Across How Many Borders

If there’s one thing going for Matthieu Aikins (going for him in a big way), it’s the dreamlike feel of the narrative:

Matthieu’s friends chicken out. He goes back to Kabul, aching with frustration. His friends will try another way to get out of Afghanistan.

He then ends up making some complicated travel arrangements: Istanbul, Venice, Trieste, Llubljana, Van. He flies out of Istanbul, disembarks in Venice, takes the train to Trieste, spends the night at a friend’s house, then takes the bus to Llubljana, where he catches a flight to Istanbul. At Istanbul, he undergoes some things: he is searched by a man wearing gloves (UGH), he is interrogated and put into a waiting room. He becomes friendly with a man who tells Matthieu that he has been in the waiting room for six months (Waiting Room = Oxymoron, lol). He tries to distract himself by reading Toni Morrison (Beloved) He is sent back to Llubljana.

Hello, Beautiful!

My Golden Opportunity rose (my newest rose) is about to bloom! And it’s going to be gorgeous.

Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.

The “emotion-recording apparatus,” as Robert Graves called it

The author’s companion Omar is having second thoughts, only a day into the journey.

I tried to think of what I could say to rally Omar. He’d once been up for almost anything, but as the years went on, I found him less eager to take risks on our assignments together. He’d had too many close calls and seen too many bodies. Of course it was different when you were doing it for pay instead of glory, but for me, repeated exposure had the opposite effect. I understood that I was probably damaged, but at the time it seemed useful for working in places like Afghanistan and Syria, I thought I could separate feeling from reason. And it was natural, but not rational, for your fear to spike when it came time to act.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 89

2023 Pull Up a Seat Photo Challenge, Week 20 (May)

This is another fun photo challenge. Thank you for hosting, XingfuMama!

Self spent last weekend in beautiful Mendocino. That place is so beautiful, it always revives her spirit.

She dropped by the Mendocino Coast Botanic Garden, where she saw this fabulous driftwood bench. She wishes she could get something similar for her garden!

Reading a Book for the First Time

This is the first time I’ve read anything by Ernst Junger — I mourn because surprise is so much part of the pleasure I’m deriving in reading him. Alas, you can’t discover a great author twice.

I’ll always remember what I was doing when I first picked up Storm of Steel — the time of year (late spring), the weather (hot). Anyhoo, absolutely taken aback by Junger’s nonchalance and insouciance, mouth dropping open practically every page, here he is in Flanders field (again)

The total absence of self-pity (“Our army is losing! There’s a good chance I might die here!”) is remarkable:

Fall, 1917, Flanders field:

The morning hours of 26 October were filled by drumfire of unusual severity. Our artillery too redoubled in fury on seeing the signals for a barrage that were sent up from the front. Every little piece of wood and every hedge was home to a gun, whose half-deaf gunners did their business.

— Storm of Steel, p. 197

At eleven o’clock on October 26, Junger is ordered to the front with four men. As he nears the command dugout, “we came under aimed machine-gun fire, a sure sign that the enemy must have forced our line back.”

Stay tuned.

Sentence of the Day, Storm of Steel

At this point, dear blog readers must be asking themselves, Is self ever going to finish this book? It’s taking her aaaages!

The Germans, it turns out, are not all spit-and-polish. One of the commendable aspects of this book is that Junger documents many instances of friendly fire. He describes these incidents with an “oh well, that’s war” detachment, with the result that the reader places absolute trust in his voice.

Regniévile:

• One enthusiast threw in a smoke stick, making any further attack on the place impossible. (Oh, the irony! The platoon was supposed to be providing Junger and a hand-picked few diversionary “covering fire” so that they could take advantage of the enemies’ distraction to advance)

Still Regniéville:

• “Of the fourteen who had set out, only four returned . . . “
• Kienitz had “taken some losses . . . from our own artillery fire.”

May Showers Bring . . .

More flowers!

More and more!

Side yard, today. In years past, self’s been lucky if she gets more than a half dozen blooms.

Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.

Flashback Friday: Andrew, One Hour Old

Posting (one day early) for Six Word Saturday:

18 February 2001, Foxstone Park (Virginia)

Self driven to hair-pulling distraction by all this coverage of “pomp and circumstance” on cnn. Something happening tomorrow? Hard pass.

She’s on Chapter 6 of Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, and it’s about another thrilling event (possibly second only to the killing of Osama in the thrills meter): the arrest of the FBI mole, Robert Hanssen.

Just after Hanssen had left a small garbage bag under a bridge (his last dead drop ever ever ever), “ten FBI agents” came out of the woods, “surrounded him, cuffed him, and read him his Miranda rights.” Self can just imagine the scene! That’s what makes the Hanssen arrest so satisfying.

Here was the damage:

“Hanssen was found to have betrayed at least four Russian agents working for US intelligence, three of whom were executed as a result of his treachery.”

Spies, as Zegart points out, do not just work for adversaries. She cites the case of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel. “One day an alert coworker saw Pollard carrying what looked like a classified envelope into the parking lot and reported him.” He served 30 years of a life sentence.

“Today, according to former U.S. intelligence officials, two to three million people are engaged in espionage around the world, most of them aiming at the United States.”

— Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, p. 146

Sentence of the Day: Oyinkan Braithwaite

Is there anything more beautiful than a man with a voice like an ocean?

— My Sister, the Serial Killer, pp. 48 – 49