular, so you can say that yes, I am very popular there.

My dilema now is that if I want to stay trusted, I'll have to tone down on the rhetoric, seeing as the place is crawling with Zionists. I'm going to have to end the fight for freedom. But if I do that to gain social acceptance, will I perhaps lose that very acceptance? Will my changed way lose me my silent friends?

I don't know, but one thing is clear - the fight for freedom for _all_ men shall continue, and it doesn't even matter if I lose trusted user status.

2002-07-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

How the Palestinians should win - a low intensity war

Whenever Israel kills 15 innocent people, it is a victory for the Palestinians. The people who die do not die in vain. The problem is that there must be revenge, but revenge often results in in the international media switching attention to the Israeli vistims, rather than the Palestinians victims of Isreali terror.

So what would be a good solution? Whenever Israel strikes an gets internationally condemed, wait for heavens sakes for the revenge. At least 2 weeks. Afte rthe two weeks, do not reply with a huge 20 people dead attack. Rather, killing settlers with guns - one or two each time - in a low intensity warfare, and at different locations is more likely to strike terror into the hearts of the Zionists, and will not be noticed internationally.

Because the Zionists are cowards, they will not send their soldiers into Palestine to revenge, they will use their airplanes. When that happens, there will be another big incident, and international condemnation will rain upon Israel again. It will look like the Israelis are attacking without provocation.

2002-07-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

We don't need another hero.

Big words are easy to speak. Great deeds on the battlefield are easy to do. Every people gets freed from subjugation after a while. A hero leads them to freedom.

But peace does not need heroes. Peace needs equality for everybody, peace needs everyone to work together. After the battle is won, the heroes have got to leave the arena, and let the bakers, the teachers, the farmers continue the revolution.

Listen to my words Mugabe. Hear me, Arafat. We don't need another hero.

2002-07-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

Hmm, the comment code seems incredibly slow. I don't like it.

2002-07-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

Let's see if it is working...

2002-07-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

Adding comments and a tracker right now...

2002-07-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, Blogger is supposed to remove that crummy ad up there soon. I paid a while ago, why ain't it removed yet?

2002-07-30T13:05:00.000-07:00

Just test driving my blog. I actually wanted to write something interesting here, but I've lost my mojo for that.

2002-07-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

How easy is it to actually write about nothing, simply so that you can see how it looks on your weblog page? It must be quite difficult, because after a while there seems to be very little to say. Unless, of course, you write about exactly how little there is to say. I regularly hold long conversations on how one cannot ahve a long conversation anymore, seeing as there is next to nothing one has to say to other people.

In exactly the same way, this post is just a space filler, a lot of talk, but nothing said, sort of like the right honourable President Bushes important speech on the middle east a while ago.

2002-07-02T07:07:00.000-07:00

Welcome to psychologists weblog. I'm still considering my options.

Mission: Congo & Equitorial Guinea

2002-07-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

These are the archive pages for the congo mission

I'm finally employed again
Whoaw, we are moving today
Leaving South Africa
I've just driven 900 kilometers
A dead man in my hands
Our men are leaving
VJ died today
Almost all our soldiers are gone
This is no war!
Xavier is dying and crying
Assasination
Is it OK to kill a child?
The sound of congolese music
Jungle Fever
The small men

Extras: The closest thing to crazy: http://psychologist.blogspot.com/2004_05_24_psychologist_archive.html

This page is backdated to provide information about me and my missions.

2002-07-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

About me

2002-07-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

My name is John Ben-Younes. I am half American, and half Tunisian. I was born in Tunisia, but studied in America. After I was done studying, I worked for several years for the American military. After Sept. 11th, my entire unit was dissolved, and I moved to South Africa to start a new life. I subcontracted for Executive Outcomes for a while, and after the gov shakeup, worked for smaller security companies. I have worked in a lot of places around the world, from Europe to the Middle East to Africa. The missions are usually well paid, and the risk is not always significant.

My blog is not published on a time-scale that matches what I am doing. It is delayed sometimes, sometimes it is not. Sometimes the entries are written but are not uploaded, sometimes they are written directly into the web, sometimes they are about things that happened in the past. I do not have time to always be at a computer to post regularly, and I just do this to clear my mind, not for you to read.

Mission: America

2002-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

This page orders the events that happened in the America mission in a sequential manner. To understand the story, read the posts in the order they appear on this page.

So far:

1. I return from the Congo Jungle to South Africa

2. I meet with Jacob to receive instructions on my new mission

Guns & Sunglasses

3. I arrive in America

4. I hit the road