Stiff Upper Lip All the Way

Self is now on p. 155 of The Naked Don’t Fear the Water (about halfway). She truly appreciates how deadpan Matthieu Aikins is when dealing with certain unforeseen situations. A few pages earlier, a companion takes him to a restaurant in a Kurdish section of Istanbul. “The police don’t come here,” the companion says. At that same moment, “a middle-aged cop walked in, his radio and pistol passing at eye level. We went quiet and looked down at our plates.” LOL

Now, on p. 155, his smuggler tells him they should get going, a ship has been found that will take Aikins and his friend Omar to a Greek island. They are taken in a white Hyundai to a nearby mosque, where they transfer to a taxi driven by “a very nervous Turk” who first takes them “down a steep blind alley” and then has to “reverse back up, the clutch burning.” They eventually arrive at a hotel, where they transfer yet again, to an empty white van. They make a stop to pick up more passengers. “Young men started piling in, one after the other, until they were sitting on each other, their heads at an angle against the ceiling.” Aikins and Omar are sitting all the way in the back, surely they are spared this undecorous seating arrangement, if not then surely Aikins will comment on the extraordinary experience. Only, he doesn’t. All he writes is: “The men were speaking Arabic; I tried the little I knew. The guy on my lap said they were from a village in Aleppo, in northern Syria — I’d been there on reporting trips.” omg, Matthieu has such presence of mind, he can’t stop interviewing people for information, and what better subject than a man sitting on his lap, lol

Finally, they join 50 other migrants in an inflatable rubber boat meant to hold 25. The “pilot” is a refugee who’s never piloted a boat before, but he’s being offered free passage so he gladly accepts the responsibility.

This is all too exciting!

The End of Langemarck

Lieutenant Ernst Junger is wounded again. This time he has to wait in a crater for 13 hours, drinking rainwater from his helmet, before help comes.

He’s wrapped in a tarpaulin, a tree sapling is slid through the loops, and two orderlies prepare to carry him to the rear. But they have to dodge shells, zigging and zagging, and once, painfully, they drop him.

Unexpectedly, Junger learns that one of his brothers, Fritz, the one “dearest to my heart”, had taken part in the first wave of attacks against the British line, and was reported missing: “a feeling of appalling, irreplaceable loss opened up in front of me.”

“Then in walked a soldier, who told me that my brother was lying wounded in a nearby shelter.” Junger runs over, and finds his brother gravely wounded: a shrapnel ball “had penetrated his lung, the other shattered his right shoulder . . . We squeezed each other’s hands, and said what had to be said.”

After he himself is wounded, Junger is taken to a hut being used as a field dressing station. “Suddenly, bespattered with mud from his boots to his helmet, a young officer burst in. It was my brother Ernst . . . ” (The author is also Ernst. It’s probably a typo: you can’t have two brothers from the same family sharing the same name, surely?)

They have the briefest of reunions. Ernst is carried back of the line, and there, he slips in and out of delirium. A couple of officers he doesn’t know are in the room, drinking wine “out of tin cups and whispering among themselves.”

The chapter ends with this paragraph:

Mortally tired as I was, a feeling of happiness now sneaked in that grew stronger and stronger, and which stayed with me throughout the ensuing weeks. I thought of death, and the thought did not disturb me. Everything within me and around me seemed stunningly simple, and, with the feeling “You’re all right,” I slid my way into sleep.

— Storm of Steel, p. 179

Langemark, 1917

No need for explanation of the excerpt. Junger’s language is so vivid, especially here:

The hour was at hand. We had to defend the Rattenburg, and I told the men, some of whom looked troubled, that we were not about to run away . . . I picked up a rifle and hung a belt of cartridges around my neck.

As our band was very small, I tried to bolster it from the numbers of those who were drifting around leaderless. Most of them heard our appeal willingly enough . . . while others hurried on their way, having stopped in disbelief and seen what poor prospects we offered. It was no time for niceties. I ordered my men to aim at them . . . they slowly came nearer, even though we could see from their expressions that they were most reluctant to keep us company. There were various excuses, prevarications . . .

“But I don’t even have a gun!”

“Then wait till someone gets shot, and use his!”

— Storm of Steel, pp. 167 – 168

Here Comes the Gas

Storm of Steel, p. 82:

The long-drawn cry went up: “Gas attack! Gas attack! Gas! Gas! Gaaaas!”

By the light of the flares, a dazzling flow of gas billowed over the black jags of masonry. Since there was a heavy smell of chlorine in the quarry as well, we lit large straw fires at the entrances, whose acrid smoke almost drove us out of our refuge, and forced us to try and cleanse the air by waving coats and tarpaulins.

The next day, we were able to marvel at the traces the gas had left. A large proportion of the plants had withered, snails and moles lay dead . . . The shells and ammunition splinters that lay all over the place had a fetching green patina.

The following day, the whole process is repeated: “Gas attack!”

There was a sweetish smell in the air . . . In the ring around Monchy, powerful drumfire was raging, but that ebbed away before long . . . The British had set off clouds of gas and smoke at five in the morning . . .

The Hunt for bin Laden

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms maintains that US special forces almost captured bin Laden in the December following 9/11. The CIA traced bin Laden and about a “thousand of his men to a maze of tunnels and caves high in the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush.” Yet, even “with bombs pummeling Tora Bora from above,” bin Laden slipped the noose. He would elude American agents for 10 long years.

What followed was the arduous task of sifting through “phone calls, emails, radio signals, tweets and text messages” — 1.7 billion of which were intercepted every day. It turned out this was all futile effort, because after Tora Bora, bin Laden and his “trusted lieutenants had ditched their cell and satellite phones” and for the next 10 years would rely solely on trusted couriers. “US airplanes dropped flyers with bin Laden’s face behind bars and offered a $25 million reward for anyone who helped turn him in,” but the trail still went cold.

In the end, the break came from a tip from a detainee: the name of a courier. Other information came from what detainees did not say. When they ran the courier’s name past Abu Faraj al-Libbi, al-Qaeda’s third in command, Faraj al-Libbi denied ever knowing him. They ran the name past “another senior al-Qaeda leader in custody, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who downplayed the courier’s importance.” Then “KSM returned to his cell after questioning and communicated to other prisoners that they should not mention anything about this courier.” American interest in this “courier was now sky-high.”

Eventually — this took years — they were able to identify the courier’s real name and discover what kind of car he drove: a white Suzuki. Tracking the car was what eventually led them to the compound in Abbotabad.

Sentence of the Day: 1st Tuesday of May 2023

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet wrote a memo declaring war on Osama bin Laden nearly three years before 9/11, urging that “no resource or people (be) spared,” but only a few agency heads received the memo and all of them ignored it.

— Chapter Three, p. 69, Spies, Lies and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

The Economist (Week of Apr. 1 – 7): Warsaw Hackers

• The cyber partisans, a group of anonymous dissidents, have hacked their way to the very top of Belarus’s authoritarian regime. They claim that last year when Alexander Lukashenko, the country’s dictatorial president, said he was more scared of cyber weapons than nuclear weapons, he was thinking of them. “What opposition group can say that they have the passport information of all its country’s citizens :-)” typed a hacker identified only as Cyber # 3. They have reason to grin. The Cyber Partisans are are the cutting edge of a militant wing of Belarus’s opposition that is gearing up for action.

Six Word Saturday: Last Lunch of the Fabulous Four

This is a picture of self with two of her oldest friends — Carla Pacis and Judy Benares — and a new friend — Mahla Sen. It was her last full day in Manila after a four-year absence. The four of us had gone on a day trip of Laguna Province, just a few days prior. The theme of the day was historic churches. The four of us squeezed into Judy’s car and visited the church at Majayjay (and the nearby Taytay Falls), founded by Juan de Salcedo in 1573 (he was 23; the grandfather he came to the Philippines with was dead, and Juan de Salcedo kept on with his sworn duty: the Christianization of Spain’s newest colony) and the church at Nagcarlan (almost as old).

It was a very very long day (we were stuck in a four-hour traffic jam on the way back). Anyhoo, we exchanged stories and came to the conclusion that we made a good “team.” We started drawing up plans for future trips — Kalempong, anyone? Or Simla? Next year, we resolved.

The following Wednesday, Mahla invited us all over for a fabulous Indian buffet — the picture was taken after said lunch. Self had to suck in her stomach. She hadn’t slept a wink the night before — she always gets last-day-before-flying-home jitters, surprised she was still upright. Note the AWP tote? It’s already one of her most-traveled totes.

Posting for Debbie’s Six Word Saturday.

Birds of Negros: Murals by “Otay”

Posting for Debbie Smythe’s Six Word Saturday.

I loved the murals on the walls of my hotel in Bacolod, Dear Departed Dad’s hometown in the province of Negros Occidental. The hotel, called the Henry Hotel Roost, is part of a chain of boutique hotels scattered around the Philippines, but the chain places particular emphasis on local (native) products.

Each of the 19 rooms in The Henry Hotel Roost has a unique mural depicting a different Negrense bird. Here are just a few:

I asked the hotel who the artist was, and they told me he went by “Otay,” which is the native word for barber. Apparently, this young man supports his art by working as a barber. His real name is Jovito Hecita, and he is a native of Talisay.

Stay tuned.

That November, Yes That One

I still have PTSD from that November. The stress and anxiety of living through the four years under Trump never went away.

The day after the elections, I was trying to cross Market Street to join a women’s March in front of City Hall. Instead I stumbled into a humongous “pro-life” parade. I called my friends who were supposed to be at the march with me, and they said: Are their colors pink? Because we’re with the “pinks.” I checked the parade and told my friend: “Their colors are green.” And my friend said, “You are in the wrong demonstration. Get out of there!” But policemen were preventing people from crossing Market, so I ended up watching helplessly as the giant posters of dead fetuses paraded in front of me.

That day, as I got into the car to drive to the hospital, everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win. Some predicted by a landslide. My friends were buying champagne. I was not so sure. Disembodied heads, like Trump’s — male, blustering, bullying, blind — had been hanging over the landscape for decades. Limbaugh, Gingrich, Cheney, to name a few, now Ryan and Pence, all men who called themselves “pro-life” although they would take food stamps away from the poor, health care from children, and social security from the elderly.

— “Ordinary Devotions,” Essay # 11 in Anxious Attachments