Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Page 13

  “You’re not going to heat that up?” I asked.

  “Warm food is for pussies,” he replied emphatically. “This is how we used to eat at Ranger School. They never gave us enough time to eat, and when you did have time, you were so tired that this was the easiest way to eat so you could get to sleep as quickly as possible. Just mash it all up and shovel it down.”

  “Looks fucking disgusting,” I said.

  “Looks can be deceptive,” he replied.

  For a lucky few, there was life beyond the MRE. Those based down with Battle Company’s headquarters element at the main outpost on the valley floor had access to the company’s two cooks—Bui and Lackley. Both were important fixtures in the life of the company, though it was misleading to use the word cook to describe their work. In fact, Bui was so compromised by his obsession with Gameboy that I’m not sure which was worse—having to eat what he served at the main outpost, or resigning oneself to a life of MREs at one of the more remote outposts like Restrepo.

  One day, the men up at Restrepo reached what could be called an MRE breaking point. I was not there at the time, but Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne, from Pennsylvania, told me the story later. It began when Sergeant Al and Hoyt had a crazy idea.

  “Hey, let’s kill a fucking cow!” one of them said.

  Some cattle had been grazing close to Outpost Restrepo, and the men had one eye out for the herders who normally accompanied them. Often the enemy would send people toward the outpost to scout for soft spots in the base’s defense—and what better pretext than looking for a wandering cow? On this particular day, though—one of those long, quiet days in the valley when the fighting had died down for lack of ammunition rather than will—no one seemed to be around. The herd clung precipitously to the loose slate ground, the cows whisking their tails and oblivious to the men peering down from the green sand-bagged roof of the armory bunker.

  As luck would have it, Lackley happened to be visiting from the main outpost that lay three thousand feet below on the valley floor. He’d come up to Restrepo on the pretense of bringing up supplies, but in reality he wanted to get into a firefight so he could earn his Combat Infantryman’s Badge—known simply as a CIB. A posting to the Korengal was considered dangerous enough, but Restrepo—being the outpost closest to enemy territory—was the tip of the spear in the company effort in the valley, and a visit there would guarantee even a cook his CIB. So when Lackley staggered up, sweating and out of breath, everyone in the platoon was happy to see he’d made the long hike up to their flea-infested home—it was, at the very least, a gesture of camaraderie that they welcomed. They ended up taking him on a patrol down to the village of Kalaygal and stayed long enough to ensure they’d get shot at on the way out—so Lackley was able to get himself in a fight and rightfully claim his medal. Content with the outcome—no one was killed and everyone had a good laugh—he stayed up for a couple more days, sunbathing with the rest of them while they waited for the enemy to get an ammunition resupply.

  Now, looking down on the cattle, Lackley suggested that if they killed a cow, he’d cook it up on the makeshift grill with some of the onions he’d brought up. It was decided that they couldn’t shoot it—a gunshot would raise the alarm down at the main base that Restrepo was under attack—so Hoyt decided to make a spear out of a tent pole and a Rambo knife, attaching it with parachute cord and some gaffer tape. They picked out a fat brown cow that had made the fatal mistake of straying too close to the concertina wire and encircled it on one side, trapping it between them and the wire. O’Byrne told me how Hoyt got close enough to stab it a few times, gouging it in the neck—the poor beast went down without much of a fight, bleeding out on the mountainside. The men rolled the body down the incline and dragged it quickly inside the perimeter of the outpost, looking around to make sure no one—officer or Afghan—had seen them. Once inside, no one knew exactly what to do next, so they decided to take its head off first with a Christmas tree saw. This didn’t work too well, until Murphy started twisting the head around. It snapped off and sent him sliding down the mountainside. Everyone roared with laughter while O’Byrne—who had no butchering experience whatsoever—stood nearby giving authoritative instructions as they sliced it down the belly, taking care to avoid the bladder. They cut themselves the tenderest steaks the cow had to offer. Finally Lackley rubbed his hands and took to the grill. Minutes later the men relished what became known as “same-day cow.”

  About a week later, some local people came looking for a cow they claimed was missing from their herd.

  “We had buried it and burned it and stuff like that, and we didn’t have a clue how this guy knew we’d killed his cow,” O’Byrne told me. “So we were like, ‘Nah, we didn’t kill your cow.’ Finally Sergeant Patterson said, ‘Listen, your cow got caught in the C-wire. We didn’t kill your cow.’ They wanted money for it, and we were like, ‘We’ll give you some rice and beans and stuff that equals the same value of your cow, but we’re not giving you money for the cow.’ They all got pissed off at us. I heard the estimate was ten thousand dollars that we had to give the Afghanis for the cow. But that was the best steak I ever had.”

  EAU DE CADAVRE

  ~ SOMALIA AND RWANDA ~

  SAM KILEY

  HIS SHARPLY HONED NOSE AND CHEEKBONES ARE SET IN GUNMETAL skin and framed against a chalk background. The white tips of his incisors are sneaking a look from beneath enigmatic lips. His eyes are a mass of blue-green. The boy is statue-still, and beautiful.

  The slide projector clatters to the next image. It is a wide-angle photograph of the same boy, taken on the same day by me in Baidoa in 1992. I’ve composed this with no sense of irony, just of horror. The lad, no more than ten, is lying on his back with his arms flung out next to two others, both of them in their late teens. They’re all skeleton-thin because they’re dead of starvation. Their eyes are green with bluebottle flies.

  We’d picked up ninety bodies that morning on the Death Bus. That is what the locals, who lived in the dusty town about a hundred miles inland from Mogadishu, called it. Families who’d drifted in from the wide alluvial plains on either side of the Jubba River had lost their food stocks to bandits who’d been organised by warlords. Now, destitute, they propped themselves against mud walls and waited for the bus. They all wore dirty white shrouds. Some curled in the thin shade of thorn trees by the roadside. They were almost all going to be passengers. Local businessmen organised the bus, a jangling truck with a roaring diesel engine, to pick them up and take them out of town for burial. They were slung into a long open trench cut into a field stubbly with harvested sorghum stalks.

  I’d clambered around on the bus since it started its route at dawn. Just one aid organization had turned up at this time, run by a saintly Irish nurse. Her little wattle-ringed camp was becoming a magnet for the starving, who wobbled silently toward it out of the dust beyond. She had food only for kids—adults turned, without protest, from her gates to sit and wait for the bus.

  I swung like a monkey from the shiny worn metal piping of the frame over the back of the truck, seeking odd angles for my pictures. I was twenty-eight. I’d seen plenty of war in Ethiopia and during the civil war in Mogadishu by then. Bodies were nothing new to me, but I burned with an urge to “do something.” Sometimes journalists get the chance to feel that what they tell the world about what’s happening in the world might actually change it. This was my chance, our chance (I was not alone). And so I took the pictures, hiding behind the lens. I tried to compose images that, while they were of dead people, might be publishable somewhere. I worried that they might offend and therefore be ignored.

  The bus dumped its passengers in the stubbly field, not far from the road south of Baardheere, and headed back into town. It hit the main road that went left to Kenya and right to Mogadishu. I banged on the roof of the cab to stop the driver opposite a pastel-pink building with hand-painted advertisements for spaghetti and long bars of Sunlight soap.

  “Thanks,” I called to t
he driver, giving his door a grateful pat. Then I clapped my hands together and said out loud, “Fuck me, I’m starving.”

  Nothing inflames the appetite like a famine. And there was always plenty of food in Somalia during the mass starvation that killed about 350,000 people. That’s why, in the end, the United States led the world’s first humanitarian military intervention. Warlords were starving their own people to death and charging the international community to feed them. It was the world’s biggest, and most blatant, protection racket. George Bush Senior smashed it. He saved many thousands of lives, even if things went bad in the end with the “Black Hawk down” debacle.

  As journalists stationed in Mogadishu’s Green Zone, covering the war, famine, intervention, and mayhem in Somalia, we never lacked for food. Over dinners of endless lobster in the Al Sahafi Hotel we talked about anything but our work; we talked as if we were stoned, and some were. We got sick of lobster, which was abundant off the coast of Mogadishu. The means to get it to market in Europe had been sunk or stolen by the Somalis—so we scoffed lobster till we gagged.

  We learned to eat spaghetti with one hand, curling it between little and index fingers back and forth until a ball of it could be popped into the mouth. Camel steak was delicious, and it often came sitting on a pile of spaghetti. We ate and swam at a bullet-riddled shack called the Indian Ocean Club. It was on the edge of the Green Zone, where fighting had turned the city centre into concrete lace. In short breaks between covering the fighting, Dan Eldon, my photographer friend who was soon murdered by an enraged Somali mob, and I leaped in and out of the waves. We padded to the club across white sand to guzzle prawns stewed in coconut milk, saffron, tamarind, and cumin. We sluiced it down with nose-achingly cold beer. We stopped swimming when we realised we were down-current from the local abattoir and UN soldiers started getting bitten in half by sharks. One even took an armed Moroccan soldier in full combat gear, including flak jacket, from a rock like a trout taking a grasshopper off a leaf.

  Old Etonian, cameraman, and former mujahideen guerrilla Carlos Mavroleon made a big deal out of teaching me to make peperoncino aglio e olio. He made it sound like I was being initiated into a brotherhood of culinary superiors. Carlos had a gentle, fey voice like a pantomime homosexual. He also carried a Colt 45 pistol hidden under his shirt. Ordinarily journalists who carry guns are freaks and fantasists likely to get themselves killed. Carlos was different.

  “If I knew that all you were going to do was fry up some garlic in olive oil with snipped-up chilli, I’d have stayed on the roof drinking with everyone else. This is bollocks,” I said, giving his shoulder a gentle shove.

  It was exquisite. But I haven’t cooked it since Carlos was found dead in a Peshawar hotel room in 1998.

  For the young and brash among us, these were the good days. We had war. We had famine. We had two seasons in the sun. We also had good food, plenty of booze, freshly made watermelon juice with a hint of ginger, little perfumed mangoes from Afgooye, and rooms fumigated against bugs with frankincense and myrrh. Enough of us got killed to make the rest feel brave and noble.

  Rwanda was different.

  I was smuggled in from neighbouring Burundi by Vjeko Ćurić, a Franciscan monk who was Rwanda’s Scarlet Pimpernel. We drove in his small Toyota saloon. We were stopped at a roadblock by interahamwe killers. One wore a doctor’s white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. We were about ten miles short of Gitarama, not far from Vjeko’s parish. The white coat was splattered with fresh blood. A woman in a purple dress was lying facedown. The naked soles of her feet rested on the edge of the tarmac. I could see her white knickers. Her head was in the ditch with a tangle of three or four other bodies.

  We had passed a corpse about every ten yards for miles behind us as we’d driven north from the border with Burundi. This was early May 1994. The genocide in Rwanda was three weeks old, but no one had quite dared to use the word—genocide. In those days this was a big thing to say. Today it’s hard to find a conflict in which the term isn’t chucked about.

  A million people were killed in Rwanda in ninety days. We know the numbers because we know how many Tutsis were in the country, and how many survived. Then add in the Hutu moderates, who were the first to die in this perfectly organised state-sponsored mass slaughter, and a million is the minimum figure. That’s 11,111 a day—by hand, by machete, with clubs made from the roots of saplings. Many were burned alive. The lucky ones were shot—but had to pay for the privilege in advance. Those with money could die with their children in one burst.

  The roadblock “doctor” shoved his bald head into the Toyota and rotated it so he was nose-to-nose with Vjeko. He shouted something in Kinyarwanda, straight into the priest’s face. Vjeko laughed and spoke back harshly, then pushed the doc’s head back out of the car. We drove on.

  I had only understood the guy shouting “Belge? Belge?”

  “He wanted to know if you are Belgian. He said if you are then I must hand you over to be butchered. I said, ‘No—he’s not Belgian, you fool. Look, he’s skinny—he doesn’t eat enough chips to be Belgian.’ Sometimes you just have to scare the morons and murderers.”

  At Kivumu Vjeko put me up in his parish house. It was a quadrangle of red brick classrooms overhung by a mango tree. His small cell, and small kitchen, opened onto the slab-stone path. He was hiding dozens of Tutsis in a nearby barn and was planning to smuggle them out of the country. I didn’t visit them because he said he was being spied on. There were three bullet holes in his kitchen, one above the stove, one through the door frame, another through the foam back of an old armchair. Someone had come to kill him the week before and missed. He’d pushed past them and hidden in the mango tree.

  He made a thick bean stew, which we flavoured with chillis. No one wanted to eat meat in Rwanda—not with the sweet grilled-pork smell hanging in the air. Our guts and throats knew it before our minds could recognise the scent of burned human. No one I know who was in Rwanda then can eat roast pork or, worse still, fry chops—they smell of death.

  I hired a Mitsubishi Pajero in Burundi and set out northward across the country with a photographer, Dominic Cunningham-Reid. By the time we got to Rusomo Falls, a cascade of chocolate water where the Akagera River separates Rwanda from Tanzania before snaking northeast into Lake Victoria, a few weeks later, I had become used to drinking tea that smelled of dead bodies. The water, every body of water, had a body in it. The rivers, creeks, household cisterns, outdoor shit houses, ponds, and lakes were crammed with corpses. I learned pretty quickly to tell the time of death by the smell of the dead. At Rusomo I walked past a pile of thousands of machetes dropped by Hutu killers who had fled retribution for exile in Tanzania. Standing on the bridge they had taken to safety, I looked down. I timed the number of bodies that tumbled over the falls and floated north—there was one every second. They slopped over the rocks, snagged briefly, and slid on, like Tuscan bean soup being poured from a saucepan. Some of the bodies were brown, some white. Black people bleach white when they’ve been dead in the water for a few days. We called Rwanda’s uniquely horrible water eau de cadavre.

  By the time I got to Rusomo, I was also starving. I didn’t want to drink the tea. And the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, which was by then sweeping the Hutu genocidaires out of the country into Tanzania and Zaire, would not allow us to capture and kill any of the hundreds of thousands of goats and chickens that were running feral now that their owners were in mass graves or slopping around in the rivers. Instead, we got a plastic plate of paraffin-flavoured rice every day. I had long ago eaten the round of cured sausage and flat bread I’d brought with me and was feeling weak with hunger, my jeans falling off my hips.

  Fruit. We were allowed to pick ripe fruit. Actually, once I lost my temper, leaped out of the car, and ran into a homestead where papayas were dangling like huge green and orange gonads from the tops of rubbery-looking trees. I made Dominic get a long stick.

  “You gently poke them out of the tree, I’
ll catch them before they hit the ground. It will be a doddle—did I ever tell you I played county-level cricket as a wicket keeper when I was at school?” I said.

  “Yup,” Dom said and dislodged a fruit, which dropped about ten feet, smoothly falling into my cradling hands.

  He popped another couple off, and we got into a swinging routine of harvest. I handed them to a Tutsi rebel fighter who had been hitching a ride with us. He piled them gently on the grass. I looked up. Dom dislodged another, which teetered and dropped through a drooping umbrella of leaves—where I lost it.

  The sickly-sweet fruit hit me square on the bridge of my nose, burst all the way down my body, and left me coated in pulpy orange flesh and gelatinous seed, which looked like frogspawn and smelled of vomit. The Tutsi fighter, Leon, spluttered. Laughter did not come easily to him; his family had been murdered a month earlier. But now an orange mzungu (white man) was standing before him. None of us had washed for three weeks and we reeked. (I would spend the rest of the week stinking of puke. I would attract swarms of flies that hatched in the flesh of the dead.) Leon walked away from us so that he could laugh discreetly. He even covered his face with his hands. Then he returned to where we were now carving up the unexploded fruit on the bonnet of the Pajero.

  “I wish you’d let us grab a chicken. Why not, just this time? They’re just running about.”

  “They belong to someone,” he told me. I didn’t state the obvious, but I thought it: But Someone, everyone, is dead.

  We didn’t make that mistake again in Rwanda. For our next trip, Dom and I brought kit bags heaving with instant meals, tinned sardines, tuna and fruit. We found half-litre bottles of Tabasco sauce and padded the whole lot with toilet paper and baby wipes. The latter we used to clean our bodies every day so we would never have to get into the water, which stank. We filled the back of the car with 200 litres of petrol, jericans of water, and camping gear. We forgot machetes for cutting firewood—they gave us the creeps anyway, since they were the principal tool of the genocide. Still, it was fun to set off back into Rwanda properly equipped. We were so excited about our provisioning and gear that we stopped thinking about where we were going.