Twenty years ago I did my military service as an NCO in the Para Commando Regiment. I have very fond memories of that time, my unit, colleagues and especially my team members.
As a combat unit, we were being prepped in the spring of 1993 for a four-month peacekeeping mission in Somalia under the United Nations flag.
Mission with a manual.
Stopping a vehicle, entering a house, frisking a person, ... the United Nations had devised a procedure for every situation.
One of the procedures prescribed what to do when finding an armed person. The procedure was: "Stop, Stop, Stop", followed by "Stop or I shoot!" and then "Shoot in the air.", "Shoot in the ground." etc., etc., ...
And what I thought at the time is that’s how things sort themselves out. Because by the time I had finished this list I would be long gone.
And still it inspired confidence. That thick white folder with the sky-blue logo of the United Nations. Things remained unpredictable, but at least we had a manual. We could look for solutions and make decisions in accordance with the manual.
Applying the "stop the car" procedure when entering a house was about the worst that could happen to me. At least that’s what I thought.
The first time.
We left the compound for the first time. At the final checkpoint separating "us" from "them" I loaded my weapon. Locking the bullet in my weapon, looking for the right seating position, the silence of my men told me it was "for real".
Once we had left compound, I didn’t know where to look first. In every door opening, every alley, every vehicle, I saw danger everywhere. Because our skin was white as milk, the Somalis knew that we were on our first patrols. Some stood still and smiled. We didn’t.
We drove slowly past buildings you couldn’t tell anymore what they were used for. The white walls looked like chalk cliffs in de surf. A piece disappeared with every storm.
I looked at a pack of mutts gathering around a steaming pile of rubbish. I saw a dog drinking from a puddle of stagnant water smelling like a cesspool. Something grabbed me by the throat, pushed me against a wall. I couldn’t move.
A woman was sitting among the dogs, sliding through the muck, half-naked in burlap rags, on her hands and knees. She sat down and threw her head back, with her tongue hanging from her mouth. She picked something up from between the legs of a dog and put it in her mouth.
Nobody looked. Nobody stopped.
The images I had formed in my mind over the past months were gone in a flash. Nothing made sense anymore, because there isn’t a manual in the world that could place a mentally disabled woman in the filth of this disrupted society.
To me, this was the end of a beginning.