War is Boring by David Axe & Matt Bors

Author:David Axe & Matt Bors [Axe, David & Bors, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NAL
Published: 2010-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Ted Rall is a cartoonist, columnist, and author of To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue, and Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?

PROLOGUE

IRAQ

LEBANON

WASHINGTON, D.C.

EAST TIMOR

AFGHANISTAN

SOMALIA

DETROIT

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD

So I didn’t die. Not really. The Chadian soldiers at the intersection in Abeche pointed their weapons at me, demanded to know who I was, seized my documents and threatened to kill me. But they didn’t.

Neither did the mob of deserting child soldiers I fell in with after extricating myself from that intersection. The mob’s ring leader—a hollow-faced sixteen-year-old boy—chased me through midnight Abeche with a knife, but I outran him, even with my cameras shoved in the crotch of my pants to protect them.

Nor did I die in Nicaragua, Kenya, Djibouti, off the Somali coast hunting for pirates or in Logar province, Afghanistan, where the Taliban blew up the truck behind mine in a U.S. Army convoy and pinned us down for twenty minutes with rockets and gunfire.

“I’m good luck,” I now tell the soldiers I spend half my life with. They don’t believe that. Neither do I. A lucky man wouldn’t feel the way I do. A lucky man would be happy to be alive. Me? I feel like my body survived that night in Abeche, but something inside me succumbed to the violence it had always craved. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

The more of the world I see, the less sense it makes. The more different people I meet, the less I believe in their humanity. The older I get, the less comfortable I am in my own skin. We are a world at war, sometimes quietly, often not. We are the cleverest monsters, and we deserve everything we’ve got coming.

Everything falls apart. Everyone dies in time. In the great, slow reduction of our lives and history, the things we can believe in shrink into a space smaller than our own bodies. To preserve them, for as long as you might, arm yourself, and be afraid.

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