Stories from the Warzone...

Maybe it’s not me, maybe I’m done volunteering. Perhaps I should just admit that I now understand the world is corrupt and brutal, that most nations only look out for their own interests and people seldom rush to dangerous acts of self sacrifice. No shit. Where did I get the idea I would find otherwise?

We actually set out to save the world. That is what was insane – not ten-year-old warlords with bad breath and voodoo fetishes in Liberia, not Matt’s assassin, not the boss in Somalia who set us up for an ambush in exchange for a fifteen per cent kickback on the judges’ salaries, not the Hutu militants who butchered a minority who had repressed them or the Tutsi survivors who executed the suspects – but me, for thinking I could enter a war and personally restore order.

So that’s the easy answer: forswear idealism; resign myself to a sad majority; put away the things of youth; be thankful I survived and move on.

But that’s horseshit too, a craven capitulation. I’m not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naïve and romantic and idealistic – that part of yourself you treasure most – to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? If everyone resigns themselves to cynicism, isn’t that exactly how vulnerable millions end up dead ...

I have another quote from the exit of Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem) on my desk … Son of man, keep not silent, forget not deeds of tyranny, cry out at the disaster of a people, recount it to your children and they unto theirs from generation to generation.

I don’t know who saved the honour of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that and ancestral memory of tyranny commands me not to keep silent…I am a witness, I have a voice, I have to write it down.

Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a Warzone.