Rebel Without Borders: Frontline Missions in Africa and the Gulf

REBEL WITHOUT

BORDERS

REBEL WITHOUT

BORDERS Frontline Missions in Africa and the Gulf

MARC VACHON with François Bugingo Translated by Charles Phillips

ECW Press

Copyright © Marc Vachon, 2008 Published by ECW Press 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada m4e 1e2 Published originally by Les Éditions du Boréal, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Vachon, Marc, 1963– Rebel without borders: frontline missions in Africa and the Gulf / Marc Vachon with François Bugingo; translated by Charles Philips. Translation of: Rebelle sans frontières. isbn-13: 978-1-55022-786-4 1. Vachon, Marc, 1963–. 2. Humanitarian assistance. 3. Doctors Without Borders (Association). I. Bugingo, François, 1974– II. Phillips Charles (Charles H.) III. Title. jz6369.v3213 2008 341.5'84 c2007-906565-1 Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan Cover Image (Front Top): Brian Raisbeck / iStockphoto All other images courtesy of Marc Vachon Typesetting: Mary Bowness Production: Rachel Brooks Printing: Transcontinental This book is set in Spectrum and printed on paper that is 100% post consumer recycled. The publication of Rebel Without Borders has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp).

distribution canada: Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown, on l7g 5s4 united states: Independent Publishers Goup, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, il, 60610 printed and bound in canada

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix

1

Nobody’s Son 1

2

A Teen Adrift 9

3

Tough Guy 17

4

How Deep the Abyss 26

5

Whatever You Do, Don’t Look Back 33

6

The Company of French Doctors 42

7

Humanitarian Folly 52

8

The White Knight 64

9

Dr. Marc Vachon 76

10

A Meeting on a Roof in Sulaymaniyah 89

11

Nights at Café Obala 99

12

Impossible Mission 112

13

The English Gentlemen 126

14

Serving the Republic 136

15

Cruel Africa 150

16

Goma 161

17

That Strange Evil Consuming Me 171

18

Redemption 182

19

Kabul 191

20

The Blond African 198

21

Al Qaeda: Sun and Shadow 210

22

Palm Trees, Banana Trees . . . 224

23

The Whole World’s My Home 242

24

It’s Been a Long Time . . . 255

25

A Dream 269

Acknowledgments The interviews that made this work possible were conducted at the foot of Mont Saint-Julien in Buis-les-Baronnies, France. Across from us, Mont Saint-Trophime hid Mont Ventoux. In the peaceful land where legend has it that the Good Lord created cicadas—nicknamed town criers—to wake up slumbering country folk over-fond of their siestas, Marc Vachon and François Bugingo enjoyed the wonderful hospitality of the Morard family. We would like to express our sincere thanks to them. And to the charming inhabitants of Buis. Marc Vachon would also like to express his gratitude to the circle of friends who were a source of inspiration and read the manuscripts: Christophe and Margie, Jean-Christophe, Geneviève, the Begkoyian clan, Mégot, François, Olivier, the Rouletabille, Élisabeth, Bettina, Adrian at Stolly’s, Michel at New Cactus . . . François Bugingo would like to thank his family (his parents, sisters, and in-laws), Stéphanie Kitembo, her mother Annie Monin, as well as his friends and colleagues. Our warmest thanks go to Natacha and Élisabeth for their corrections and to Jean-Christophe Rufin for his valuable input.

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Preface Many people have been quick to judge Marc Vachon. And yet, until now, no one has taken his true measure. Numerous accusations have been laid at his feet: gangster, Hells Angel, drug addict, gigolo, dealer, pimp, adventurer, spy . . . None of these is entirely false. And yet, these words fall far short of the truth. Because the kid whom life threw from pillar to post, the teenager forced to fight to survive, the man compelled to scratch and claw to save his life is the same person whom nature has blessed with a pure soul, a heightened sensibility and rare generosity. Please bear with me, Mr. Prosecutors! You have punished this man numerous times, and justifiably so. When he fled, you had him pursued to put him under lock and key. But now he stands before you a better and wiser man after fifteen years of unfailing commitment to the poor and the destitute in every war zone in the world. Is Vachon another Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa? Perhaps not. At any rate, there is something of Jean Valjean and the Count of Monte Cristo in him. How was such a transformation possible? This is what the book allows us to understand. That alone makes the work an exceptionally interesting document. To people tempted to lose faith in humanity—and aren’t we all from time to time—his story offers much needed reassurance. At first glance, this fascinating biography appears to be a story of redemption. Abandoned by poverty-stricken parents, a young Quebecer

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struggles to his feet, triumphs over fate and begins to share the little he has wrested from life with the world’s poorest communities. A fairy tale . . . But Marc Vachon has never been one to believe in fairy tales, not even this one. This book is about his life, period. Mention resurrection and he laughs in your face. No doubt he is being modest. But Vachon is no Pollyanna and is not given to heroic posturing or endless moralizing. Instead, he reveals a sparkling wit, a passion for soccer and a taste for a fresh glass of ice-cold beer. Not to say that this confession was easy. I was there at the outset of the project and witnessed the resistance he had to overcome. The first editor suggested that Marc record his story on tape. Somehow the tapes got mislaid. I suspect that their content so overwhelmed him that he lost them on purpose. It was the first time I saw the big lug cry. A few years later François Bugingo came on board. He collaborated with Marc on the present text. Reading it helped me understand why Marc was so devastated the first time. Alone in front of a mike, he couldn’t bear to dredge up memories of what he had actually endured. Evoking his childhood was excruciating, as if it had belatedly dawned on him, given what life had permitted him to become, what immense injustice he had suffered as a child. That’s why, appearances to the contrary, this book is not about redemption; it is about rehabilitation. It is not the story of a bad child turned good; it is the painful evocation of a wonderful child, full of tenderness, joy of life and generosity, a child to whom life offered only violence and betrayal. This lost, violated child, whose potential lay untapped, long had to conceal the treasures in his heart lest they be stolen. After a long absence, Marc finally dared to set foot in Montreal again years ago. I met him there one evening. He led me down the streets where he used to roam with his gang in days gone by. I had the sense that it all had happened ages ago, but to him it seemed like yesterday. He started breathing heavily. His

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eyes darted around as if he expected a rival gang to suddenly appear. He scented danger like an Indian buffalo hunter. Following in Marc’s tracks, we go on a dizzying plunge into our era, from the forgotten Third World wars to the violent nights of North-American metropolises. I first made Marc’s acquaintance in Kurdistan at the end of the First Gulf War. Back then, I was vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières and I’ve followed his peripatetic journey ever since as he resolutely tackled a succession of relief missions in every country at war: Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Mozambique, and so on. In all of these countries, Marc Vachon has shown extraordinary dedication. But the word dedication can be misleading. Marc does not equate dedication with self-sacrifice. And even less does it involve ostentation. Dedicating yourself simply means making yourself useful to others. It can take many forms: building a refugee camp in a few hours, supplying drinking water to masses of people driven into exile by armed conflict, negotiating dangerous checkpoints with supply convoys, avoiding traps laid by warring militias. And Marc Vachon is a virtuoso at plying these peculiar arts. In this field, he has demonstrated rare and natural qualities, undoubtedly the fruit of those years of hardship. Many a major relief organization has entrusted him with vital responsibilities. The book offers a valuable account of his years in humanitarian work: few volunteers have embarked on so many perilous missions. I can attest to the fact that nothing, here, has been invented. On the contrary, some things have been simplified so as not to overtax the reader. Not only is this an indispensable document of these conflicts, it is the portrait of a man. Marc Vachon has lived his life backwards. He started out old beyond his years like other children who can ill afford innocence or vulnerability. And with the passing years, he has become gentler and more confident until finally with this book he has been able to open his heart to us. On the banks of the Ligurian Sea, former fishermen take tourists in small boats just off shore. Then they hand their guests

preface

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masks and invite them to look under the water. And the visitors discover, beneath the black waves of the Christ of the Abyss, arms raised up to them from the bottom of the luminous seabed. Does this bronze statue want to drag us to the depths or is it imploring us to raise it towards the light? This book elicits a similar response: it relates violent and tragic events but beneath their dark roiling surface, it reveals the astonishingly pure figure of a hero reaching out to you. If Vachon ever reads this preface (perish the thought), he’ll blow a gasket. “Bloody hell, what in God’s name is he talking about?” When he is embarrassed, he lays it on thick in a Québécois accent, vintage Saint-Henri, the working-class district where he was born. And then he switches the subject to the Paris SaintGermain Football Club whom he actively supports, and if he really wants to lighten the mood, he pokes fun at Jacques Chirac. In the end, he howls with laughter and you have to shut the windows so the neighbours won’t complain. But no, this time, leave the windows open. So what if the good folks are annoyed. Let them call the caretaker or even the cops. Now, we’ll know what to have them read, so they’ll finally understand whom they’re dealing with. “Hey you! Big guy down there with the tattoos on your arms and the joint stuck behind your ear, what’s your name?” “Vachon, officer, Marc Vachon. Remember the name. One day Tom Cruise will play me in a movie.” Jean-Christophe Rufin

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1 Nobody’s Son

The name’s Marc Vachon. I was born on October 27, 1963, in Montreal, Canada. Somewhere near Saint-Henri, a working-class district in the city’s southwest end. I was baptized 13 days later at SainteCunégonde Church. Still an infant, I was abandoned on the front steps of the welfare building. When? Who knows? My life really began when I was 17 months old with the Fortier family at 2363 Bercy St. in another working-class district, HochelagaMaisonneuve. If you ask me, they’re my real parents. It was my seventh foster home. At least that’s what the man who ran the welfare office told my foster mother. I don’t remember the first six. He told her my full name was Marc Gérard Stéphane Vachon. And I couldn’t be adopted because my biological mother had not signed the papers.

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I figured something was odd when I went to school: mom’s name was Fortier but mine was Vachon. So I asked about it. Apparently, my biological mother fell sick and had to get rid of me. Her name was Jacqueline. That’s all I know about her. I learned how to get along without her. I know my biological father’s name: somebody called Vachon. I also have two brothers, but I couldn’t care less. My real mother, the one I call mom, was the woman who raised me. When I got sick she took care of me. When I had the flu, she looked after me. I had asthma so I can just imagine how many sleepless nights she spent at my bedside. My father was a tinplate worker at Macdonald Tobacco. That’s where he plied his trade all his adult life. The Fortiers led a modest life; they had four other children, every one of them older than me. Micheline was the eldest, followed by Daniel, Huguette and Lise in that order. They were good people. My mom had a heart of gold. She minded children while their parents were at work: little Arab and black kids, the offspring of immigrants who slaved away at thankless jobs. I grew up in a cheerful atmosphere with children of all cultures and races. My big sisters, who were white, dated Haitians they met at Expo 67, the World’s Fair in Montreal. My brother went out with the Italian girl next door. The whole brood would pour into the Metro, plunk down ten cents for the fare and head to St. Helen’s Island to take a dip in the pool. Back then, Montreal was like a big friendly village. The town was fine, but it was a turbulent era. Women’s Lib. People listened to The Beatles and The Stones. People were getting into pot and harder substances, like lsd. Everything was happening at once, and much too fast. At seven, I was just a normal kid, a good little fellow who attended Sainte-Anselme School, located between Hochelaga and Rouen Streets. It was a rough neighbourhood. Kids smoked nasty cheap dope; they sniffed glue. At eight or nine, we got into smoking, rolling our own, trying to look like big shots.

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Checked pants were in and the Quebec music scene exploded. When the Québécois folk rock group Beau Dommage sang “Le Blues de la métropole,” they were describing my neighbourhood. Harmonium and Offenbach were hot. Separatism was on the rise. The Assumption sash was back. We were proud of being Québécois. Then my mother got the brilliant idea of imitating her neighbour who shipped her 14- or 15-year-old son off to boarding school to keep him from running with the wrong crowd. And mom didn’t want me turning into a thug. I didn’t burst into a flood of tears when I left home. I was only eight, but I was a little man, leaving on a mission. Mom, dad, and my sisters stood on the front steps. I squared my shoulders and puffed out my chest. I was a tough little kid from Bercy St. What was so scary about boarding school? Anyway, the neighbour’s kid, a tough-guy wannabe, swore he’d look out for me. But what followed absolutely baffled me. After driving two and a half hours straight, Mr. Paquin, the welfare agent who handled my file, pulled up outside a country house. There was a bulldozer out front and five kids hanging around. A couple came out to greet us. I didn’t realize it, but this would be my eighth foster home. What a shock. Rawdon was a village with unpaved streets and no sidewalks. The first thing I asked was, “Where can I play here?” All I could see was a black-and-white tv. I was the family’s third foster child. The mother said that school wouldn’t be starting for another week. A bus would pick me up every morning. I had no idea where I was or what I was doing there. “It’s a hell of a trip to go back to Montreal every weekend, isn’t it?” “You won’t be going back to Montreal.” “What do you mean I won’t be going to Montreal? I have to go home, don’t I?”

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“Forget your home; you don’t have a home anymore. Your parents have abandoned you.” I didn’t believe it. Even if I was just a kid, even if, deep down inside, I was sore at my mother, I wouldn’t cry. I’d show them I was tough. Five months later, Mr. Paquin came to take me to another foster home. I had no regrets because in that family I had experienced violence I’d never known. The slightest offence would earn me a slap in the face. And if I had the nerve to cry, I’d get a volley of slaps that would make my head spin. The father would scream, “Stop bawling, you goddamn little bastard!” I stopped crying. It would be years before I could cry again. The new home, my ninth, was in Chertsey not far from Rawdon. Mr. Paquin brought me there along with two other children who had stayed in Rawdon. And there was another kid besides. So the four of us were squeezed like sardines into a small bedroom. Two bunk beds constituted the only furniture. We had to sleep with our arms over the covers. I had no idea why. It was the start of a long series of ordeals. I was changing foster homes at an ever-increasing rate. No one bothered to explain. The truth was that in 1972 no one wanted to have kids underfoot. My city ways disrupted country folk’s lifestyle. In one home, the lady told me, “If you’re good, we’ll take you to Expo . . .” Why did I have to be good to go to the World’s Fair? My mom took the opposite tack: she’d sent us there when she needed a little peace. I returned to Montreal when I was 10. A couple in their fifties took me in. A brief oasis of joy and happiness. I went to SaintMarc School, named after my patron saint. I had a room of my own. This childless couple considered me an answer to their prayers. They treated me like a little prince. They gave me my first pair of skates: Daoust 10s. For Christmas, I got an electronic game.

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This happy period ended because of a fluke. The couple had arranged with the neighbour to give me lunch. As I had the key to the house, I was allowed to go home after the meal and watch some kid’s programs on tv. One day, the phone rang. As usual I picked it up and answered. A voice asked to talk to an adult. “They’re not here.” “Who’s speaking?” “Marc . . .” “This is Mr. Paquin. Do you know who I am?” “Yes, the big gentleman.” “Are you alone in the house?” “Yeah.” “What are you doing?” “I’m watching tv.” “How did you get in?” “Through the door; I’ve got a key.” He hung up. The next day, a car came to fetch me. The couple had been blamed for leaving me in the house by myself. Parting was extremely painful. I clung desperately to the bars of my bed. When you’ve known misery, you recognize happiness when you see it. You know that good luck never comes in pairs. And certainly not for a bastard . . . After that, I lived with the worst family I ever knew. Yet on the surface, it was a good family, well respected in the Richelieu Valley 20 miles south of Montreal. The mother had earned an award for her humanitarian and charitable work. I can still see the big certificate that had pride of place on the wall beside the Quebec flag. The H... family took in about twenty Down’s syndrome children. Their house was immense. And the Down’s children were left for the day in a backyard, surrounded by a high fence. They rode around on a bike or played ball. Behind the little play area, there was a trailer.

Nobody’s son

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I’ll never forget my arrival. Mrs. H... gave us a tour of the property. The trailer. The lovely fireplace. The huge bedroom with a view of the fields on one side and the yard on the other. Ecstasy. I rubbed my hands with glee as I watched her sign the foster care papers. Mr. Paquin handed Mrs. H... my bag with the new clothes they gave us when we changed homes. The man was barely out the door when she grabbed my jacket, which lay on the magnificent bed, and steered me to the laundry room. Stuck behind the washing machines was a foldingbed. “This is your room!” she announced. I stayed there nearly eight months and never unpacked my suitcase. I was barely 10 years old. I did the housework; I mowed the lawn. They made me do anything that popped into their heads. And when I say anything, I mean anything. That woman’s cruelty knew no bounds. One of her sons invented a nasty little game that resembled roller derby. He’d skate around the yard and plow into me. And I had to stay there and get hit. One day, I’d had enough. He charged, I dodged and he crashed into the fence. It made me laugh to see him grimace in pain. That evening, on my way to my room, I didn’t see the blow coming. The slap lifted me off the ground and sent me tumbling down a few steps. My head ached and I saw double. “Don’t ever let me hear you making fun of my son again!” One evening, she decided to teach me table manners so I could eat like a “civilized person.” She sat me down beside her on a bench and slipped a knife and fork into my hands. But no sooner did I start eating, than the blows came raining down. Whack! “That’s no way to hold a knife.” Whack! “You opened your mouth too soon.” Whack! “We don’t eat with our mouths open.” “You’re nothing but the son of a whore. The son of a whore, Marc. Do you know what a whore is? That’s what your mother was. I’m going to educate you, I tell you!”

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I’ll never forget Christmas Eve dinner. The entire village was a whirl of activity. Garlands filled the entrance of the house. A big Christmas tree sparkled in the middle of the living room. At the foot of the tree lay a slew of gifts wrapped in shiny paper. And there on one little box was my name. Something told me it was a watch. I was sure it was a Timex. It had to be. And when you’re 10, you’ll forget everything, forgive everything. The abuse, the blows, the insults. Your heart brims with Christmas spirit and your eyes are riveted on the mysterious box. Mrs. H... suddenly seemed beautiful, human. Then the whole family arrived. I couldn’t see them because they kept me out of sight. Cocktails were served before the fireplace in the extension behind the house. Meanwhile, I set up the folding tables and prepared the big dining room for the meal. The guests settled in for the feast. Mrs. H... discreetly asked me to meet her in the trailer. Looking positively conspiratorial, she confided in me that she was entrusting me with a mission of the utmost importance: watching over the embers in the fireplace. “Soon the flames will die. Then there’ll be nothing left but glowing embers. Make sure they don’t set the house on fire. When they’re completely out, come and join us!” I sat down in front of the big bay window. Opposite me, I saw the whole clan dining, heard the music blaring; watched the people dancing. And there I was, alone in a corner, guarding the embers. But I was onto her. She’d made a fool of me. Visions of murder or arson crossed my mind. In the end, I fell asleep by the window. When I woke up the next day, there were wisps of smoke rising from the fireplace. I threw on my coat and hurried into the room where the festivities had taken place. Paper and empty bottles littered the floor. I headed straight to the tree and grabbed my gift. Again, I forgot everything but the watch. Mrs. H... heard my steps and came down to take a look. We

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were alone in the room. She gave me a radiant smile. “Merry Christmas, little Marc. Sorry the embers took so long to go out. But you did a good job! You can open your gift now.” She didn’t have to tell me twice. I ripped open the wrapping paper. It wasn’t a watch. It was a bar of soap. She cackled. “Now, you can wash yourself, you little bastard.” When I was 22 years old, I contemplated killing her so she would stop haunting my dreams. One day, I tooled down the Richelieu Valley on my Harley with my pistol in my back pocket. I pulled up in front of the house. There was no fence around the yard where she parked the Down’s kids; I figured she didn’t look after them anymore. I could see the whole scene unfold. I’d knock on the door. She’d come to open it. I wouldn’t let her say a word. I’d empty an entire clip into her from point-blank range. She’d sink graceless, lifeless to the ground. I’d step away, hop onto my motorcycle and drive back to the city. I could practically taste it. Time stopped. For what seemed like an eternity, I sat on my Harley glaring at the door, recalling the pain and humiliation I’d suffered in that house. I didn’t dismount. I told myself killing her wasn’t worth it. She’d won. She’d destroyed me. I didn’t need to kill her to prove she’d turned me into a rat. Sitting on the bike with the pistol in my hand, I knew she’d won from start to finish. I wouldn’t give her the additional satisfaction of fucking up my next 25 years. I kick-started my motorcycle and headed back to Montreal. I ditched the gun on the side of the road.

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2 A Teen Adrift

By 12 years of age, like it or not, I already was a tough customer. I knew I wasn’t like the other boys. And my classmates never let me forget it. Every time I changed homes, I was the new kid with old clothes. My foster parents cashed the welfare cheque to buy fresh clothes for their eldest kids and foisted their hand-me-downs on me. There was always the same old introduction. “My name’s Marc Vachon. I live at Mr. John Doe’s house.” Then someone would ask, “But where’s your real father?” That hurt. It was only later on that I learned to fight humiliation with violence. Living with Mrs. Longpré was a solace for my bruised body and soul. Then the man

9

looking after me got sick. But before letting me go, he told me to drop by once in a while. So Mr. Paquin told Mrs. Longpré, “Marc has changed homes because his guardian’s sick. If you don’t mind, he can see his family on the weekend if he wants.” The next week, Mrs. Longpré gave me a little money. I took the bus and went to . . . 2363 Bercy St. I knocked on the door. My mother answered. “Do you know who I am?” She couldn’t speak. She burst into tears and smothered me in her arms. Then I strutted around the neighbourhood. The prodigal son had returned. The next day, when my mother brought me back to Mrs. Longpré’s, I witnessed an extraordinary meeting between two big-hearted women. Two women of modest means who had looked after children for 20 years: mostly troubled boys, abandoned by their parents. Women of infinite humanity and generosity. They hit it off right away. That week, Mrs. Longpré rang the welfare office to set things straight. When she hung up, she simply said, “Marc, you can go and spend the weekends with the Fortiers whenever you like.” “How come, Mrs. Longpré?” “Because your mom’s an honest woman.” From then on, I visited my Bercy St. family regularly. I spent every second weekend there and Christmas as well. And in the summer, I stayed longer. I did my best to act grown-up. I smoked. Big Harold, who lived at Mrs. Longpré’s house, handed me a cigarette when I arrived. But I was a kid again as soon as I was back in that warm atmosphere with brothers, a real little troupe. In all, there were fifteen welfare kids. I started to dream of the future. Maybe I’d become a fireman. Not a soldier. I didn’t like the look. I had joined the cadets before. But we had to keep our hair cut close to the scalp. Hardly in style

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in the 70s. So, when the monitor chewed me out for talking too much, it gave me an excuse to quit. And the scouts refused to let me join because of my bad rep. Hockey and baseball occupied my spare time. I played ball with my friends in the middle of Bercy St., stopping to let the cars go by. Sometimes I’d hop on a bike and go for a spin. But I never read a book. I didn’t go to church. Life had taught me that not all God’s children were created equal. And I had lived with Mrs. H... To me, the Church was nothing but a place for hypocrites and phonies. I learned to live day by day, never counting on some higher power. To enjoy happy times to the fullest and quickly erase the bad times from my mind. Never to regret missed opportunities. When I was almost 14, something happened that changed my life: a man I hardly knew, Mrs. Longpré’s brother-in-law, died. The house we lived in belonged to him. He had willed it to one of Mrs. Longpré’s daughters, and she wanted to kick us out. Mrs. Longpré tried negotiating with the notary. The only concessions she won were to keep the attic, two dogs, a cat and one child. She chose me. Her daughter, Mireille, didn’t even take the time to finish mourning her uncle’s death before she moved in with her husband and three children. I stayed with them for a year. My life was almost normal. I had plenty to eat. And Mireille’s husband taught me skills in the building trade. I shared a room with their son, Martin. But, in fact, things had changed. I no longer felt at home. I was keenly aware that I was in the way. With me around, the family never felt completely at ease. I changed schools and went to Calixa-Lavallée, a comprehensive school in Montreal North. My descent was immediate and brutal: I started smoking hashish . . . In school, I opted for the building and construction program.

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A year wasted. The teacher showed up once at the beginning of the year; then he took sick leave. One of the substitute teachers, an English guy with long hair, must have been smoking more hash than we were because he’d start his classes with anecdotes about the Himalayas and treks through Nepal. It was the era of long hair, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones . . . In my class, we were a bunch of loonies, local potheads with an insatiable need for cash. To score some weed, to dress cool. People wore Lois trousers, leather shoes with stitching on top. Checked shirts and little sleeveless vests were also in vogue. I started on my downhill slide. First I targeted the stores. You had to slip a couple of pairs of pants under the poncho, and another around your waist. Look casual and be ready to bolt if anyone approached you or even looked at you suspiciously. After that, all I had to do was to get the word out that I was selling jeans retailing at $30 in the stores for half price. I was never short of customers. Nobody told me to stop. Nobody warned me I was on a slippery slope. Whenever I needed shoes, I headed to Yellows. I tried on new shoes and, if I liked them, I’d keep them on my feet. And while my friends distracted the sales clerks, I’d slip away. I started taking orders: You want a bag? Ask good old Marc. He’ll go to Zellers and get one for a quarter of the price. I bought cigarettes and hash with the money I made. When I was 15, I was constantly stoned. Unhappy children eventually find one another. So I hung out with orphans and kids of divorced parents. After drugs, came alcohol. A discreetly filched flask of brandy was enough to knock us out for the afternoon. There were no adults around to keep us under control. There were widespread strikes in transportation and the schools. The demonstrators and protesters in 1968 and beyond didn’t give a damn about children, and we gradually lost our way. To straighten myself out, I tried delivering newspapers. But when it came time to collect the money, I was always short. So I

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raided Big Harold’s coins, which he kept in 50-penny rolls. Since I was $11 short, I stole 22 rolls from him. Needless to say, I got caught, and there was hell to pay at the house. School was going down the drain. But I did graduate: from hash to mescaline. I recall my first acid trip with my “friends” from Montreal North. I swallowed a purple pill while I was in the park. A half hour later, I grew impatient because it didn’t seem to be having any effect. I decided to go back to my mother’s house on Bercy St. On the way there, things started to get out of whack. All I remember are three people boarding a bus; the rest is a blur. At the house, my father was sitting on the balcony. Trying to put on a brave face, I said, “Hi, Dad!” I scrambled straight upstairs to my sister Huguette’s flat on the second floor. In my hallucination, I saw whales. But I liked it. And I got hooked. In Montreal, there was a new drug on the street called thc. It came in the form of a yellow pill and it blew your mind. Mindaltering. It cost five dollars a unit, but you could get three for a ten spot. One thing led to another. I bought my first “quarter ounce” of hash. I broke the hash into eight chunks for resale. I kept one for myself. I didn’t make a killing, just enough to pay for my weekly supply. Soon, word was out: Vachon is the dealer of choice for small users. You don’t realize you’re on a slippery slope. You think you’re still in control. You think you’re a big shot. You think you have the smarts to avoid getting busted by the police or, worse still, getting caught by the family. You think you really know the people in the business because they invite you to their parties and they pay for your beer at the tavern. When you’re fifteen and you hang out with guys with mustaches, you’re under the illusion you’re somebody, too. Truth be told, I wasn’t a big dealer yet, just a little shit in the schoolyard. And the school was left to fend for itself. I had the

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whole range: hash, thc, mescaline. And enough alcohol to drown in. I split my time between the trailer that Mrs. Longpré’s daughter had let me have in her yard and Huguette’s flat on Bercy St. After screwing up my school year, it was time to make some decisions. The ones I made were far from wise. I went from shoplifting to breaking and entering. I knocked off tvs, radios, bikes, and mopeds. I still didn’t realize the gravity of what I was doing. The life I led made me feel good; it flattered my ego. I was a regular at l’Évêché, the bar for the in-crowd in Old Montreal, a rocker meeting place. Everyone looked alike: hippies, potheads. I was sporting long hair, too and I was doing quite well financially. I didn’t think I’d gone bad. I was having a blast. Things were cool. Summer vacation gave me a chance to sample all kinds of drugs: morphine, heroin, etc. Everything. The following year, I was officially enrolled in Grade 11, my final year in high school, but technically I was still in Grade 10 because I had so many credits to make up. In fact, I was doing Grade 9 English. I was finishing my building construction course, but I was too young to enter the job market. So I took cooking classes. My friends in construction tagged along with me. Again, things didn’t go well. The teacher was never there: he was going through a divorce and was pickled all the time. And I was consuming hard drugs like they were going out of style. When I came to school in the morning, I was often high on thc. It’s funny but now I can see I could have taken many other directions. There were teachers who believed in me. Some made a lasting impression on me. At the comprehensive school, for example, there was a French teacher. He was incredible. This beanpole of a guy knew how to get the best out of me. He taught me how to write properly. For a few hours, I was one of the good kids. I wonder how things would have turned out if I had followed his advice. Maybe I’d be a reporter or a journalist today. But it was too late to save me. I was sinking deeper and deeper into a life of drugs and petty crime. We even failed our iq tests.

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Rebel Without Borders

Anything so we could stay in the trade program. My friend Daniel Marier and I decided it was time for a change. Inspired by a Beau Dommage song, we wanted to head to Florida. Just as in the song, we were leaving, casting off. Life would be good down south. And by the time we came back to Montreal, people would be waiting for us. We stuffed jeans, a couple of T-shirts, a few odds and ends and a map of the United States with a route linking Plattsburg to Miami into our bags. We bought a one-way ticket to the American border. A fat American customs officer grilled us. “Where do you think you’re going?” “Plattsburg.” “What’re you going to do there?” “See a friend.” “What’s his address?” Oops! Then the guy opened our bags and fished out the map. The route we’d traced in pencil was a dead giveaway. We tried to give him a song and dance, but it didn’t work. “How much have you got in your pockets?” I had $180; Daniel had $250. The customs officer wouldn’t let us through; he sent us packing. We crossed the road to take the bus for Montreal. That’s not the way it happened in the Beau Dommage song. Back to square one. Daniel Marier was younger than me. He left me and went straight back to his parents. But I couldn’t stay at Mrs. Longpré’s, not after spinning a yarn about finding a job and living with some guys from work. On Viger St., there was a big dilapidated building, where you could rent a room for $35 a week. I had $120. I rented a room for two weeks. It was a modest room with plenty of cockroaches. After that, I went to my mother’s house. My sister Micheline had just lost her husband in a car crash and she had plenty of cash from the insurance. She helped me out by buying a blackand-white tv and a few basic utensils.

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To survive, I returned to the only trade I was good at: shoplifting, and fencing stolen property. I took orders. As an apartment burglar, I had no equal. I was a past master in breaking and entering, even in the houses with the best security system. But there were weeks when business was poor. People were getting on to me. In the stores, the security guards kept their eye on me. Business collapsed. And unable to pay the rent, I was evicted. It was mid-February and terribly cold. My frozen fingers weren’t nimble enough for stealing. I couldn’t go to the Salvation Army because I was still a minor. Down-and-out. In those circumstances, you lose your points of reference, your dignity. All you can think about is how to survive. You rummage through the trashcans behind Saint-Luc Hospital. Then, it becomes too much. You’ll do anything, no matter how crazy. You run, you snatch a purse. Incredible luck: you don’t get caught, and, go figure, the lady was carrying around $600 in cash. A small fortune at the time. It allowed me to rent the room. And get back the things the owner had confiscated. I was miserable, but luck smiled on me and I never got busted. Except once when I filched an alarm clock because I had to get up early for a job I’d landed. I spotted the security guy heading in my direction. I raced into the bathroom to ditch the clock in the trashcan. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. I would have protested. But the cameras had recorded everything. The police came. The court in Westmount fined me $75.

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Rebel Without Borders

3 Tough Guy

In those days, I lived a day-to-day existence. I counted myself a huge success if I managed to have 24 hours of enjoyment with a full stomach. As luck would have it, I got into the hotel business. I’d lied about my age to land a job waiting tables at the Chez Queux Bar and Restaurant. There I discovered a new group, a new posse. A club of tough guys: hard but cool. I loved hanging out with them. My sister Micheline frequented nude dancing bars, squandering the insurance money she got when her husband died. And she brought her younger sister Huguette along for the ride. Neither was a raving beauty, but they imagined themselves as movie stars on the arms of those Romeos. Marco was Micheline’s pet go-go boy. She was head over heels. She lavished a fortune on

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him every evening. She was the one who told me the club needed a waiter. I applied. I discovered a new world of beauty and seduction, sordid, frequented by women wild about the sight of men’s bodies. Some of the dancers were homosexuals, the first gays I’d met. Above all, it was easy money. The kind that falls into your hands and you don’t have to get involved in crooked deals. After I left the bar, I went to work at the Limelight, the hippest club in Montreal. There I met a fabulous girl named Maria. I didn’t know it at first, but her brother was the notorious head of an outlaw motorcycle gang. Her younger brother was a member, too. But Maria had nothing to do with her brothers’ activities. When Maria suggested I move in with her, I didn’t hesitate. She had a place on Versailles Street in Montreal’s West End. A few weeks later, her brother, known as Le Gros, was released from prison. When he got home, he found a guy lying in his sister’s bed. He could have bumped me off then and there, no questions asked, Italian style, defending the family honour. Instead we became friends. He was part of my life until I was 25 years old. I knew who he was; he was in the papers. The cops suspected him of murdering a guy with a baseball bat while he was in the slammer. Was I afraid of him? You better believe it. Especially since he was no Adonis. And he was as powerful as a linebacker. On his release from prison, an endless line of friends came to welcome him and swear their allegiance. It was like a brotherhood. And I latched on to it. Quite simply: I grabbed at anything resembling a family. I realized they were trouble. Like me. We were the same but for a few details: they were older, and they had Harleys. But I couldn’t live under their roof without getting involved in their schemes. I saw how they operated. Maria’s brother didn’t make me do dirty work. I was still too young to be in on the secrets of the Lords.

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Rebel Without Borders

Not long after, I left Maria. The breakup wasn’t violent. We both realized it wasn’t working anymore. Le Gros didn’t hold it against me. I got a call about a job at Chez Bud’s, a club in Montreal’s gay village. I accepted, not without some trepidation. To keep away from wandering hands, I kept a firm grip on the case of beer in front of me. I knew the manager, and he knew I wasn’t gay. He found the situation amusing. A regular customer informed me that he was going to open a bar. He gave me his card. The name of his club would be the kox. I dropped by to see him the next day. In fact it was a big garage. There were five or six workers on the site. I accepted the construction job while waiting to become the barman of the establishment. I worked the grand opening of the kox, one of the biggest gay bars in Montreal. I stayed three months, raking in the money and having a ball. Every day I came to work in a different getup: dressed as a sailor one evening, a fireman the next. I discovered the pleasure of taking good care of your body. That’s when I got my first tattoos. My colleagues started to become envious of me and they claimed that some clients found it embarrassing to be served by a straight guy. I could have stuck it out, but I was offered the SaintSulpice, a mixed bar, one of the most famous destinations on Saint-Denis. Even today, when you go to the Saint-Sulpice, you can see that the shelves are too high for the average barman. They were built to suit me. I had good customers, a very diversified clientele. Students from the University of Quebec at Montreal nearby and their professors discussing philosophy rubbed shoulders with punks. A different world from the nude dancing bar. I got to know people who are still close friends. Mégot, the lovely Chantal . . . And that’s where I met Andrée. She was 24 years old, two

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years older than me. She was superb; anyone would have fallen for her. I never knew exactly what her job was. At any rate, she seemed to be doing all right. She’d come to the bar. I noticed that she was watching me out of the corner of her eye. We decided to live together almost immediately. I could afford it. I gave her a motor scooter for her birthday. With Andrée, I coked up almost every evening. I was more of a consumer than a dealer. I no longer got involved in crooked deals. I’d stopped hanging around Maria’s brothers. I’d even bought myself a big Harley-Davidson. And we thought we made the perfect couple, with her on her scooter and me on my Harley. When I was 16 and working at Chez Queux, I had gotten to know a French girl named Sophie. Her father was a cook who had immigrated to Canada. I’d slept with her three or four times, then she went away without leaving a forwarding address. She was probably a year younger than me. When I saw her some months later, she was sporting a big belly, and she informed me I was the one responsible. Still I was practically living in the street. When I went to see her the next day, her father opened the door. “Can I see Sophie?” “Who are you?” “A friend.” “She’s not in!” And wham! He slammed the door in my face. All that took place five years earlier. One evening, I met Sophie in the bar. She stared at me a long time. She didn’t say anything; then she got up and left. I asked around and learned that Sophie had given birth to a girl. In fact, I was leading a double life: evenings in the bars and days in construction. I reached a point where I was disgusted with my life and all the uncertainty. I decided to go back to school, and

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Rebel Without Borders

train to be a mechanic. I thought I’d made my mind up; but I hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed the shady side of life. At the Pipeline, another bar, I met someone who would bring me a world of trouble: Nathalie. A dancer with a body to die for. Nathalie had just made Penthouse magazine. Her face reminded you of Sandra Bullock, only prettier. With long blond hair, she was a number 10 all the way. Wanting to land her was a stupid guy thing. Nathalie and I had an affair. Andrée found out somehow or other. After that, nothing was ever the same between us. She couldn’t trust me. She got deeper into drugs. I didn’t realize how hooked we were. But I told myself that, if I went back to school, we’d find a way to get out of this mess. I found a job at Boule d’Or, a slot machine place on Ontario St. At the counter, I ran into my ex-brother-in-law, le Gros. He had just bought the business. He gave me a big hug, and somehow I knew my dreams of salvation had vaporized. I wouldn’t be returning to school. He offered me a job working the bar at the Boule d’Or. A damned good job. Gradually, I fell in with the milieu again. First I stashed merchandise at my pad. I took a half-pound of coke, then five pounds of hashish. The gang paid my rent. Without realizing it, I was back with a family that I knew all too well. The downward spiral accelerated: it became two kilos of coke, dozens of boxes of mescaline. Then I began to keep firearms in my apartment. Aware that I was moving up the dealer hierarchy, I rationalized. The sooner I got rich, I thought, the sooner I could get out, finish my studies, take up with Andrée again, and lead a quiet life. But she drifted a little further away from me every day. In December, she overdosed and had to undergo detox. When she got out, she decided to live with one of her friends rather than come back and live with me. I’d never been so heartbroken.

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I’ve never gotten over it. It was monumental. Colossal. Devastating. One day in December, Andrée left. I thought I would go mad. Eleven months went by, and then Andrée’s friend called and asked if I had seen her lately. I told her I hadn’t. I went to her place, but she wasn’t there. Her wallet and all her cards lay on the bed. But she wasn’t there. She’d vanished. She was never seen again. To this day, I wonder what happened to her. Did she die? Or was it a trick her gang pulled to keep me away from her? In addition to looking after the stash, I got another easy job: delivery. A half-pound of coke here, a kilo of pcp there. A great life, providing you didn’t get busted. And you’d better make sure not to screw any clients, because they were all a bit trigger-happy. The organization that hired me was somewhat mysterious. I didn’t know who the big boss was. Either there wasn’t one or people thought I was too green to be in the picture. In those days, Maria’s brother was close to the Hells Angels. A gang founded in California in 1948, the Hells arrived in Montreal in 1977. Eight years later, they controlled over 75 percent of the city’s drug trade. Le Gros’s pals were called “Mom” Boucher and Beef Hamel. But I was different from the others. At first, the gang hardly knew I was there. I was a small fry, Le Gros’s little protégé. But they seemed a bit more impressed when I bought my Harley. They clued me in to the structure of the organization and to the functions carried out by the people hanging around them: the strikers, the prospects, etc. I got my head shaved and drove an allblack Harley-Davidson. I wore Dr. Martens boots and army pants instead of Levi’s and boots with chains on the sides. I attended meetings in my dad’s braces and pajamas. I had a sense of belonging to the family of outlaws. Yet I was more of an anti-skinhead than a biker. In fact, I was a “redskin.” First of all, I wore red laces on my Dr. Martens. And we redskins opposed the white supremacy espoused by the skinheads. The oppressed, Blacks, and Jews were the ones we defended. We showed no mercy to their detractors; we let them have it. Our motto: “One for all, all on one!”

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Rebel Without Borders

You could already feel the tension among the bikers. In 1985, five Hells Angels from the Laval chapter were executed in cold blood by Hells members from Montreal, who suspected them of misappropriating drug profits. Le Gros felt that the Hells had committed the ultimate crime in assassinating “brothers-inarms.” In 1986, he founded a new movement, the Rock Machine, while Mom Boucher took over the leadership of the Hells Angels. Ten years later, a biker turf war exploded between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine, resulting in around 160 deaths in six and a half years. The war lasted until 2001 when the police arrested more than 5,000 people. I’d left before that, so I wasn’t involved. But if I had remained, I would have sided with the Rock Machine’s founding group. That summer, I worked for a guy named Christian. He was the king of coke. His furniture business served as a front for his coke activities. So the futon and sofa deliveries were never innocent. He was in the big leagues. He got his supplies in New York. In fact, the guys who whacked him in Outremont were from the Big Apple. They pumped five bullets into him at pointblank range. I did deliveries for him. I was his chauffeur, bodyguard and all-around handyman. Above all, I was on call 24 hours a day. And he exploited the situation. Because he wasn’t particularly blessed physically—he was short and fat with curly hair—he spent his nights watching nude dancers, and he had a coke habit. But he was generous: he paid me a grand a week. What’s more, he loved to treat people to drugs and pay for rounds of drinks. Christian was a biker boss, but he was a sophisticate. He taught me a love of art: Van Gogh, Monet. He wasn’t like the other bikers with their predictable conversations. I’m criticizing them now, but back then I was just like them. When I read the Journal de Montréal in the morning, I immediately turned to the sports pages at the back. I couldn’t have found Paris on the map. I’d never read a book. I was a total illiterate. Christian gave me an education.

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Fortunately for me, I wasn’t on duty when a Colombian gang from New York assassinated him. I was devastated. I knew people who had died, but this was different. I’d been talking to him that very morning. It wasn’t a game anymore. I never really knew how high up the biker ranks I’d risen. Yet I sensed I was becoming important. I ran a downtown bar, passing on messages, without being aware of the contents. I was what they called a handyman, someone with no particular affiliation, who could go anywhere. Through Maria’s brother, I had been in contact with the Italians and eventually the bikers. This gave me an entry into discotheques frequented by Anglophones in the West End of Montreal. I also had access to the underground milieu on Saint-Denis and Saint-Laurent, which the rockers couldn’t infiltrate. Particularly because of their look. My appearance allowed me to go through doors closed to them. It allowed me to serve as a go-between. In the final analysis, I made as much money from introducing clients to each other as I did from peddling drugs. I kept my ear to the ground so I knew what people needed and what others had to offer. I set up meetings and earned commissions. Things had gotten to the point where my life had changed drastically: kids brought their stolen television sets and stereos to me. I was in the network. I thought a lot of myself. I was young. I was good-looking. I had women. I had my Harley. And most of the time, I was stoned. The trouble is that the drug network gobbles you up. Either you get used to it or you get hooked. You can’t live any other way. For construction work or other odd jobs, you have to get paid under the table, because you don’t have a bank account. And to get by in life, you need money. So you have no choice but to carry on and get deeper into it. The trap is set and you’re the prey. You don’t realize you’re fucked up, or at least not yet. You think you’re somebody. Life is too easy.

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Rebel Without Borders

First I consumed dope, then I stashed it and eventually I became a dealer. I received mescaline or other products, which I cut in order to triple the quantity. I added icing sugar to mescaline. When I had a lot of it, I mixed it in the bathtub. I cut the dope as often as it suited the suppliers. But as I was the first in the network, the product was pure enough to allow me to extract a few grams for my parallel market. But happy endings are rare in the world of the con. I had lost Andrée. And I got involved in some nonsense that cost me my jobs in the discotheques. My deals weren’t making money anymore. And I was still strung out on coke. It was the beginning of the end. I’d stopped visiting my family. I didn’t feel like it. More to the point, I was afraid of disappointing them. I also had enemies, real or imaginary. I had gotten into many fights. As a doorman, I had been involved in countless brawls. At any rate, if you want to run drugs on Montreal’s main drags, you’d better be good with your fists. At least fists are better than guns. Every dealer started out on the street before being assigned his own little network of taverns and bars. And every street corner had a boss who set up his man there. When you showed up in the area, you were taking his place. Especially on SaintDenis St., near the lucrative university market. Of course, the first few evenings, a couple of guys would rough you up and advise you to do business elsewhere. Either you obeyed them or you used muscle to discourage them from harassing you. The issue was generally resolved with fisticuffs and knives, with little likelihood of building lasting friendships.

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4 How Deep the Abyss

A month after Christian’s murder, my mother, Jeanne died. Returning from the bar at three in the morning, I found a brief note my brother had slipped under the door: “Call me tomorrow. It’s extremely urgent. Daniel.” I understood immediately. I picked up a toolbox lying on the table and hurled it at the television set. I smashed the aquarium. My mom was dead. She didn’t give birth to me, but she raised me. Maybe I turned out bad, but she never lost faith in me. And when anyone asked about me she was always discreet: “He’s managing.” Perhaps she regretted sending me to a kind of hell instead of to boarding school. But I’d never disrespected her; I’d never resented her. I couldn’t pull the

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wool over her eyes; she was a Montreal girl. She knew I was running with bad company. Mom just hoped she wouldn’t pick up the Journal de Montréal one morning and find a picture of my bullet-riddled face on the front page. Despite the mess I was in, she wanted to believe I would straighten up someday. Mom was like that. She died the way she lived, dignified and helpful. Dad had to walk with a cane because of poor health. And when Mom got out of the car to lift the garage door, she collapsed with a heart attack. It was so unfair; my father was the one who had been sick. And he was on the mend. The family was enjoying a rare period of happiness in a little house in Repentigny. They deserved it. Goddamn death striking without warning. The next day, I didn’t wait to sober up before I made the funeral arrangements. I didn’t understand a thing. Her death had hit me hard; I was stunned. The fact that I was consuming an average of five grams of coke a day didn’t help. I started dipping into the stash the bikers had left with me. I took more and more risks, selling stock that didn’t belong to me, cutting the dope more and more. With my godfather Christian dead, I started hanging with the bikers again. Now they had a bigger influence on me. A number of setbacks finally brought me to my senses. My father died in January. That was too much. My coke consumption rose to seven or eight grams a day. My feet no longer touched the ground. I was in debt; I was cheating. I was out of control. Andrée had dreamt of going to France. Maybe I’d go instead: for her, of course, for my parents, who’d never managed to go on a trip, and for Christian. It would be good to get away from Quebec for a while. I got a passport in less than 24 hours and immediately bought a plane ticket. I fooled the passport service and the French

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consulate into believing that my bloodshot eyes were the result of weeping about a family tragedy. On January 14, 1989, two days after my father was buried, I boarded a plane for France. Paris. In the boarding area in Montreal, I was so stoned I was sure the detectors would go crazy and I would never make it through customs. I landed in Paris the next morning, refreshed from a good night’s sleep. I spent four days in Paris. After that, I went to Amsterdam for three days and then returned to Paris for another three days before flying back to North America. About all I did was walk around. I walked and walked and walked. I walked 25 miles a day. Breathing everything in and spitting out the crap flowing inside my veins. A whole week in France without rolling a joint or sniffing a line of coke. I discovered the French capital using a map like any hick tourist. But I walked like mad. As if I feared my legs would refuse to walk again. I walked as if it was the final walk of a condemned man. I walked as if the sound of my footsteps would start my heart beating again. I went all the way to Versailles on foot. I felt the tar and the drugs exiting my blood and oozing out of my pores. I walked. With no particular destination. I felt like an extraterrestrial. Marc Vachon, biker, ex-redskin, cokehead with an accent that cut glass. Around me, urbane people chatting about politics and football, subjects beyond my ken. I told them I worked in the construction business and that I was just visiting. They must have taken me for an idiot. I was in raptures about the architecture in Paris. It was like an outdoor museum, and Christian had taught me to love museums. Amsterdam was a revelation, too. I discovered the freedom to smoke a joint in a coffee shop without breaking the law. But also the etiquette that went along with this: you didn’t roll a joint near a schoolyard, for example.

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Rebel Without Borders

When I boarded the plane for Montreal, I knew I was finished with coke. I’d gone without it for ten days so why shouldn’t I continue to do so? I just needed a month in Montreal, I thought, time to take care of business, replace the pills I had ripped off from the stash, put everything in order and clear out. Now I knew I could live some place else, some other way. A friend was waiting for me at the airport. I got hooked again that night. We cruised bars. Consumed alcohol, not a gram of coke. Then we dropped by Supersex. And who was on stage? Nathalie! I knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending. She sauntered over to my table. An enchantress. She invited me to her place. I didn’t decline. On the way, we dropped by her dealer for a few grams of coke. More foolish vanity. I kept cutting dope. Things seemed hunky-dory. It felt great motoring around in my big chromeplated Buick with tinted windows, or powering my Harley with the Penthouse bimbo by my side, a wallet bulging with cash, a largecaliber piece tucked into my belt. At my pad, there were seven firearms, including an ak-47. I’d never use them, but they gave me the look I needed. I was nobody’s fool. I loved drifting between respectability and crime. Saint-Laurent St. belonged to me. I gorged on a steady diet of hot dogs. In rare moments of lucidity, I thought about Paris. Especially about a remarkable thing that had happened to me. In a black-and-white film about the Three Musketeers and d’Artagnan, I had learned about the historic prison known as the Bastille. It would be fun to check it out, I figured, since I’d probably end up behind bars in Montreal anyway. I went to see my friend Mégot’s mother, who lived on the Place de la République, to find out where the famous building was located. She told me that after leaving her place, I should head straight along the boulevard: “The Bastille is at the end.”

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I reached a square in the middle of which there was a column with a winged spirit on top. I scanned the area. No prison. All I could see was the Opéra. “I’m looking for the Bastille,” I asked a passerby. “You’re there, sir. Just across the way.” But back in the square, the prison still hadn’t magically appeared. I panicked. It was pouring rain. Typical January weather in Paris. I looked at rue de la Roquette, which led to an old section of Paris. An ancient prison logically would be located in a quarter like that. Rue de la Roquette intersected rue Saint Sabin. And on Saint Sabin, there were small basement windows in the walls like the windows of a prison. I darted into an entrance to get out of the rain. Behind me, there were chairs, a coffee machine and a logo vaguely reminiscent of the Red Cross symbol. It was almost 11 o’clock. I was drenched, chilled to the bone. Grabbing a cup of coffee wouldn’t be a bad idea. I was enjoying my coffee, when a girl casually came up from behind. “Hi, my name’s Catherine.” “Hi!” “Have you just arrived or are you about to leave?” “I’m leaving,” I said, thinking she was about to ask me to leave. “And where are you going?” “Out.” “Yes, but where?” “I just got here. I’m from Canada. I dropped by for a coffee and to wait until it stops raining. Don’t worry: I won’t be long. I’m looking for the Bastille.” “It’s on the left when you go out.” Then a guy joined the conversation and asked me what I did in Canada. “Construction work.” “Do you speak English?” “Yeah, a little.”

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“Give me a couple of minutes. We’re looking for a logistician for a clinic rehabilitation program in Zimbabwe.” At that point, I was no longer buying. I checked for hidden cameras. I was on my guard. In Montreal, people in shirts and ties didn’t speak to me. Fortunately, I was in a talkative mood. “What’s a logistician, what’s a clinic rehabilitation program, what’s Zimbabwe?” I went on to say I was just passing through France and would be returning to Montreal to my job, to my life. “Think about it,” he said. “You can always come and see us because we’re looking for people like you, who’ve worked in construction, with personnel management experience.” Before leaving, I asked the girl who they were. “This is Médecins Sans Frontières, of course, Doctors Without Borders!” I didn’t care what that meant. I was soon awakened from my reverie. Things went from bad to worse with Nathalie. I had no idea how it would end. Maybe with a bullet in my head? Perhaps a bank heist to pay off the debts I’d racked up? When would my partners discover that stock was missing? I had nothing left. There was very little to eat. All I had was my Harley and I often ran out of gas. Then, on July 7, 1989, I entered a pizzeria. There was a mirror behind the counter. Three sixteen year olds were shooting pool. They spotted me, walked over and patted me on the back. “Hi, Marc. How’s it going?” They gave me a rapper handshake. “Not bad, bloody hell.” “It’d be great if we could make a little money together.” “I’ll let you know if something comes up.” “Thanks, big guy.” They went back to their game. I stood there, eating my hotdog and watched them. They reminded me of the way I was ten years back.

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I looked in the mirror and a flurry of images raced through my mind: my first flowered shirt, blacks with Afros, whores in sequins, slick-faced pimps, the first knife fights, bikers, SaintLawrence Blvd. It happened so fast I couldn’t stop the flow of images. And at that precise moment, I was gripped with a powerful urge: the urge to start over. Kids should be coming to me for other reasons. I had to change. I looked at myself in the mirror again, and chills ran down my spine. I paid the bill, drove Nathalie home and went back to my place to clean house. I dumped my guns in the river. I distributed the dope—the little that remained—around the neighborhood. I owed money to some pals so I paid them off in grams of coke. On July 8, my last evening was spent freebasing. It wasn’t pretty. It lasted all night. Anyway, coke had numbed my senses, had wrecked my nose. At nine o’clock the next day, I stuffed jeans and a couple of Tshirts into a bag and headed out, just as I had when I was fifteen. At Windsor Station, I ordered a ticket for a train that would take me as far west as possible. I had $800 in my pocket. I was thinking about California. The clerk advised going to Vancouver and taking a bus from there. But Canadian Pacific no longer ran a direct line to the west coast. I had to go to Sudbury, Ontario and then, wait for the train to Vancouver. There was no turning back. I hadn’t been in touch with Nathalie for two days. I hadn’t shown up in a bar. I hadn’t called anyone. I was courting danger. So I took the Sudbury train. I remember walking across the station and boarding the last coach. I watched Montreal disappear behind me. And then I gulped three Valium and slept like a log. A sleep without dreams for a kid with no future.

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5 Whatever You Do, Don’t Look Back

There would be serious consequences for what I was doing. There was no going back. I had to look ahead, believe in the future. Keep my nerve because some people wouldn’t take too kindly to my leaving. Fifteen hours of sleep brought me down to earth. Sudbury was like hundreds of towns in Canada, dull as dishwater. I didn’t know anybody. I found out there was a huge provincial park west of the city. In a Canadian Tire store, I purchased an orange tent, a sleeping bag, a little saucepan and some basic camping equipment. At the grocery store, I loaded up on dozens of cans of corned beef and sausages. The entrance fee at the park was three dollars a day. I paid for a whole month. I walked for hours. I took off my Doc

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Martens and slipped on some running shoes. I started walking and immediately stumbled and sliced open my big toe. So I found a lovely stream in an isolated spot of the park. The water was clear, the woods were beautiful. I pitched the tent and sat down. I reached into my bag and fished out my few remaining grams of hash. Two days went by and then things got ugly. I couldn’t get to sleep. My head and body were wracked with excruciating pain. My system was crying out for its daily dose of drugs. I pissed and shat all over myself. How many days did I remain in my tent, reeking of shit and vomit? I have no idea. It was hell. The hallucinations made me want to slash my wrists. I was miles away from the park exit. And with my bloody toe, it would have taken hours to get to Sudbury. And even then, there was no one who would give me coke. I could hardly ask the cops to slip me a bit of coke from whatever stock they’d seized. There was nothing I could do. Visions of my mother’s funeral went through my mind. For the first time since I was ten, I cried. I laughed and cried at the same time feeling the tears tickling my nose. Finally, I crawled out of the tent. I stunk worse than the town dump. I scrubbed myself off in the stream. Unfortunately, I’d thought of everything but soap. It took forever for my clothes to dry so I had to sleep in the nude on the plastic. It was freezing cold. I spent another 14 days in the park. Drinking water and pissing. That’s how I spent my time. I also had a terrible bout of diarrhea. My body was purging itself of its impurities. I couldn’t take any chances. I had set up my tent so that I could keep an eye on the trail. What if the bikers decided to send a punitive expedition? And what if the police got an anonymous tip, fingering me for every murder in Montreal in the past year? Common gang practice against members who leave the fold. I was a traitor. In the biker code of honour, members were brothers for life. You didn’t just up and run. You might consider

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a sort of retirement at fifty, but at my age, the only way out was feet first. I knew too many people; I knew too much. The bosses couldn’t let a potential informer like me walk around loose. Nothing happened. No one denounced me. But the bikers spent a long time searching for me. They even forced Mégot to open my apartment, hoping to find their stash of coke. Mégot told them I’d never return. They left him alone. When the swelling in my toe went down, I was ready to leave. My nose was sensitive to odours and stimuli again. I lingered at the park exit for a couple of hours, mulling things over. I could cross the road, take the bus and go back to Montreal. Despite everything: I was in hock to my former colleagues, I hadn’t been in touch, I’d just taken off, and I was clean. I could have gone to see them and spoken to them as a friend. Of course, we were a bunch of low-lifes, but that didn’t preclude camaraderie. I would have asked for more time to pay them back. They would have agreed. Better to run the risk they’d refuse than to have every police force in Canada on my heels for multiple murders I hadn’t committed. I could have gone back. I know. But I headed west instead. I mailed a letter to Le Gros from Winnipeg. I told him I had to leave. That I was fed up with the life I was leading. That I realized I was on the fast track to death and that I wasn’t going to just let it happen. That he shouldn’t be mad at me: after all, he hadn’t always been straight with me. Hadn’t he tried to screw my lady even though I defended his girl’s honour when he was behind bars? As brothers, maybe we’d done things we shouldn’t have, but I was asking him to forgive or at least forget. I slipped the papers for my Harley-Davidson and a letter turning ownership over to him in an envelope. As far as I was concerned, we were even. At the Winnipeg bus station, someone suggested Banff. Plenty of hotels and restaurants were looking for waiters. I went to the employment office. Three days later, I got a job in a restaurant.

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Imagine: Marc Vachon, one-time Montreal hood, was a dishwasher at the Banff Centre for Continuing Education. The natural surroundings took your breath away. The mountains were majestic. And the Banff Centre was a gathering place for painters, writers and artists from many backgrounds. It was a cool scene. And relaxing. I had told my interviewer that I had just finished detox and that I wanted to get my life under control. “I’m impressed with your honesty,” he said. “You’re hired!” Not only did the Banff Centre give me a job, it gave me a room. But my first paycheque didn’t last the night. I went into a bar, and after one beer, I thought I was rolling in dough the way I’d been in Montreal, so I bought a round for the house. The bill added up to $140; I was earning only $182. But so what? I was in good health. There was plenty of fresh air. And I’d kicked my coke habit. In Banff, my English improved. I could hold a conversation with people whatever their social class. And the girls were scrumptious. I remember my twenty-sixth birthday. It was October and already freezing cold. I was back on the blades. It had been eleven years since I’d donned a pair of skates. As I stepped on the ice, the famous Hockey Night in Canada theme played in my head. I felt like a kid again. I wasn’t fast, but the ice seemed less scary than it did when I was a child. I was starting my life over, for the better. I discovered youth hostels. I was amazed to learn that some of the kids were going backpacking for a month in Thailand or Europe. That’s why I’d become a biker: to get away. I just took the wrong road. Deep down, I felt I hadn’t gone far enough. And I hadn’t put the past far enough behind me. I was constantly afraid. Every busload of tourists filled me with anxiety. I rarely ventured into town for fear that I would run into a couple of bikers. When I got paid in December, I decided to try my luck as a skidder operator in

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northern British Columbia. The job involved slipping cables under felled trees, then sliding them down the hills all the way to the truck loading area. One wrong move and you could be crushed by a log. It was dangerous work, but it paid well. In Vancouver, people told me I was a month late. Recruitment was over. I decided to stay in town. I visited dozens of construction sites looking for a job, but everywhere there was the same answer: “Sorry, we’re closing on December 15 for Christmas break. Back on the job in January.” I had a little cash, enough to hold out three weeks and rent a room. Things were going bad. Times were hard that winter. For the second time in my life, I was back on the street. One week on Pacific Avenue, from Christmas to New Year’s. Under the bridge. I was twenty-six years old and I turned up at the soup kitchen. I entered the Salvation Army canteen, blushing from embarrassment, my head down. It was full of gaunt young girls and their children: misery personified. These mothers had nothing to offer their babies but the warmth of their scrawny bodies. They had tears in their eyes, rueing the state they were in. When I looked at them, I had to fight back the urge to cry right along with them. A rage was burning inside me. I could have mugged a sales clerk. To survive, I could have stuck up a bank. It would have been easy. I rented a hotel room only once every four days for a shower and a good night’s sleep in a normal bed. On Boxing Day, I happened to drop by a café. A Quebecker at the next table heard me say I was looking for construction work. He introduced himself. His name was Denis. He told me he installed metal partitions in tall buildings and he needed an employee. “When?”

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“Tomorrow.” “So you’re not closed?” “I’m running behind on some contracts.” “Okay, I’m your man.” The next day, I started working for him for ten dollars an hour in cash. On December 29, I received my first pay. On the site, I met another Quebecker, Laurent. We became friends right away. Denis rarely came to work. And when he did, he was sloshed. He didn’t give a damn about his sites. Eventually, the contractor ran out of patience and offered the contract to Laurent and me. Practically over night, I was earning $1,500 a week. Incredible. I worked from six in the morning to sundown with no more than a couple of days off every two weeks. Payday was every two weeks. We landed contracts. We recruited employees. And we paid them $10 an hour under the table. At the time, I stayed at the hotel, and Laurent lived with a couple of friends. We thought about moving into our own apartment. We had enough money. Laurent asked me what part of the city I preferred. I didn’t hesitate. “Pacific Avenue!” I wanted to exorcize the pain of the days when I roamed that road without a dime in my pocket. We rented a huge apartment on the fourth floor with a fine view of the bridge where I had been sleeping just a few weeks earlier. We worked hard. But once every two weeks, we went out on the town to blow the cash practically falling out of our pockets. I looked better: a combination of no more fights, no hard drugs, invigorating physical work and good food had bucked me up. One evening in February, we went to a nightclub called Lover’s with a friend to celebrate her birthday. I immediately spotted a pretty little blond in the middle of the dance floor. But I barely had a chance to make a move when a tall brunette slipped in between us.

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“Hi, I speak French.” “Good for you. Thanks. But can you move a little; you’re blocking the view.” Unruffled, she said, “My name’s Karen.” “Delighted to meet you, Karen. The name’s Marc. But I’m a bit busy. We can talk some other time.” The blond gave me a little smile. We looked at each other, and I sensed things were going to work out. But the brunette was relentless. “I learned French at the Cultural Centre . . .” The only way to discourage her was to be blunt. By the time I finished my little speech, the blond had disappeared. So, I resigned myself to spending the evening with the brunette. On closer inspection, I realized that in her own way, she was a bit of a babe. She was twenty-nine years old, about five foot eleven, and a former model. She was a boutique manager. She oozed presence. Alcohol clouded my vision. I barely remember getting up, hailing a cab and bringing her back home. We didn’t get much sleep. After all, I’ve got nothing against English women. I saw Karen again. She suggested we might live together. I said no. There was something missing between us. I got my words mixed up: I said lightning instead of spark. She didn’t understand. Neither did I. She had everything: beauty, good health, exuberance. She enjoyed life. Everything I normally would have found attractive. “It won’t work, Karen. I’m not here for good. In a few months, I’m going to Europe and Africa. If you come with me, you’ll miss your world of stars, models and fashion, and you’ll resent me for it. I’m just a construction worker. You need more than I can give you!” Hoping to get me to change my mind, Karen offered a compromise: “Okay, leave when you want. But as long as you’re in Vancouver, let me be your lover. I won’t ask for anything. We’ll give each other a good time. That’s all.”

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The case she made was hard to resist: black miniskirt, ripe breasts peeking through the opening of her blouse, dazzling eyes and a killer smile. The jury was convinced. Our arrangement lasted the four months I was in Vancouver. Karen almost succeeded in persuading me to stay for good. One weekend, I was astonished to find myself visiting a spacious apartment. Better get out while the getting’s good, I thought. That same day, I went to a travel agency and bought a oneway ticket from Seattle to London. On the construction site, my employees gave me a cold reception. But I’d always been straight with them. I had told them no amount of money could tempt me to stay in the city. I had to go away just as I did when I’d jump on my Harley and leave. Laurent took it badly. I was like a big brother to him. He’d had a hard childhood, too. That evening, he downed three whiskies before saying what was on his mind. “Can I come with you?” I didn’t see why not. A few days later, we left the business, tools and employees, and took the bus for Seattle. We had a few thousand dollars in our pockets. Karen accompanied me to the bus station. When the call came for the passengers to Seattle, I hugged her. I knew that the constant urge to venture into the unknown was forcing me to leave something precious behind. Karen stopped me as I was just about to board the bus. “I forgot to tell you something, Marc!” “What, dear?” “I’m two months pregnant.” “What?” It was more of a croak than a shout. I didn’t know what to do. I was conflicted. On the one hand, the Greyhound was about to pull out; on the other, a woman I didn’t love but admired with all my heart had a life growing inside her. And my whole child-

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hood had been shaped by parents who had abandoned me, by fear and by the unknown. Karen came to my rescue. “Don’t let this influence your decision. Go and be happy. I’ll look after the child with love and devotion. All I ask is the right to use your name. I’ve always dreamt of having a child with a guy like you. Too bad you have other goals in life. But I want to keep the child as a reminder of the happy times we’ve shared.” I was speechless. That day on the bus, my eyes stung. As if they were tearing up. Seven months later, a girl was born. Karen named her Jacqueline after my biological mother. She had remembered.

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6 The Company of French Doctors

Laurent and I stayed in London a few hours, and then proceeded to Amsterdam. By the time we got to Paris, we were running low on cash. Laurent joined his grandparents in Bordeaux. I went to Normandy to do some routine renovation work for a friend of Mégot’s mother. A month later, I returned to London with three thousand francs in my pocket: I had to find a job. While in France, I paid a visit to Médecins Sans Frontières (msf) in Paris. The organization held an open door session and interviewed job applicants every second Tuesday. The first time, I was one of 20 candidates. msf showed us a film about its activities on the ground. Then, the recruiting officer conducted the interviews. The candidates who had traveled a long way were the first to be inter-

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viewed. This applied to me literally and figuratively. It was a struggle for her to get used to my accent. “Let me have your cv,” she said. “I’ll study it right away.” “My what?” “Your curriculum vitae.” I didn’t have the foggiest idea what that meant. As it happened I didn’t have one. I summed up my brief career in a few words, emphasizing my unique capacity to adapt. The recruiter promised to call me in London when there was an opening. In Great Britain, a German construction company took me on as a floor sweeper at five pounds an hour. Three weeks later, I put the broom aside and started making four times as much, half of it under the table. I was the boss’s blue-eyed boy because I charged by the job, not by the hour. My colleagues probably suspected me of brown-nosing. The boss asked me whether I could recommend another good worker. I called Bordeaux that evening. “Hi, Laurent. I’ve got a job for you!” We were constructing the roof of the Canon Street Station, which was a steel-and-glass building. Money was flowing in. It was summer. The kind of beautiful summer you rarely see in London. I lived in a rooming house run by a Swedish woman. It was full of people of diverse origins. When it comes to melting pots, New York has nothing on London. Two months went by. Then the phone rang. From London, I traveled to an msf logistics-training centre in Lézignan in the Corbières for a two-week workshop. Then, I was slated to return to Paris and wait for an assignment. We watched msf in operation. We did ridiculously easy practical exercises: changing tires, sticking msf labels on cars. . . . But,

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without realizing it, we were being observed. msf was assessing our skills as team players, our capacity to get along with a variety of partners. Two weeks later, I was told I was ready. In Paris, I expected to be shipped off to Africa straightaway, but apparently the evaluation process wasn’t over. msf gave me a lead-poisoning project in Paris. Acute lead poisoning is a serious disease. I worked as a logistician, and François Callas, back from Mozambique, was the project manager. Lead poisoning is a scourge in poor areas, in immigrant districts. Buildings repaired in the 1940s had been painted with lead-based products. Dust particles from the walls can penetrate the lungs. Though not a deadly disease, it can cause blindness or serious liver damage. msf had decided to intervene in the crisis, partnering with the heads of neighbourhood health centres. When doctors diagnosed the disease in a child who had come for a vaccination, they contacted us. We offered to repaint the family’s apartment. msf maintained three residences in working-class suburbs to accommodate the families. We scraped the walls, repaired the doors, and fixed defective toilets. Sometimes we had to rid the hovels of the rats infesting them. We offered people new mattresses to replace their kids’ urine-rotted ones. Then, the family could go back home. My job was to see that the work was executed in minute detail, that the workers had the tools they needed, and that the warehouses containing the tenants’ furniture were well guarded. With three sites to supervise, I had no shortage of work. It still didn’t feel like humanitarian work. Of course, I had no inkling what humanitarian work actually was. But Africa seemed to be getting closer and closer. Mégot’s mother let me stay at her house for a nominal rent. msf lent me an old French postal car, a yellow four-litre, with big “Médecins Sans Frontières” logos on the sides. Discovering Paris in a four-litre when you are a Canadian used to showing off on a Harley-Davidson is an incredible experi-

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ence. I learned how to drive like a Parisian, with my elbow hanging out of the window, cursing every “fucking asshole” that got in my way. Sometimes, I drove for msf, delivered mail, picked up visas at the embassies. The aid workers back from an assignment or about to leave fascinated me. There was such an aura about them that I already could see myself leaving on a mission. At msf, people regarded me as the charming foreigner with the funny accent. The only other Canadian with the agency was Sylvain Charbonneau, and it would be years before I would meet him. In Lézignan, I got to know Guy Jacquier, a former clockmaker from Switzerland. He was trained with us, even though he had already been on assignment in Cambodia. Not only was he friendly, he looked out for me. He regaled me with stories about life on the ground, liberally spiced with anecdotes. It made my mouth water. That’s one reason I declined to extend my contract for the lead-poisoning project. I hadn’t joined the organization to do the same work in Paris that I’d done in Montreal, London and Vancouver, and earn four times less. The human resources lady could see I was ready to pack it in. “Would Malawi be more interesting? A camp for Mozambican refugees. There are almost a million of them in the whole country.” What a shock! What a thrill! Working on the ground at last. True, I had no idea what refugee meant. But Malawi sounded like Hawaii to me. I could just imagine an island, palm trees, naked girls. I shouted, “Yes!” Incredible. I was heading to Africa. Scarcely a year earlier, I was tooling around Montreal’s crime-infested streets on my Harley. Now, I was leaving for Malawi. With msf. A new family. I already felt a sense of belonging. Good people. Nurses. Political analysts.

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As I arrived at Centre Louis-Pasteur for my vaccination, I strutted around, telling everyone that I was leaving for Malawi. Hoping, of course, that no one would ask me where it was. That evening, it took me over an hour to locate the tiny country on a very large map of Africa. Africa fascinated me. It had fired my imagination as a child. It meant Tarzan and Daktari. I fantasized about Africa. Africa and its gorgeous shapely women with gleaming smiles. The days flew by. There was barely enough time for a premission briefing. A sharp learning curve. I was getting a schooling in real life. Apparently, refugees were fleeing the murderous civil war between the Marxist Mozambique Liberation Front (frelimo), who had wrenched their independence from Portugal in 1974, and the right wing Mozambican National Resistance (renamo), armed and supported by South Africa, with the U.S. active behind the scenes. I was replacing Jérôme, a guy who had put in two years. My responsibility would be logistics and accounting. I had to oversee the construction of latrines and showers. I also had to supervise clinic rehabilitation and the installation of solar refrigerators. In short, it would be like looking after an immense apartment stretching over 150 miles. Logistics is the art of coordinating the details that determine the success or failure of a mission. I would be working with two nurses. Our airline was the highly unpredictable Air Africa. The plane set down in the middle of the landing strip, and we had to walk along the tarmac. We’d left Paris in the rain; in Lilongwe, it was already 35°C. Blue sky and incandescent sun. Fantastic. Africa at last! I couldn’t believe it. We got through customs; the documents were stamped. Everything went like a dream. The driver reached for my bag, but I brushed him aside. I wasn’t used to people carrying my bags. We piled into the car, heading for Blantyre 150 miles away. There was news of a cholera outbreak in the camp at

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Niaminthutu in the south. More than in Ntcheu, this town was where the real tragedy was playing out. People were dropping like flies. And we heard that a new influx of refugees was on the way. The operation was about to become msf’s biggest mission. At the height of the tragedy, there would be over 50 expatriates. We drove for half an hour. I stuck my head out to sample the fragrances of Africa. The driver pointed to Dedza, a village near the Mozambican frontier. My area of activity would be Dedza and the 40 miles after that. One side of the road was empty. Absolutely nothing. Like Nevada, this was bare, arid country. On the other side stood scores of African huts. Refugees had been dwelling in them for years. It took less than two minutes to zip across the tiny county town of Ntcheu. Then we drove into Blantyre. msf’s big white houses buzzed. People didn’t take time to say hello. It was like the films I’d seen in Lézignan. I felt out of place in my Doc Martens. I ran into the “watsan” (Water Sanitation specialist), Guy Jacquier. He was leaving for Niaminthutu the next day. The camp already held 40,000 refugees, and 20,000 more were arriving every month, an average of 800 people a day. I couldn’t fully appreciate what that meant. But I had a vague notion that the big show was taking place there. That evening, the guy I was replacing arrived. He had planned on spending the weekend briefing me and showing me around the city. But I wanted to be where the action was. Mission chief Geneviève Begkoyian strode into the office. A dynamic young woman, almost thirty. Diminutive, but pretty, she radiated strength. She immediately took the situation in hand. When she finished issuing orders, I timidly asked whether I could accompany Guy to Niaminthutu. I’d undoubtedly be of some assistance, I said. And I promised to be back before Monday. She eyed me for a few moments, then, pounded the table, stood up and said, “Sold!” We set out right away even though it was already seven in the evening. First stop: Nsanje, three and a half hours down the road.

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We drove for an hour and then we ran into a tropical storm. We had to get out and walk in front of the car to guide the driver. Finally, there was some action. I was pleased with that. In Nsanje, I met a second msf team fresh from the bush. Real ones. Tough guys. If you looked around you could see why. Nsanje was sheer hell. Thirty-eight degrees at night. In the middle of the swamps. It was so hot our clothes were drenched. It was the cliché we have of Africa. It was hot and humid. Grasshoppers flew low. In the river nearby, the hippopotamuses snorted. In the night, dogs yelped as if recounting tales of horror. Nsanje was the last town in Malawi before you reached Mozambique and the civil war. The expats were drained, exhausted. There was a feeling of frustration about all the attention paid to Niaminthutu, as if people weren’t really dying in the other camps. At the time, humanitarian aid wasn’t rolling in money; assistance came in dribs and drabs. It was pick-and-shovel work. The decisions were heartbreaking. The team was disgusted. They had bags under their eyes from lack of sleep. The next room reeked of mosquito repellent, but radio pumped out Bob Marley. Liquor bottles littered the floor. People passed around a joint. They were relief workers trying to decompress, to forget apocalyptic scenes I could only imagine. Later, I learned that these were precious moments, moments of excess, folly, playfulness and indiscipline to recharge people’s batteries, to counterbalance visions of hell. The people enjoyed poking fun at me. They teased me because of my accent. This lasted about ten minutes. Then they accepted me. But in the back of their minds, they resented the fact that I hadn’t been assigned to work with them. Though I had gone without sleep for over 24 hours, it took me an hour to get to sleep. But I really felt it the next day. I met Luc Legrand, an extraordinary man. The 40-year-old nurse had been the cholera specialist for msf for 15 years. He had

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been to every corner of humanitarian geopolitics. His gruff way with the nurses was somewhat intimidating. No nurse was willing to handle the injections for critically ill patients. Luc had to do it. And he battled fiercely, marshalling the modest weapons at his disposal. One death was a death too many. The guy was really impressive: this thin, diminutive guy radiated incredible strength. He never went without his big ranger boots and his trousers with big pockets on the side. Or his ubiquitous dust mask, which he had probably worn since his first war experience in Chad. His receding hairline revealed a skin like rawhide, chiselled by hellish suns. He’d been through a lot. In the morning when I got up, he was drinking coffee. While I was waiting for Guy, he hardly spoke to me. And then as he was leaving, he let slip: “Maybe we’ll see each other later at the camp!” The plan was to tag along with Guy all day to observe how he coordinated toilet construction in the Niaminthutu camp. The principle is simple: cholera is related to shit. During the rainy season, shit flows along the rivers, contaminating the drinking water. So, the only way to break the cycle is to build toilets. We went into the field as soon as Guy finished his coffee. The camp looked huge: 50,000 people were parked there. I had never seen so many blacks in one place. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen on tv. The same haggard faces. The same desperate eyes that look at you hopefully. The utter destitution. Their sole possessions were the plastic tents the High Commissioner gave to refugees. The road crossed the camp all the way to the msf office on top of the hill. From there, you got a good view: the nutrition camp, the cholera camp and the infirmary. I was starting to appreciate the magnitude of the task. The horror. The dust. Hordes of people walking barefoot. Beyond the camp, there was a river. And in the distance stood Mozambique, responsible for the whole tragedy. On the horizon, other people arriving. I saw a

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town grow up. And I understood what logistics was. It was mathematical: construction and a great deal of logic. I took it all in. And, above all, there was the stench. You couldn’t tell by watching tv. It changes everything. It grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go. For the first time, I was stunned. I felt small, insignificant, almost an imposter. Who was I to think I could help solve this crisis? But I understood that my most effective weapon would be resourcefulness. That suited me to a tee; that’s what I had relied on ever since I left school. But it was daunting to realize how much those people were counting on me. Throughout my vagabond existence, I had been responsible for only one person: me. And there, I had 50,000 pairs of eyes staring at the white msf tents, convinced they had reached the end of the tunnel. I felt like fleeing to Ntcheu; it seemed calmer. Back at the msf house, we found Luc Legrand, sipping coffee and reporting on his tour. He seemed composed, but he was in no mood for chit-chat. Then we shook hands for the first time. “So, Canadian, what brings you to this neck of the woods?” “I’ve been assigned to Ntcheu. Guy asked me to come and give a hand here and I said to myself ‘why not?’” “I see . . .” “Would you mind if I come and see what a cholera camp is like?” He studied me a few seconds then gave his okay. That day, at the precise moment when I set foot in the cholera camp in Niaminthutu, Malawi, in November of 1990, my life was turned upside down. The scene was appalling. Death was so close you could smell its fetid breath. To make matters worse, the logistician who had built the camp had set up the incinerator in the wrong place: the wind blew the smoke toward the tents. And when the wind died down, a putrid, grey cloud floated over the camp. There were over a hundred patients lying on rotten beds. Those blacks were just skin and bone. With big, ugly needles

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stuck in their arms. As they had cholera, there were buckets under their beds. The patients evacuated at an unbelievable rate. Some lost over 90 pounds in a few hours. Without treatment death was 99% certain. Of course, I’d seen these scenes before. Like everyone else, I’d seen them on tv. And like everyone else, I changed the channel. At first, you’re ashamed to look inside the tents. At those eyes filling with hope whenever a Muzungu (a white) like me deigns to take a look. No one had taught me what to say or what to do in such circumstances. Shake hands and say hello? Maybe a little humour? What about a joke? And then there were people accompanying the hundreds of patients. At the time, I was unaware of the political issues that had precipitated this catastrophe. All I could see were the consequences. People hovering between life and death, looking imploringly at the doctors and me. It left me reeling with my arms hanging down by my side. At the far end of the camp, in keeping with tradition, mourners wailed for the five refugees who had died the previous day. They lamented the death of a son, a husband, a brother. This went on 24 hours a day, every day of the week. The wailing of the mourners and the moaning of the sick were blood-curdling. The dead, still infectious, were wrapped in plastic body bags so they wouldn’t spread the virus. Under the tent, the temperature stood at 45°C. I felt like vomiting. I raged inside. At Canadians and our incredibly selfish lifestyle. We just don’t know what it’s like. I staggered to the back of the camp, clung to the fence and gulped a few lungfuls of air. Pulled myself together. But then I looked down and saw the small makeshift cemetery with freshly turned earth. The three hundred little crosses reminded me that most Mozambicans are Christian. Time to get down to work, I thought, rolling up my sleeves. We’ll put an end to this mess.

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7 Humanitarian Folly

I went back to see Luc. He took up where he’d left off, showing me around the camp. He described how cholera treatment is divided into three phases. Phase 1 involves observation to make sure the symptoms detected are those of cholera. Once that’s established, we proceed to phase 2, which consists of supplying the body with liquid by intravenous drip. The water and antibiotic irrigation lasts three days. Until the disease eases up and goes away. In fact, the patient’s body cures itself. Hydration and antibiotics serve only to help the system reconstitute its antibodies. Phase 3 consists of disconnecting the intravenous supply from the patient, but hydration continues. Three more days and the patient can go back to his family. In the final phase, the atmosphere in the

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tent is already quite different. The patients have recovered their weight and colour. The children are acting like kids again, running all around the place. You can hear the older ones burst into laughter. They’ve spent four days with the whites. They’re used to it. There are no more tears. And the African in them reemerges. Because Africa is, above all, a smile. Gleaming teeth in a brown face. It’s beautiful. “Bom dia, Dr. Luca!” And the voices come alive. The local nurses teased Luc. But respectfully: he was a magician with a needle. I have seen children reduced to 450 grams, kids we could hold in one hand. They had to be injected with a needle almost as big as their arm. Locating that goddamn vein was a nightmare. But Luc could find it. He was incredible. He was the white witch doctor. Years later, I can still see him at work. The guy saves lives. He lost some patients, too. They’d arrived too late. Their tissues were so dried up that they were ripped apart by the sudden supply of water. The liquid penetrated their lungs and they died of suffocation. Fortunately, that morning Luc had time to spend with me. He even explained the system, the water, and the evacuation system. I had to be a quick study. Down to the smallest detail: like the vomit bucket at the side of the bed and the one under the bed for excrement. Luc told me they were having problems. It was so hot the nylon cord supporting the serum bags was melting. The bags ended up no higher than the patients’ arm so the solution wasn’t flowing into their body. The people accompanying the patients had to hold the flasks at arm’s length for hours. When I left him, I was sure I could help. I would be better off there than in a penitentiary in Montreal. It was closer to hell on earth, but I felt ready for the battle. I didn’t realize the cholera camp was just the hors d’oeuvre. Then Luc took me to the nutrition camp. At the entrance, he introduced me to a pretty nurse named Christine. She had set up

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her office, if you can call it that, under a baobab tree. She processed 40 patients an hour. Another shock. This time, the new arrivals were near starvation. Waiting in line were patients from the previous day, thin and emaciated. And there I was with my rosy cheeks looking as if I’d just gobbled some Big Macs. My legs trembled. This was no tv show. But I couldn’t turn away. I was obliged to look. To hear the flies buzzing. To endure the oppressive heat. The piercing odour. See the kids, who were unable to prevent the insects from invading their mouths, ears and noses. I had to pinch myself to prove it wasn’t a nightmare, that it was all too real. I thought about hightailing it out of there, but there was nowhere to go. Blantyre was four hours away; Lilongwe two hours farther than that. Go back? It was out of the question. To go where? France? England? I had wanted to come; I had gotten my wish. I studied Luc and Christine, peering into their eyes to see where they found the strength to carry on. They were glowing with self-confidence. It was a beautiful sight. Christine was lovely beyond words, with long auburn hair cascading down her shoulders. President Kamuzu Banda of Malawi had forbidden women to wear trousers, so she wore a dress. She came from sunny Nice. She looked gorgeous in her cute little 1950s style skirt. She radiated beauty and self-assurance. There was nothing trivial or sexual about my fascination with her. The startling contrast of a green dress amidst blacks struggling to swallow their energy paste. She looked so fragile, so alone, but so strong. She had the tanned face of a woman who has already been at the front for a while. She kept on working as she turned to say hello to me. She was holding a kid with one hand and reaching for a scale with the other. She asked her assistant to take over for a few minutes and paused for a cigarette break while she talked to us. Suddenly, she frowned, dashed over to the line and, still smoking, shouted, “Antonio, there’s a priority, here!”

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I overheard her asking Guy Jacquier how far he had gotten with his boxes. I had a vague notion she was referring to coffins. “Your boxes have arrived, Christine.” “So, send me ten . . .” They weren’t making fun of the dead. It was just their way of coping. We had Saturday evenings off at Nsanje. Some expats decompressed by shutting themselves in their rooms and reading. Others needed to get smashed until three in the morning to get rid of their pent-up rage. I belonged to the latter group. The arrival had been a shock; I needed to blow off steam. In 24 hours, I had already seen enough to make me feel different. After showering, we gathered in the central room. First one bottle of whisky appeared. Then another. By the time we were working on our third, groups were starting to form. One group drifted away into the bedrooms for a little privacy. Another got ready to go dancing in town, but a third had to write up the weekly reports. Luc worked on the technical side. He wasn’t an administrator; he had nothing to do with reports. On Saturday evenings, he let himself go and took a breather. He was more interested in my origins. And he told me that in Chad he had known another Canadian, Sylvain Charbonneau—obviously someone I should meet. I listened to the conversations, trying to absorb as much as I could. At the other end of the room, someone was talking about Ethiopia. To me, Ethiopia was the song “We Are the World.” The person had actually been there. I was impressed. Another guy was making comparisons with Southern Sudan. Well, well, I thought, if there’s a Southern Sudan, there must be a Northern Sudan. The subject of humanitarianism didn’t come up. They talked about life—their lives. They didn’t indulge in fruitless intellectual debate. Instead, I heard stories about life by people who were

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describing their jobs. And their everyday lives. Like the time Sylvain got sloshed in Kenya. Or when Thierry came down with the worst case of the trots in his life in West Africa. People were splitting their sides. That’s what humanitarian aid was like. The human element. That evening, I got my first taste of an African nightclub. Dancing the kisumbu African-style, hugging the girl close in a sweltering 38ºC. In Canada, we think we can dance, but we’re just wiggling. In Africa, it’s for real. In the middle of nowhere, with mosquitoes ripping chunks off your hide. The bar was a wormeaten wooden shack. And the only décor was a refrigerator stuffed with cold beer, a godsend in this inferno. It would also be the first time I met ordinary Africans. Until then, the only Africans I’d seen were dying from starvation or cholera. But I’d never met Africans who were dancing and having a good time. I guzzled Carlsberg and whisky. Swigging alcohol to drown my rage to succeed. Nobody asked how my day had gone. Relief work is like that. Everyone has his burden to bear. You’re afraid to let the other guy vent, adding the weight of his distress to yours. In the jungle, you’d better take care of yourself! That night, I saw Christine again. She seemed far from her food camp. There she was, in love and lost in the arms of another French logistician. She was living. That night, I had the impression I would be seeing some people again soon: Luc Legrand, Christine and some others. I knew our paths would cross again one day. And I already was looking forward to it. Because it’s always great to be with remarkable people. The next day, I woke up without a hangover. I headed to Blantyre and then went on to Ntcheu. And a pleasant surprise awaited me—both of my nurses were blue-eyed blonds. Ntcheu, a border town near Mozambique, numbered 4,000 inhabitants. It is the capital of Ntcheu District. The town was

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located on both sides of the road, at the foot of the mountain called Ntcheu. They quickly outlined the setup for me. The Malawians lived in square houses; the Mozambican refugees, in round houses. Sometimes, a few round huts surrounded a square hut, an indication that the landowner had taken in refugees as servants. The situation was less critical than in Niaminthutu. True, there were 150,000 refugees, but they were spread over 90 miles. In addition, they had been in the region for two years, so they had settled in. The emergency had passed. In fact, I was the third msf logistician to work in the area. The basic structure was already in place. There was an accountant, three cars, three drivers, a store, petty cash, about 15 employees, masons, labourers. We had two houses: a residence for the women, which contained the common kitchen; and my dwelling, which also served as an office and a warehouse. The only thing the women insisted on was that the car be ready in the morning when they had to do their round of dispensaries. It was my responsibility to make sure this requirement was met. When the refrigerators in the health centre broke down, they had to be repaired without delay because that is where the vaccines were kept. Our relationship was all the more cordial because the guy who preceded me was far from adept at human relations. His sole concern was to keep the books in order. Temperamentally, I was more focused on concrete results and human relations. I liked action and I learned fast. The office coordinator was a woman from the Massif Central in France. It was her third mission for msf. A real go-getter, married to a veterinarian in Veterinarians Without Borders. She had just completed the program on populations at risk, msf’s most advanced emergency training phase. The other nurse, who was coming back from Yemen, was on her second field mission. She was the epitome of a good Catholic, with a cross conspicuously hanging around her neck. She was a very nice person.

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The following Tuesday, a Malawian applied for a job. I didn’t know what to say, since I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do. So I just gave him a book on water sanitation. The title was something like Where There Is No Water. I told him to read it and return in two weeks. He left with the book. Three weeks flashed by. I took everything in. I used my eyes, ears and nose to absorb everything I could. My predecessor had given me the keys to the car. Marc Vachon was on his first mission and at the controls. Increasingly confident, I offered to travel on weekends to Niaminthutu, where there was an emergency, and to return to Ntcheu on Monday morning. Geneviève Begkoyian had no objection, providing the Ntcheu mission didn’t suffer. Not long afterwards, I had my first “death in the field.” I had seen corpses before: the corpses of my parents and the plastic bags in the cholera camp at Niaminthutu. But I had never seen a life disintegrate before me. I was coming back from doing some errands with my driver when a kid ran across the road waving madly. We stopped alongside an adult who was dying from dehydration. We put him in our pickup to drive him to the cholera camp. I climbed in the back with him to hold his hand and keep him from being ejected on the bumpy road. At the camp, I ordered a stretcher. I was beside myself with worry. I wanted this story to end well. But he died even before he reached the tent. And I could read in the nurses’ eyes their disapproval because I’d brought them a hopeless case. While scrubbing my hands with soap, I noticed that I was almost clawing at my skin. I hadn’t known the man, but his death enraged me. I felt like jumping back into the car and fetching every patient who was seriously ill before it was too late. I was livid. But after a while, you learn that you can’t always arrive in time. That when you’re too late, there’s nothing left to do but crawl back into the car and turn the music up full blast. Then you hurl some wood into the pickup to let off steam. Teeth clenched. Silent. The driver gives you a hand. Two or three trips and you’ve cooled down.

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You never get used to death. Yet you realize that your first corpse is just a grain of sand in an hourglass that never stops flowing. And that Africa is ever generous with its scenes of horror: plagues, mutilated corpses abound. And I was furious with myself for abandoning my studies. Because I could have become a nurse, I told myself, and been a hell of a lot more useful. Life’s a bitch! The first six months, I was like a sponge. I spent my weekends at Niaminthutu in the cholera camps or digging latrines. Or rather, managing the teams of local employees who actually dug them. Because the presence of an expatriate encouraged the workers to get a move on. If not, the oppressive heat would have made them seek shelter. I remembered the serum bag problem that Luc had described. I suggested that the nylon cord be replaced with electrical wire, which is more resistant to temperature changes. I scoured the whole of Nsanje, looking for electrical wire. No luck. Frustrated, I reported back to Luc. He looked at me as if I was a half-wit. “Are you telling me that in the whole of Blantyre, there’s no electrical wire anywhere?” Oops! I hadn’t understood that in relief work the end justifies the means. Even if it means a three-and-a-half hour trip. On foot, if necessary. In Blantyre, the hardware store owner asked me what length of cord I needed. Christ! I’d forgotten to take the measurement. I did a rapid mental calculation and asked for 300 yards. By 3 p.m., I was back in Niaminthutu, happy as a lark to have completed my mission. I was about to tell Luc about it, but he looked at me as if to say: “Hey, big mouth, you want a medal? Shut up and set the thing up for me asap.” It was four o’clock and I realized that all I’d had was a couple of cans of Coca-Cola on the road. It was like a furnace inside the

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tent. I slogged away, cutting wire and tying knots, then installing the bottles again. I was working between two beds on which two guys were evacuating. Apart from the groaning, the only sound you could hear was the slosh into the buckets slipped under the beds. Six knots later, my arms were starting to stiffen up. At 6:00 p.m., I packed it in. My whole body was giving out. Luc gave me a pat on the back. “Nice work, little Canuck. Come a bit earlier tomorrow so you can finish it for me!” Karen gave birth in January of 1991. Though we continued to correspond, it felt as if she was quite far from my life. When I reached her on the phone, I knew she couldn’t come and see me. It would be suicidal to bring her there with an infant in her arms. I wasn’t making enough money to support a family. We agreed to forget our dream of getting back together. To maintain the relationship, we’d write each other. But she needed to be free and get on with her life. It was a heart-wrenching decision. She’d sent me pictures of our daughter. And I knew how adorable her mother was. But I didn’t belong in Vancouver. Above all, I could never go back to Canada and forget about what I’d witnessed in Africa. I had seen too much in Malawi to settle for a humdrum existence in the West. I had found my path; I had to pursue it, no matter what. I had experienced the satisfaction of a job well done, the joy you feel when you finish the floor on the second storey and you’re ready to go all the way to the eighteenth. Relief work was addictive; I couldn’t get enough. Karen would cope without me. She’d meet someone who was good for her, someone who’d give her the happiness and stability she and the kid needed. I didn’t think I was abandoning my child the way my parents had done. My motives were good. When I fathered the child with Sophie, I was a lost kid becoming a rotten adult. Now I was on a different path, gaining credibility and dignity. My daughters would be proud one day. They wouldn’t think their father was a

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bastard. I couldn’t provide them with the life they deserved but I’d give them even more precious gifts: honour and pride. Going back to Niaminthutu on weekends had a happy result. Christine (the lovely woman from Nice who worked at the food camp) and I became a couple. But the last month of my stint at Ntcheu was less cheerful. I failed to establish cordial relations with the person who had replaced the mission chief. She was eager to show who was boss, insisting on strict obedience. The situation was especially irritating since I had spent six months in Ntcheu, six months more than she had. Furthermore, I had experienced my first real emergency. It occurred in Mulanje. Torrential rains had caused landslides. There were many dead and wounded, and my job was to handle emergency logistics. It was my first solo mission with control over the money. The village had been wiped out. I had to build shelters and avert another catastrophe, like a cholera epidemic. An army helicopter had dropped me right in the middle of the disaster zone, and we were working in mud up to our knees. We managed pretty well. This success, coupled with my weekend visits to Niaminthutu, had considerably enhanced my standing with msf. That month of January 1991, war broke out in Iraq. Bush the father launched Operation Desert Storm when Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw from Kuwait. Like everyone else, I was excited at the prospect of being sent to Turkey or Iran, where msf anticipated an influx of Iraqi refugees. I pleaded with Geneviève Begkoyian to recommend me to the brass. She flat out refused. But she paid me a compliment for which I am forever grateful. She dispatched three people to Iraq and asked me to fill the three vacant posts in Malawi by myself, in addition to handling my office in Ntcheu. Two absolutely delirious months. I had to manage to be everywhere at once: somehow to be both in the north and the south.

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As compensation, Geneviève sent me to Lézignan for the msf course on logistics in precarious situations. After that, I would return to Malawi for another six months. Christine had finished her contract. She was going to visit her sister in Madagascar before joining me in France. The weekend I arrived in Lézignan, someone stole my jacket with my passport and wallet. Obviously someone from the msf house. It was an inside job. On Tuesday, I started to sweat. I was hot. I didn’t know what was happening to me. At the noon break, I thought it was probably the result of fatigue I’d accumulated in recent months and that forty winks would put me back on my feet. Four days later, I woke up in the hospital in Carcassonne. A severe case of cerebral malaria had left me in a coma. I almost died because people had attached little importance to my absence. They thought I was just sleeping off a hangover. I had a fever for three days and lost nearly 35 pounds. And I missed the first week of training. I couldn’t wait for my girlfriend to arrive. I called her a dozen times: no answer. And when she finally picked up the phone, she told me that she had gone back to her ex in Nice. A bout of malaria, personal effects stolen, classes missed and a broken heart: too much at once for even the hardiest of adventurers. I went back to Malawi, for an assignment in Niaminthutu. In three months, I had 12,000 latrines and 10,000 individual showers built. And the operation went without a hitch. I lived in Chiromo in a little bamboo house on the banks of the Mulanje River. Part of the structure was built on piles over the water. In the evening, hippopotamuses would rub up against the piles. The house was covered with a mosquito net. Malaria was no joke. I felt like Daktari. I was single again. Fortunately, Heike, a Canadian friend I had gotten to know at Banff and seen again in Paris, called to say she

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was in Lilongwe. I spent two weeks with her in Malawi. And there was Rachel, an Israeli. One of the most beautiful women I have ever met. She came to spend ten days with me in Chiromo. We viewed many a marvelous African sunset together. It was bliss! Then I spotted a little Mozambican who was in a theatre troupe in Blantyre. Her name was Lucrecia. A beautiful black angel. Though I scarcely caught a glimpse of her three times, I wouldn’t forget her. Geneviève Begkoyian was finishing her mission. When she left, I must confess I felt a pang of regret. She had trusted me; she had given me my opportunity. I was the guy she counted on, the one who took on impossible missions. And to a certain extent, I was her friend. On assignments, people usually resent their immediate superior: people in the field blame management for the lack of resources, while the office in the capital rages at Paris headquarters. Administration is largely solitary work. And in Malawi, Geneviève was in charge of some 50 expatriates as well as nearly a million Mozambican refuges. It could have proven to be too much of a burden for a young woman in her thirties. She had her fears, her doubts. I did my best to ease her solitude. Sometimes, we would find ourselves together on the terrace and she would confide in me. She chatted about this and that. About her mother, about Brittany. She also needed to unwind. We are still friends.

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8 The White Knight

I read the ad in msf’s internal newsletter: “We’re looking for a logistics coordinator for Baghdad. Six-month contract.” Baghdad and everything it evoked: the tv series about the blond genie. To me, Baghdad was camels and belly dancers. What about the war? Sure there was a war. But I had just spent a year in a “war” zone and I had seldom heard shots or seen burnt houses. It was a far cry from Apocalypse Now. There was no television in Malawi, unlike the rest of the planet, so I hadn’t been force-fed on images from Iraq. I was staying at the hotel in Blantyre when Bush declared war on Saddam Hussein. I remember turning on the tv. And cnn’s Breaking News was covering the onset of the air strikes. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I turned off the tv and took a shower.

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Nothing scared me. So when I read the msf ad, I thought, “Why not?” Until the day I departed for Amman, Jordan, I was still the only one not concerned about my assignment. Colleagues who had watched the war live on cnn regarded me with a mixture of fear, envy and admiration. In Amman, I hardly had time to procure a visa for Iraq. Twelve hours later, I was in Baghdad. I had to stay at the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad. Our offices were located just behind the Palestine in the Baghdad Hotel. At the time, there were hardly any expatriates and just a handful of people from two or three ngos (non-governmental organizations) and the un. Most organizations were focusing their operations on Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Electricity and running water still hadn’t been restored in Baghdad though the war had been over for six months. The next morning, I huddled with Luca, the Baghdad administrator, the mission chief and the accountant. Luca was leaving the following week and her replacement would arrive a few days later. Joël was the man I was replacing as logistics coordinator. He introduced himself. Before coming to Baghdad, he’d done a stint in Turkey. It had worn him out. He wanted nothing to do with the capital. As far as he was concerned, it was a dirty job. I barely had two days’ briefing. He showed me the warehouses, the transport trucks, the pharmacy order for Brussels, the mainframe and the radio system. Then he said, “Good luck, so long, I’m leaving!” The war in the Persian Gulf marked a turning point. First, in terms of the media, live coverage had put cnn on the map worldwide. And humanitarianism became highly commercialized. Before that, humanitarian action was performed by heroes out of the spotlight. Medals and press coverage were the last things on their minds. In relief networks, you found people like Luc Legrand, Christine and Geneviève. In Iraq, everything became politicized, and the country became a focus of media attention. From then on, it was more important to be the first on the scene

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than to do effective disaster relief. Western citizens could relate to this new conflict and they reached into their pockets. So, expense was no longer an issue. In Iraq, for example, msf had seven serious automobile accidents in four months. The cars were a total loss. Brand new Toyotas at $30,000 a car. No problem. A logistician had sawed off the roof of a station wagon to turn it into a convertible. No big deal! Having just come from Malawi, where money was scarce, I was furious. Two days with Joël were not enough for me to learn how things worked. On the morning of his departure, I sat down at his desk and realized he’d neglected to tell me what button to press to start the computer. I knew nothing about computers; I had never touched a keyboard. In Malawi, we didn’t have any walkie-talkies. The only time I’d seen a walkie-talkie was in the emergency logistics course in Lézignan. But I got sick during the week when we were supposed to learn how to use a walkie-talkie. Not only did I have to know how to use it; I was responsible for the mission’s entire radio network. So there were 25 radios traipsing around the country and I had to coordinate them even though I was incapable of operating my own. Beginning the next morning, I had to call the regional posts to make sure everyone was doing fine. In Baghdad alone, I had seven new cars. The warehouses were the size of two football fields and were filled with emergency products. I was a nouveau riche, but my nabob’s clothes were too big for me. Another incredible luxury: I had secretaries. One of them, a Lebanese woman, was the wife of an Iranian carpet salesman. She had been the private secretary of the former head of Thomson France in Iraq. In addition to Arabic, she spoke French and English without the hint of an accent. The other secretary, who was of Shiite origin, didn’t stay long because she married the Belgian accountant whom Françoise had replaced. She joined him in Belgium.

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Only one of the drivers, a man named Walid, was an Arab. The others were Sudanese: they were the only ones who could travel to the north in Kurdish territory. Even my assistant was Sudanese. The offices were set up in six hotel bedrooms. They provided so much comfort I almost wept: shower; swimming pool, which we still couldn’t use because the water was green, Iraqi television spewing Saddam’s propaganda all day long, clean sheets, air-conditioning. The restaurant buffet could have fed a herd of elephants. After sleeping in bamboo huts and dining on chunks of goat meat grilled by the side of squalid roads, I thought I was in heaven. Of course, after three weeks, you get used to it and you end up stuffing yourself. Traces of the war were still visible from my bedroom on the seventeenth floor. The bridges hit by American raids were yet to be rebuilt. Offices that had been bombarded had not been repaired. The façades of houses still bore traces of bullets. But, oddly enough, there was no strong military presence in the streets. Years later, we learned why: Saddam’s army was in the south, massacring the Shiites, who wanted to revolt. The result: 300,000 dead. Soon after my arrival, I had to tour the regional offices. There were four in Kurdistan and one in the south in Basra. We learned that there had been flooding in the refugee camp in Saïd Sadik, Kurdistan. I immediately organized emergency operations. This was my first mission in Kurdistan. And Saddam Hussein had built Saïd Sadik and then later destroyed it in 1988, when he employed chemical weapons to crush the Kurdish rebellion. Saïd Sadik had been transformed into a city of bricks and cement with plastic roofs. Gone was its past splendor. Nearly 60,000 refugees were arriving from the Kurdish villages, fleeing Saddam’s wrath after his debacle in Kuwait. The place swarmed with aid workers and un people. No guarantee of efficiency: too many cooks spoil the broth.

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In Saïd Sadik, I ran into Laurent again. I had recommended him to msf when they were looking for a logistician to work in Iran, then Turkey and finally Iraq. He had grown up. Now he was playing the big man. On his arm, he had the same tattoo as mine: a scorpion. He was more assured. We were delighted to see each other, but like good Canadian males, we shook hands at a distance. He seemed a little reserved, but I figured he probably felt overshadowed by another Canadian higher up on the totem pole. I didn’t make much of his coolness at the time. Back in Baghdad, I had the good fortune to work with Geneviève Begkoyian again. She had just been appointed head of the Iraqi mission. With me as logistics coordinator, the dynamic duo from Malawi had been reunited for the next six months. Contact with the Iraqis was pleasant right from the start. They bore no animosity toward me. And when they found out I was from Canada, their smiles were even broader: every one of them seemed to have a cousin or a nephew in Canada. The souks were doing a brisk business. The war seemed long gone. Anyway, Iraqis were used to war. One more, one less . . . Iraqis didn’t harbour intense hatred, even for the United States. Thanks to . . . Saddam Hussein himself. Indeed, if they went by the dictator’s daily propaganda they could believe they had won the war. He told them that the mission in Kuwait had been successful, that Iraq had recovered everything it needed and that there was no reason to stay in Kuwait any longer. So, according to them, they had won the battle, and punished the Kuwaiti infidels in the bargain. Saddam was a great man. Khalass! That’s that! In early January, Geneviève summoned me to her office. Like me, she had been burdened by budgetary constraints on the Malawi mission. She pounded the table. “I’m fed up with the car accidents, Marc. What a waste! I want you to go north and tell them that the next one who gets into an accident will be shipped out on a plane for Europe!”

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I drew up a basic rule: expatriates were forbidden to drive. Then I left to deliver the boss’s message. I also took the opportunity to introduce myself to the logisticians in the regional offices. I handed each logistician a diskette containing a form they had to fill out to identify their needs. And I made sure every expat would have a driver who was directly responsible for his car. A week later, I got a call on the radio: “There’s a problem.” “What’s the problem?” “An accident.” Geneviève asked me to go to the site and check it out. The vehicle in question was a pickup truck in Saïd Sadik. A logistics vehicle. I asked the driver what had happened. Laurent was in the room with us, but he said nothing. The driver said he had been caught in the middle of a pileup and had rolled over twice. But not once during his explanation did he look me in the eye. He kept his eyes lowered. I smelled a rat. I played a trick on him that I had seen in a cop series on tv. When a car rolls over, the steering wheel leaves bruises on the driver’s legs. “Drop your trousers!” Laurent shouted, “Marc, I’m the one!” He had paid the driver $500 to take the blame for the accident. There was a lump in my throat when I called Geneviève and told her that an expatriate had been at the wheel. She didn’t even ask who it was. “Bring him back to Baghdad. He’s gone!” On the way back to the capital, the silence hung heavy in the air. I did my best to reassure Laurent during the two days before his return flight. The good news was that msf didn’t fire him. Paris understood that he was exhausted after living eight months in precarious conditions. In the end, he was simply asked to take a break for a few weeks before leaving on another mission. A few weeks later, he wrote from Paris to tell me he was leaving for Liberia. The Iraqi incident seemed totally forgotten. But he flunked out when he was getting vaccinated and they

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discovered the big scorpion tattoo on his arm: in Liberia, it was the identifying mark of Charles Taylor’s followers. He was a guerilla leader who would become president of the country a few years later. Laurent took the decision badly. I tried to console him by suggesting we set up a construction company in Kenya when my contract ran out. Some time later, when I returned to Paris, I found out he had decided to go back to Canada. Start his life over in Vancouver. I tried to revive the idea of our Africa project, without success. But I understood. He had a right to be fed up. Before hanging up, I asked him if he had seen Karen. He said that he had, but that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. She probably told him that I was a bastard for leaving her when she was pregnant. She had found another guy. That would be the last time I talked to Laurent. Ironically, the United Nations was indirectly responsible for the humanitarian crisis that prompted our intervention in Iraq. In response to the un embargo on Iraq, Saddam Hussein decided to impose a blockade of his own to strangle the Kurdish region: he had decreed a land frontier at the very same 35th parallel that a un resolution had forbidden him to cross. But winter was coming. As the Iraqi army had mined the fields, the Kurds couldn’t go out to cut their wood. The only resort was to use oil stoves. Besides heating, there was the issue of the medicine supply. Barring intervention, the crisis could turn into an immense human catastrophe. Especially since the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia would monopolize Europe’s attention and resources at the Kurds’ expense. We were already starting to trim our fleet of cars so we could send some to Europe. Despite everything, I found time to enjoy life. I had hardly been in Iraq three weeks when I spotted an old man riding along the street on a Triumph. The biker in me snapped to attention. I stopped the man to compliment him on his motorcycle. He asked me if I wanted to buy it.

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“How much do you want for it?” “$50.” I fished it out of my pocket before he realized how ridiculous his offer was. He got off the bike and handed over the keys. A few days later, I stopped at a street corner when a taxi pulled up beside me. The driver lowered the window: “I see you like bikes, mister.” “That’s for sure.” “My cousin has plenty of bikes in his yard and he wants to sell them. Come with me, mister. I’ll show you.” I goofed: I followed him. It might have been a trap. He drove me to the Shiite district of Saddam City. We pulled up near a traditional Arab courtyard. And his cousin Rashid came out to greet us. When he opened the courtyard door, I almost fainted. Lined up side by side were about 20 gleaming Harley-Davidsons. On their tanks, they still bore the flag of Kuwait, where he’d stolen them from an emir. There was no way I was going to leave without buying one. Negotiations started at two thousand dollars per bike and we settled on five hundred bucks for two. At the office, I left a message on the answering service so I could bring the bikes back to the warehouse and strip them. I exchanged the transmission of one for the transmission of another to scramble the serial numbers. I had the bikes painted white. In the end, they looked like big North American police motorcycles with a windshield, yellow and blue turn signals, trunks in the back and the msf flag on the side. During my stay in Baghdad, I could be seen tooling along on a 1340 flht, my hair blowing in the wind. If you have never driven a big, fast Harley along the road from Baghdad to Basra by way of Al Kut on a warm afternoon, you can’t imagine the pleasure it gives you. Sheer exhilaration. I could see myself years earlier rolling through the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire in the usa. The same sense of freedom. With Jim Morrison in my ears. And I couldn’t help thinking about old

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acquaintances: all those I had left behind in Canada and who thought of themselves as bikers. But I can tell you to be a real biker, you have to drive along the magnificent roads of Iraq on a Harley-Davidson, with your tattoos flashing in the air. When I reached the roadblocks, I worked the siren, and the barriers lifted out of respect. That’s right, you goddamn barriers, rise and pay homage to the king of bikers. In the evening, I drove all over Baghdad. I checked out the military march-past on the grand boulevard. Sometimes I rode up the beltway and circled the city. I felt great. In Iraq, msf made a mistake that some ngos would duplicate fifteen years later. Wanting to centralize activities, msf made everything go through Baghdad. They were counting on the country remaining unified after the war. Thus, all the medicine had been shipped to Baghdad warehouses. All the food, gas and medicine had to transit through the capital before going up to Kurdistan. It was as if we asked the regime to let munitions and supplies through to support the enemy. My challenge was to get the gas and medicine past the border guarded by Saddam’s men. The World Food Programme undertook to deliver the food. My assignment would be no picnic. The Iraqis took pains to let me understand that. The medicine wasn’t much of a problem. All we had to do was to get authorization from the health ministry, whose sole requirement was that we inform them of the exact number of convoys and their contents. Later, I learned that the data would enable them to estimate the size of the Kurdish population. But we had no alternative, even though we knew that it was a double-edged sword. We couldn’t fool them. In all, there were more than 21 checkpoints between Baghdad and the no man’s land just before Kurdish territory. Oil was another story. Geneviève Begkoyian dropped in to see me one morning.

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“I have a problem, Marc.” “I’m listening.” “I’m a doctor; I take care of people. And today, I have patients who are dying in Kurdistan. The cause of their suffering is the cold. I know only one medicine to save them: they have to have heating.” I had to think fast. The Iraqi government had given us the right to about 5,000 litres of gas a week for our vehicles. That was a start. We had to find a way to deliver oil to the Kurdish region, since the United Nations had distributed oil stoves to the population, but not oil. In Kurdish territory, gas was beginning to cost a fortune on the black market. People who didn’t have the means to buy it were condemned to freeze to death. This time, my outlaw past in Montreal came to my rescue. I started to concoct phony documents and projects. It was easy to find fake un stamps. All I had to do was to go into their offices and distract the civil servant while I stole a dozen sheets of paper with the United Nations letterhead. Next, I would find Iraqi counterfeit artists. I showed them the seal I wanted and I gave them a piece of soap. A few hours later, they gave me the soap engraved with the desired form of seal. The phony project I concocted involved an aqueduct linking the Kurdish North with Baghdad. So I needed a lot of trucks and steam shovels. To allay suspicion, I rented about thirty trucks, dozens of graders as well as sandblasters. Leading my giant convoy, I went to the oil ministry. Waiting for me there was an engineer responsible for assessing how much oil I would need to operate the gear every day from six in the morning to eight at night. It was estimated that every truck consumed nearly 120 litres an hour. As the calculations proceeded, the figures rose at an incredible rate. So I was able to procure an official document from the Oil Ministry granting me over 50,000 litres of gas per week at the ridiculous price of 0.0001 dinars per litre. One dollar was worth 100 dinars. So I bought 15,000 litres of gas for a paltry $15.80.

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I knew I was breaking the law. It didn’t take long to revert to old habits. But instead of being a black knight on a black Harley in Montreal, I was a white knight on a white Harley in Iraq, a Robin Hood robbing rich Iraqis to give to poor Kurds. I’d be lying if I said we felt perfectly secure carrying out those operations. After all, we were defying Saddam Hussein and his sinister secret police. On the same floor as our Baghdad offices, silent Inspector Clouseau types with the requisite moustaches were running a wiretapping room. We knew our room was being subjected to regular searches. We raised our voices whenever we talked about the fictitious construction site in Kurdistan. If we were being tapped, Saddam and his men must have been wowed by our project. The document authorizing me to increase fuel consumption was good for eight months. Now we had to deliver the fuel to Kurdistan. This was far from easy. Because we knew that the checkpoints would be increasingly dangerous the farther we got from Baghdad. The guys in charge thought they were big shots and were reluctant to recognize written authorizations from Baghdad. Especially the last one, who was a real brute; he was the one who faced the Kurdish enemy, and they were far from sentimental. The no man’s land was a highly volatile zone. There were Iranians pointing their canons at Iraq and at the Kurds, Iraqis aiming theirs at the Kurds and the Iranians, and Kurds carrying rifles ready to roar as well. Meanwhile, I moseyed along in the middle with three white tankers flying an msf flag. I felt an unpleasant tingling down my back. We had to be careful not to travel the same route too often or the soldiers would get suspicious and things could become dangerous for the operation and the drivers. So I had to find two or three points to enter Kurdistan. And once there, I would have to distribute the precious heating fuel fairly, knowing full well that rebel Kurdish groups would

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demand the lion’s share. So there was also a moral issue: were we not indirectly supporting an armed group, a participant in the ongoing conflict? It was too much for msf. So we left fuel distribution in Kurdistan to the German ngo Medico International. The organization had been established longer than we had and they had established an effective supply distribution network. With Medico International on the job, we knew that the Kurdish population would have gas to heat their homes despite the rations seized by the mountain fighters known as peshmergas.

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9 Dr. Marc Vachon

A month later, everything was going like a dream. We got greedy. We rigged the floors on some Scania trucks so we could slip an extra six to eight tons of oil into them and get past the checkpoints with vehicles that seemed empty. Because, besides the Kurds, every ngo operating in the north also was running short of oil: French agencies like Action contre la faim; Équilibre; the Americans like the International Rescue Committee; as well as the Germans, Spanish and even the United Nations. We supplied all of them. I never let the oil convoy leave without me. I always rode in the first truck. In the end, I got to know the guards at each of the checkpoints. There were six entry points I knew by heart and I alternated among them. I had even set up a mail and newspaper

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delivery service for guards at the posts farthest from the capital. The heads of these units knew me. I often joked with Colonel Ali or Major Sahib. All told, we smuggled over a million litres of oil. The Kurds could survive the winter. Things took a turn for the worse when Saddam Hussein decided that no additional visas would be issued to aid workers. Only those with valid permits could stay in the field; the others had no hope of renewing their visas. There was one ngo closing shop every day. No amount of political pressure could affect the dictator’s decision. The guards at the roadblocks were less and less cooperative. And in Baghdad, there was an increasing military presence: after completing their campaign to massacre the Shiites in the south, the units returned to the capital to continue the festivities. This posed a serious problem for msf; especially for the mission in the south, for which the visa was about to expire. We had the choice between simply closing the office there or handing over management of the operations to the local teams. Eventually, someone inquired about my phony aqueduct construction project. How come months had passed, and Baghdad still hadn’t received a drop of water? Anxious not to lose face and dreading reprisals from Saddam, the bureaucrats kept their mouths shut and closed their eyes to the con. They consoled themselves that someday they’d get a chance to screw me. The convoys were becoming dangerous. Geneviève Begkoyian cabled the people in Paris to suggest they close the Baghdad office if my visa wasn’t renewed. There was no point staying there if we weren’t operational. What was interesting about being in Baghdad was the availability of goods and services. Take that away, there’d be no use hanging around. Paris instructed us to take as much medicine as possible with us to the north and then close shop.

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I increased the frequency of the convoys to empty the giant warehouses. Many of the drivers were Iraqi Kurds, so they took advantage of the crossings to make off with the trucks after unloading them in Kurdistan. They never stole the medicine. Then they sold the vehicles in Iran. From there, they returned to Iraq via the Shiite south to begin the whole merry-go-round over again. Losing a truck or two on every trip was a bloody nuisance. Worse still, the soldiers at the checkpoints got edgy when some of the trucks were missing when I returned. At that rate, I would end up emptying the entire country of its trucks. One day, I decided to organize a big convoy with a dozen trucks. At the first roadblock, the commander pulled the usual stunt. He brought a can over to the truck’s gas tank and nearly drained it, leaving me with only about 20 litres to get to my destination. He claimed he didn’t want me to sell the surplus on the black market. A few checkpoints later, there was another stop. I knew the commandant, but this time, he seemed fussier than usual. Normally he’d take the travel warrant, make sure the drivers’ names matched the names on their id cards and wave me on. Now, he seemed to be in a bad mood. When he got to the third truck, he muttered something in Arabic. The driver’s helper came running—every truck had a driver and an assistant. I can still see his eyes. He was a guy in his forties with salt-andpepper hair. His face was lined from years of hard work. I didn’t understand what was going down, but when I saw how terrified he looked, I knew something was wrong. The commandant spoke to him in Arabic for a few minutes. Everything happened too fast. I didn’t see it coming. The commandant’s arm stretched out. I recognized the black object in his hand: a Makarov pistol. The noise was deafening. The assistant’s head recoiled under the impact of the bullet fired at point-blank range. Blood splattered. He collapsed between the truck and me. Everything became muddled in my head. I reeled. My ears rang. The scent of gunpowder made my nose itch. The blood

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stopped flowing to my brain. I couldn’t think. I was sure I was next. I wasn’t even afraid. But I found it had been an absurd and unjust end for my drivers. Still holding the pistol, the commandant looked at me and grinned. He handed me the driver’s papers. They were blank. Then he started bantering, turning toward the next truck, “I swear, Mr. Marc, I’d love to go to Canada some day!” I stepped over the body. It had stopped twitching. I followed the soldier, my mind blank, my legs numb. The commandant chattered. He had a cousin in Toronto and, one day, he would like me to help him visit his cousin. “Toronto is very beautiful. Canada is very beautiful. Niagara is very beautiful. My brother is a terrific ping-pong player; he may become a star in Canada!” He checked all the trucks. Then we walked back along the row. Truck 7, 6, 5 . . . Near the third truck, the assistant’s body was still lying on the ground. We climbed over it again. Two, one. “Have a good day, Mr. Marc!” The roar of the engines shattered the deafening silence that had followed the gunshot. I looked at my Sudanese driver Clément. His knuckles were white from clutching the steering wheel. I climbed up and sat beside him. My legs wouldn’t stop trembling. It was a struggle not to piss myself right then and there. The scene haunted me for years. I have been to numerous theatres of war since then, but the incident is etched in my mind. I could never figure out why he did it. I ran the convoy. I couldn’t help feeling guilty. I had never seen the man before, since the drivers and their helpers were supplied by the companies that rented me the trucks. Of course, before we got under way, I went around routinely shaking hands but I didn’t remember names or faces. They put their safety in my hands. I was the boss; they trusted me. As the convoy started up again, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the body of the guy lying there on that rotten patch of earth eroded by fuel. The Iraqi soldiers unleashed volleys of gunfire into the air to mark our departure. I had to fight the

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urge to cry. But I was the team boss; I couldn’t break down. We crossed the no man’s land without stopping. Then we drove relentlessly in Kurdish territory. As if the spinning of the wheels and the infernal noise of the trucks would help us forget. I halted the convoy by the side of the road. Everyone got out, and 22 hands reached out to me. They were thanking me. As far as they were concerned, one man had been lost, but eleven had been saved. Did they know why the guy had bumped off one man and spared the rest? They weren’t saying. I’ll never know what I did to prevent the carnage. I remember the sensation of floating outside my body when the shot rang out. I remember wondering whether I should have thrown myself on the ground and begged the commandant. I couldn’t start running. I couldn’t do anything but trail along behind him like a robot. It looked like I was keeping my cool but I was just an empty shell dragging behind the commandant. I had lost a man. He was innocent. I lost a man right before my eyes, I kept saying to myself as I guzzled beer in Sulaymaniyah. I lost a man, I thought the next day, as I tried to assemble the trucks for the trip back to Baghdad. Nobody had agreed to return, nobody except Clément. I didn’t hold it against them. So we made the trip back alone along the same route. The commandant hardly looked up when we passed by. The bastard had won. And I had lost a man. At the time, the concept of post-traumatic stress was either little known or not taken very seriously by the heads of humanitarian organizations. To survive in that milieu, you had to stay strong, hold on and above all, not show any signs of weakness. I hardly breathed a word about the incident at the checkpoint. The Iraq mission never ceased to be surprising. A month after Laurent was repatriated, I was in Diana in the north for a series of meetings. One morning when I woke up, there were two inches of snow. My driver, who had never seen any, was amazed. I had sent him to put chains on the wheels of the car. Twenty minutes later, when he still hadn’t returned, I went to look for him. He

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didn’t know what to do. He had never driven on ice. I offered to take the wheel. And what happened, happened. The car spun out of control on a sheet of ice, and I found myself at the bottom of a cliff after rolling over two or three times. Fortunately, no one was injured. But by the time we turned the car over and put it back on the road, we were suffering from hypothermia. At Sulaymaniyah, they had to give us tranquillizers. The driving manuals for Iraq had neglected to mention the snow in the mountains of Kurdistan. I got into plenty of other scrapes on the Iraq mission. One of them ought to be listed among the series of blunders by Marc Vachon from Montreal. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. One evening, I was in Rania, Kurdistan, having a beer with Ralf, a German guy who headed Medico International. Ralf was a giant of a man, over six-foot-five and 240 pounds. In the months that I worked with him, we got to like each other and I was impressed by his methods. He always walked around with a 9-mm pistol tucked into his belt. Unlike us, the good guys from msf. He told me he’d been waiting days for a rice delivery for the Kurds, but it was blocked on the other side of the border in Turkey. The Turkish frontier was closed. Ralf introduced me to a detestable German logistician and boasted about the miracles I had achieved, getting through Saddam Hussein’s lines. The logistician didn’t take too kindly to hearing this. “I’m a pro. I don’t need anyone telling me how to do my work!” He avoided speaking English to make it clear he wasn’t talking to me. I felt insulted and I promised myself I’d make him pay for it. Then I got a call on the radio. “Marc, this is Geneviève. We’ve got a problem.” “I’m listening.” “The Belgians have sent two trucks hauling 80 cubic metres of medicine two days ago and they’re arriving at the Iraqi-Turkish border.”

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“How come? Haven’t they got a brain?” The remark fell flat. “Don’t they know the border is closed?” “I told them, but they didn’t get it. It’s too late to call them again. Find a way to go and get the trucks.” “Impossible, Geneviève. You know damn well everything’s closed. Even the Red Cross can’t get through.” “We all have our problems, Marc. I expect to get the trucks as soon as possible.” The German logistician sniggered. It wasn’t worth the effort, he assured us. I headed to Zacko the next morning to show that dickhead nothing could stop me. But the nearer I got to the frontier, the harder it was to see how I could get across it. Then, little by little, something completely idiotic hatched in my head. And when Zacko appeared on the horizon around noon, I said to Clément, my driver, “If I’m not back by 6:00 p.m., don’t wait. Go back to Sulaymaniyah and radio Baghdad that I’m in deep trouble in Turkey!” The Sudanese understood and started to stammer: “Boss, boss, don’t do that! Mushkila, mushkila, Marc!” Mushkila means “problems.” But I felt strangely serene. The calm of someone who has nothing to lose. Clément stopped the car at the deserted Iraqi border crossing and switched off the motor. He got out and left me alone in the car. I pulled on my msf shirt, slipped a thermometer into my pocket, hung a stethoscope around my neck, adjusted my sunglasses and drove toward the Turkish border. Something was telling me I must be out of my mind. But I didn’t listen. The Turkish border crossing was a concrete cabin with a window that gave a view of the barriers. There was a Turkish officer at the window. He must have been in his forties. Average-sized, slightly pudgy, with a pot-belly and a cap screwed onto his head. I parked the car and headed to the wicket. The guy frowned,

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ready to send me back to Iraq pronto. But a couple of yards from the wicket, I stopped in my tracks, my mouth agape and stared at him as if I’d seen a ghost. I kept myself from yelling out in surprise, and he looked puzzled. So, the stunt was working. He started checking himself out, examining his paunch, looking at me again, then his paunch again and his sides. The show lasted a good minute. I pulled out my msf card and my passport from my pocket, put them on the counter with the tips of my fingers and jumped back a couple of yards. He glanced at my papers, then asked me in English: “What’s the problem, mister?” “Nothing, nothing. Things are fine!” “But why are you jumping away from me?” “Well, it’s not real important. Give me my passport; I’m going back to Canada; I’m too exhausted.” “No, tell me, mister. What’s wrong?” I pulled out my Iraqi work pass, which had me down as a doctor. He studied the card, looked at the msf car. The ruse was working. “What’s the matter, mister?” “Well, I’m not sure. I think you’ve got a disease. But I’d rather not say anything because there’s nothing I can do for people like you. In fact, I can’t do anything for anyone. I’m out of medicine, I’m leaving the country, I’m going home to Canada and I just wish all of you good luck.” “Doktorr, doktorr, tell me, what’s the disease?” “Please, what’s your name?” “I’m Captain Mamahmut,” he said (or something like that). “Just a minute, Captain. I’ll be right back.” I went back to the car for my msf emergency kit. It wasn’t too late to come to my senses, jump back into the car and head to Kurdistan. That’s what I should have done. But when I get crazy like that, there’s no stopping me. I strode back to the cabin, went around the wicket and started to take the captain’s blood pressure. Then I stuck a tongue

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depressor in his mouth to check his tongue and tonsils. I checked his ears. Checked his mouth again. Examined his joints. Then came the big test. “Do you have any problem urinating?” “No.” “Have you noticed any change in appetite?” “No.” “There’s every reason to believe you’ll get the disease. But just a moment. I pretended I was consulting the msf guide for caregivers. A few moments later, I confirmed the diagnosis. “You’ve probably got it. But you’re not in the terminal phase yet. There’s a slight chance you can get over it.” “Thank you, doktorr.” Suddenly, he felt sick. I fished out a sheet with an msf letterhead and dated it. Dear Dr. Abdallah, I am referring my friend Captain Mamahmut to you. He was of invaluable assistance when I was leaving Iraq. I think he has contracted the well-known disease. Do everything in your power to help him. I hope to see you again next year. I’ll miss you, my friend. Yours sincerely, Dr. Marc Vachon, mpp, stt, ltlt. I had gone too far. There was no turning back. I drove in the last nail. “Captain, the disease will make you lose both testicles. The epidemic started in Afghanistan . . .” I let loose a big gob of spit on the ground: you have to spit whenever you talk to a Turk about Afghanistan. “The Afghans (I spat again) got it from taking opium and other drugs. Then they brought it to Iran (a big spit for Iran) when they fled the war with the Soviets. And, from there, they entered Iraq.

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Besides the testicles, nothing else will happen to you.” But for a Turk, there’s nothing worse than losing his testicles. I was aware of the effect I was having. Then I went in for the kill: “Your balls will shrink until they’re the size of lima beans. Then, they’ll shrivel up. One day, they’ll just fall off. When people look at you, they won’t notice anything abnormal. But I hope you’ve got children because now you have no hope of having any.” After my time in Malawi and the few months I’d spent in Iraq I had confidence enough to keep up the charade; but things could end badly. “I wrote a letter to my friend Dr. Abdallah, for you. He’s at the University of Istanbul hospital. If you get there in time, he’ll help you . . .” I didn’t know if the University of Istanbul even had a medical faculty. This farce could have ended abruptly. The commandant could have picked up the phone and checked with any doctor. But I wasn’t really thinking. I just couldn’t stop the flood of words from pouring out of my mouth. The Turkish officer took the bait. He was practically sobbing. “I’ll never get permission to go to Istanbul . . .” “Then, I can’t do anything for you. That’s why I’m leaving Iraq. I’m fed up with not being able to take care of people. Just because you’re holding back our trucks loaded with medicine in the city nearby.” “One moment,” he bellowed. He grabbed the phone and yelled into it for ten minutes straight. Not long after, an armoured car and two jeeps belonging to the glorious Turkish army rolled in. We set out in a convoy for a frontier town by the name of Batman. There were nearly 300 trucks parked. It took me a good half hour to find the two that belonged to msf. The captain cleared the way and brought the two monsters back to the border post.

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And then, I realized I had thought of everything but the possibility that the gag would work. What should I do now? I spent ten minutes rummaging around in the truck. I stumbled on to some H2O capsules. I remembered that Geneviève had taught me how to do vaccinations. All you had to do was to make a cross high on the left buttock and make sure your aim was good. I prepared a water injection and then went back into the captain’s cabin. I did my best to sound like a conscientious physician. “Captain, doesn’t alcohol burn when you put it on an open wound?” “Certainly.” “The burning sensation means that the medication is working. The antibiotic that I’m going to inject you with will have the same effect. You’ll feel an intense pain. The intensity of the pain will indicate your degree of contamination. The medication will act directly on your testicles. Tell me how you’re doing in a few days.” The captain didn’t have to be asked twice to drop his pants and stick out his left buttock. It took me just one try to stick the needle in. Then I gave him a 10 cc shot of water. He turned to me with tears in his eyes. He didn’t even try to preserve a semblance of pride. I removed my gloves and told him to sit down. I imagined the pain that was coursing through his body. “What do I do with my trucks now, Captain?” “Bring me the papers. I’ll take care of it.” His voice was barely audible. His face was red. He stamped the documents. He said, “So long.” When I left, I promised I’d be back soon to find out how he was doing. I found Clément at the Iraqi border post. His expression was a mixture of incredulity and terror. In Baghdad, I was welcomed like a returning hero. Geneviève did something completely out of character: despite the suit she was wearing, she climbed on to the back of my

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Harley. Two trucks followed us and we paraded them around the United Nations and all the ngos as a sign that the embargo had been breeched. Two days later, we had to bring the trucks back to Turkey. The game was becoming more dangerous. I couldn’t let the drivers go alone. There wasn’t a soul at the Turkish border. Nobody but my captain, sitting behind his counter. But, in the shadow, I couldn’t see the expression on his face. Then, he said: “Mister Marrrk. Docktoorrr Mark. My brother. My friend . . . Come, come!” I had the impression everything was going well. In no time at all, he stamped the papers to let the trucks in. “Mister Mark. My best friend. You saved my life . . . One moment.” He picked up the phone and shouted some orders in Turkish. My heart skipped a beat and I thought I got the picture: “So that’s it, the guy’s making a fool of me. He’s just called the guards. The firing squad is loading their rifles. I should never have underestimated his intelligence. I’m going to pay for my arrogance.” Then, I really panicked. It was a surreal version of Midnight Express and I was the actor in the jackpot. I clung to the faint hope that with an msf card and Canadian citizenship, I would merely be expelled, possibly after a few days in the slammer. That was the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario was that pride would lead the captain to take the law into his own hands. None of these things happened. In the distance, I saw a jeep arriving. Two soldiers got out, followed by a typical big-legged Turkish woman, wearing a scarf on her head. She was certainly not suffering from malnutrition. She entered the cabin. The captain gestured to her to sit down. And she did. The officer turned to me.

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“Mister Mark. I am okay now. Very okay. Everything’s fine. Ask my wife . . .” He ordered his wife to confirm the fact. Mortified with shame, the poor woman looked at me and smiled as if to say: “He’s marvelous in bed, Al Hamdulla!” Out of professional conscience, I nevertheless insisted on evaluating him again, and while I was at it, I checked out the two guards who had brought his wife. The diagnosis: they were all in perfect health. “Mister Mark, I’ll always be grateful to you for what you have done. Ask me anything you want. I’ll do everything in my power. You have saved my marriage. Tell him, my wife, who has saved our marriage!” “As a matter of fact, I do have a favour to ask. I have a friend who has about ten trucks with rice held in Batman. He’s a German who, it so happens, has also suffered from the disease. Bringing him his trucks would be a blessing to him . . .” “Go ahead, you can get them.” A military car accompanied me to the Turkish village. We got the 11 Medico International trucks and brought them to Rania. Our entrance into the Medico compound in Rania did not go unnoticed. My driver, Clément, had a high old time, spraying the gravel from beneath his tires. Ralf came out to take a look. I showed him his 11 trucks. The next day, the logistician was shipped off to Germany.

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10 A Meeting on a Roof in Sulaymaniyah

I didn’t get to know many Iraqis. Of course, there was one man, an old msf mechanic. Like handymen all over the world, he had a caustic wit. I certainly remember the checkpoint guards, whom I couldn’t help liking, no matter how nasty they were. Every time I went through, I gave them about twenty newspapers. It helped establish relationships. Gradually, I became a kind of postman for the guys whose families had remained in Baghdad. Once, I even took a boy to see Geneviève. He was the son of a commandant. He had a big abscess on his hand. Geneviève operated on it and took care of him until we were sure that the wound wouldn’t become infected. The boy and his uncle who accompanied him stayed at the hotel for two days. I took him back to his father’s, and Geneviève went to change his

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dressing a few days later. The Iraqis couldn’t get over the fact that a French doctor would travel 120 miles to go and treat one patient. We were never bothered on that road again. The Iraqi people had learned how to cope with life under a dictator. The Baa’th Party and the intelligence services, which carried out a reign of terror in the country, had their eye on everything. The Iraqis had stopped talking politics. How many times had I gone to our office in Basra without hearing about the massacre of the Shiites that Saddam was perpetrating? No one breathed a word. Iraqis didn’t trust us, or anyone else for that matter. It was only months later that the world finally found out. Ordinary people, that is; the leaders had long been feigning ignorance of what was happening so they wouldn’t have to intervene. No Sudanese driver or Iraqi was willing to talk openly. All day long we heard: “Saddam Hussein is the big man of this country. . . .” Walid, the Iraqi in our office, was more open, but even with him we barely crossed the thin red line into politics. He was a war hero, who had served with the Iraqi air force. He had narrowly escaped death twice. So he had been assigned to the maintenance service in Baghdad, looking after the dictator’s personal aircraft. He had accompanied Saddam to China, Libya and numerous other countries. The order came to close the Baghdad office. It also meant the end of our presence in Basra. I had to arrange the evacuation of our seven expatriates. For a while, Paris had thought about letting me work without a visa until I got arrested and expelled. Too risky. What about media and diplomatic campaigns to force Iraq to reconsider its policy of refusing visas to aid workers? Recent events had shown that Saddam Hussein was immune to international pressure. So there was no point staying. We had to leave. I still had tons of material and equipment in the warehouses. I had to rent thirty trucks to bring as much equipment as I could

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back to Kurdistan. Geneviève compiled a list of public and private agencies in Baghdad that would receive the rest of the material: religious convents, Protestant groups, etc. We still had lots of enriched food that we delivered to the pediatric hospitals. I slipped my Harley-Davidson into one of the trucks hauling medication back to Kurdistan. Leaving the drugs in Baghdad would have been a pain in the ass. The Basra office was closed with little regret. Malnutrition was being stamped out in the region. Large quantities of food would be distributed to pediatric hospitals. They could finish the job. The two expatriates in Basra quickly packed their bags and headed back to Baghdad with me as casually as if they were going to the monthly meeting. At the time, we didn’t realize why Saddam Hussein was so keen on getting rid of aid workers. We were providing services for him and caring for his people in addition to helping him avert social and political upheaval. Once again, it was only later that we understood that to carry out his dirty work in the south, he didn’t want any witnesses from the Western community of nations. For an aid worker, nothing is as heart-rending as the closing of a mission: laying off the local staff, leaving. It’s hard. But in Iraq, I didn’t need coaxing. I was exhausted. I had seen enough. I couldn’t take it anymore. Too many weapons, too much needless violence. I was becoming increasingly edgy. I had to leave. We emptied the organization’s confidential documents into big blue trunks so we could take them to the warehouses, where we would burn them page-by-page. We wanted to do things right so the local employees we were leaving behind wouldn’t have any problems after we left. On the final day, I arranged to have the convoys leave through different exits. Geneviève was in the first convoy, Éric in another. I was on board a large car carrying the heavy material: satellite phone, radio etc. Anything delicate. Anything Iraqis were liable to prevent us from taking with us; especially if we were going to give it to those Kurdish “savages.”

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I’d spent six months building trusting relationships at the checkpoints. That certainly helped. I chose the road that was probably the safest. I arrived well after the others, but I had all the equipment. At Sulaymaniyah, the whole msf team waiting at the office formed an honour guard for me. It was my moment of glory. You never got used to it: the applause, the girls kissing you, the hands reaching out to you, the pats on the back. I was proud of myself. I climbed the steps to the msf office and met a man I’d never seen before. He watched me strut about, coolly puffing on his pipe. He was a tall man in his forties. He stuck out his hand. “Hi, my name’s Jean-Christophe.” “Hi, I’m Marc Vachon.” “So you’re the logistician who organized the evacuation?” “Yeah.” “Great, good job. But it’s 11:20 and at noon, I’ve got an interview with Radio France Internationale. Set up the satellite for me.” Wham! He’d just rained on my parade. So much for my moment of glory. His order really caught me off guard. This was no way to talk to a hero. It should have been a time for feast and festivities, not for work. What he said was short and to the point: You did a good job, thanks. Now install the bloody radio. Taken aback, I stammered something inaudible and went back to the car, grumbling: “Fucking asshole! Who does he think he is?” I set up the parabolic antenna on the roof of the msf house, all the while muttering under my breath. I felt like punching the journalist’s lights out, the arrogant asshole. I tested the link: “Hello Paris, this is Sulaymaniyah. Baghdad is closed down. In five minutes, you will get a call from somebody called JeanChristophe. Ciao!” Speak of the devil. Jean-Christophe came to see me. He still had his pipe and he had a sheet of paper on which he had scrib-

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bled the highlights of his interview on the radio. He was looking to chat, but I wasn’t in the mood. “So, how did it go overall?” “Fine!” “No problems?” “Bah.” “And if you had to start over, would you do things any differently?” “What do you mean?” “Take it easy, it’s just a question.” The phone rang, interrupting the conversation, which had gotten off to a bad start anyway. I went back down to the kitchen to join the rest of the team, who had opened some beer and were listening to rfi live. I arrived just in time to hear the beginning of the interview: “Dr. Jean-Christophe Ruffin, vice-president of msf, you are calling us live from Sulaymaniyah in Iraq . . .” Shit! He was the vice-president. And none of these schmucks had bothered to tell me. I was impressed. I had never met the vice-president of anything, never mind of an international organization. I listened more carefully when he explained that msf had just closed its offices in Baghdad and Basra, first for reasons of security and then for political reasons. I began to see him in an entirely different light when he said: “Operations to close offices are always dangerous, but our logistics coordinator in Baghdad handled the file expertly . . .” He didn’t need to mention my name; he couldn’t have paid me a better compliment. And live on rfi. When he came back to the kitchen, I must have seemed a lot friendlier. Everyone on our local staff had an interesting future in store. The secretary, a woman of Lebanese origin, assured us that she felt safe with her husband and that she had no intention of leaving. The Sudanese were clannish and they wouldn’t have trouble finding new driving jobs. The mechanic assured me that

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no one would take it out on an old guy like him. Walid’s first child was born at that very time. He was worried about the safety of his wife and son. Jean-Christophe’s remarks could have given him cause for concern. But Walid had gone with his little family to Jordan. msf had given him an official document stating that his baby needed urgent medical care in Amman. Geneviève Begkoyian recommended him to one of her friends who ran the un Refugee Agency. That’s how Walid and his family managed to immigrate to Australia. And my driver Clément took his bag and went to the north with me. At 28 years of age, he didn’t know what to do. He kept working with msf, this time in Kurdistan. We started to deploy our activities in Kurdistan. We buried containers loaded with medicine in various spots. This tactic was the fruit of long geopolitical and geostrategic study. We thought that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t put up with Kurdistan defying him for long and that soon hostilities would break out. The Turkish and Iranian borders were mined, so the population couldn’t escape in that direction. They would cut across the mountains in northern Iraq or flee to other pockets of resistance. So we had to maintain medicine and tools that would allow us to quickly set up units in those areas. Nothing had been left to chance. I had agreed to stay with the people in Kurdistan. But when I woke up one morning, I flipped. Flashbacks of my mission came flooding back. I was in the middle of the mountains in Sulaymaniyah. It seemed like a peaceful enough setting, but I knew that in this wretched country, appearances could be deceiving. Baghdad was unhappy with the way events were unfolding. I didn’t trust the Kurds either. The area was crawling with Saddam Hussein’s spies. I didn’t feel comfortable walking along the street or anywhere else for that matter. Baghdad had kept me on constant alert. Spotting spooks had become second nature. But my built-in detector didn’t work with the peshmergas.

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The people in the north were suspicious of us because we had worked in Baghdad. Wherever I went, conversations stopped abruptly, or there was an awkward change of subject. I felt I didn’t deserve this treatment. I was cold, literally and figuratively. Baghdad was a metropolis with shows, concerts of classical music. Sulaymaniyah was a godforsaken place. I loved to go to the zoo and the old market in Baghdad. I felt less free in Sulaymaniyah. Anyway, most of the work had been done. And there wasn’t room for two logisticians in Sulaymaniyah. When I saw Laurent off, the msf declared the car he had wrecked a total loss. But I didn’t send it to the scrapyard. I was in a restaurant in Baghdad with Walid one day when I spotted a pickup like Laurent’s parked out front. It was beautiful, almost new. Walid started talking to the owner. The guy informed us that the Republican Guard had received about forty of them. I told Walid to ask him how much the trucks were going for. The two conferred and then promised to find out. Two days later, Walid let me know that I could buy one of the pickups for $2,500. I couldn’t believe it. “How come you can buy a brand new Toyota with Republican Guard colours for $2,500?” “It’s simple,” Walid said. “The driver hands you the keys and gives you 48 hours to change the identification marks. After that he files a report that the car’s been lost.” Visions of a juicy deal caught my fancy. I bought the car from the Iraqi army without an okay from Paris. All I had told headquarters was that I needed $2,500 to purchase automobile parts. I brought the car back to the warehouse and painted it white. I installed the motor and transmission from the car that Laurent had smashed up and I chucked the parts from the Iraqi vehicle in the desert. I had just equipped msf with a new car at Saddam’s expense, right under his nose. Then, it was child’s play to use the licence plate from Laurent’s car, which had been declared a total loss. The guy who sold me the Harley also lent me his id card so

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I could register my motorcycle. As in Iraq, we could choose our license plate number. I chose fsh91: Fuck Saddam Hussein 91. So, by the time I left Kurdistan, not only did I have my Harley, I also had a Toyota ripped off from the Iraqi army. I loaded the Harley on to the Toyota along with a couple of Geneviève’s carpets and a few trinkets from colleagues. Then I headed out. What a combination: a bike swiped in Kuwait, a car stolen from the Iraqi army, Turkish carpets, souvenirs from Iran and Iraq, and there I was on my way to Europe, destination Paris. It was all too easy: I entered Turkey with papers stamped by my good buddy, the hypochondriac custom’s officer. I stayed in Istanbul a couple of days. From there, I went on to Greece where I boarded a boat for Ancona, Italy. I waited in vain for a Greek custom’s officer to come and inspect my car. I won some T-shirts on the boat’s casino. Good luck comes in twos: I spent the night in my cabin with a 42-year-old woman that I met in the bar. At the Italian border, my msf flag was a hit and I was waved on through. The custom’s officers at the French border post were impressed with my Iraqi visas. I wowed them with stories of bombings I’d never seen and their mouths were agape with admiration. They congratulated me and suggested I avoid the autoroute because there was a truckers’ strike. Then I drove through the Mont-Blanc tunnel and headed for Paris. That afternoon, I was alone on the road, I had the music full blast and I was grinning from ear to ear as if I had just won the lottery. I had succeeded again. Bloody hell! I was stopped once by the strikers as I entered Paris. In my best Québécois accent, I expressed my solidarity. They asked me where I was coming from. I told them I was leaving Iraq, but that I was going to Yugoslavia the next evening. I had gone out of my way before entering the city, just to tell them not to give up. A piece of sausage and a glass of wine magically appeared in my hand while I was waiting for the strikers to remove the barriers and let me pass.

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I reached Paris late at night. I cruised around msf’s neighbourhood, looking for a parking spot. Oddly enough, there was a parking spot just in front of number 8 rue Saint Sabin. I went for a bite to eat and then came back to sleep in the car. I didn’t want to leave it unguarded. The next morning, I was awakened by a knock on the window. I opened my eyes to find the whole msf office surrounding the car. All hugs and kisses. The president of msf, Rony Brauman, one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, gave me a lighthearted ticking-off. “You’re no good, Vachon: it’s all very well to bring back a Harley, but where’s mine?” Few people know it, but he’s a big motorcycle fan. That day, I went through a debriefing that Geneviève Begkoyian took part in. She had arrived ten days earlier. Then, I roared around Paris on my bike with its Fuck Saddam Hussein 91 plates. I had balls as big as an elephant’s and a head like a giant watermelon. Proud of my caper, proud of being alive, proud of my tan, proud of living. I didn’t realize that while I was away, the world continued to go round and the eyes of the world were riveted on Bosnia. I was pissed off with msf because they wouldn’t guarantee me a quick assignment and kept insisting I needed a vacation. Three days later, I sold the Harley, msf paid what they owed me in cash and I boarded the train for Amsterdam. The two Dutch people who operated the msf Basra office welcomed me. They helped me locate a reasonably priced apartment in the centre of the city, beside the canal. But to sign the lease, I needed msf Holland to act as guarantor. In their offices, I learned that they urgently needed a logistician to open the Sarajevo post. I told myself that, with the adrenaline still coursing through my veins, I could leave for three months. Three months, at the most, I swear! I’d set up the structure, come back and just chill out.

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Meanwhile, my old girlfriend, Heike, who had come to see me in Malawi, had planned to join me in Amsterdam for the vacation. When she arrived, I had already said yes to msf and I was getting ready to leave. The four days we spent together were awful. I didn’t deserve any better. She went back to Canada. I never saw her again.

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11 Nights at Café Obala

I was furious. I had to leave for Sarajevo, but there I was stuck in Zagreb. I was bored to death with a mission full of amateurs. There were four of us to handle two or three shelves of medicine. A month later, I packed my bags and returned to Amsterdam. My month and a half of R & R was sheer luxury. I bought clothes and shoes. It didn’t take me long to find a girlfriend. It was bliss in small doses. It’s better like that. I stayed at Geneviève’s place in Brittany a few days to help her fix up her house. Locmariaquer is a wonderful spot. It is calm. It has a rich history. And the residents are friendly. Especially toward Quebeckers: Bretons would rather travel across the ocean than take the train for Paris. Bretons say a foul air blows from Paris. But wind from the sea is ever fresh and clean.

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One morning, the telephone rang. Mickey Wolf, the former project director of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (unhcr) in Iraq and Geneviève’s ex, was on the line. He was calling from Zagreb to offer her a post there. But she had decided to get a master’s degree in public health in the United States. She declined the offer, but suggested Mickey speak to me. When he heard that msf had yet to call me back, he asked me to work for unhcr. I wondered whether my lack of formal education would be a handicap. He told me not to worry about it and to send my cv, a motivational letter and references from Geneviève Begkoyian and Mickey Wolf. Rather than mail the letter, I hand-delivered it in Geneva. I went to the Palais des Nations, un headquarters, and like an idiot I asked for the recruitment office. After that, I returned to Brittany for ten days, painting the house, fishing and becoming pals with Geneviève’s brother, Pierre. She had two other brothers, JB and François, and a cute little sister, Anne. I also met their mother Madame Begkoyian. She had become the sole head of the clan when a terrorist group assassinated her husband in Lebanon. The Begkoyians, a family of Armenian origin, have been through a lot. I felt at ease with them. They were my French family, humble, joyful. Madame Begkoyian more than fulfilled her role as the mother. If anyone does anything to harm her, he’ll have me to deal with. La famiglia è sacra. On September 14, 1992, an Italian plane with un colours was shot down while entering its landing phase over Sarajevo. The airlift was immediately suspended. The Canadian Blue Berets would be redeployed outside Sarajevo, leaving it up to the French to retake the airport and restore order. unhcr had to revise its operations to loosen the stranglehold on Sarajevo. It was the hottest news from the former Yugoslavia when I boarded the train for Amsterdam. Opening the door of my apartment, I spotted a big envelope with the United Nations

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flag. It was a job offer: assistant logistics officer in Split, Croatia. I had already gone to Split on msf business. So I knew what it meant: beautiful Yugoslav women (the ones on the coast were particularly lovely), the glorious Mediterranean, the beaches, the scooters and the good life. I could picture myself doing a good job for a few months in such an enchanting setting. And it was with the United Nations, after all. Montreal, Saint-Henri, SainteCunégonde seemed far behind. Three days later, I was summoned to Geneva. I’d be starting at level 1, with the lowest un salary. But I didn’t care. It was more money than msf had offered me. I went on a shopping spree for seaside clothes in Amsterdam: yellow, pastel tones, pants with creases. I knew a thing or two about Croatia. Croatians like to dress up and I didn’t want to look like a country bumpkin. Especially since I worked for the un. Better keep my tattoos well hidden. Before hopping the plane to Geneva, I dropped by an Irish pub in Amsterdam and knocked back four pints of beer. It dawned on me I was heading to a war zone. Even if Croatia wasn’t the target of heavy bombing, it was close. It was still part of the Yugoslav family. And it was still occupied by the Bosnian Serbs. It was a hot spot. And the images I saw on television were far from reassuring. I boarded the plane, pretty hungover. On the flight, I downed a few more glasses until I was completely smashed. As ill luck would have it, my valise wasn’t at the airport in Geneva. The only clothes I had were the jeans, jacket and white T-shirt I was wearing. It was Sunday evening in Geneva so the stores were closed. The airport services that had located my valise promised to bring it to the hotel for me at noon the next day. Shit! What about my meeting at the un? Might as well buy a suit so I’d make a good impression . . . The next day, my face was as crumpled as my clothes. The man who greeted me didn’t hide his disapproval. Obviously,

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he wondered why the un had stooped to recruit a wreck of humanity. Nevertheless, he sent me for photos to prepare travel documents. The next three days were pleasant enough. I was briefed and given lessons about the geopolitics of Yugoslavia. I got instructions on how to use un jargon when talking to the press. I also met the person who was going to be my boss. He wouldn’t be handling the operational side, but he would be taking care of orders. On Wednesday afternoon, I finished my final briefing and went to pick up my ticket for Zagreb. The departure was scheduled for the next day. Then, I was issued a United Nations passport. As I stood in front of the entrance to the Palais des Nations in Geneva, opposite Lac Léman, I couldn’t help wishing my mother and father were alive. If they could see me now. If only I had a phone so I could call someone I knew. Just so I could say, “I am Marc Vachon from Saint-Henri in Montreal, parents unknown, look at what I have become!” I thought about my daughters. I was feeling on top of the world. A un passport is the most beautiful thing that humanity has ever conceived. No colour, no affiliation, no religion, one planet, one world. It was also the symbol of this utopia of peace. But it is still incredibly beautiful. And I belonged to that family of dreamers, of great humanists. My passport photo was the proof. In the document, only my name, date of birth and job appeared. Nothing else. Not the colour of my hair, or my country of origin. From now on, my country was called Earth. I was a citizen of the world. The next day, our flight touched down in Zagreb. A car with a un emblem was waiting for us. There were rooms reserved for us at the Intercontinental. The city had not yet undergone bombing, but the sandbags stacked in front of sensitive buildings were a sign that the end was near. Normal life was no longer possible, but essential services including those for water and electricity were still available.

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In unhcr offices, I learned that the priority was to assign someone to the Sarajevo airport to coordinate the arrival and distribution of humanitarian aid. The logistician at the airport was a Norwegian. He would soon be transferred to a calmer town because he was terrified. I suspected that I was going to be offered the post. The promise of sending me to Split as an assistant to the assistant now looked very much like Geneva’s idea of a joke. A little voice in my head mocked me, “Bravo for the seaside clothes!” I was alone in the boss’s office. He must have left to handle some emergency. Then a stunning woman with the body of a goddess walked in. She wore glasses that made her look both serious and mischievous. Not taking much notice that I was there, she picked up the phone and started to bawl somebody out. From what I gathered, her name was Una, the office assistant in Sarajevo, she had to return asap and she didn’t see why she didn’t have a goddamn seat on the goddamn fucking un plane. She swore like a trooper. I thought she was cute with her salty language, her un look and her total indifference to me. She slammed the phone down. Lifted her glasses and looked me up and down, smiled and then left. When the boss came back, I learned that I would be going to Sarajevo; and I didn’t wait to be asked, I beat him to it and offered to leave right away. He grilled me for about twenty minutes about my experience. If necessary, I would have dreamed up a mission in the Vietnam War. I had to go to Sarajevo. Una was there. Nevertheless, I did go to Split. I attended a meeting, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was trying to guess how tall Una was. The next day, I headed to Sarajevo. Thirty miles from Split, we had to detour through the forest to avoid a danger zone. We also had to drive across Mostar, which was at war. At the entrance of the city, the Croat at the checkpoint refused to let us pass. My Iraqi experience came to the rescue: “We already talked to your captain in town. He gave us the authorization. Nema problema. You can call him!”

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The plan was that he would take us at our word and let us pass. But Jesus Christ! He pulled out a phone from behind the wall and dialed a number. I was unfamiliar with Croatian customs but the outlook seemed bleak: a bullet in the head or decapitation. I clung to the faint hope that I could convince him he wasn’t speaking to the right captain. As luck would have it, the phone was out of order. He let us through. It was about 5:00 p.m. It started to get dark in Mostar. There was the sound of gunfire on the heights, but everything seemed calm in the city. Still, the streets were eerily deserted. We raced along at 90 miles per hour in our Volkswagen Golf. Inside, the silence was intense. We were anxious to reach the last checkpoint and exit the city. When we got there, we realized that we had just run the Mostar blockade. My travel companions had to go to Vitez. The town hadn’t yet been ravaged by war. The population still had electricity. We found a pretty little hotel for the night. The next day, I got up early to go to Kiseljak, one hour from Sarajevo, a melting pot, built from scratch by Tito. The United Nations had thus decided to deploy contingents of various origins in this military zone to represent the three ethnic groups involved in the conflict: the French Catholics for the Croatian side, the Egyptian Muslims for their Bosnian co-religionists and the Orthodox Ukrainians for the Serbs; altogether it made a beautiful un portrait. Since the Kiseljak road was in Serbian territory it was supervised by the Ukrainian troops. To protect the un vehicles, they surrounded them with armoured vehicles. We weren’t the first to arrive at the Kiseljak control point. A small ngo was already negotiating with the Serbs to enter Sarajevo with trucks full of supplies. If you didn’t belong to the un, the Serbs simply asked you to let them have half of your cargo. And all this was punctuated by the sound of exploding bombs. I was quite impressed. Especially since that’s exactly where I was going. I ended up climbing into the Ukrainian armoured vehicle. I

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glimpsed the landscape through the little windows of the av. At first I saw a forest, then a suburb like any other suburb in the world, except for the deserted streets. Then we arrived at the airport. I stepped down onto the tarmac. The Norwegian I was replacing came to greet me. He took me to the place where I was going to live for the next six months: a warehouse at the Sarajevo airport. There were six big hangars near the control tower. unhcr was located in the next-to-last hangar. Inside, the décor was minimal. A partition separated the stores from the living quarters: a little office, a kitchen corner where we could make coffee, and a small bedroom. The Norwegian introduced me to my team of local employees who were cooling their heels, waiting for the airlift to start again. I met Rale, who would be my guide and driver. He was levelheaded, courteous and dependable. A nice guy. I quickly felt close to him. He insisted on introducing me to the French commander whose troops, detachments from army, navy and air force, were handling airport security. Two colonels carried out the command: one for aviation and the other for security— this was Colonel Sartre. I was introduced to my secretary, Amra. She was a Bosnian Muslim. She was a superb blond with blue eyes. Clearly, there was nothing ordinary about this war. Sarajevo had been plunged in the horror of a civil war since 1992. Because of its ethnic and religious diversity, Yugoslavia did not long survive after Marshal Tito’s death in 1980. Beginning in 1986, the Yugoslav federation had suffered its first blow when Serbian intellectuals launched an appeal for a return to Serbian in the name of their historic resistance to Turkish and German designs. One man, Slobodan Milosevic, had exploited this rise in nationalism among his compatriots to hoist himself at the head of Serbia, and then at the head of the Yugoslav federation. His project to rebuild a great Serbia enchanted his people, who

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applauded him for abolishing the autonomy of Kosovo and the independence of Vojvodina. Not content to stop there, the Yugoslav army, in which the Serbs were clearly dominant, attempted to subjugate Croatia. As early as June 1991, heavy artillery rained down on the Vukovar region, and things fell apart in early July when Serbia refused to recognize the authority of the Croatian politician Stipe Mesic at the head of the federation. The Slovenes drove out the federal army. The Croats didn’t have time to organize their exit. The army and militias from the Krajina region laid siege to the town of Vukovar, which fell in November, and tackled ethnic cleansing in the conquered regions. The Croatians mobilized behind General Franjo Tudjman, a nationalist and former authoritarian Ustasa extremist sympathizer. Then there was the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia in miniature, a republic embodying Tito’s dream of a successful melting pot. The population was equally divided among SerboCroatian-speaking Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. At first, the social fabric held up. In the capital, Sarajevo, mixed marriage was a common practice. But in March 1992, the fine dream collapsed when Radovan Karadzic announced the creation of a Serbian Republic of Bosnia, with Pale, a town near Sarajevo, named the capital. Karadzic’s snipers turned a peace march into a bloodbath. But the horror went well beyond the capital; the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina exploded. All sides—Serbs, Croats and Muslims—were involved in the massacres, concentration camps and systematic rapes. In all, there would be over 200,000 deaths in a population of four million, half of whom now live in exile. The world’s response was to create a United Nations mission, the United Nations Protection Force (forpronu). The Serbs made a mockery of the force on numerous occasions. Bosnia was furiously engaged in war. This is the country that I found. The war transformed poets into soldiers, fathers into

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godless criminals, youths into wolves thirsting for blood. And the rest of the world? As usual, out of a mixture of cowardice and naivety, it chose to believe in a negotiated diplomatic solution. So time was lost drawing up unrealistic projects for peace. Meanwhile, in the field, the tentacles of hatred and grief spread farther and farther. Sarajevo is nestled in the hollow of a long valley. The airport was located at the southwest corner of the city. The landing strip began in Serbian territory, and then crossed the Bosnian zone before ending up in Serbian territory again. A strategic nightmare. Naturally, it was the scene of frequent clashes. Hardly surprising, since it was near Nedarici, a small Serbian enclave encircled by Muslim towns. Obviously, the Serbs were loath to abandon it. When night fell, the combatants had to go by the airport to exit the city. Exchanges of gunfire less than 900 yards from our offices were a common occurrence. I found out what it was like to hear bullets whistling by my ears. French soldiers did nothing to reassure me by telling me, “If you hear the bullets whistle, they must be close to your head.” It became my daily musical fare. Mortar shrapnel clattered onto the warehouse roof. But I wasn’t scared. There were so many people jammed into the damned airport that we felt more edgy than terrified. The Norwegian left early the next day. I settled into my quarters. I paced up and down. Still no sign of planes. We had two delivery points in Sarajevo: Magros, the central warehouse, and the Bakery. Relief supplies had to travel the Split or Belgrade routes to reach us. Big Swedish trucks hauled them. It was the Swedes’ pet project. Eventually, the English opened up the Godinje route. At the time, unhcr had five Scania trucks that left Split with tons of food. I got along well with the French who took care of airport security. They found me a welcome change from the Norwegian

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who preceded me. They couldn’t hold a decent conversation with him. I had five Bosnians with me at the airport. From their appearance, you’d think they were from Montreal or Detroit. The only guy who looked like an Arab with his tanned skin and bearded face turned out to be a Serb. I realized I knew nothing about the ethnic reality of the country. The sexiest babe in the airport was Amra, a Bosnian Muslim. I wasn’t the only one in a state of bewilderment. I remember a driver in his fifties who told me he was a Croatian, who was married to a Serb and lived in Sarajevo. What side was he supposed to be on? Bosnia was full of people who were torn like that. All true Yugoslavs, what Tito had envisioned: a mixture of ethnic groups. Yet they were somewhat confused and tortured. A mixture that survived, for better or worse, in the big cities, since ethnic cleansing worked only in secondary localities like Vukovar. These people with their hybrid identities naturally felt at ease with me, I was just another piece in the mosaic. We heard horror stories every evening. Most of them recounted cruelty by Serb nationalists, the Chetniks. Madmen. They came from all over the world, even Europe and America. They carried on like bikers do in Canada. They crushed everyone in their path. I met pro-Bosnian French people and pro-Croat Australians. On the tombstones in Mostar, it was not uncommon to see words like “Here lies Mike the Englishman.” The national television channels were still on the air. Evenings, we watched various networks: the Serbs showed scenes of barbarism, which they attributed to the Bosnians, who were no more given to restraint than their enemies. We didn’t have to sit in front of the tv to see how nasty things had gotten. You just had to hear the explosions in the distance and think about the people being bombed.

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I didn’t lie around soaking up the sun like an idiot. Instead, I went to the Post and Telecommunications Building. The ptt building had been requisitioned by the United Nations and Western embassies. The building was headquarters for forpronu in the Former Yugoslavia. I had to see the woman I was supposed to work with, Isumi Nakamitsu of Japan. I also needed to find out about the planes, see whether the airlift was likely to start up again anytime soon. The French gave me a lift in an armoured vehicle. The ptt building stood in the Muslim section of town. To get there, you had to survive the trip along notorious Sniper Alley. Its reputation as the “road of death” was well earned. It was a vast six-lane boulevard, divided in the middle by tramway rails. It was the Yugoslav Champs-Élysées, but without the boutiques. The Serbs were on one side, the Bosnians on the other. The snipers holed up in the buildings, immobile, behind sandbags. They kept their rifles motionless to avoid drawing the attention of their counterparts across the street. The winner of this contest was the guy with the steadier nerves who exploited his opposite number’s weakness to take him out. The snipers were driven by racial hatred. How many times did I hear a Serb swear, “I’m going to get me an Arab”? Across the street, the Bosnians had assembled the whole bunch of mujahedeen, Iranians, Afghans and all the radical Islamist fighters. The scariest of all was Big Mike at Checkpoint Charlie, the second control post when you left Sarajevo from the Serbian side. The former mechanic had led an uneventful life. He was a giant of a man, homely, gap-toothed, aggrieved. Full of resentment because he couldn’t enjoy the beautiful women of Sarajevo. The laughing stock of the kids at school, he was a cauldron of rage. In his mind, all the handsome guys were Muslims, and he would make them pay for the abuse he’d suffered. In Sarajevo, everyone had his reasons for making war; not all of them were geopolitical.

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A few days later, I decided to go farther, visit the city and meet the recipients of our shipments. Amra looked at me with astonishment. She tried to make me understand that things were getting hot and they could end badly. I asked Amra to accompany me in my armoured Range Rover. We slipped on our bulletproof vests, which we were seldom without, and began the journey. The Rover tucked in behind the French tank opening the way. We skirted a bridge, which was probably mined. Then, raced down Sniper Alley in five minutes flat. The 300 seconds seemed like an eternity. I stomped on the gas and the car leaped forward. I was James Bond. Nothing could touch me. But I had a hard time convincing myself. Buildings were ablaze on both sides of the street. This was definitely not the movies. The high-rises were going up in flames. And there was the infernal sound of bombs exploding in the city. We passed by the ptt Building without stopping. About 500 feet south of Sniper Alley, cars were turning on to a little road. It seemed peaceful enough. That’s how we entered Sarajevo. Amra brought me to the Obala Theatre, the former drama academy. We slipped in by the back door to avoid snipers. Amra’s friends were in the basement. They reminded you of the denizens of the underground art scene in Paris or Montreal. Their sharp wit was their protection against despair. On the radio, the Rolling Stones were screaming themselves hoarse. We were within 500 yards of the front line. Mick Jagger complained, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Artists bantered and talked shop. I stood there agape. I hung around for a couple of hours, chatting and sipping coffee. The people’s faces told of countless sleepless nights. Some of their friends had chosen to leave. They preferred to stay. Not out of pride or patriotism, but because it was their home. “We should see them more often,” I said to Amra on the ride back.

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“Yes, but maybe we should ask for un staff security authorization.” I didn’t realize it was the first time she had been to Café Obala since the war began.

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12 Impossible Mission

Going to Café Obala was a shot in the arm. I could deal with the terror of Sniper Alley, the sound of bullets whistling by my ears. I also started to make friends. After the Norwegian left, I hid behind some French Army pallets to smoke a joint. I was sitting down, puffing away when a young French soldier arrived. He must have been about twenty. I was only 28 and in charge of the whole airport. He must have been impressed. All I could think of saying was: “Do you smoke?” In Québécois lingo. “Beg your pardon?” “Do you smoke?” “Yes, sir.” He fished into his pocket and was about to offer me a Marlboro. “No. Do you smoke weed?”

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As quick as a flash, his head did a 360. There was no one around. “Yes,” he murmured. He squatted down beside me and took the butt I had between my fingers. “Hi, I’m Marc.” “I’m Olivier, but they call me Juju.” “What do you do?” “I unload planes. What about you?” “I don’t do much of anything.” We chuckled. Juju became my best buddy at the airport. To help pass the time, I made the back offices more comfortable. We piled a few layers of aircraft pallets on the hangar roof to beef up our protection against mortar shells. Wishful thinking. Highcaliber mortar could pierce this thin defence. Our living room décor was hilarious: we installed five tv sets, not so we could od on the boob tube but to provide light after nightfall. I emptied out a closet to make room for a bedroom with a fairly comfortable bunk bed. I piled sandbags on the upper bunk. I stacked others up around the bed. So bullets would have to penetrate a series of obstacles before they got to me. The setup wasn’t pretty, but it was safer. And, it felt good after I left the general camp in the evening to retire to my own room in relative privacy. I established a rule about the living quarters: to visit after 7 p.m., people had to bring a bottle of wine or some other alcoholic beverage. I also had to protect the two girls working for me. They were the only women at the airport, and I was responsible for their safety. No one was ever discourteous to them. After all, the people around the airport were soldiers in the French Army. The lovely Una worked at the ptt. She was the main reason I took the job in Sarajevo; she was also the reason for my frequent trips to town. Soon, she started to come by to see me at the airport.

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Then the big day arrived. The Americans announced they were going to resume the airlift. With winter approaching, it was time to get to work. I had arranged everything and I was prepared for their arrival. I had confirmed our usual distribution points. The Magros warehouses were ready to store our supplies of food and medicine. The owner offered the service free of charge because he knew that un initials ensured that his infrastructures wouldn’t be bombed. I passed through the Croatian blockades without incident. I had my Serbian contacts. I often went to see them to avoid foulups. Because all they had to do was to guess that one of the drivers had a Muslim-sounding name for them to kill him. When I was there, they were more accommodating. The airlift got under way again. My first tv interview ever was with cnn’s Christiane Amanpour. I told her I was fed up wasting my time on menial jobs while I was waiting for the food to arrive. I’d seen enough death everywhere. Women and children struck down by snipers’ bullets. The scenes in the hospitals were unbearable. The violence really got to me because, unlike Malawi or Iraq, this place reminded me of Bercy St. in Montreal. The people dressed like me. A woman killed in her flowered blue dress could have been any Mrs. Tremblay in Montreal who went out on her front steps and yelled, “Manon, time for supper!” Goddamn war. José María Mendiluce ran unhcr in Yugoslavia. He had an office in Zagreb, but he made frequent trips to Sarajevo and Belgrade because the United Nations still considered all this shit to be a single entity, Yugoslavia. The resumption of the airlift brought other characters to our unhcr offices in Sarajevo. A Japanese woman by the name of Isumi headed the mission. A guy named Larry Hollingworth claimed he was coordinating a project. It was unclear what the project was. In fact, he just wanted to get a contract. Anthony Land arrived in late December. I kept them all in Sarajevo so I would be the only expatriate at the airport.

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There were few ngos in the area. Of course, there were two guys from the French organization Première Urgence, whose job consisted of receiving the packages of relief supplies and distributing them. There was msf Holland, which took care of the main pharmacy. There was also Action contre la faim (Action Against Hunger). That was all. A war was raging. So the agencies weren’t eager to jump the queue to get to Sarajevo. Even the Red Cross had abandoned the region in protest against the murder of one of its delegates during an exchange of prisoners between Serbs and Bosnians. Apart from the soldiers, the Yugoslavs and the Japanese woman, I didn’t see many people. The resumption of the airlift enabled me to increase the number of my convoys and inject a little life into the airport. It put me in a better mood. One afternoon when I was at Café Obala, I launched the idea of throwing a party. It had been months since the residents of Sarajevo had had a party. “What?” The artists cried all together. “Yes, we should have a cocktail party, an evening. I’ll take care of everything.” First, I got the emergency generator that we kept at the airport. The artists handled the décor, installing tv sets to provide the light and the music. Every day, I slipped a few bottles of wine or whisky into my bag and piled them up at Café Obala. For the most part, I rounded up bottles of pastis and some beer. We brought cold cuts, ham and sausages that we received at the airport. I went to see the guys at the French Army canteen who gave me boxes of fresh fruit. I bought five cartons of cigarettes. I asked the artists to invite their family and friends and tell them that Juju and Marc were going to entertain them French style. One last puzzle to solve. How could I bring Juju, who certainly wouldn’t want to miss the event, without someone noticing his absence? He came to my place and donned some civvies. We slipped him into the back of our Jeep, and he lay flat

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on the floor under the secretaries’ legs. That’s how we sneaked a French soldier out of the airport absolutely illegally. Juju kept his head down until we were cruising along Sniper Alley, past the checkpoints. It was a strange expedition with a unhcr car driving a French soldier in civvies, and two Yugoslavs, at night to an underground party in the heart of a Sarajevo crumbling under the bombs. About 50 people came to the party. The gals were decked out in magnificent black evening gowns and wore immaculate makeup. The guys wore freshly pressed tuxes. It was an unforgettable evening. For once, people living in a war-torn country got a taste of normal life. To put the guests at ease, Juju and I offered them a glass of pastis and a pack of cigarettes, so they didn’t have to bum them off anyone. Some hadn’t seen fresh vegetables for ages. And they did justice to our buffet. We found Juju at dawn the next day, asleep in a corner. We dragged him to the car. We brought him discreetly back to the airport. He threw his uniform on, climbed onto his tractor, drove over to the landing strip, and didn’t budge. I wondered what he was up to. When I went over to him, he slurred: “At least I’m ready . . .” It was six-thirty in the morning; the first plane wouldn’t arrive for an hour. When all is said and done, unhcr was pretty well what we imagine the United Nations to be, in other words, a company of bureaucrats and administrators. The head of the organization isn’t called Secretary General for nothing. During the war in Iraq, the ngos stole the show. They were credited with saving the poor Kurds. The un agreed to perform its proper function as it had in Malawi: managing funds, working in small but wellcoordinated teams. Nevertheless, the ngos’ media success probably didn’t sit well with the un. So when the humanitarian circus in Bosnia began, unhcr decided not to let any other group upstage it. This was a mistake. unhcr lacked the political savvy and the technical know-how to coordinate humanitarian aid.

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Besides, wasn’t it supposed to take care of refugees? That is, people who had to flee to a foreign country. This was hardly the case in the Bosnian crisis. Furthermore, the bloated un machine had gotten much too big to be efficient. And its habit of requiring an endless stream of reports resulted in a loss of time and flexibility in handling emergencies. Oddly enough, a quality that gave the un a certain appeal—its cultural and ethnic diversity—created another problem: you can’t ask a Filipino to think like a Dane, a Mozambican to function like a Canadian. Westerners with stable well-paying jobs to go back to can grouse and complain to get better results. Argentineans, South Africans or Rwandans, who suddenly find themselves with fabulous salaries, want the good times to last as long as possible. Pretending to follow the rules to the letter they make sure the wheels don’t turn too fast. No matter the diploma, people’s background always comes into play. Death doesn’t have the same meaning for an Indian Buddhist that it does for an Irish Catholic. That’s why it didn’t work in Bosnia. The un had put a Japanese person in charge of the mission. But the Japanese aren’t decision makers. They’re negotiators, they discuss things, seek consensus. They avoid radical measures. In Bosnia, canons had become the communication tools. The Japanese’s voice was scarcely audible. At the operational level, I did my best to give the company some structure, if only at the airport. In January 1993, we had reached a maximum of 24 planes a day. In Metkovic, I managed to assemble a convoy of 15 Mercedes that I rounded up in Sarajevo and repainted white to load them with supplies to restock our warehouses. When winter arrived, we managed to distribute blankets, wood stoves, wood and many things other than food. The only problem was that we didn’t have enough staff to ensure that the supplies were well and truly delivered where we

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intended. We had a good idea that we were feeding the Bosnian soldiers, all the while realizing that the Serbs fed their army before they fed the civilian population. We knew that the first batch from the bakery went directly to the front lines. We wanted to be fooled as seldom as possible. But that was a dicey proposition: where could we go to complain? Anyway if we had, it would have been easy to kill us and describe it as the work of a sniper. This was war. A ruthless mafia controlled Sarajevo and its black market. Given the circumstances, should we keep delivering supplies? Of course. Some food reached the target civilian population, but not all. This wasn’t a situation unique to Serbs or Bosnians. All people in conflict zones know what a war is like. Nothing new under the sun. We couldn’t avoid some losses, but we had to make sure innocent civilians didn’t pay the price. Juju left in October, two days before my birthday. I struck up a friendship with Daniel, another guy from rima. He looked after the back of the hangar. He was about 27 years old, and he had been in the regiment for over five years. He was tougher than the diminutive Juju. With Daniel on guard, I could sleep soundly. He was a soldier through and through. The job was still just as dangerous. Snipers had me in their sights a number of times. The first time, adrenaline rushed to my brain. I heard a big blast on my jeep. My heart nearly leaped out of my mouth. Another time, a guy on the other side of the airport took aim at me and the bullet whizzed by within inches of my head and crushed a container behind me, making a hell of a racket. The second bullet smashed into the ground half a yard from my feet. If there had been an Olympic gold medal for diving onto the ground, I would have won it. Why did that bloody idiot fire at me? He probably just wanted to test his aim. This was one weird fucking conflict. It failed to destroy fraternal relations between ethnic groups. I made friends with people in both factions. Of course, I felt closer to the Bosnians. After all, I lived with them, in their zone.

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Still, my partner Una was a Serb. Boris, who became a radiologist in Toronto a few years later, was an Orthodox Russian. His father, a surgeon at the hospital, was murdered a few weeks later. At the Serb checkpoints, when they saw me coming, the caps flew off the bottles of alcohol, and we slapped each other on the back as we toasted brother Vachonavic. After five or six glasses of their slivovic (plum brandy) we were zonked, and it wasn’t even nine in the morning. I talked sports, especially soccer, with everyone. It felt like talking to people from Verdun, a blue-collar district in Montreal. But a Verdun under fire. I knew that some of these bons vivants were killers. I had seen some of them blow people away in a ditch, without blinking an eye, cool as a cucumber, then turn to me and ask who was on top in the French First Division. One day Big Mike had me pose for a photo with him. Behind us, in the picture, we can make out ten corpses as décor. The lucky ones had gotten a bullet in the head; most of them had had their throats cut. What could I do about it? Refuse to take a picture? I was in the company of raging madmen during a grotesque and pathetic war. Most of the time, in Sarajevo the reek of gunpowder and the smell of burning buildings hung in the air. Dust rose from the rubble. As soon as you got out of the city, the contrast was striking. Life seemed normal. There was a pretty farm about two miles from town. The 70-year-old owner spent his days on his tractor, cultivating his land, the war punctuating the strokes of his shovel. It was a theatre of the absurd. Something monumental would have to occur to end the farce. On October 27, my birthday, we decided it was time for another party at Café Obala. We had time to get organized. The artists assembled more than 150 people, recruited an orchestra. I stocked up on alcohol and cigarettes. On D-Day, the first plane to land at the airport was piloted by Captain Cournoyer of the Canadian Air Force. He had brought a case of Labatt Blue, the beer I drank in Montreal, and a bottle of whisky. I took a photo of him and his copilot in front of the C-130 Hercules.

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The next plane, an American craft, made its contribution to the festivities: whisky. Then came the Germans with some schnapps. All day long, every flight brought a bottle of something or other. So I ended up with nearly 18 bottles in addition to the ones I had been buying for weeks. That evening, Marco Vachonavic was the star of the Café Obala. Back to the war. We realized the Serbs didn’t have the resources to indulge in house-to-house ethnic cleansing. But we also knew that the status quo had become unbearable for everyone. And if that was the feeling in Sarajevo, the same was true in Bosnia. unhcr appointed another mission chief, Jeremy Brade, a former British Army lieutenant colonel. As a result, Sarajevo was full of English citizens, among them Larry Hollingworth and Tony Land, whom I previously mentioned. Worse still, they foisted four British soldiers on me to work as assistants: one was responsible for distributing fuel, a man and a woman for handling supplies in the warehouses and the captain for dealing with me directly. I had a hard time accepting this enforced cohabitation. I didn’t see the necessity. I would have much preferred a clearer distinction between unhcr and the soldiers. Though we weren’t really aware of it, the constant state of tension frayed our nerves. Something happened that confirmed this. I had a big dog, a sort of German Shepherd I kept attached in a corner of the hangar. That Thursday, there was intense bombing near the airport. A shell fell close by and wounded the dog in the leg. Mad with pain, the animal broke his chain. Just then, two French soldiers were passing by the hangar. The dog violently bit one in the calf. When I heard the shouts, I raced out of my warehouse, grabbed the beast by the collar. He turned on me and sank his fangs into my wrist, managing to pierce my leather jacket. The enraged animal was foaming at the mouth. I took my fist with all

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the strength of desperate force and punched the dog in the nose, and he let go. A Jeep had arrived to evacuate the French soldiers, who were covered with blood. I wasn’t finished with the dog. I asked the soldiers to put a bullet in his head. They replied that they couldn’t because their bullets were rationed. They needed authorization from a superior officer to kill the dog. They offered to kill him with a bayonet. Much too barbaric. I picked up a shovel and chased after the dog, which fled to a corner in the hangar. In one hand I was holding a rope in which I had made a slipknot. When the dog saw me, he started growling. He was cornered and he knew there was no stopping me. He made little effort to escape. I put the rope around the dog’s neck and yanked so hard that his paws barely touched the ground. I dragged him to the end of the runway. There was a wheeled gangway used in the past for exiting a plane. It still bore the inscription: “Sarajevski aerodrom” though the letters were peeling off. I scrambled up the stairs, threw the rope over the guardrail, and yanked. The animal was lifted up off the ground and was hanged. I wondered which of the two of us was the more insane. I dug a hole to bury the dog, and then I went to the infirmary. Emergency: no anti-tetanus serum. I found out that the French soldier was going to be evacuated to Belgrade that evening. I went to the hospital in town. They didn’t have any serum either. I would have to go to Zagreb. But there was no plane. I dispatched a telex to Zagreb to ask them to get my per diem ready. I had no time to lose; I had to go back right away and get treated. No luck, the planes were canceling their arrival one after another because the shooting was still going on in the city. It was the beginning of the afternoon before the first plane touched down. I arrived in Zagreb in the late afternoon and immediately went to pick up my dough. “No money,” I was told. The accountant, a Frenchman, the damn fool, unearthed a clause in the regulations according to which I should have showed up before

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the office closed at noon. I was dumbfounded. But I was in no mood to waste time arguing. I needed an anti-tetanus shot before it was too late. The accountant and his assistant also reminded me that I had omitted to report the accident. I marched to the office of José Maria, the big boss, ready to torch the place if I didn’t get what was coming to me. José himself actually lent me a thousand dollars from his own pocket. The accountant was fired a few days later, accused of sexually harassing my friend Tamara, a Croatian secretary. And, to wrap everything up, I filed a report that people talked about for years at unhcr: “14:27. I take my life in my hands and jump on the dog . . .” It ended with: “Monday, 16:30: I take the plane back to Sarajevo. My name’s Marc Vachon.” My text was constructed like an episode from Mission Impossible. It was so zany that my note made the rounds of every unhcr office in the world. In early 1993, on January 8 to be exact, an incident with dramatic repercussions for the region occurred. We were waiting for a special plane carrying humanitarian aid from the Turks, a gesture of solidarity toward their Muslim brothers in Sarajevo. The flight worried a lot of people, especially French soldiers who weren’t sure they could prevent the Serbs from trying some nasty business that might internationalize the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The soldiers had orders to fire on any suspicious characters prowling around the airport when the plane landed. Deputy Prime Minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina Hakija Turajlik had decided to greet the airplane on the tarmac. But I didn’t know it yet. The plane touched down as scheduled. The tension that had reigned throughout the day had left me on edge. To unwind, I had decided to spend the night snuggled up warm beside Una at the ptt. When I spotted a convoy pulling out of the airport, I wanted to accompany it. I didn’t bother my head to find out who

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was in the convoy. I climbed into a Range Rover beside the English captain who was at the wheel. In the back seat, there were three passengers: a Muslim and two Serbs. The lead car in the convoy, providing protection, was a Ukrainian armoured car. It was followed by a French car. I was in the third. And last in line was a French vehicle. Our convoy got under way as the Turkish plane took off again. At the end of the airport, there was a bend in the road. That’s where all hell broke loose. A Serbian tank blocked the road. The Ukrainian vehicle ahead of us swung to avoid it and ended up in the ditch. The convoy came to a halt. Armoured cars suddenly appeared from both sides of the road. And about 40 Serbian fighters sprang out from the ditches. I swore. It was about 5:00 p.m. and it was starting to get dark. Flares tore through the sky. With their weapons trained on us, the Serbs seemed in no mood to fool around. They were well aware—I’m absolutely certain—that they were committing a direct act of aggression against the United Nations, the worst possible breach of diplomacy. I was in the only vehicle with windows. Someone yanked the door open and before I realized what was happening, I was grabbed by the collar and dumped forcibly on the ground. Three other civilians quickly joined me. The captain shouted, “What’s happening?” In the confusion, I heard a Serb say, “Inspection!” The ground was damp in the month of January and my clothes were starting to get soaked. I shivered. It might have been the cold or the Kalashnikov stuck against the nape of my neck. I knew that the assailants wouldn’t back down. Someone grabbed me by the collar and picked me up, no more gently than before. He tore my un card off my neck. I screamed, “Canadiansky, Canadiansky. UNHCR. Visoki Komisariat.” The guy gave me back my card or rather, he threw it in my face. I was no longer trying to hide the fact I was shivering. I was cold, very cold. In the darkness, I heard shouts and people moving around

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me. The radios of the Serbs and of the un officials kept spitting out orders. One of our passengers got up. The Muslim driver. The Serbs simply took him to the side of the road. They were going to kill him. I don’t know why I always stick my neck out in the worst possible circumstances. I heard myself yell, “No!” I strode forward and stood between the soldier and the Bosnian. I grabbed the driver’s hand and screamed, “Driver Visoko Commisariat. Driver. What the fuck?” I kept hollering. Then the English captain stepped in. Normally people are a bit awed by my height (I’m six-foot-three) and weight. But the Serb wasn’t the least bit impressed; he held the weapon. I had to do something. The Bosnian was a married man with two kids. I couldn’t stand by while he got his throat cut. On our right, someone screamed. The attention of the group focused on another vehicle. Colonel Sartre, who was in charge of security, climbed out. He took control of the situation. He has been a hero to me ever since. Since he was in charge of security for forpronu, his primary mission was to keep humanitarian aid workers alive. At that moment, his job was first to protect them and then to make sure the soldiers got out of the situation safe and sound. In that order. If he pulled it off, his mission was a success. Colonel Sartre asked the Serb captain what was the justification for the attack. He was told that the Serbs had been informed that there were mujahideen in the convoy. Coolly, without the slightest arrogance, the colonel suggested to the Serb that with so many witnesses, it would be difficult for a calm discussion to take place. It was all the more impressive since the French officer was not very tall and looked somewhat frail with his big glasses. First he managed to persuade the Serb to let the Ukrainian vehicle leave. So at least one had been saved. Then he walked over to the civilians, to me. He gave me a nod of recognition. The Muslim was still behind me. Colonel Sartre immediately grasped the situation. Positioning himself in front of

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me, he started negotiating for the Bosnian’s life. I felt the man behind me begin to breathe when he realized a French Army officer and a unhcr official were shielding him from the killers. In the end, the Serbs lowered their weapons and ordered us back into our vehicle. Then they walked over to the other vehicles, passed by the second and reached the first. Someone opened the door to let Colonel Sartre get in and everything changed. A Serb walked beside Sartre. The Serb raised his arm over his head. I saw a flash of black metal. The gun kept coughing until the clip was empty. The reports drowned out the squealing of the tires as our car took off. I found Una at the ptt. She was totally panicked because she’d heard of the ambush over a un radio. We were still embracing when the armoured car arrived. We found out that Hakija Turajlic, the Bosnian deputy prime minister, was the one who had been assassinated. The incident was a blot on Colonel Sartre’s file. Politically, the assassination complicated the already complex former Yugoslavia file. However, as a witness to the incident, I must insist that Colonel Sartre’s actions were beyond reproach. He carried out his mission to perfection. Saving the Bosnian politician would have been a bonus, a luxury. He didn’t manage to do it. That’s all.

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13 The English Gentlemen

The situation continued to deteriorate in Sarajevo. The Bosnians accused French troops of complicity in the assassination of their deputy prime minister. Colonel Valentin replaced Colonel Sartre the following week. Valentin was an entirely different caliber of man. An officer in the French Foreign Legion, he arrived with a horde of bad-asses. The Legionnaires were professionals who gave no quarter. For them, everything was either black or white. They were tough customers. Their arrival transformed airport security. First, they started erecting ramparts around the site. And it occurred to us that we’d been working unprotected and in the open for months. The conflict had become venomous. The Muslims in the middle of Bosnia-Herzegovina

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and Ilidza, a Sarajevo suburb, had wanted to loosen the grip around the city by going through Mount Igman. Their plan was to come down from the hills and cut across the airport to enter the city. We knew things were about to explode. The aerial photographs American and European reconnaissance planes were sending clearly indicated that the hills and valleys around Sarajevo were crawling with vehicles. The task kept getting bigger. It was estimated that between ten and fifteen thousand men were on their way. We braced for the attack. Sarajevo had reached Alert Level 5, the highest security level. Non-essential staff needed to be evacuated. The airport buzzed with activity throughout the day. ngos were pulling out. General Morillon personally saw to it that operations proceeded in an orderly fashion. The last plane, a Canadian craft, took off at 5:30 p.m. At most, there were 40 civilians left. I remember the aircraft mechanic who asked: “Are you staying, Marc?” “Sure. Some people have to.” “Okay. Good luck.” After the plane took off, silence fell. We waited for the explosion. We could sense the storm brewing . . . That evening the Muslims launched their attack. But the Serbs were ready and willing. It was hell. The mountain was ablaze in red. Tracer bullets whizzed over our heads and smashed into invisible targets. We lay behind sandbags, our helmets and bulletproof vests affording scant protection. Whenever we screwed up the courage to raise our heads, we could see enough to guess that a massacre must be going on in the mountain and in Serbian areas. The French soldiers had received orders not to defend the airport, but to prepare to withdraw if the Muslims worked their way down from the mountains. A night and a day went by. Then came another night. The Bosnians still couldn’t fight their way down. The Serbs held fast.

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A few days later, we climbed the mountain. The scene made our blood run cold, as cold as the weather. Eighteen-year-old kids had frozen to death, standing behind a tree, with their Kalashnikov clutched in their arms, scant protection against the cold that must have attacked them from everywhere especially from inside. Others, mowed down by gunfire, lay there staring blankly ahead while the snow gradually covered them. The survivors were eerily silent. A pale apocalypse in a shroud of snow. I was exhausted. The unrelenting stress had taken its toll. Sanitary conditions were dreadful. Washing every day was out of the question: it was far too cold. Our bulletproof vests had become a second skin. To make coffee, we had to chop up some ice and boil it just to produce a barely drinkable brew. The canteen’s steady menu of sausages grossed us out. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I’d had my fill of wasting time negotiating with everyone as if nothing could be solved normally. The Croatians were ripping off my trucks full of gas for their own use. The fuel was meant to supply electricity for the hospital. Patients might die. I couldn’t stomach any more concessions. So I went looking for the Ukrainian captain in charge of the convoy and found him in the cafeteria. I asked him who had ripped off my trucks. “They are at Kiseljak. We turned them over to the Croatians because they asked for them.” I lost it. In front of everyone in the cafeteria. When a Canadian officer tried to intervene, I said, “This Ukrainian handed my trucks over to the Croatians. And I’ve got sick people who could die this evening, right in the hospital . . .” “First of all, sir, he isn’t Ukrainian. He’s a un official.” I felt like giving this idiot a piece of my mind about Canadian consensus building. I drove alone to Kiseljak. I happened to come across a huge American lieutenant colonel. I didn’t know that the Americans

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had sent troops to Bosnia. The officer was a stereotypical American marine you see in war films. I wondered whether he was going to whip out a cigar before the director shouted, “Cut!” We headed on foot to the Croatian Council of Defense (hvo) base. The American summoned the hvo leader. “I’m with the United Nations. I’d like to know when you intend to give Mr. Vachon’s trucks back to him.” “Never. The fuel goes to Sarajevo. The Bosnians put it in their tanks and then they come and bomb us.” “Look, I don’t want to listen to this bullshit. I know what you’re up to. Either give me back the trucks or I’ll get my men and we’ll take them back.” I left Sarajevo with my trucks. There were more and more incidents. Not only was there trafficking of all kinds organized by the Blue Berets themselves, the combatants started to take advantage of the networks offered by the international presence. One day, I almost paid big time. The unicef representative had set up a system for delivering oxygen bottles to Sarajevo. The hospital couldn’t do without them. The company that manufactured them was located 40 miles from the city. We had to make a trip a week. It was extremely dangerous. A bullet in a bottle would have been enough to blow up the whole district. Besides, no one wanted to drive. A civilian from Boston was the one who drove the first truck to enter the city. Not an undercover agent or a soldier in disguise. Just an anonymous hero from unicef. After the first delivery, the operation was handed over to unhcr. There was no way to avoid it. If unicef could do it, we could do it. For a month, everything went pretty smoothly. Then the rate of deliveries increased. First there was one truck every two days, then a daily rotation. I asked Larry Hollingworth whether he didn’t find it curious that the demand for oxygen had increased. Though he swore it was normal, he promised to check with hospital authorities.

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I wasn’t comfortable about putting so much pressure on the drivers. I was afraid they’d crack one day and that we’d realize it too late. I called the Finnish woman at the World Health Organization who was at the hospital and asked whether she knew why the oxygen deliveries had increased fivefold. She had no idea. I knew I had to expect the worst. One morning, the phone rang: “Marc Vachon, you’re expected at the Ilidza police station!” unhcr information officer Ron Redmond insisted on accompanying me. The police officer who questioned us knew me, but he didn’t bother to say hello. “We looked at one of your trucks supposedly carrying oxygen. We opened a bottle. It was full of gunpowder,” he said “I beg your pardon?” The officer walked me over to the truck. Then he accused unhcr of being complicit in delivering munitions to the enemy for an entire month. He was in no mood to socialize. According to him, I had helped people who fired at him all day long. Just then, a big man arrived, dressed in blue with polished shoes, a Makarov tucked in his leather belt. When the police officer stood to attention, I realized the man was a bigwig from the mountain town of Pale, the capital of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I’d never seen him before. He took over the interrogation while the police officer obsequiously served him coffee. “Vachonevic?” “Da.” “Marco Vachonevic?” “Da!” He pulled out his Makarov and laid it on the table. “We have to talk.” Redmond fidgeted behind me. In his nervousness he dropped his pen. “What’s the story?” “They’re unhcr trucks loaded with gunpowder.”

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“Did you know about this?” “No, boss.” He scrutinized me for a minute. It was a test. If I blinked or looked the least bit unsure of myself, I was a dead man. He listened as I vividly detailed the origin of the transaction, the steps I had taken when I began to suspect that something was fishy. I talked for a solid hour, trying to convince him. I was desperate for him to believe me. He had to believe me. I had nothing to do with the scheme. I’d never been so scared in my life. It was no time to fool around. This wasn’t a Turk with balls trouble. He was the head of a gang of killers and I’d seen their handiwork all too often. He was judge and jury. His sentence was lying there on the table: a piece of black metal with a barrel that could spit deadly fire. When I was through explaining, he shook my hand and wished me a good trip back to Sarajevo. I didn’t want to blame anyone, nor should I have, not unicef or unhcr. Our job consisted of picking up bottles in a private factory and delivering them to the hospital, period. And someone probably had taken possession of them there. The Bosnian soldiers had carried out the operation. It was their deal. It was their goddamn war. And I was fed up. But what a coincidence! When I returned to Sarajevo, Larry Hollingworth and Anthony Land had called in absent. I’m not accusing them of anything. I’m just saying it was quite a coincidence. Anyway, what would I have told them? There was no way of communicating. Boys don’t cry. I had to get out of there. Around mid-February Mrs. Sadako Ogata, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, paid us a visit. It was her second trip to Sarajevo. She complimented us on “our extraordinary work.” José María was in the delegation that accompanied her. He realized I was worn out, exhausted, running on empty.

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He ordered me to take a few days off to unwind, far from the sounds of war. Then we got some alarming news: my assistant Rale had been shot in the leg. I’d worked five months with the guy. I’d seen him every day. I’d shared daily life with him, my fears, and my successes. And there he was on a stretcher. His blood was my blood. It was decided to rush him to the ptt for an emergency operation. I sat down in the French ambulance beside Rale, who was unconscious, and held his hand. It was an ugly wound. The ptt was in a panic. They had heard someone on unhcr team had been shot, but they didn’t know who. Mrs. Ogata insisted unhcr do everything in its power to help the employee. Then she went upstairs with her delegation to finish her meal. I’d lost my appetite. I waited by the operating room door until I was reassured that my assistant—more than that, my buddy—would pull through. Rale’s mother arrived. Mrs. Ogata promised her that unhcr would do its utmost to ensure that her son would walk one day. Two 65-year-old women talking about their sons as only mothers can. José authorized me to stay a few days to tie up loose ends. The next day, Anthony Land, who had turned up again, told me that Rale would be discharged from the hospital that very day. Relieved, I asked him where they were taking him. Without batting an eye, he said, “To the Sarajevo hospital!” I couldn’t muster the strength to kick up a fuss. This guy must have a PhD in stupidity, I thought. “Rale is a Serb.” “No, he’s unhcr,” said Anthony Land. “Forget it, Tony. He may be unhcr in your mind. He’s undoubtedly the Serb who’s risked his life the most for the Bosnians. But he’s still a Serb. As soon as he sets foot outside, he’ll get his throat cut. Either a nurse or a doctor will do it, or someone will sneak into the room at night and put a bullet in his head. Anyway, the Sarajevo Hospital is full up. No way they’re going to bust their asses to look after a Serb.”

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“We can’t give a local employee special treatment, look . . .” “But Mrs. Ogata’s the one who recommended it.” “Yes, but it’ll cost too much.” “It’s not your dough, Tony. Mrs. Ogata promised.” “So, we’ll have to evacuate him to a Serbian hospital.” “He’ll be blown away; he supplied food to the Bosnians.” I could have cried. But I wouldn’t give him the pleasure. I went to see a French doctor and begged him to sign a document stating that if Rale didn’t undergo treatment at the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris, he would lose his leg. The good doctor didn’t need prompting, he was only too happy to accompany his patient. Bernard Kouchner, then French Minister of State for Humanitarian Action, had set up a humanitarian airlift to evacuate people to France. The flight took off from Split, stopped over at Bordeaux, and then headed to Paris. I’d arranged things with my pals from the French Air Force. The French were the only ones willing to break the rules to save a human life. I can’t say how much I admire them. We kept Anthony Land out of the picture. I ended up sitting beside Rale on the plane flying back to France. There were lots of wounded Croatians onboard as well. In Paris, a French Army ambulance was waiting at the gangway to drive him to the Val-de-Grace. I dropped by unhcr office in Paris and handed Rale’s card to the lady who greeted me: “Hello, madam. I’ve come from Sarajevo. I accompanied a Serbian employee. He’s being treated at the Val-de-Grace. Here’s his contract. Keep an eye on him; he’s a colleague of ours. Also check with Geneva to have his medical expenses reimbursed. Bye. So long!” I left almost immediately for Amsterdam and then Zagreb. Una and José were waiting for me. We had a lovely evening together. Five glorious days in Paris had invigorated me and lifted my spirits. I was delighted to be with Una.

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José María departed for Belgrade. But he suffered a heart attack and had to be repatriated. I ran into Anthony Land in the corridors of unhcr in Zagreb. He avoided eye contact and ran off. Bizarre. When I went to pick up my business pass so I could take the plane to Sarajevo, the assistant informed me that the new Ops Commander, the guy replacing José, wanted to have a chat. The ex–British Army general greeted me with a sly smile. “I’ve heard about you, Marc. I know you’re a crackerjack. I’d like you to handle the opening of the office in Banja Luka, the main city in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia.” “What?” We had already closed Banja Luka. The employees couldn’t take the pressure. The city was too dangerous. “You’ll be going to Banja Luka.” “I’ve been in Sarajevo for five months, sir. I’ll be finished in three weeks. I’ve already said I don’t want to renew my contract. It’s impossible to open up an office in a few days with a population I’m not familiar with. Not only that but they’re Serbs, and I’m coming from Muslim Bosnia. It’d be suicide.” “Either that or you go back. A pity. I feel for you.” I got the picture. I saw Anthony Land again as he was leaving his office. He wouldn’t look at me, but the smirk on his face made it clear that he’d won. I called Sarajevo. A secretary picked up the phone and started to cry. “Larry Hollingworth and another Brit have opened a bottle of whisky. They’re toasting your departure!” They’d got me. An Englishman was replacing me. They were slotting their people into various airport jobs for military intelligence purposes. And having someone in my position would come in handy. They’d eliminated every obstacle in their path. I said goodbye to Una. I stayed in Zagreb for a few days, waiting for my personal effects and my return ticket. Instead they sent me a box and a

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garbage bag. Hollingworth had let the Ukrainians enter my apartment. They had cleaned me out. I didn’t even get a chance to say so long to the people I had lived and worked with. I was left with no official status. Just a few days earlier, I’d given interviews to tv networks from around the world and, now I was being kicked in the ass like a little brat. I bought a ticket for Paris.

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14 Serving the Republic

I went back to France, heartsick. I found out that msf needed a logistician for Mozambique. I jumped at the chance. I arranged to have Una come and join me. My mandate consisted of opening an office in Mulanje, on the Malawi border on the other side of Mulanje Mountain. The war was over. Peace accords had been signed. Preparations were in progress for the return of the refugees. For me, it was a quick job: toilets, food centre, etc. A temporary post. Next I had to coordinate mission logistics in the capital. Mulanje was in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing there. In the morning, the birds were the only sign of life. There was no radio, no television. I was out of touch with what was happening in the world, particularly in Bosnia. I had to cross the border to Malawi

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to phone Una in Sarajevo. A genuine feat of high technology: my voice was transmitted by radio from Mulanje to Blantyre. Then it traveled by cable to Lilongwe. Next, it was patched to Sarajevo by satellite. We couldn’t hear each other talk. I was forced to scream. When she could hear me clearly, I could hardly make out her voice. When I cursed, she thought I was taking it out on her. Things gradually became muddled. I could still see, hear and smell the war. I wanted to beg Una to come and join me in Maputo as soon as possible. A few weeks later, I got a Dear John letter: Una was breaking it off. She was fed up with being yelled at over the phone. She said she was happy she’d gotten to know me, but she’d be staying in Sarajevo with her parents. I finally transferred to Maputo. Our mandate was a typical Flying Doctors mission. Sure the peace accords had been ratified after 30 years of war, but they were yet to be implemented. In particular, the regions that were still divided between rebel positions and the government forces had to be unified. We operated three units in the Zambezi region, two in the centre and one in Maputo. I coordinated logistics. It was my task to authorize all purchases and the use of airplanes, since every doctor had a craft to go into the bush. I studied the plans for setting up the new infrastructures. We distributed medicine and conducted vaccination campaigns. By sheer coincidence, I bumped into Lucrecia again. The little actress from Blantyre was attending an evening at the French embassy. She was standing at the top of the staircase. She was wearing a tiny white dress that fit her marvelously. She was very slender. She hadn’t changed. Seeing her took me back a few months. I immediately went over to see her and said to her in Portuguese, “Excuse me. My French isn’t very good and my Portuguese is worse. I just wanted to say that you’re absolutely the most beautiful woman in Mozambique. “Muito obrigada!” After that, I was tongue-tied. I felt like an idiot. I didn’t know whether she recognized me. I babbled a few more words in a

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mixture of French and Portuguese. Sensing that I was out of my depth, she granted me a smile. “No problem. I’m fluent in French!” she said. Christ. I was in love. We dated a few times. Then I accompanied her back to her place on the sixth floor of an apartment building in downtown Maputo. We lingered an hour between the fourth and fifth floors. And she became my fiancée. Lucrecia spent almost every night at my place; she made me feel like working again. Humanitarianism had left me disillusioned. My experience in Iraq had taught me that not every operation is the same in the eyes of the fundraisers. Sarajevo had demystified the United Nations for me. Mozambique was a chance for renewal. When I finished my mandate, I could stay in Mozambique and make a fortune. There was an entire country to rebuild. I could get by in Portuguese. Nearly everyone knew me. I could build a prosperous business. I entertained that little pipe dream until November 1993. Then the phone rang. “It’s Jean-Christophe. How’re you doing?” I’d kept abreast of French politics. I knew that the Left had lost the legislative elections. François Léotard was the new minister of defense. Things had changed at msf, too. Rony Brauman had announced he was leaving the organization, and Jean-Christophe Rufin had been tapped as his replacement. People considered me a Rufin man. But some of his qualities worked against him: he was a specialist on political issues, he had remarkable experience in the field—from Ethiopia to South America. So you couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes. Some people on rue Saint-Sabin contested Rufin’s appointment, preferring one of their guys, someone more accommodating. As in other ngos, the msf president is elected by a vote of the members. They chose Philippe Biberson.

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Meanwhile, Léotard had asked Jean-Christophe to be his humanitarian action adviser. France was professionalizing the army; it had to define its role in humanitarian and un missions. In France Léotard wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea but he was a visionary with the courage to appoint someone from the humanitarian relief community to a post in the Ministry of Defence. “France has been in Sarajevo for nearly a year and a half, Marc. Our soldiers are in contact with aid workers, the media and lots of other groups, but they have no way of putting the facts in context and assessing the impact of their activities. At the Quai d’Orsay, Juppé has decided to reopen the French embassy in Bosnia.” The French embassy stood on the fourth floor of the tv Building, near the ptt. The ambassador found himself alone with two guys from raid (Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion), the counterterrorist unit of the French National Police and three crs men. At that point, a slew of ngos were operating in Sarajevo. Every one of them was soliciting France for financial support, protection and engineering services. As a result, the soldiers shouldered the bulk of the work. Foreign Affairs despaired of finding a bureaucrat willing to slog away in a suicidal area. The Defence Ministry couldn’t wait until candidates applied. It had to find a humanitarian and human rights attaché immediately. “Would you be interested in the post? You’re a Francophone. You know Sarajevo: you lived there for six months. We don’t have any civilian who has stayed there as long as you have. We need somebody who can quickly become operational and who can make a precise assessment for us.” “Just one detail, Jean-Christophe. I’m not French.” “Since no French citizen has applied, we can appoint a Francophone who isn’t a French citizen. After all, you Québécois are our American cousins . . .” I could hear the smile in his voice.

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I tried selling the idea to Lucrecia. I thought I could accept Rufin’s offer, make a pile of cash, stay in Bosnia a few months and then return to Mozambique, which had become my second home. I had a house, a car, and above all a woman I loved and who loved me. I went to Paris. Straight to a meeting at 16 Saint-Dominique, at the Ministry of Defence. I was ushered into Jean-Christophe’s office in my soaking wet shoes. Outside, a dreary light rain fell. Autumn in Paris. Jean-Christophe’s office looked like the salon of a château. We threw our arms around each other. We took up the conversation where we had left off the last time I’d visited Paris. Then, we dropped by one of Léotard’s advisers. A kind of secret agent, but more sophisticated than agents from the cia, dsge (General Directorate for External Security) or other intelligence services. The guy had clout: he was a colonel who knew every colonel who had any influence with the generals. Complex dossiers were assigned to him. He was a sort of chief logistician in the minister’s office. Naturally, as logisticians, we had certain affinities. But, despite the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, it was obvious that they weren’t hiring a spy. My mission was clear: 1) to identify which ngo did what and for whom and where; 2) to determine where French money went and whether it was being put to good use; 3) to make suggestions for improving the French Army’s image. I was introduced to the man who would be my colleague in Sarajevo. He was a doctor and former soldier. All I needed was an official title: humanitarian and human rights attaché. The Quai d’Orsay printed me up some business cards. Then we met Henry Jacolin, the French ambassador to Bosnia, who happened to be passing through Paris, and we discussed our responsibilities and modus operandi. He seemed worried. The somewhat clandestine nature of the operations was a cause for concern. It was only normal for someone with his diplomatic background to be wary. He was told that our assignments would not involve dubious activities. We merely wanted to

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make sure that France’s military and humanitarian assistance was effective. I went back to Mozambique to give msf my resignation and hand over my files to my successor. Lucrecia and I agreed that I would be away for six months on the mission, which would pay me $12,000 a month. The money would go to buy equipment in Paris so I could launch my business in Mozambique. On the flight to Split, it finally dawned on me that now I was somebody. I was a sort of diplomat. Me, Marc Vachon, former Montreal hoodlum. But I didn’t feel like an imposter. I had come by my present status honestly. Maybe I was just a little uneasy in my suit-and-tie getup, carrying a card indicating that I represented a country in which I didn’t even have a residence permit. The doctor and I spent two days in Split. Even though we were still quite far from the front lines, he had a change of mind about the project. He had trained with navy frogmen, among the toughest forces in the military. But he was past fifty and a few years from retirement, he’d accepted the mission for one reason only: the money. But in Split, he realized you don’t come back from Sarajevo unscathed. It was an agonizing decision for him. He knocked on my door. “Marc, I’ve got to talk to you. I’m not going.” I knew it was hell for him. So I told him he couldn’t offer his wife a lovelier token of his love for her. I hope that they’re happy and that when I’m that age, I can make the same decision. The next day, he flew back to France. Twenty-four hours later, I sat in the plane alone on my way to Sarajevo. Sarajevo Airport. My airport. Eight months before, I’d left it without a word of goodbye. Mount Igman was snow-covered again. The airport had undergone considerable change. Security had been beefed up: there were even more armour-plated doors, sandbags and soldiers. But it was less noisy. The combatants were probably exhausted. The war seemed to belong to the distant past.

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Electricity had been restored. When they unloaded my company car from the plane, I asked the French soldier whether there were armoured vehicles to escort us to the ptt. I didn’t need an escort, he said. I could get there on my own. Sniper Alley wasn’t dangerous anymore. People strolled down the avenue. Along the main road where the tramway passed, tomatoes grew. The wave of carnage and slaughter had ended. Very sporadically, you heard the sound of bombing in the distance. In town, a captain showed me to my room and my offices on the fourth floor. I was a French diplomat. As I fell asleep that night, I felt like laughing. The next day, I headed to unhcr offices. I had an appointment with General Soubirou, Morillon’s successor as the commander of un forces in Sarajevo. I climbed out of my car, with its diplomatic markings, and found myself nose to nose with Anthony Land, still unhcr mission chief in Sarajevo. He didn’t think things were so funny now. He did his best to act friendly. “Happy to hear about your appointment,” he piped. “That’s good.” “So, you’re the man to see about the money?” “Try not to come too often.” I turned and walked away. Una had resigned from unhcr. She was studying in the Czech Republic. Amra had quit, too. When the ambassador arrived in Sarajevo, he discovered that his only assistant was a Canadian with an incomprehensible accent. And the ambassador was still obsessed with the idea that I was a spy. I became pals with the embassy cops and the two raid guys. Of course the tattoo on one of my arms indicated that I hadn’t

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always been on the right side of the law. It said: acab, which stood for All Cops Are Bastards. Restaurants, discotheques and bars had reopened in Sarajevo. Providing you had money, you could buy just about anything. Now we had the incredible luxury of going for a walk and visiting the cemetery without being afraid of snipers, even though there were still some of them around. There were more ngos and soldiers. The English were now under General Rose’s command. I went back to Café Obala. The owners’ daughter had grown. The giant doll I had brought her from Zagreb a year earlier when I was the only one who could get around in Bosnia, seemed a lot smaller in her arms. Café Obala, now a real café-bar, was doing good business. There was a movie theatre. Using unhcr generator I’d left with them, they showed movies for the kids even during the war. People welcomed me like a member of the family. I was happy to see them. Then, my passion for the finer sex caught up with me: I met the lovely Senela and lost my head and forgot about my little Mozambican. I visited every ngo that had received French government funding. I prepared a nearly 60-page report for the Defence Ministry. I scrutinized the operations of each organization. One ngo had waited until February to submit a request for children’s winter clothing. Absurd. Even if the agency had gotten the money, the clothes wouldn’t have arrived before late April. A bit late for the winter! Examples of such stupidity were legion. I recommended strategies to promote the soldiers’ accomplishments. I believe the report was appreciated. Whenever things are going well for me, something always happens to disrupt my life as if I wasn’t meant to have peace of mind. It all began when the Obala artists decided to stage an exhibi-

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tion of works by Sarajevo artists in France. The hope was to have the French Army transport the precious cargo to Paris. I invited three French colonels to the café so they could meet the owners and draw up a plan of action. Our car was pulling away from the café when we heard a deafening explosion. My chest tightened as I stomped on the accelerator. At the ptt, we found out the Sarajevo market had been bombed. To this day, no one really knows which side was responsible. I scrambled back into the car to go to the scene. Horror. A winter version of Apocalypse Now. Sarajevo had a covered market. The bomb had destroyed the roof. So the victims had been hit in the head. Blotches of blood had splattered the slush, the snow and the market products. People screamed. Children cried. Men looked frantic. In times of crisis, I always feel calm and collected. I don’t know how many trips I made back and forth to the hospital. The first trip was amidst the noise and devastation. By the third time, there was silence. I knew why. The dead have little to say. The incident marked a turning point in the war. It brought the Western powers into the conflict more quickly. On February 9, 1994, nato issued an ultimatum to the Serbs to withdraw at least 20 kilometres from Sarajevo in ten days at most. The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, had to deliver nato’s ultimatum on behalf of nato to Radovan Karadzic in Pale. I was there to greet Juppé when he got off the plane. He seemed a little disappointed to see a Canadian representing France. My car, which had official status, joined the convoy. Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Observateur climbed in with me along with one of the bodyguards. When one of the three crs men from the embassy fell gravely ill, I had to replace him. I accompanied Juppé throughout his mission. I traveled with an Uzi tucked under my yellow raincoat. This was no picnic. Juppé was nervous. He was a family man, an intellectual, a graduate of the École normale supérieure, an ex-student of ena (Ecole nationale d’administration), he moved in sophisticated circles. And he had been instructed to go and talk to a bunch of swine.

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The tension ratcheted up several notches in Sarajevo. Once again, the ngos began to withdraw, fearing the Serbs would take a tougher line. Scenes of evacuation I’d witnessed before. Three days later, the French embassy also got orders to close shop. The ambassador and his guards withdrew to Zagreb. I was the only remaining French “diplomat” in Sarajevo, so I was the most important. By the ultimatum deadline, all the foreigners had fled the town. The population hunkered down, waiting for the onslaught from the Serbs, who were still camped out in the hills around the city. A fine snow muffled the sounds. Apparently, the Serbs were refusing to retreat. But no one was certain what was going on. Neither the satellites nor the spies in the field could help us. A nato intervention might trigger a massacre. Hardly a cheerful prospect. But I was convinced that nato should keep its word. If the Serbs ignored the ultimatum, the air strikes should begin immediately. This was crucial if nato was to preserve its credibility and establish peace in the region. That evening I drove through Muslim checkpoints on my way to Pale. The rolling hills covered with bare trees and the silent snowfall reminded me of the Laurentian Mountains and my days in a foster home in Rawdon, north of Montreal. You could tell nothing was moving on the roads: tanks leave tracks in the snow. Then, quickly, night fell and I spotted a Serb tank approaching me. It was pulling a truck and three T-45 guns. Then another tank, followed by a third. Hell! Paris needed to know. I called Jean-Christophe. “If you can do something to bring things to a halt, tell them not to pull the trigger. The Serbs are retreating!” “You’re certain of your information?” True, three tanks didn’t make an army. But the three Serb tanks discreetly withdrawing in the night had no intention of stopping.

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“I can confirm it, Jean-Christophe!” I could have howled with joy. Damn, it had worked! I returned to Sarajevo. My mission had entered phase 3: examining measures for strategically enhancing the French army’s image in Bosnia. I sat down with French mechanics and pored over a plan to restore henhouses. We found some incubators and fixed them. Then, for Easter, we had more than 10,000 fertilized eggs flown in from France. We gave 8,000 of them to Sarajevo and the rest to the Serbs. A few weeks later, the markets were glutted with chickens. Ordinary people in Sarajevo hadn’t tasted chicken legs for months. I didn’t think I was selling out. The combination of impartial observation and humanitarian commitment appealed to me. It was a noble cause. Some people sing peace songs, suggesting we swap rifles for flowers; I persuaded French soldiers to look after 10,000 fragile eggs arriving from Paris in a Transall. And what’s more, they enjoyed it. We were restoring the town’s economic system. This went a little beyond traditional relief work. The ngos gave me funny looks. People used the formal “vous” when they spoke to me. I was the human rights attaché after all. I went around in a tie and shirt. I could poke my nose into any department or office. I was the mediator between the ngos, human aid recipients and France, which signed the cheques. Muslim leaders asked me to see whether France could change the location of its relief drops in Bihac because where they were made, only the strongest got to use them. I had to convince them that they should stop relying on foreign aid intervention to solve their problems. If they truly were leaders, they had to assume their responsibilities. We were in Bosnia because there was a war going on between the Bosnians, the Croatians and the Serbs. We weren’t going to complicate our task by attempting to resolve internal Muslim conflicts.

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The ngos also brought their grievances to me. Every agency had its area of activity: coordinating water sanitation, rebuilding hospitals and providing aid for women. I tried to find money whenever possible and monitor our investments. If I could help out, why shouldn’t I? If the operation also did justice to French soldiers, who were doing a marvelous job, why should I be jealous? I owed it to Juju, Colonel Sartre and all the heroes behind the scenes. They deserved more than the caricatured portrayals some media had given them. I also got a visit from another big shot. Michel Rocard came to see what the situation was like on the ground. As we waited for the plane to land, General Soubirou and I wondered what we could say to the ex-prime minister, especially since he was only the head of an opposition party without an official mandate. “You should know. You’re French.” “I’m just a soldier. You’re the diplomat.” When Rocard got off the plane, I walked up to him, stuck out my hand and said, “Hello there! I’m Marc Vachon.” He gave me a thin smile. “Yes, I know. They told me.” General Soubirou gave his little talk about the security rules. Then the procession got under way. Two armoured vehicles led the convoy. First we drove to the ptt for a bite, next to the presses of the daily Oslobodjenje, in the ruins of the newspaper’s building, and then to the hospital. When we passed by the road above the soccer stadium, Rocard remarked that it had been converted into a cemetery. He asked me to pull over to the side. The two armoured cars kept right on going. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d departed from protocol. They’d grown accustomed to it. We stayed there for a good minute. That’s a long time. Nobody in his right mind would stop any longer beside a road at the bottom of a hill crawling with snipers. Rocard didn’t say a

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word. He stood there in silence, studying the little white stones that dotted the pitch. As I watched him, I wondered what he made of it all. The Serbs might have loosened their grip, but they were still encircling Sarajevo, and I got back in contact with unhcr. Relief aid was a crucial matter. The trucks went through Serb checkpoints. The guards stamped the travel authorization after checking the lists of products delivered. The trucks had to go to the airport and drop off 25 percent of their load, which other trucks delivered to the Serbian population. Only after this was done, could the drivers enter the city with the remaining 75 percent. unhcr guaranteed the Serbs that they would get their share. But some ngos couldn’t afford to lose a quarter of their cargo—an enormous amount. In addition, the United Nations Protection Force (unprofor) was charged with protecting relief convoys. We were too willing to knuckle under to the Serbs. When I was working for unhcr, my car had taken more than 50 hits from bullets while I was driving through blockades, heading to the front line and negotiating with military leaders. Now, we did nothing. We caved in without a word of protest. The Serbs didn’t even unload the trucks. We did the job for them. At your service, gentlemen! The eu, ngos and other sponsors grumbled about being fleeced. It was especially galling since they had designed programs specifically for the Serbs. Why should relief agencies pay tribute? The issue had to be cleared up. I was particularly eager to do so because it would allow me to settle personal scores with some unhcr people: Larry Hollingworth, Anthony Land, who was the boss, and the general who fired me and paraded around with a Bosnian woman a third his age. I sensed my revenge lay there. I was determined to lead an entire convoy into the city without surrendering the 25 percent to the Serbs. It would refute

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unhcr ’s contention that such a thing was impossible. I went to see Première Urgence and offered to bring them a dozen trucks. We needed French drivers: the whole operation had to be French. I made sure Paris was in on the picture: Defence and Foreign Affairs. The French commander in Bosnia promised an escort. Even though the drivers were informed of the risks involved, every one of them decided to embark. We were going to drive right into the heart of Sarajevo without stopping at any of the barricades. As if by coincidence, a couple of French tanks had apparently broken down at each of the barricades. In fact, we had positioned them there to annoy the Serbs. The operation was a success. And we were delighted to inform the local press: yes, it was possible to enter, and no, we didn’t have to capitulate to the Serbs. unhcr was humiliated. I gloated. From then on, the ngos refused to pay tribute. But I went further: I sent Paris a report about unhcr ’s disgraceful deal, with a copy to the European Union in Brussels. Paris and the eu raked Geneva over the coals. Naturally, unhcr representatives in Bosnia tried to defend themselves. They put it all down to my frustration at being fired, but the figures gave them the lie. Some unhcr people were removed from their posts; others were transferred. Anthony Land was shipped off to Geneva to take French lessons. Larry Hollingworth became a university professor. It was a pleasure to see them pack their bags. Now it was their turn. I bought drinks all around for the drivers. We even threw a surprise party to celebrate a driver’s birthday. Nothing beats a good time in good company.

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15 Cruel Africa

I resumed my duties as the embassy’s humanitarian attaché. In cooperation with the university, I set up a project to publish a professional directory for Sarajevo: electricians, plumbers, teachers, etc. to help ngos find skilled collaborators. Then, something else happened. One incident too many, though I didn’t realize it at the time. One evening, I was climbing out of my car on my way to a café when I heard an explosion, coming from the other side of the street. The killer had taken aim at me. He fired three times. Fortunately, he missed all three times. If he had hit me, I wouldn’t have gotten up because I had dispensed with a bulletproof vest. We never found out who tried to murder me. But some people resented my attempts to clean up unhcr. I had made inquiries about

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the black markets. The dealers and the mafia weren’t too pleased about that. I hid in the café. The guys from raid came to get me. Two days later, Paris advised me to come back. Things had gotten too hot and anyway I’d executed the mission. When I phoned Lucrecia in Maputo, she told me she was leaving town to immerse herself in country life to prepare for her next play: she was going to portray a bush woman. So I had to choose between living alone in Maputo or taking another assignment. Then I got a call from a French colonel, who’d helped me out a number of times in Sarajevo. “I may have an interesting project for you, Marc. One of my friends has a sailboat in Guadeloupe that he’d like to bring back to France. Would you like to accompany him?” And so, I headed off to Guadeloupe with an ex-soldier who’d bought a boat so he could sail around the world with his wife. But she’d dumped him, and he had to bring the boat to France. That’s how I became a sailor. I rang the Defence Ministry from Bermuda to find out whether I’d be paid for the remaining two months of my contract. But there was bad news: the Serbs had arrested members of Première Urgence, claiming they’d found a weapon in the trunk of a pu vehicle. More than ten expats were being held prisoner. I was ordered to fly back to Paris on the double. I hopped a plane to Philadelphia. This was my first trip to the U.S. since I’d left for Europe years earlier. It was April 22, the day Richard Nixon died. I landed in Paris the next day. They kept me on standby for days, waiting for instructions. I might as well have continued my cruise. In the end I didn’t have to go to Bosnia. So I spent two months twiddling my thumbs and living it up. At the French taxpayers’ expense. A few months earlier, after I got back from Mozambique, JeanChristophe had introduced me to a journalist named Elisabeth

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Levy. Her work frequently took her to Switzerland. In fact, she came to Paris on the weekends mainly to do her laundry and see her boyfriend. So she said I could crash at her place anytime I was passing through Paris. And that’s how I became a Parisian. Juju and I often got together. Through him, I met his friend Christophe Morard, known as the Fireman. We became pals. I also met François Roustand, known as the Corsican; he was like a brother to me. During my stay in Paris, I bought equipment for my construction company. The equipment was loaded into a container bound for Mozambique where I would pick it up. Just when my contract expired, the Première Urgence people were finally released. But Lucrecia was still in the bush and it would be weeks before she’d be coming back to town. Since I didn’t want to sit on my ass doing nothing and a little extra cash would be good for my business, I dropped by msf. According to the logistics director, the humanitarian aid program in southern Sudan was having one big aviation logistics headache. He thought I could run the show, given my experience with planes in Sarajevo. “I just want you to know that the contract is short term. We’ve got a million dollar budget; that’s all. Considering how much planes cost, it’s not much.” So I ended up in the Bahr el-Ghazal region in southern Sudan. No more neckties. Back to casual wear. The Sudanese tragedy has been going on for years. There has been a humanitarian presence there for years as well. Our television screens are full of heart-wrenching scenes of Sudanese children in the throes of starvation. My mission entailed setting up an airlift in southern Sudan to complement the food supply provided by the World Food Programme, which wasn’t sufficient. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, the project administrator was a strange bird whose journalist

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wife lifted information from the msf office. The guy seemed to have a serious coke habit. In those days, given the massive expatriate presence in Kenya, there were plenty of drugs and they didn’t cost much. When I arrived, the administrator told me he had signed a contract with an aviation company: Southern Air Transport. Two days later, I flew to Lokichokio in northern Kenya. From there we proceeded to southern Sudan, and to the Bahr elGhazal region. This swampland gets its name from the Bahr el-Ghazal, the River of Gazelles, which empties into the Bahr elGebel to form the White Nile. The region is predominantly populated by the Dinka. Once there, I started marking the terrain for the supply drops. The plane had to descend to 1000 feet, open the door and drop the food packages. Setting up a landing strip would have been too costly and time-consuming. So it was hard for big carriers to touch down. On the other hand, smaller planes, loaded with non-jettisonable products like oil, were landing. The first plane also brought us a tractor and trailer, all-terrain vehicles, which we were going to use to bring supplies to the surrounding areas. The first distribution went smoothly. The msf unit installed in the Therapeutic Feed Center was put to good use: over 500 people were being treated there. There were seven expatriates on the team. The area seemed like the end of the world. There was nothing worth seeing, certainly nothing to admire. Unless you fancied mosquitoes, disease and malnutrition. Talk about a tough mission! The Dinka were an odd people. One day, a male employee might leave at three in the afternoon and not return until four days later. With no explanation. And there was no point asking questions. “Why’d you take off?” “I had to go.”

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That’s all we could pry out of him. Curious things were happening to the planes. I knew the pilots; they had worked in Sarajevo. They flew the U.S. Air Force’s old C-130s with the company’s name Southern Air Transport, a company registered in Florida, each painted white for the occasion. When I went on the rounds with them, it took us four hours to fly to Bahr el-Ghazal and back. But solo flights took an extra two hours. Oddly enough, the pilots didn’t charge us a cent more, not even for the additional fuel consumption. The pilots’ explanation was that they organized safaris in their spare time. Thanks to them, I had a chance to go on an expedition, a magnificent trip. But I did wonder whether they were up to something a little more serious. I quarreled with my colleague, the nutritionist. We handed over the food to the village heads, who shared it with the clan. That’s what a war economy is like. It was useless to try to avoid the rackets the combatants were involved in. You might as well give the food to the village chief, who was better than we were at negotiating his village’s contribution with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (spla), the guerilla force with a stranglehold on Sudan. Then he could distribute the food fairly—or at least that’s what we hoped. The Dinka didn’t live in big villages. They lived in small communities, which made the geographic units more familial in nature and encouraged us to hope that there would be equity in the sharing of resources. My colleague didn’t agree. She thought we should give the food directly to the women. After all, they were the bedrock of their families. On paper, her argument seemed lovely and touching enough. Gender equity had become the hobbyhorse of every young aid worker who had graduated from a prestigious Western university. And why not give the food to the women? I had no problem with that in Mali or Senegal. But not in Sudan. Not in a war zone. Not in a vast African country bogged down in a terrible conflict

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for years. The fact that the armies were relatively quiet didn’t mean hostilities had ended. The pause between the skirmishes was only an illusion. The situation was a powder keg. The warlords always have the last word. In fact, it turned out badly. The spla soldiers came to claim their due. But since the women had been given the supplies, they faced the wrath of the militia. Many of the women tried to resist, but they were cruelly beaten. It was a tragedy. But it was totally predictable. I had said it over and over. But no one listened. We had to revise our entire action plan. I went to Nairobi to convince them that the next time we tried that bullshit, we’d be the ones who got burned, not the women. I could smell it. It stunk to high heaven. Some things you can’t explain; you rely on your instinct. The administrator was still high on drugs; he called me a rat. And I couldn’t get Paris to see how dangerous the mission was because the administrator said he had paved the way with his spla contacts in Nairobi. He believed in General X’s or Colonel Y’s word. He didn’t realize there was a world of difference between spla officers in Nairobi and barefoot soldiers in Bahr el-Ghazal. My Paris boss had to choose between himself and me. He decided I was wrong. He asked me to return to the field and begin distributing the food to the women again. Four of us left our base in a car crammed with food. But things soon got out of hand. Early in the afternoon, we were just about to start distributing the supplies when people suddenly began running all over the place. We couldn’t see what was causing the panic but we knew we’d better get out of there. We barely had time to jump into our car and make our getaway. The car got stuck in the mud several times. We kept our high beams off so our pursuers wouldn’t spot us. We finally reached base, absolutely exhausted. It was four in the morning. A harrowing journey. The next day, we went to see the local commander, who swore to us that he hadn’t heard of a rebel attack near our distribution site. It was impossible to identify the people responsible

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for the previous day’s nightmare. Each camp blamed the other. And we were stuck in the middle. I called Nairobi. I was in no mood to chat. Every ngo in the region decided to withdraw, fearing that the incidents might have a snowball effect. The administrator droned on over the line. It was like a mantra: “I’ll make sure you get out of there!” The best he could do was to send a plane that sat 12 passengers. There were 21 of us waiting to be evacuated. It was useless to kick up a fuss. It was all too silly, too sad, too infuriating. I had to stay behind to make sure that all the personnel had left. Four expatriates volunteered to stay with me. We took refuge in the msf compound, hoping and praying that nothing unfortunate would happen before the plane returned. But it was already noon and we doubted that the plane could fly to Nairobi and back the same day. As they say: bad luck comes in bunches. There was a storm that night. The plane couldn’t land the next day. We were stuck in southern Sudan, surrounded by hordes of assassins rapidly closing in us. To top it all: one of my colleagues, the poor guy, chose that time to come down with malaria. It seemed like a bad horror film. Fortunately, the rain had flooded the land, slowing down the troops chasing us. Four days later, we were evacuated. The others had left the camp, too. Refugees who were able to flee the area did so, fearing an attack by a warlord. So, it was a short mission indeed. Simply because an administrator was too stubborn to admit his mistake. It was disappointing that msf had chosen to believe him rather than someone on the ground. And we allowed a population to starve. Nothing is more painful for an aid worker than abandoning people at risk. Because of my experience, I was able to accept it. It wasn’t my war, I had done my best, and I could leave with a clear conscience.

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But nothing prepares you to see women disappearing in the night, clutching children who will probably not survive. Nor can I forget the look of the msf nurse who turned to me as she was boarding the plane and said, “You bastard!” She hated me for making her leave, abandoning the women she loved, the babies she’d brought back to life. To her, they weren’t abstract statistics. They had faces, names. They had personal stories, tragedies. They were adults she had fed with a baby bottle so they wouldn’t gulp down the first water they’d had in days. They were human beings. I didn’t resent her for calling me a bastard, but it hurt all the same. Especially since I’d done everything in my power to avert the catastrophe. Still, I was the one who would have to stay an extra day with the refugees who were the worst off, the ones who couldn’t flee. This was a latter-day Auschwitz. The people were just skin and bone. Dreading the nightmare about to befall them, they trembled with despair, their eyes wide with terror. I felt small, insignificant, powerless. If only I could go home so I’d never witness this horror again. Then I could be like other Westerners. For them it’s out of sight, out of mind. I’d go home, get a little rest, be indifferent. Ironically, we arrived in Nairobi only to find the administrator had taken a leave of absence, pleading “exhaustion.” Just as well he did, as I was planning on remodeling his face. Even if it meant being blacklisted by msf for the rest of my life. I went back to Paris, determined to hop the first flight to Mozambique. Fed up. Fed to the gills. I opted for a week in Paris to blow off steam and forget the Sudan fiasco. I made the rounds of the bars and clubs. But tv screens everywhere showed news reports and pictures of the Rwandan massacres. It was early 1994, and journalists had managed to arrive on the ground. Reports were pouring in from United Nations forces and aid workers. And they all told the same story, with horrifying statistics: nearly a

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million Tutsi and Hutu had perished in what could only be called genocide. To add to the horror, a war was raging between the Rwandan Patriotic Front (rpf), the rebel movement largely composed of exiled Tutsi, and the Rwandan Armed Forces (far). After a disgraceful absence that lasted for months, the United Nations had just authorized Operation Turquoise, a French initiative, to impose a ceasefire between far and the rpf in addition to protecting the Hutu refugee camps being set up in the countries bordering Rwanda. There was a grisly new chapter in the history of genocide: the civilian population, backed by the militias, had taken an active part in the massacres. The same population that fled Rwanda and settled in eastern Zaire, in a locality known as Goma, at the foot of the Nyiragongo volcano, after far was routed. Nearly 800,000 people had swarmed across the border in record time. Politically, Operation Turquoise received widespread condemnation. Critics said it would allow far forces and militiamen responsible for the genocide to escape. This wasn’t entirely inaccurate except that most of the orchestrators of the genocide had already flown the coop. In addition to leaving the door open to military vengeance, the mission would have caused one more tragedy in a country that had already suffered unspeakable barbarity. Then the call came from msf. “Can you drop by and see us tomorrow morning? As early as possible?” The situation resembled that of other tragedies: a camp had to be built for a great number of refugees. Two questions: what was there to be done and how soon? Meanwhile, in Goma, msf Holland was busy, sending messages to assure everybody that things were going well, that the situation was under control. But television reports gave the lie to this version. msf France decided to send a mission into the field.

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Since I still hadn’t managed to contact Lucrecia, I reckoned I could do with a little activity. Fighting was ongoing in some Rwandan regions, so there was little likelihood the wave of refugees would dry up. We wanted to build a cholera camp in Bukavu, south of Goma. I scribbled down the equipment order and dashed off to Burundi. In Bujumbura, I met the msf teams in place. They helped me quickly round up trucks to transport the material to take care of at least 60,000 refugees. Six trucks and three cars headed out: destination Bukavu. We reached the camp 24 hours later. As we’d arrived without authorization, the camp logistician negotiated with local authorities to let us stay. That wasn’t my job; my task was to deal with the cholera outbreak. But, three hours went by, and we still hadn’t made any progress. I went over to see the head customs officer. “What’s the problem?” “Boss, the problem is that you don’t have the papers and it’s not right . . .” I’d like some baksheesh! was written all over his face. This was Zaire. There were deep-rooted customs no one could circumvent, not even a relief delegation. “I agree, chief. If I were you, I’d insist on a fine . . .” “Really?” The look on his face said, This makes sense. He’s talking about money! “Of course. In Canada, there’d be a fine of $250 per truck and $50 per car for the infraction. It would amount to $1,650 for a 48hour pass to enter the country and unload the material.” “Well, boss, it seems like a pretty good idea.” He flushed. He could almost feel the weight of the cash in his pockets. Of course, this didn’t sit well with the logistician. He had hoped a little speech would do the trick: “We’re the good guys, we’re helping you and your brothers. How could you even think of shaking us down?” He was naive. The Zairian customs officer

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didn’t give a flying fuck about Rwandan refugees. The law of the Third World is “Every man for himself and God for him, too.” After all, hadn’t we committed an infraction? We weren’t going to spend days negotiating. There was an emergency on the other side of the border. We drove into Bukavu around three in the morning. There was not a soul stirring on the streets. We parked our cars and got some sleep. The next day, while reconnoitering the town, I spotted two msf cars parked outside the hotel. My friend Luc Legrand was back from Tanzania. Hardly surprising to find Mr. Cholera in Zaire. We were going to do a magnificent job. We had a champion on board. Bukavu was calm. The refugees still hadn’t arrived. Across Lake Kivu, in Rwanda, the war raged on. The French troops had already set up position in Cyangugu, the last Rwandan town before the border. Their presence alone averted clashes. It would be a while before the refugees arrived. Luc and I decided we wouldn’t sit around in the region, twiddling our thumbs. So we split the mission in two: one group would stay behind to take care of any eventuality. Luc and I would accompany the other to help out in Goma, which seemed like the most dangerous spot. There was one hitch: travel. By road, we’d have to transit Rwanda to get to Goma. A six-hour journey. Impossible. The fighting in Kigali made that option a non-starter. Otherwise, we’d have to reach Goma by air, less than a 20-minute flight. Luc went to see the French soldiers. They were the only ones with planes. We took off the same day.

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16 Goma

How could such a lovely word stand for hell? Goma was a godforsaken place. The devil wore a triumphant smile. In the city, hundreds of thousands of frantic, haggard-faced Rwandan refugees roamed the streets; others sat on the ground, waiting for who knows what. Outside of Goma, on the slopes of the Nyiragongo volcano, there were another 300,000 refugees. There were bodies everywhere. The living looked like the walking dead. As we left the airport, Luc said, “Count the corpses on the left, Marc; I’ll count them on the right.” In lieu of a casket, mattresses had been wrapped around the corpses and small pieces of wood had been stuck in the ground to mark the spot for rescue workers. I had reached 22 bodies when Luc tapped me

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on the shoulder. “Stop, Marc. It’s useless. Just look!” Indeed, counting was a pointless exercise. It was a charnel house. The survivors trudged along like zombies, stumbling over the dead, not even lowering their eyes to look, then struggling to their feet and resuming their futile quest. We heard distant bursts of gunfire from the Rwandan region of Gisenyi where war raged unabated. Millions of feet pounded Goma’s volcanic soil, stirring up a black pall of dust. It was like a futuristic horror film. It was even more surreal when you thought that half of these wretches had committed crimes against humanity or been accomplices to them. Who were they? What was going through their murderous minds? How could I distinguish de facto between criminal and victim? Given the enormity of suffering, are there gradations of good and evil? What was the point of asking this sort of question? Shouldn’t I start working and stop thinking? Act, get a move on so death wouldn’t win. Beside me, I could feel Luc’s small body tense for action. He wasn’t nervous or anxious, just ready, and somewhat awed. Goma citizens tried to carry on as usual, making the situation even more bizarre. My brain jammed, unable to process the information bombarding it. There was no doubt, this was big, very big, too big. I’d insisted on coming; I’d gotten my wish. msf co-founder Xavier Emmanuelli, emergency director Marc Castillu, nurse Luc Legrand, logistician Thierry Fournier, watsan specialist François Antenne and I huddled in an msf Holland trailer to draw up an action plan. We agreed on the urgent need to set up a cholera camp. And it would have to be a huge one with at least 700 beds. This wasn’t my estimate; it was the considered opinion of these experts, who had seen a lot in their lives. Xavier Emmanuelli was appalled. “This is worse than Ethiopia, Marc, worse, worse than Biafra!” he said.

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So I realized that we were facing an enormous crisis. When an msf founder says the situation is beyond anything in Biafra and Ethiopia, what more can be said? As if that wasn’t enough, Hutu were lynching Hutu, accusing the victims of complicity with the enemy Tutsi. A little later on, someone had hacked a man to death with a machete. The condemned man’s alleged crime: he wasn’t 100 percent Hutu. Amidst all the suffering, some refugees found nothing better than to continue the slaughter. The region was flooded with weapons. Simply because the less than valiant far troops had been the first to turn and run. They had camped higher up, on the volcanic hill. They had brought weapons and munitions. Helicopters and mortars. Assault rifles and revolvers. And then there were the machetes, tons of them. Of course, machetes were and still are indispensable tools for workers in Rwandan fields. But they had been transformed into weapons of genocide. They were soaked in blood. Even before the influx of Hutu refugees, a camp had been set up for Rwandan Tutsi. In 1959, the first inter-ethnic massacres had driven them into exile. Normally, in the event of vast population displacement, people must be moved away from urban centres. Otherwise, the increased demand would overtax the sanitation systems, causing a spate of additional tragedies. So it was imperative to direct refugees to open spaces and start building infrastructures. The humanitarian agencies in Goma applied this golden rule, but they lacked experience. They were awed by the magnitude of the task. They instructed the refugees to follow them to the volcanic hills and the eventual campsites. The refugees complied, clinging to any assistance offered them. But barely 300,000 had exited the city before Zaire Army forces cut off the route to prevent the refugees from returning to the city. The Zairians were fed up with this mass of refugees who were ruining the local water supply. They were disgusted with people shitting everywhere. It doesn’t take long for a million people to ruin a city. Not

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to mention the corpses, beggars, thieves. And the violence. In the end, the Zairian’s revulsion was understandable. By setting up in the volcanic mountains, the humanitarian organizations denied themselves access to drinking water. If we now estimate that there were between 70,000 and 75,000 deaths due to cholera, the dehydration problems caused by the camp locations undoubtedly played a large part. Ironically, Goma sits on the banks of one of Africa’s biggest lakes. With these problems in mind, we devised our modus operandi: msf Holland should continue its work in the refugee camps on the slopes of the hill, msf France would take care of the people still on the streets in the city. François Antenne’s sole focus would be water. We would have to use every available resource (including the lake), purify immense quantities of water in the reservoirs and then distribute it to the refugees with Oxfam’s cooperation. I worked with Luc Legrand to set up a cholera camp in town. In the heat of the discussion, I was asked how long it would take. I don’t know what got into me, but I boasted, “Four days!” Luc frowned in surprise, but I insisted I could build a 700-bed hospital in four days. In fact, I believed I could create a unit that was operational in fewer than four days and complete the job when the patients were in their beds. We chose a football field near the Collège des Pères Blancs. Students were still taking their exams in the college. It took me an hour to assess the site, the natural elements and the requirements in terms of construction, workers and equipment. When everything was filed in my mental computer, I was ready to act. The first assignment was to move the scores of corpses piled there. A senior student at the college came over and asked me what I was doing. I described the project to build an emergency hospital. “Would you be interested in working for me?” I said.

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“Sure. As it happens, I’m free.” “Good. Start now.” “Okay, boss. What should I do?” “You’ve got ten minutes to find five more strong guys.” I had to think fast. This was a daunting exercise in personnel management. But I knew exactly what I wanted: skillful workers, ready to do any job. When five men showed up, I immediately sent them to find five more. While I was waiting, I asked the head of the college to assemble the professors. When they arrived, I asked whether there was a math teacher among them. Someone raised his hand. “Great. You’ll be the accountant!” The two literature professors would become administrators, the geography teacher my assistant in charge of the store. I set up office in a classroom. Before nightfall, I had formed a team of nearly 200 people: about 30 carpenters, nearly as many masons. At the height of our activities, I managed a team of 430 employees. I had already received my tools: shovels, machetes. I had delimited the land, and the French Army had agreed to lend me an excavator. When it arrived, I asked the driver to dig a ditch instead of latrines. I intended to build raised johns, like in the ones in Platoon, with three steps, a floor and a barrel underneath that could be emptied when it was full. I was ready to inaugurate the site the next day. The night flew by. I organized teams in units of ten so there would be no lull in the work. There were enough employees to work day and night. I permitted myself a few hours sleep once every two days. On the site, the noise continued non-stop. The shouts of employees working their butts off responding to the orders I was barking out. Nobody really knew what would come of the exercise. I was the one with the plan in my head. When the walls and tents started going up, people thought I was a genius. I had delegated masonry to a young logistician who had just

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arrived and excavation to another who was on the same plane. I handled carpentry and overall coordination. A Congolese served as crew chief and we got along well together. The result: on the morning of the fifth day, the camp was operational. That evening, we took in 270 patients in a camp that had electricity. It was the biggest cholera camp in msf history with 740 beds. It was divided in two: one side for cholera, the other for shigellosis (a kind of dysentery). There was water, a place for washing, a morgue and a kitchen. The masons were still working on the chimney, but people could cook on the stone nearby. We relied on a local company to supply the beds. It made some rudimentary beds to fill my order for 300 units in a brief period of time. The boss asked for three weeks. Too long. So I let him have about 40 employees and he met the deadline. Things were working out. While I was busy doing this, Luc Legrand finished assembling the medical team. He recruited most of his assistants from the Hutu who were there. We also stocked medicine on the pharmacy shelves, and a team was assigned to distribute it. That’s what a cholera camp is like. A whole set of little details that must never be neglected: the shower, the morgue, an ingenious evacuation system (How do you evacuate 40 tons of wastewater a day?), traffic routes, etc. Overlooking one element can endanger human lives. msf had given the world a formidable lesson in rapid crisis management. More importantly, we were going to reduce the appalling death rate of a thousand a day. It took two weeks of intense activity to put the finishing touches on the project. I worked 36 hours straight before collapsing into bed: day, night, day, then sleep; day, night, day and sleep again. The pace was killing me. From the second day of work on this vast site, I knew I was coming down with something. I had many far veterans working

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as unskilled labourers, while the Congolese were masons and carpenters. Some workers didn’t even bother to change out of their uniforms. They still had blood in their eyes as they worked like madmen digging ditches and latrines. When you saw them wielding their pickaxes, you could imagine the pain they must have inflicted on their victims when they struck them on the back of the neck with a machete. A group of malcontents was beginning to form. In the afternoon, two guys started to raise their voices. But I didn’t pay them any attention. Then three, five and eventually eight others began to grumble. Suddenly, everybody had stopped working. I put my pencil on the table and went out of the office to see what was happening. I realized there was a problem and given the terrible emergency we were dealing with, there was no time to lose. I didn’t even stop to think about the danger: I was the only White in the middle of Hutu who had had, in their time, their hands dripping with blood. They put down their tools and surrounded me. One of the spokesmen came up to me. “Look, boss, we’re not putting up with it!” “What?” “We’re on strike.” My blood was boiling. I felt like dropping everything and getting the hell out of there. Those idiots needed to understand that this was no time to talk about a strike. I didn’t need the camp; their wives and children were the ones who were dying. I could pack my bags and fly back to Paris, or to Mozambique and join my beloved. Suddenly, I remembered something. “Shit, I forgot to call Lucrecia. She’s probably mad at me.” I was the last person on Earth who had anything to gain by staying in this hellhole. And these idiots were threatening to strike as if I had a company that could go bankrupt. I was none too pleased. But I asked calmly, “I beg your pardon?” “Anyway, boss, you’re violating human rights.” “Say what?”

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“You only pay two dollars an hour. Really, that’s not enough. It’s really hard for us.” I felt like killing the guy with his expression full of childish hope. Just then, my pickup truck arrived. I climbed aboard so I could tower over the group. And I let them have it: “What’s your fucking problem, you bunch of idiots. So you want to talk about human rights, you band of child killers?” They certainly weren’t all murderers, but a hell of a lot of them were, especially the ones shooting their mouths off. “Repeat that: human rights?” I said. In my mind I could see the corpses littering the road between my hotel and the camp. I could tell the people who had been hacked to death with a knife the previous evening. “I’m Canadian. I know human rights. I know democracy. Listen up: the boss decides; that’s democracy! And who’s the boss? I am. Before you stir up a pathetic revolt, you’d better speak to me. If you have any questions, raise your hands!” The group spokesman raised his hand. So did three others. Nothing could stop me. “The four of you with your hands raised, you want to know what democracy is? Well, it’s the boss’s right to fire anyone he chooses. You’re fired. Beat it!” They were dumbfounded. So was I. I ordered the guards to escort them out of the camp. “Does anyone else have any fucking questions?” “Yes, boss, it’s about . . .” “Get out.” (He didn’t have time to finish his sentence.) “The rest of you, listen up: My name’s Marc Vachon. If you piss me off again, I’ll hop into a plane and clear out of here. And you can go back to being unemployed. Get back to work immediately. I can’t give you a raise; I don’t have any money. Not only do you get two dollars, I feed you and give you something to drink. And since you’re working for us, you’re not shut up in the camps or roaming the streets where your pals are getting massacred all day long.

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If you’re not happy, beat it. There are five thousand candidates waiting for your job. You’ve got five minutes to go back to work.” Thirty seconds later, there was a deafening sound of tools digging the ground. msf Belgium sent a cameraman to interview me about camp cholera. I was supposed to recount how I’d organized things so that everything would be in order and operational. msf Belgium wanted the document for their archives to train future logisticians. It was like the cassette they’d played for me in Lézignan. Naturally, the issue of personnel management came up. “How did you manage to get so many different ethnic groups, cultures and nationalities to work together?” “You have to avoid shilly-shallying. Rwandans have witnessed genocide—if they haven’t committed it. So they’re not interested in social niceties. Exploited by Mobutu for two decades, Zairians are in no mood to be pushed around. They are honest people, providing you speak frankly to them. A boss has to make sure he gets respect.” I told them how efficient my staff had become after the abortive strike. I reconstituted the teams based on affinity, and I asked each team to name a representative, who would be the only one with the right to ask me questions. The far vets understood my orders. They formed small platoons, led by non-coms. In the new setup, I headed a small contingent of ex-soldiers. The Congolese were grouped according to trade category: masons on one side, carpenters on the other. To distinguish the staff, I had given them coloured baseball caps: red-striped for masons, blue for carpenters and the green to labourers. Come hell or high water, in Africa, there are some customs you must never ignore: you always celebrate the opening and closing of a site. This was Zaire. Zairians are champion partygivers. When the camp became operational, I treated the entire team to a night on the town. I cleaned out a bistro’s supply of beer and

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lemonade. The party immediately got under way. And the employees started showing off and chatting up the girls. I didn’t know it yet, but there’d be a price to pay for the interview I gave the Belgian filmmakers.

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17 That Strange Evil Consuming Me

We grew accustomed to the horror. I remember an evening at the msf France house, in the former Air Zaire offices. I was with Luc Legrand and François Antenne. From the second floor, we witnessed a scene out of the apocalypse. It was an eerie spectacle with 50,000 refugees huddling for warmth around small, slowly dying bonfires. In the background, the Nyiragongo volcano had chosen a bad time to erupt. From far away, it looked like a huge red dish belching wreathes of white smoke. And there was the constant gurgling sound of people in the throes of death. From time to time, we heard occasional bursts of gunfire. Saw the lynching of supposed traitors. Leaving for work in the morning, as we went down the stairs of the Air Zaire offices, we had to step over the corpses of people who had

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chosen to come to our place to die the previous evening, because they had heard that there were whites living in the house. At night, they didn’t dare disturb us. They waited until the morning so we could take them to the cholera camp. Often, it was too late. Their bodies were blocking the door. We had to push it open, and pretend we didn’t notice them. If that isn’t hell, what is? Gradually things started to come together. Corpse-recovery teams got down to work. We weren’t the only ones on the ground; there were the boy scouts from Goma, the Irish ngo goal and the Red Cross. Camps were being set up. Water supply trucks boosted their rate of delivery. Death was on the retreat. Prompted by political expediency, Kinshasa sent troops to disarm the Rwandan refugees and restore order in Goma. The Republican Guard used strong-arm tactics from the very beginning. A truck went around the city, announcing over a loudspeaker that the refugees had 24 hours to exit the city and go back up to the camps on the mountain. I’ll never forget the evening when the Zairians carried out their threat. The Green Berets of Mobutu’s Republican Guard, sporting Ray-Bans, got out of their pickup truck. They showed no mercy. They strode around the streets, firing at every Rwandan they met. The steady metallic staccato of bullets spitting death. During the evening and much of the night, the Green Berets went about the ruthless “cleanup” of the town to the terrifying rat-a-tat-tat of the guns. It was horrifying. The next day, the survivors resumed their exodus. This time, they trudged toward the camps on the slopes of Nyiragongo. I didn’t realize it yet, but the situation was starting to overwhelm me. Lack of sleep made me a physical wreck. I smoked hash every night to keep from falling apart. Mentally, it became harder to endure the scenes of horror. Goma was my biggest achievement, but I paid an incredible price. Every detail of that infernal period is etched in my mind. I will never forget our first visit to Gisenyi. It’s the first Rwandan town you come to after you cross the Congo border.

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Rwandan Tutsi were still gathering up their dead. That’s where I really saw genocide. The mass graves and the common ditches overflowing with men, women and children dismembered by machetes. The elderly and the disabled struck down by sadistic killers. Everywhere you looked there were corpses. Abandoned for weeks, the bodies were in an advanced stage of putrefaction. They had been piled up in the middle of the roads, and then the killers had placed grenades among the bodies to serve as explosive barriers to halt the fpr rebels’ advance. Amidst these sinister devices wandered survivors, desperately searching for faces they could recognize. But most of the living just sat there, resigned, haggard, barely alive. In the country’s interior, in Ruhengeri, people had been slaughtered in churches, patients had been butchered in their hospital beds. There was an odour, one that constricted the lungs and seized the brain. I hoped I’d get some reprieve by returning to Goma. But the devil had been unrelenting there, too. As I worked, I listened to my Walkman belting out rock music so I wouldn’t hear the death rattles, the crying of the orphans, the thud of the corpses as they fell into the common ditches. But as soon as I took off the earphones, the horror caught up with me. In our cholera camp, half a dozen patients had died, and we wondered why. Later we learned that killers had slipped in at night and cut off the antiviral serum supply. They claimed their victims had Tutsi cousins. We found infants whose skulls had been crushed because their mothers had conceived them with a Tutsi. It was appalling. It was a constant battle to prevent disease from claiming its daily quota of victims, to contend with the stupidity of people who persisted in perpetrating evil, and the despondency that engulfed us when we saw the corpses of patients murdered the night before. One evening, we decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. After work, every employee was obliged to undergo a search. They moaned, “Oh, boss, really, that’s a violation of human

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rights and workers’ rights. You think we’re a bunch of bandits!” I understood that they felt humiliated, but Luc needed to find out what was happening. In fact, hidden under the shirt of the biggest and sturdiest nurse, the one who complained the loudest, we found six boxes of Siflox, a medication that we used in the treatment. In the tent he was in charge of, four or five people were dying every day. He was a murderer. Before I could grab little Luc, he yanked the guy by the ears and kneed him a couple of times in the nose. Luc wouldn’t have stopped if the guards hadn’t pulled him off the guy. We thought about handing the thief over to the police, but Luc wanted only one thing. “Get him out of here. I never want to see him again, even in court. He’d better disappear! If I ever meet him again, I’ll kill him in cold blood.” Meanwhile, I had found out that my old Bosnia buddy, Colonel Sartre, was the Blue Helmets commander for Operation Turquoise in Rwanda. A colleague told me she had to set up a displaced persons camp in the Hutu zone in southwestern Rwanda. She asked for some advice and I suggested she see the Colonel and tell him I sent her. At French Army hq in Goma, they put me in radio contact with the colonel, who was somewhere in Rwanda between Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. He treated me like a friend. “Glad to hear from you, Vachon.” Before I could ask, he said, “Listen, buddy, if you’re ever working on this side of the border and you need anything, just say the word!” “Actually, colonel, I’m sending you a colleague who may need your help.” After arriving in Rwanda, the woman realized she needed heavy tools to build the camp. The French Army engineering unit helped her out. msf had benefited from the exercise, but some within the organization objected to it. “msf shouldn’t flirt with the French Army. Our neutrality will be compromised. After all, the French

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Army trained the far people who organized the Rwandan genocide.” Without knowing much about politics, I thought the objection dogmatic and a little hypocritical. If we trace the lines of responsibility, it is clear that the army never makes decisions about military cooperation. The army merely obeys orders and adheres to agreements carved out by the civilian authority. In those days, François Mitterand and his entourage set France’s African policy. And msf members were predominantly left-leaning. In fact, most msf brass had made a career in the Socialist Party. Whom should we avoid associating with, the soldiers or the ministers? Bedeviled by stomach aches and diarrhea, I gulped tons of medicine. But I grew a little weaker every day. One morning, we received a letter that floored us. It was addressed to one of our assistants, a Tutsi woman married to a Hutu. Someone had stuck the letter on the door with a knife. It was a death threat. She would be killed that evening if she didn’t quit msf. Luc Legrand blew his stack. “Dickheads!” he yelled. He left the camp the next day. He shook my hand. Then he picked up his bag and took off. It was another blow. I wasn’t eating well. I was battling sleep deprivation, with no more than five or six hours every second night. A call from Paris found me in a state of exhaustion. The order was to build a feeding centre asap. I started work on the site. I finished only three quarters of it. I saw the buildings in phases 1 and 2 go up. That’s as far as I could go. I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom. I’d lost nearly 45 pounds. I had to get away from this hell. That’s when I finally met Sylvain Charbonneau. People had often talked about a Canadian at msf. He’d just arrived in Goma to serve as an administrator. He told me he had arranged to have me evacuated to Paris via Bangui, in the Central African Republic, and N’Djamena, in Chad. He was sending a doctor and a nurse with me just in case.

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In Bangui the next day, I took a turn for the worse. To avoid soiling the seats, I had to wear sanitary napkins. Not just for sanitary reasons but to avoid being placed in quarantine when I arrived in France. Colonel Sartre was at the airport. He had just finished his mission in Rwanda. He shook my hand. The airline staff treated him like a celebrity. When the pilot welcomed him aboard, Sartre whispered, “Look, if there are any first class seats left, I would like some friends in the back to join me. Is it possible?” “We’ll do our best, colonel.” Shortly before take off, they ushered my companions and me to luxury class. I forgot how sick I was as I curled up in my cozy seat and listened to the colonel describe his projects. “I’m going to be in Djibouti for a couple of years, commanding the forces there. I like you a lot, young man. If you want to join me there, I’ll have a job for you as a humanitarian adviser, showing our men how to work in other countries. He made me promise to give him a call. After four days of vigorous treatment for diarrhea, I showed up at msf, where everyone was returning from vacation, and I got a chilly reception. But I didn’t care. I wanted to return to Mozambique, see my beloved and sleep. But I still hadn’t managed to get in touch with Lucrecia. I found out that msf had tried to open a new mission in Sudan but spla rebels had arrested three guys who were scouting locations. An incredible story. Charles Pasqua, then Minister of the Interior, had gotten his hands on Carlos the Jackal, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. The arrest had been carried out in Sudan. Everybody knew that France must have brokered a deal. The price? A mystery. Word had it that Paris had authorized Khartoum to make incursions into the neighbouring Central African Republic to supply a Sudanese position in the south. Wao never fell to spla rebels, probably because the troops were never short of munitions. Another reward: France may have handed

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over aerial photographs of spla troop formations. The shots were so precise that they seemed to have been taken from a plane rather than a satellite. Besides msf craft making food-drops, what planes were authorized to fly over southern Sudan? The Southern Air Transport pilots’ cock-and-bull story about aerial tourism came to mind. “Fuck, we were had!” The spla guys were no fools: they made the link between msf and the photos. I’m convinced msf Paris was never involved in that funny business. I have my doubts about the administrator in Nairobi. It remains to be determined whether he was manipulated or whether he was aware of what was going on. Everything was getting me down. The tricks, the duplicity, the United Nations, which had abandoned Rwanda, fickle Canada, which hid behind the letter of the law so it wouldn’t have to take action. In Iraq, I’d never hesitated to break the law in order to save lives. Because I believed. Years later, Canadian soldiers confessed that their morale broke when they didn’t get the go-ahead to act. Instead, they were powerless witnesses to the worst barbarity in the late 20th century. They were also dispirited because their staff headquarters lacked the courage to stand up for what’s right. When human lives are at stake, you have two choices. Either you go home and stick your head in the sand or you stay there and pretend you can’t hear what headquarters is telling you: “New York, New York, I’m not receiving you.” Then you order the men to do everything humanly possible. To act instead of whimpering like a puppy that’s lost its toy. I know Canadian soldiers; I know what they’re like. They would have told their chief: “We’d rather die on our feet than live on our knees.” I’m not saying they would have saved the whole of Rwanda, but they would have secured part of Kigali, created a sanctuary where Tutsi or Hutu in danger could have taken refuge. They failed to do this. Nor did they send specialists to counter the propaganda the Hutu militia spewed over hate radio.

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Contrary to widespread views about Rwanda, the genocide victims were betrayed by people on the ground who saw what was happening and did nothing. If they had fought to secure a few regions in the country, it would have been too late for Washington and Ottawa to pull back. The world would have been obliged to send support troops. The French, the Canadians and the Belgians would have intervened. There would have been paratroopers and Special Forces to end the massacres. At first, tens of thousands would have perished, but then we would have acted to prevent the situation from becoming even worse, and 500,000 or 600,000 lives would have been saved. This wasn’t done. Leaders in the West looked the other way. People on the ground, where the horror was taking place, tried to convince themselves that mere words would stop the carnage. Not even the clergy would have made that claim. I cursed Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who led his powerless little troop. He could have done more than whine about the United Nations, ngos and missing media, never admitting his own failure. By contrast, another Canadian, General MacKenzie, took risks in Bosnia. In the beginning of the war, he headed multinational forces that braved fire from all sides to open the airport. After witnessing massacres, after seeing thousands of dismembered bodies, after smelling the stench of decomposing flesh, I met people returning from their vacation on the beach in the south. I was dumbstruck. I washed away my pain in alcohol. It took a bottle and a half of whisky to get to sleep every night. Without it, I had a recurrent dream: I was in a pickup truck and there were bodies on the side of the road. The scene I’d witnessed when I arrived in Goma. It kept repeating. Over and over. I was sweating. I was terrified. I was losing it. It was too much: msf’s repudiation of my mission in the Congo; the realization that despite ourselves we had been used as spies in Sudan, even if the three msf agents were freed a few weeks later; the indifference of the French; the images haunting my sleep; the alcohol I was consuming from

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morning to night. I could tell I was in a downward spiral but I couldn’t stop. I finally found out why msf had its doubts about me: the video by the Belgians. I was unaware of it at the time, but I’d been under enormous stress and I’d simply vented. My explanations had seemed cynical to some. I had wanted to explain everything, talk about everything. The waste-water system. The morgue. The first dead bodies I had to look after. The difficulty of persuading superstitious Congolese to do the rotten work. Work that eats at your gut every time you do it. The first corpse I handled belonged to a 16 year old, cut down, his mouth open, in a graceless pose. As if that mattered at the time. I used my bare hands to stuff the wadding down his throat to block his esophagus. Then I made a ball and inserted it into the anus with pliers to block both extremities to prevent the body from voiding because it still had cholera vectors. I sprayed the body with a mixture of chlorine and water to disinfect it. Then I wrapped it in plastic like a sausage and tied it up. And that was its sepulchre. Finally, I left it on the side of the road for the cadaver removal cars to come and pick it up. Repeating this operation once, twice, dozens of times was enough to drive you mad. At least the Congolese sense of humour helped preserve our sanity. No matter how grim the situation, the Congolese would come up with some macabre bit of wit to lighten the atmosphere and make us laugh. “So, boss, today you’d like a little more cold meat to take out . . .” Or, when we greeted them in the morning we’d say: “Hi, pals, how’s it going?” “Pretty quiet, boss,” they’d say. “Only four customers today! Things are bad. I may go bankrupt.” Bloody Congolese! It was in this highly charged environment that the Belgian film crew found me. And I just vented. I recounted how I ranted on about human rights when the Congolese had refused to work. My tirade shocked msf. All they focused on in my whole Goma mission were the words “You’re fired. Beat it!”

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Of course, this was completely unacceptable behaviour to people whose humanitarian commitment consisted of soothing their backsides on padded office chairs at 8 Saint-Sabin. In the mouths of bureaucrats, ignorance became certainty. One reason for the failures of humanitarianism. I headed to Mozambique. Another chilly reception. This time from Lucrecia. Of course, I’d been gone eight months. We hadn’t talked much. If you’ve been away from your woman for a long time, you have to woo her all over again. But I lacked the energy. I couldn’t anymore. I just wanted her by my side. I wanted to lie in bed next to her. Just close the blinds and turn off the lights. Not even to make love, just to sleep and wake up three weeks later, free of the nightmares. That’s all I wanted. Just sleep. But nothing turned out the way I’d hoped. Beginning with my apartment. In Mozambique, long a communist country, apartment buildings were state-owned. The government symbolically gave a key to a new tenant. Because of my long absence, a family was squatting in my apartment. The husband was an army captain. There was no point even thinking of booting him out. I had bought the apartment, but there was nowhere I could go to complain because selling state property was against the law. I’d been duped. Nothing was left of my pickup but the carcass. Everything else had been stolen. I crashed at msf. Two of my friends were in charge there. I couldn’t locate Lucrecia until the next day. She greeted me with transoceanic aloofness. I was a stranger to her. My tongue was so furred, my mouth couldn’t form the words to explain. Instead, I went to a bar and got plastered. I don’t know how I managed to take a taxi back to msf. I tiptoed in, so I wouldn’t wake the guys up, and then I bolted for the first-aid kit and emptied the box of Valium. I slept 18 hours straight. The next day, I took my Lucrecia by the waterside for a snack. A bottle of wine, then a couple more, and I was sloshed again. I went on a two-week bender. I’d drink myself into a slurring

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stupor, sleep and start all over again the next day. I didn’t even bother to go and see my tools that had arrived by container. I’d lost my house. My car. But worst of all, bit by bit, I lost Lucrecia. How long could I go on? I didn’t know. Something had to happen. One evening, I found myself in an English pub, holding the boss by the collar. His feet were a yard off the floor. I was going to tear his head off. The customers had to intervene and throw me out. I was barred from the place. It wasn’t the first; there were six or seven others in Malputo. I looked for trouble everywhere I went. I fought Swedish sailors. I hurled insults at Mozambican soldiers who were drinking their pay. I had been in so many fights that even the police were afraid to arrest me. Clearly, I was losing my grip. And yet, all I really wanted to do was sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, the same goddamn vision came back to haunt me. The dead, the dead whose faces refused to fade but grew clearer and clearer every day. The day after my scene at the English pub, I called Air France and made a reservation for the next flight. That evening I drained the bars of Malputo. Two days later, at nine in the morning, I was at the airport, although the flight was scheduled to take off twelve hours later. I went to the bar on the airport roof and slumped into a chair. I kept drinking alcohol and pissing on the floor. I left without saying goodbye. Not to Lucrecia, not to my colleagues at msf. I had lost everything; I’d totally messed up. I was ready for the scrap heap. All I had left was beer, my steady but treacherous companion. I had no idea what I would do in Paris. I didn’t have an apartment there anymore, since I’d told Elisabeth that I was going away for good to live in Mozambique. I had failed, miserably, lost everything. Goddamn Congo, how could you be so mean? When the plane took off, I covered my head with the blanket and cried like I’d never done before.

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18 Redemption

“Sure, you silly twit, you can come back to the apartment,” Elisabeth said. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t need explanations. You don’t interrogate a basket case; you just know. Back to my old haunts, the bars. This time, I was drowning my heartache and sorrow. After I flew back from Sudan but before I left for the Congo, msf had informed me that an exploratory mission in Pakistan, along the Afghan border, was in the works to assess the field in case there were new developments in the region. They promised to reserve the mission for me. My reward for a fine service record. That’s where I wanted to go. I saw Jean-Christophe Rufin again. He warned me, “Be careful, big guy. You’re not well. Not well at all.” Jean-Christophe’s a doctor. He

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can spot disease. But I didn’t listen. msf had no provision for looking after what would become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, a common affliction of aid workers who have witnessed great tragedies. When I returned from the Congo, a doctor did listen to me, but for an hour at most. No more. That wasn’t enough. Not enough to really find out. The fellow invites you into his office, presses a button, and informs you that you’ve got an hour. Puts you in some frame of mind for confiding in him. But the trouble is you have so much to say you don’t know where to begin. You don’t know how to broach the subject. You’re a little ashamed, too. And you stammer. The words come out wrong. Exactly an hour later, the doctor hands you the card of one of his colleagues who could help you. You ring the guy. He gives you an appointment for the next Tuesday. But you forget the appointment because you spend the weekend getting plastered, so when you finally collapse into bed Monday evening you don’t wake up until Wednesday morning. One day, as I was leaving the office of the person in charge of human resources, I bumped into an old colleague from Sudan. “What’re you up to?” “Well, I’m off to Pakistan. Work the border. An exploratory mission . . .” This was my gig. They were taking it away from me to give it to him. They’d gone too far. I turned on my heels and stormed into Anne-Marie Glougaen’s office. “I want to know what’s going on!” “You’ve become mnl, Marc.” “Meaning?” “Must not leave.” “How come?” “In Goma, your behaviour wasn’t appropriate for a humanitarian worker. If it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only one.” “What did I do?”

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“You resorted to violence to build the cholera camp. msf considers your behaviour unacceptable.” I couldn’t understand. I had to build a camp in less than a week, and they expected me to act as if I had a month. It was so unfair I was completely devastated. I felt more miserable than when I was wracked by nightmares. When I left msf I was incredulous; I wasn’t dreaming. Though I’d worked for other agencies, I’d always retained a sense of belonging to msf. It had been my first family in humanitarian relief. And it was betraying me, abandoning me. A call from Stéphane pulled me out of my alcoholic haze. We’d become friends in Malawi and I had sold him my motorcycle after I got back from Iraq. “What would you say about taking a trip to Russia, Marc?” “Russia?” “Yeah, check out Atlas Logistique, an ngo with offices on Île Saint-Louis. Bring your résumé. They’re in desperate need of a logistician.” When I showed up in the Atlas Logistique offices, I didn’t know a thing about the little agency. Hardly surprising since it had just opened and had fewer than six permanent employees. I found out that the project would take place in Kyrgyzstan. It involved distributing food aid. “We need a top-flight logistician to get the show off the ground. . . . Are you interested?” When I arrived in Bishkek, I knew right away I could pull it off. For one thing, this population was very different from Africans. They were mainly of Asian or Caucasian descent. There was no danger their faces would remind me of Rwandans. Besides, it was already cold. It was October 1994. Winter was coming and the little cement houses were poorly insulated. The only other ngo there was France Liberté. Its staff of six expats felt as lost as we did in this godforsaken part of the world.

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Actually, feeling I was at the end of the world helped me get over Rwanda. I got busy defining the tasks for everyone, so we could set up a reasonably efficient office. Then I came down with a weird illness: orchitis. My left ball swelled up bigger than a fist. In the Bishkek hospital, the doctor gave me a shot of tetracycline, but it didn’t do the trick. Meanwhile, the American embassy doctor warned me that if the disease didn’t subside within ten days, I’d have to be repatriated to France for treatment by a specialist. Then, one of my colleagues, who happened to be a dentist, told me that when a patient had an inflammation of the buccal cavity, the nurses and doctors recommended aspirin. I stuffed myself with the pills hoping to reduce the swelling. Some Kirghiz suggested vodka compresses. A bad idea: it aggravated the inflammation. The disease had started when I arrived. It left scant time to put the warehouses in order with the local employees I’d recruited or to organize the division of labour. A young rookie named Loïc (he would eventually work the desk at msf), felt lost. He was torn between obeying the mission chief or the logistics coordinator, namely me. The chief told him one thing, I said another. He finally decided to follow my instructions. So, Loïc was at my side, every evening, while I lay in bed with my recalcitrant ball, giving me the lowdown about his day and asking what he should do next. On the tenth day, the treatment was stopped and I was evacuated to France. In Paris, I was rushed to the hospital. My hemoglobin level had sunk dangerously low. They found a seven-millimetre bleeding ulcer in my stomach, the result of all the aspirins I’d taken. Blood had started to flood my organs. Another two days in the former Soviet Union and I would have departed this life. I needed four transfusions. Fortunately, I was at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. One of the doctors in the tropical disease ward was in Goma when I was.

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When he found out I was in the kidney infection section, he whisked me off to his ward. It took eight days to recover from the orchitis and the ulcer. The experience taught me that you need a paramedic on your team when you’re on a humanitarian mission. Thanks to Juju, I got to know Christophe. A former firefighter, he’d been trained in emergency rescue work. I asked him if he wanted to work with me in the former ussr. I justified his position on the new organizational chart that I offered my boss in Paris. “Give him a chance. He’ll be a lot more useful than a mission chief who nobody will listen to anyway.” Less than three days after my release from hospital, I departed for Kyrgyzstan. Atlas Logistique had fired the mission chief and appointed me to run the project. And Christophe became a logistician. I’d assembled a little family in Bishkek. It saved my life. We were on friendly terms with the Russians. It started to snow. We cut across the splendid mountains beyond the Himalayas to deliver food. Lake Issyk-Kul, the lake that never freezes, was always deep blue. I couldn’t imagine better therapy. The nightmares gradually faded. My thoughts turned elsewhere. I could laugh again. I didn’t celebrate New Year’s Eve that year. I needed to review the fucking year I’d gone through with Goma, Sudan, Bosnia, my woman and the ulcer. I spent the evening alone outdoors, gazing at the flame held by the lovely Kyrgyz Statue of Liberty in the middle of the city. Alone with a half-litre of vodka and my thoughts. I knew I must be getting better because at least I could think. A week after the New Year’s celebrations, a European Union team paid us a visit in Bishkek. I knew one of the members. He was just back from Tajikistan where he had run into an msf mission. He told me that one evening when he was there, he was having a

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drink with some people when the conversation turned to Goma. Marc Vachon’s name came up. A madman, they said. A guy who beat niggers, they said. To listen to them, I must have committed every sin in the humanitarian religion: ripping off cars, selling weapons. I’d acted like a secret spy. When I heard all this, I was insensed. I worked in Kyrgyzstan, for Christ’s sake! Over there, you don’t accuse someone of spying, even in jest. Especially if it’s not true. I called msf in Paris. Someone named Martine Lochin in human resources answered. “Look, you don’t want me anymore; that’s okay, that’s your privilege. But tell your bunch of idiots on the ground I don’t want to hear them mention my name again. They don’t know what happened. They spread rumours like some trashy tabloid. You and msf aren’t being fair, after I gave you so many years of service . . .” “Yes, Marc, but we can’t keep people on the ground from talking. We can’t shut them up.” “Fine, Martine. So nothing can stop me from going there. If I hear one more remark, I’ll go to Dushanbe in Tajikistan personally and settle things my way.” I was serious. “Calm down, Marc. When you get back to Paris, come and see us and we’ll talk about it.” “We’ll see . . .” The call really hurt. But, since my resurrection, I felt nothing would ever put me down for the count again. Kyrgyzstan was starting to get boring. Too little action. I was spinning my wheels. And things were beginning to smell fishy with the boss at France Liberté. The organization had a crazy program for distributing beets and canned pickles. Pickles have little nutritional value. If there was enough money, why not buy something else, sugar for example, or pasta, or flour? In that area in particular, where everyone has a garden patch, people there can make their own pickles.

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I’d had enough of Kyrgyzstan. Partially on my recommendation, Loïc became mission chief. Christophe would stay on another year as a logistician. I returned to France, determined to iron things out with msf. The msf emergency coordinator concluded our interview by saying, “Okay, Marc. We’ll give you another chance.” I have no idea why he wanted to give me another chance. Particularly since I hadn’t asked for one, or offered any excuses for my conduct in the Congo. Whatever. “Good thing you’re here,” he said. “We need someone like you in Guinea. Refugees are arriving from Sierra Leone. We’d like you to build some camps there!” Guinea was slated to receive 2,000 to 3,000 refugees from Sierra Leone daily. An msf nursing team was already handling vaccinations there. We were preparing to set up a mission that would liaise with unhcr to improve camp organization. Within two days, most of the work was done. I’d identified the lands that would make good campsites and I’d bought maps of the country. Instead of establishing one big camp, we would set up ten little centres on the riverbank, capable of serving 5,000 to 10,000 people each. In the morning, I went to the border and I was impressed by the wave of refugees streaming across it. A flood of human beings that took hours to end. Men and women who were silent, as people so often are when they’ve witnessed horror. But curiously enough, at the end of the day, when we walked around, we didn’t see a single refugee. Where had they disappeared to? Guinean families couldn’t have absorbed 2,000 refugees a day so quickly. The nurses were panicking. They had to vaccinate the children. But where were the children? Instead of the expected 500 to 600 vaccinations a day, the nurses were doing no more than a dozen. It was bizarre. The nurses formed three teams to find the children, but in vain.

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There must be something we didn’t understand. But I kept that thought to myself, or I’d risk being labeled a troublemaker again. At dawn one day, I headed to the frontier. When I arrived, there was nobody there. The barrier was down; the guards were asleep. I settled in the car, sipped my coffee and waited. At 6:00 a.m., the barrier was raised, and out of nowhere, the refugees poured in. I estimated there were about 1,800. Then, the stream gradually diminished. And after 9:00 a.m. in the morning, not a single refugee came across. I went to talk it over with the border guards. “Are there that many of them every morning?” “Of course, every day’s the same.” “Has this been going on long?” “Nearly a month. Uh, isn’t that so, corporal? A month . . .” I couldn’t understand it. Two thousand refugees a day for a whole month. Sixty thousand people in all. How did they manage to vanish? “But where are they?” “They’re working, of course.” “How come?” “They’re workers, boss. They arrive in the morning; they leave in the evening.” I couldn’t help laughing. It all became clear. There we were, gullible aid workers, waiting for nonexistent refugees. “What are you trying to say? You mean if I come back this afternoon, I’ll see them leave?” “Feel free.” In the evening I observed the same bunch of phony refugees leaving Guinea on their way to Sierra Leone. We were just a bunch of bleeding hearts taken for a ride: we’d forgotten that there can often be considerable daily human displacement in Africa without it foreshadowing a tragedy. We had a good laugh about it. Then we had to ask ourselves whether we would pursue the

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mission or withdraw. Alas, a few months later, history proved us right. War really broke out in Sierra Leone. Our camps received real refugees actually at risk. Fortunately the structures were already in place, the material ready and the latrines functional. In Guinea, I struck up a friendship with an Englishman from Oxfam. Richard Luff was an engineer in charge of water. We became pals. Before leaving, Richard suggested I send my résumé to Oxfam uk. “If you’re fed up with msf, it might be a change for you to work with us for a while. We’re constantly on the lookout for logisticians . . .” I did it before returning to Paris to ask msf if there were other missions for me. Within a week, Oxfam summoned me to Oxford for interviews. Two days later, I was offered a year-long contract as a logistician. It was the first time Oxfam had created the position. In Goma, the organization had realized that it was in bad need of one when it found itself with water reservoirs without the nuts and bolts to mount them. This time, the break with msf was my decision. Just as I had done at 15, and again at 26, I had decided to leave a family.

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19 Kabul

I traveled to Kabul with Anne, an Irish Catholic. Oxfam was reputed to be particularly sensitive to gender equity issues. My friends and I had even made bets about how long I would last with Anne in Afghanistan before I went crazy or got fired. She was in the driver’s seat. A word of criticism from her about me and I’d get the sack. I was walking on eggshells. Anne seemed pleasant and professional, but her Irish brogue could cut glass, and it was a real struggle for us to understand each other. And we had to work as a team to open Kabul. The country was still in the hands of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance fighters and other armed factions who had resisted Russian occupation. With the Russians gone, armed groups captured Kabul, but

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they failed to forge a power-sharing agreement. All too soon, canon fire and missiles did the talking again. Then, a movement of young students emerged. They’d been trained in the madrassas, the Koranic schools in tribal regions of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. Known as the Taliban, these young people led by their enigmatic leader, Mullah Omar, advocated order based on the sharia, Islamic law, condemning, at least in theory, the drug traffic that was crushing the country, forbidding women from working, etc. The armed wing of the Taliban began to march on Afghanistan, encountering little resistance. By May 1995, the Taliban had seized Jalalabad, a symbolic city in the South, and were continuing to advance toward Kabul. The capital had just undergone heavy bombardment. What with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s men, Rashid Dostom’s fighters, and Massoud’s Tajiks launching raids on one another, with the ensuing counterattacks, the country was embroiled in open conflict. I had to find offices for the Oxfam headquarters, purchase vehicles, hire staff, drivers, guards, secretaries, set up the radio and train an operator. Meanwhile, Anne had to design projects. She worked with small local women’s groups. I rented a lovely house just behind the Red Cross. I had already found offices nearby. As a good neighbour, I did a courtesy call to the International Committee of the Red Cross. There I met an absolutely gorgeous redhead, five-foot-nine, lithe, with hair cascading down to the small of her back, provocative breasts and a smile that would charm a mujahideen. A Swiss woman as lovely as a postcard. “Hi, I’m Laurence.” I knew right away I’d like to hear that accent more often. Two days later, I ran into her again, at the United Nations Club. She invited me to a party the Red Cross was throwing in a couple of days. Throughout my stay in Afghanistan, we were inseparable.

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A little later, the fellow responsible for restoring the Greater Kabul drinking water supply arrived. A fifty-something engineering professor from an English university, this solid professional was undaunted by the immense task. Altogether a fascinating man. I shouldered the logistics responsibility for implementing his plans. I had to go to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to find out if an Ariana Afghan Airlines plane could land to load material. I was having a great time. I conducted an exploratory mission by truck to Herat in the northwest. It is undoubtedly the loveliest town in the country. On weekends, Laurence and I left Kabul and visited other mythic sites, such as the Panjshir Valley, a little enclave in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. There Commander Massoud had earned the nickname “Lion of Panjshir,” holding out for years, first against the Russians then against the Taliban. I crossed the famous Khyber Pass a number of times. This extraordinary mountain route, linking Pakistan and Afghanistan, is 35 miles long, one mile at its widest point and a mere 50 feet at its narrowest. I had to negotiate with the Taliban to let trucks from Pakistan through. The Taliban were pleasant and cooperative with us. My stay in Afghanistan was enjoyable, but I knew it wouldn’t last. The final explosion was brewing. Inevitably, the violence would precipitate an enormous upheaval. Word spread that the Taliban had reached Jalalabad. On occasion, I managed to find out what our employees really felt about the situation. It was a mixture of excitement and anxiety. My assistant was married to a schoolteacher who no longer went to the school because the streets in the town were too dangerous. In a near whisper, the gardener confided that what Kabul really needed was a return to order. Peace and order. Another problem with Afghanistan was that most of the intellectuals had been educated in the former ussr. In the process, they’d acquired notions that were unworkable in a

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society dominated by religion. For example, our gardener had studied family planning in Moscow. But when he got back to his country, he found the very term was taboo as far as the mujahideen or the Taliban were concerned. It is simply not part of Koranic tradition. Unable to get a job to match his education, he recycled himself as a guard. There were countless others like him wandering the streets of Kabul. They tried to hide their feelings of helplessness and confusion behind flowing pants and tunics, the traditional shalwar kameez. To make matters worse, irreconcilable divisions along ethnic or clan lines undermined the unity of the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerilla forces. There were endless clashes between the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pashtuns. When you got a chance to speak to Kabulis, most of them admitted a preference for the Taliban. Kabulis were eager to see them march on the capital. They’d had enough of the constant violence, the uncertainty, the world’s indifference and the drug trade. Of course, neither the warlords nor the Afghan exiles in London and Paris would ever admit it. The warlords and the exiles condemned the Taliban even before they came to power. They refused to acknowledge how disgusted their fellow citizens were with the status quo. Posing as honest citizens, the drug traffickers opposed the Taliban out of self-interest. Human rights advocates were justifiably concerned about radical Islamic laws instituted in Taliban-controlled territories. But the average Kabuli was prepared to sacrifice some liberty for greater security and a measure of dignity. That’s what the Taliban promised. It’s only afterwards that they went off the rails. It’s when they went too far that they became unpopular, held in contempt. So, I watched as the Taliban inched their way toward Kabul. I met them in Jalalabad a couple of times. The women there were not really worse off than their sisters in the capital. They were all veiled except for the little girls on their way to school. Sure, the Taliban forced women to walk behind their husbands, but this

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had been the practice for centuries. The Taliban imposed the wearing of the chador and the burka, but they had already been worn by 95 percent of the women for safety reasons. When a mujahideen spotted a bit of flesh or ran across a woman from another tribe, he figured he could take every liberty. It was easy to guess the international players contributing to this tragedy. The Pakistanis were allied with the Pashtuns. The Russian Mafia vied for control of the opium market with the Italians, who in turn exported the product to the U.S.A. These shadowy foreigners kept a low profile, but you could recognize their methods. The opium was processed in the countryside and packed in little bags. As we lived near Kabul’s main road, at night we could see a tank pass by, then a second, followed by a half dozen trucks, each guarded by five or six heavily armed soldiers. They crossed the city to deliver their precious cargo to some unknown clients. The tanks weren’t used just to protect the trucks, which were already well guarded. The tanks helped extricate trucks that got bogged down in the mud. The warlords might well be locked in a power struggle, but they agreed on one thing: maintain the flow of drugs. And soon the drugs showed up on the streets of Paris and New York. The huge dividends generated by this traffic were then shared among the armed groups, who hastened to stock up on munitions so they could recommence hostilities. They meted out summary justice. Anyone found guilty of a crime, no matter how petty, was killed on the spot. Without any form of trial. It had to explode. It was going to explode. It did explode. But I left before that happened. My mission was over. I returned to Oxford to take care of my next assignment. I said my farewells to Laurence. I got full marks for my work and permission to go back to Paris for a couple of weeks of R&R. Oxfam brought me back down to earth in a hurry. I was told that Liberia was now on the agenda, that I was urgently expected in

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Oxford and would soon be heading to Africa. But war had just broken out in Chechnya, and I wondered why we weren’t deploying there instead. I kept asking that question in team meetings. Oxfam oldtimers made no secret of the fact that Chechnya was just too dangerous. The emergency service favoured a mission, but the administrators were too attached to the mortgages of their cute houses in Oxford to risk life and limb in Chechnya. I kept insisting, but no one was willing to explain why Chechnya was being turned down. I was starting to get royally pissed off. Then there was a colleague who was responsible for matters related to the water supply. The Queen had decorated him for his work in the Congo after the Rwandan genocide. He rose to thunderous applause in the room. But I had my reservations— he may have brought the reservoirs, but I knew who found the water. It wasn’t Oxfam; it was one of my msf friends. It was increasingly galling to hear the boss rattle on about his trip to Haiti, while I was told to shut up every time I broached the subject of Chechnya. People waxed enthusiastic about their little gender equality projects. It reminded me of obese people at weight-loss meetings engaging in self-congratulation. More and more, I despised the hypocrisy of the guys who played the gender equity card during the day and then went to the pubs at night and made sexist remarks that would have made a hooligan blush. They were far more likely to discuss tits and ass than to debate a single paragraph in the code on women’s rights. Even more incredibly, in the meetings, we got cassettes that went something like this: “Listen, I brought you back a song that the team in country X, where I’ve just been, has dedicated to you, in recognition of your commitment to the rights of women . . .” Then someone would press the button, and we heard the ridiculous song in a local language that we didn’t understand at all: Laoulile sibew, lawouala sibwa. . . And the fifty employees gathered round the director would sigh, shed a tear and nod their heads

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when in fact, they would give anything in the world to be somewhere else so they wouldn’t have to listen to this crap. But they stayed and went on beaming stupidly. It really pissed me off. And it was obvious. I got up and stormed out. Then the brass summoned me. Paul Smith-Lomas was the one who greeted me. He’s a guy I respect. Later he would become the head of the agency. “Is there a problem, Marc?” “Yes, I’m bored. We don’t go to Liberia anymore because you don’t feel like it. You don’t want us to go to Chechnya because you’re afraid. You want me to do petty jobs that I consider useless. Damn right, I’m not happy.” “Take it easy, Marc. I see things differently. You’re going to leave soon and it won’t have anything to do with gender equity.” “Thanks, but forget it, Paul. It’s over. I don’t believe in the way we do things anymore.” I shook his hand and left.

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20 The Blond African

My second msf-Holland mission took me to N’Zeto, Angola. Angola was another Mozambique, except there was a war going on. In Mozambique, renamo fought frelimo. In Angola, Jonas Savimbi’s unita (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) led his rebel forces against President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos’s mlpa (the Popular Liberation Movement of Angola). The plan was to stay there three months before taking over logistics coordination in Luanda, the capital. But Ian, the guy I was replacing, had other ideas: he wanted to stay on because he’d fallen for an American woman there. That pissed me off: first, because after spending years on regional missions, I had dreamt of finally landing a post in town;

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second, because the job involved a substantial raise in pay. One of us had to give in: I handed in my resignation and prepared to leave N’Zeto. A radio call came from msf in Luanda informing me that some un Development Programme (undp) people wanted to meet me. When I went to meet my replacement in Luanda, I dropped by undp offices. The un mission chief said he would have a job for me in two weeks: “We’re looking for a logistics coordinator to help set up the national reconciliation offices and facilities for the Institute for Reintegration of Ex-soldiers (irsem).” The program, provided for in the peace accords, involved demobilizing rebel fighters and reintegrating them into Angolan society. The soldiers, living in un-funded camps, were supposed to undergo training so they could swap their Kalashnikovs for shovels. The program was running behind schedule so undp needed a logistician used to working under pressure. A week later, I moved into a lovely house overlooking the ocean, near a Chinese restaurant, on the peninsula in Luanda. I stayed in that house for a year, strolling around the three rooms, living like a king. To avoid having a bunch of expats swarming my place, I invited an Angolan security guard with msf France to stay at the house. A cleaning woman came by once a week to give the place a once over. Work was a ball. There was a plane almost entirely at my disposal to fly around the country. My trips had top priority. Everyone else had to adjust. I spent half my time in the air. I’d drive to the airport early in the morning and wouldn’t return before nightfall. I always had the same pilot. He became a good friend. From up there in the clouds, Angola looked a lot like Mozambique. I saw every part of the country: Malanje, Huambo, Cuito Benguela, Mushika, Luena. I crisscrossed the land, meeting irsem authorities, visiting their offices and estimating the cost of

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reopening them. I compiled an equipment list, drew up a budget, and submitted it to the financial department. Once the expenditures were approved, I went back to the locality to supervise the start of operations. I even fixed up the irsem offices in Luanda. They were located on the thirteenth floor of a building. Move over, Leonardo DiCaprio: I was the King of the World. I rode around in a big car with a chauffeur, if you please. I had a lovely house, a girlfriend who was the very embodiment of African beauty—Paola could have danced in a rapper video—a princely salary, all the sun I could take, an iron constitution and carefree youth. What more could I ask? Paola went to the market to buy fresh fish, bottles of wine and whisky, then would come back with two or three girlfriends. They’d laugh and talk, while the aroma of deep-fried fish filled the house. I stayed out of their conversation. I was delighted to see these war survivors radiant. Somehow, they were turning their backs on the misfortunes. Even when they talked politics, humour was always present. I watched them as the black night enveloped their dark skin. Seeing them made me happy. At the office, things deteriorated when we changed bosses. A Rwandan got the job. After the massacres in 1994, the un felt a bit guilty about Rwanda and started promoting Rwandans all over Africa. The un rationale: Rwandans who had survived the genocide could cope with any crisis. In fact, the people who were given these posts weren’t even in the country during the genocide. The new boss refused to learn Portuguese. Why should he? un regulations didn’t cover it. Why be overzealous? He spoke English and French. That was enough; the company could hire a translator. He started changing the staff, dismissing Westerners, replacing them with Africans: Ethiopians, Cameroonians, Ghanaians. Black power was in. Often missing with these African bureaucrats, who spend their time at cocktails, is a sense of logic. It’s not something they

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learned at school. Their string of diplomas from the Sorbonne or Yale don’t help. Decisions must be based on careful analysis of what’s at stake. This calls for critical thinking. But all too often, they let emotions guide them in issues concerning Africa. They become unreasonable and unrealistic. I was the only logistician and one of the few whites not to be transferred. I was the blond African. But there was a growing feeling of unease in the office. Meanwhile, the un turned its back on Angola. Money wasn’t coming in. unita soldiers were confined to their camps like beasts in a cage though six to eight months had gone by since they had laid down their arms. They were running out of patience. The effort to Africanize the staff resulted in serious errors. Angolan physicians recruited in Luanda and likely to be promlpa, administered the camps inhabited by the former rebels. The doctors treated the unita soldiers like dogs. With my own eyes, I saw our planes land with cargos of medicine. In the evening, the administrators took them, loaded them into cars heading to Luanda to supply their private clinics or pharmacies. The death rate among unita men in the camps was distressingly high. The men were afflicted by every possible disease: cholera, malaria, dysentery. Yet, at the United Nations, there were endless speeches: “Peace is cool.” Don’t worry, be happy. un mission offices in Huambo held an exhibition on the un Blue Helmets. In Uige, the un’s Indian contingent dubbed the camp “Xanadu” meaning “Paradise.” Meanwhile unita soldiers were left to perish with nothing but a soldier’s pride. The pot was about to boil. Rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was already threatening to renew hostilities. The world reacted with scorn, dismissing him as nothing but an old drug trafficker incapable of donning the mantle of peace. How wrong we were: he risked losing his stranglehold on his men if he failed to stop them from dying like rats. Evaluators arrived from New York. I showed them around the country and

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the camps. When they saw what was happening, they realized that the peace accords were destined to fail. They said, “We have to revise our methods, and quickly, Marc. We’ll appoint an independent administrator to work with you. Do whatever you think is best. You’ll work with our offices in South Africa for all our purchases.” Sure, they were giving me the tools to be a little more efficient, but I was bound to make enemies in our offices and the Angolan business community, accustomed to receiving manna from the un. Then an incident occurred a few days later. The United Nations requires tenders for infrastructure projects and programs. I had just launched a tender for a project in Huambo, valued at nearly a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t know how the man managed to sneak into my bedroom while I was asleep. Paola was in my arms. I awoke with cold metal pressed against my temple. I found myself staring at the business end of a Makarov. I looked up and saw the face of the guy with his finger on the trigger. An Angolan in civvies. I was sure he was just some starving guy come to rob me. My mind went into overdrive as I tried to keep a lid on the situation, give the burglar what he wanted and persuade him to leave before something irreparable happened. Meanwhile, Paola was sleeping like a baby. “The light!” said the intruder. I obeyed. Paola mumbled, and I caressed her shoulder to soothe her. She turned toward me, her eyes still misty with sleep. Then she grasped the situation, and her face became etched with terror. I pulled up the sheet to cover her nakedness before the guy got even worse ideas. But he knew what he wanted: “Tomorrow, you do business with Mr. Oliveira for the Huambo market. Understand?” He lifted the safety catch. “Yeah, I get it. Easy. No fasse mal.”

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He vanished the way he’d come. I spent the night trying to calm Paola down. She didn’t fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning. There was no way I was going to make a habit of being awakened at three in the morning with a gun stuck to my temple. I got up, shaved, put on a tie, and drove to the office. I went to see my boss and handed in my resignation. I told him I’d lost confidence in undp. No one was addressing the medical issues in the camps. And as for security, the Blue Helmets were not up to the task. I could foresee the resumption of hostilities, and I didn’t want to be responsible for what was about to happen. I left. At the time, msf France’s Luanda bureau, located a hundred yards from my house, was run by Catherine. She was married to Didier, a doctor whom I’d gotten to know in Goma. Zaire had forged an unshakeable bond between Didier and me. But it took some time before his wife learned to appreciate me. The msf logistician’s moniker was Moustache. The old firebrand was fighting a losing battle with the booze. My departure from undp coincided with msf’s decision to sack him. He had left on a two-week vacation in France. But three weeks went by before he returned, drunk as a skunk. To make matters worse, he was going through a divorce. Every night he got hammered. Finally, Didier politely asked him to go back. msf France hired me as a logistics coordinator for Luanda. It was ironic because I was back where I was supposed to be when I took the Dutch job. But there was no comparison with the original situation. First, I’d just spent four months working for the un, earning three times as much as I’d get with msf. In addition, on one of my Benguela missions, I’d become acquainted with a charming little demoiselle from France, a nurse named Viviane. We hit it off from the start. Back then, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) was the dis-

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ease of choice in humanitarian circles. It is transmitted by the tsetse fly. Every organization allocated a budget to fight the epidemic but famines got short shrift. In a way, famines weren’t a priority because, it was claimed, they were part of the permanent landscape in Africa. Not a year went by without people dying of starvation. There’d always be time, we reckoned, to get back to it. So for food projects we had to make do with modest means. I was determined to build a new food centre at an estimated cost of $75,000. “Make sure it doesn’t exceed $25,000,” I was told. But help came from an unexpected source. Ian’s American girlfriend. Ian was the guy from Holland to whom I’d turned over the msf job in Luanda. She had been appointed administrator for Angola by usaid, the big American development aid agency. She wasn’t bitter. Quite the contrary. After all, had I insisted, I could have arranged to have her boyfriend leave Luanda. I left instead, allowing the two turtledoves to get on with their honeymoon. I invited her to Benguela. I showed her around and described my plans to improve the setup. She understood. She wanted to do even more. The camp needed some trees, she thought. Oh! And a little more colour. And why not add a play area for the children while we were at it? The budget soared to nearly $100,000. But she promised to find funds to complement msf’s allocation. I had to return to Luanda. I made the rounds of our various missions, making sure they had everything they needed. Didier and I also went to assess the importance of establishing a base to fight sleeping sickness. Then I returned with Catherine to sign the agreement. Life was good. And just like that, I fell in love with Viviane. Not only was she superb, she was a woman of considerable culture. I believed I’d finally learned how to be happy. After a few months on the ground, Didier and Catherine chose

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not to renew their contracts. Didier wanted to reorient his medical career. He would dedicate himself to the fight against hiv/aids. Enough theory. Now, he needed patients so he could gain practical experience. Catherine decided to follow him. On a beautiful, sunny day in late December 1996, I ripped open a telex from Paris. It was intended for Catherine. “Call this number. Confirm arrival of new mission chief. Marc Vachon must leave before this date.” It was baffling. The message had arrived on msf’s 25th anniversary. Belgium was throwing a huge party for the entire diplomatic corps and the local authorities in Luanda. There’d be a barbecue and an orchestra to boot. In the absence of Didier, who’d gone to Paris, there was nobody but Catherine and me to represent msf France, the mother organization. I had to go to the event. Garbed in a tie and an elegant jacket, I stood at the entrance, shaking hands with the guests. In my inside pocket was the paper calling for my departure before the new mission chief arrived. I called Paris to find out what in the world was going on. “Sorry, Marc, but the new head doesn’t want to work with you.” “But I don’t even know the guy!” “Yeah, but he’s heard about you. Remember Kinshasa, Marc. People weren’t pleased . . .” So that’s what it was: they were blaming me for refusing to go and open a purchase unit in Kinshasa. I’d heard stories about Kabila, who was marching on Zaire to topple President Mobutu. Why had msf decided to set up a supply centre on that powder keg? I had suggested Namibia instead. So, if they had taken umbrage about my rejecting their original choice, there must have been other issues they were hiding from me. I shopped my résumé around. A few days later, a call came from the Norwegian Refugee Council (nrc). They needed a logistician to handle Angolan refugees arriving from the Congo.

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I worked with nrc for a while, until I became exhausted. I’d had enough of Angola, the Angolans, the violence. Luanda had become one of the most dangerous cities I had ever known. A flood of weapons had eluded state control. My girlfriend was 250 miles away. I’d had enough. I’d become aggressive, irritable. I had to get out of there before I did something stupid again. Viviane had also decided to leave Angola, so I waited for her and we flew to France together. In Paris, we booked a flight to Quito, Ecuador. The two of us were sort of homeless. Ecuador was beautiful, but after seven weeks’ vacation, we wanted to go back. I hadn’t been with Viviane long. And in Ecuador, alone together for the first time, without professional concerns, we lacked subjects of conversation. Then msf Luxembourg contacted us. There was a post opening up for a couple in Mali. The little four-year community development mission was particularly appealing since Mali was a country at peace. The project was supposed to be established in Sélingué, fewer than two hours from Bamako, the capital. Sélingué was a new town built to accommodate villagers displaced by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. The Mali mission was the best assignment in my entire career. Not surprisingly, it was also the longest: it lasted a year. I wasn’t working with populations who were destroying their way of life. They were building it, making it better. Our project attempted to bring the villages together so they could employ a labour force to construct their health centre. We provided the technical support, equipment and know-how. The objective was to create associations of 15,000 people from about ten villages to make the centre viable. In addition to delivering quality services to the population, it provided much needed relief for the Malian health system, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. The Malians had wisely opted for a system of cooperatives known as cescom (community health centres).

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This was the hidden face of Africa, the most important as I was to discover. An Africa that was active, cheerful, peace-loving, hospitable, committed and dignified. Mali is poor but courageous. And its music is divine. Viviane and I were replacing a couple who were cool, peaceand-love, long-haired. The kind of people who eat with their fingers in the same bowl as the Africans, watch a hen’s throat being slit because it’s traditional, you know. But they had neglected business. As a result, the mission was well behind schedule. A year after it opened, all it had to show was half a local health centre. And the half they’d built was rickety. The doors were all wrong, the walls were shaky. People at msf Luxembourg fulminated against the report we filed on the condition of the building. They thought we were treating them like rookies. So, headquarters sent someone for an assessment. After a week with us, he concluded that we were right. Worse still, the couple had neglected to liaise with the district hospital, so it felt threatened by the msf projects. It was a mistake to equip the community health centres while forgetting about the general hospital, which handled the worst cases. What was the point of supplying our cescoms with radios if the hospital lacked the ambulances to pick up the gravely ill patients? We worked with the Luxembourg representative to review the project. One of the issues was hospital repair. We increased the budgets by a paltry $8,000. Headquarters gave its okay. And we could finally get down to work. The buildings we constructed were first-rate. We had 26 wells dug. We also repaired about 40 drillings and the ferry people used to cross the river. Things went well with Viviane, too. We were happy. I even had an inflatable dinghy so I could go fishing. I took msf representative Olivier Marchetti fishing. We’d become good friends ever since I

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had invited him to take part in a polio vaccination campaign. We had asked him to look after the Bozo people, the men of the Niger River. At that time of the year, it was hard for the Bozos to reach the health centres. We borrowed a big motorboat and three of us—my friend Cissé, the msf France rep and I—went to see them. It was a fascinating expedition. We even vaccinated people we met on the lake, without leaving our boats. Within a year, we had set up four cescoms. Almost all of them were operational with regard to infrastructure and staff. In 12 short months, we accomplished what had been projected to take four years. We made up for the time our predecessors had lost. Our replacements would have all the time they needed to train the technical staff. Oddly enough, msf Luxembourg was unwilling to renew our contract. We had one last demographic study to carry out with the msf France team in Mali. But one morning, I got a call: “You’re not going. It’s off!” msf Luxembourg had asked Paris not to let me go to Mali. Why? Were they afraid their staff would take umbrage if we were successful with local populations? That’s when I decided I’d had enough of msf. I’d bent over backwards to overlook the things they’d done in the past. I’d swallowed my pride and gone back to work for them. But it was clear that they rewarded mediocrity and considered success a sin. That’s what humanitarian work can be like: a big heart is enough to excuse incompetence. It was disgusting. I felt for Viviane. They were punishing her to get even with me. The missions had been difficult for her. She had fought to be accepted in a society of machos. She’d succeeded where many had failed. Of course, I must confess we exceeded our simple mandate of building health centres. We got actively involved in Malian society. In fact, a soccer team with msf Luxembourg colours won a provincial championship. A year later, I happened to find out that msf Luxembourg had received an award from the Malian governor. No one thought to

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tell us about it, even though we had been the principal architects of the success. That was the last straw. I swore I’d never work with msf again. I’ve kept my word. An idea I had been toying with for months began to take shape. It had all begun in Kenya after our Sudanese fiasco. The administrator had succeeded where I had failed because he was a better communicator. He filed a better report. In Mali, a doctor working with us had asked me to find a study grant for him. So I went to the Canadian embassy in Bamako for the information. I had a friendly chat with the lady handling cultural and scientific exchanges. I saw her again two days later with her husband. She inquired about my background and was astonished to learn that I was a high school dropout. “Did you ever think of going back to school and getting a diploma?” “No. Uh, yes. Not really.” “Look, I’ll see if there are any programs available in project management, international cooperation or something like that. I had no idea what she was talking about, but it didn’t matter, she seemed nice enough. Some time later, she called and said she had two letters for me. The first was a description of the international management program at the École nationale d’administration publique (enap), and the other referred to a master’s degree program in project management at Université du Québec. That’s how I got the urge to go back to school, and it grew stronger every day.

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I opted for the enap program (École nationale d’administration publique). I had little choice. With my experience in the field, I couldn’t carry on as a logistician. I didn’t want to keep moving horizontally. I had to climb the ladder or disappear. And to move up I needed a diploma. Assessing my professional background and my references (Jean-Christophe and Geneviève), enap suggested I enroll in a short 15-credit program. If I earned the certificate, I would be admitted to do a dess (a graduate diploma). And upon successful completion of that stage, I could enter the master’s program. While I waited to enroll—the deadline had passed for 1998–1999—Viviane and I applied for a job with Action contre la faim (Action Against Hunger, acf). Founded in 1979 by a

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group of French intellectuals, including Françoise Giroud, Marek Halter, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Guy Sorman, acf was known as “French Doctors, the Second Generation.” Given the war in Afghanistan, they wanted to focus on hunger, which had been considered only one of numerous humanitarian concerns. During the interviews, it became evident that our many years of experience enhanced our candidacy. The only obstacle was that we insisted on working as a couple, whatever the destination or nature of the mission. Three days later, a call came offering us Khartoum in Sudan. I would be starting two or three weeks before Viviane joined me. It was just what we wanted. acf’s Khartoum mission was in crisis. A row had broken out among the employees. Every evening, the girls were in tears and the Spanish mission chief seemed to have lost control of the situation. Clearly he was not made for the job, but he didn’t give a damn. He’d just married a Sudanese woman and he intended to live in the country. The watsan specialist was on his first mission, amiable but inexperienced. acf operated two missions in the south, in Wao and Juba, and one in the north, in Khartoum. I was afraid my time in the South a few years before would be held against me. But nobody made anything of it. In the end, I got along well with the Sudanese, both the Christians in the south and the Muslims in the north. I landed in the midst of the great famine of 1998. People were starving to death. Nearly 10,000 Dinka had perished in Wao alone. The trouble was that the Sudanese crisis had lasted about a decade so the agencies had lost interest. This was true not only of acf but of the other ngos as well. At the time, the humanitarian community was far more preoccupied with the issue of human rights than with urgent human needs. Every ngo had its human rights expert, who reduced the Sudanese conflict to a convenient caricature: the Muslims in the north were the villains; the Christians and Animists in the south were the victims.

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I didn’t share that view. I saw the government in the north go to great lengths to solve the human crisis when not a single ngo was willing to lend a hand. I recall a humanitarian meeting in which a woman from an American company opined that the mission’s objective was to help topple the regime. I got up and left: first, the remark showed a total lack of respect for the Sudanese present; second, we didn’t know whether we were being bugged; third, I’m sorry, but I’m an aid worker, not a politician. Regime change isn’t part of my job description. And besides, the view that the southern forces had sprouted angel’s wings pissed me off. I knew these fighters; I’d witnessed their cruelty. In the camps where I worked, three quarters of the refugees refused to go back home to the south because they dreaded the anarchy and violence of the warlords. So much for the good guys. In fact, contrary to tired Western clichés about Sudan, the guiding principles of these people exhausted by years of war were self-interest, opportunism and self-preservation. However, preconceived ideas were not the sole impediments to effective humanitarian intervention. Too often, talk trumped action. For example when health centres became so run down they had to be repaired, not one of the ngos who bemoaned the lot of the refugees was prepared to invest in renovations. So the health centres had to be closed. At acf we just buttoned our lips and went to work. The same behaviour characterized the vaccination campaign: over cocktails, aid workers deplored the living conditions of the Sudanese, and yet no one did anything about it. Again acf was the only one that actually dealt with the situation. Khartoum is a big empty city sitting in the desert. Nothing worth seeing there! The name “Khartoum” comes from an Arabic word meaning “Elephant’s Trunk.” The junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile is in the shape of a trunk. There were five million inhabitants, three million of whom were refugees. It’s an ancient city. Then there’s the new district around the airport, consisting

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of permanent dwellings, marble palaces, and castles. The town is like the middle of a gigantic disc, encircled by millions of displaced Sudanese fleeing the war and clustered in ethnic groups. There was a corner for the people from the South, an area for the Dinka and Nuer, a portion inhabited by the Nuba, another occupied by the displaced people from the Ethiopian and Chadian frontiers. Measles and cholera frequently attacked this mass of refugees So the government had divided the camp into a number of sections and delegated their administration to various ngos. Khartoum is a desert city. So drillers were forced to dig more than 500 feet deep to access water. During the day, the temperature sometimes rose to 50°C. Rain brought flooding. It was the kind of microclimate that seemed like a concentration of bad luck. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir headed the government. A protégé of Hassan al-Turabi, this shady politician was determined to establish State Islamism. So there was no alcohol in the town. But the women weren’t covered like Saudi women; Sudanese women who wore the veil did so mainly to shield themselves from the sun. Before the sharia, Islamic law, was instituted, Khartoum had a reputation for being a city of libations and endless parties. Clearly, times had changed. Like all big African cities, Khartoum survived on resourcefulness, trade and the hope for a better future. Big Western oil companies kept a low profile, although in 2002 the un would accuse them of shamefully exploiting the country. The Chinese represented the largest foreign presence. About 7,000 of them had come to work on the construction of the pipeline that would carry the oil to Port Sudan. In fact, two thousand of them actually worked on construction. The other 5,000 ensured the security of the sites. Clearly, the Chinese Army was deployed in Sudan. It was only years later that the Americans returned. The Kuwaitis were also absent. They resented Sudan for siding with

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Saddam Hussein when he occupied Kuwait in 1991. The rupture had occurred when Kuwait had just finished constructing its new embassy in Khartoum. The building was superb but empty. There were Canadian oil engineers from Calgary in Khartoum. They seemed friendly enough though I didn’t really get to know them. Once, they invited me to a barbecue. They were heavily criticized in an inflammatory un report. As far as I was concerned, the accusations weren’t entirely fair. At least these people had worked in the country and hadn’t turned their backs on it like everyone else, including the un. I saw them reach into their pockets to fund the refugee camps; donations made far from the eyes of the camera, unlike all those “generous souls” in the West. It’s easy to pontificate when you never set foot in countries at risk. Perhaps history will record that these enterprises helped promote peace in Sudan. Because they believed, though not necessarily on moral grounds, in the economic potential of the country. Sudan is a fine example of how the economy can drive the peace process. Today, if there are ongoing negotiations between the belligerents, it is because of the huge oil fields. The North and the South have understood that no winners will emerge from continued conflict. They have agreed to lay down their weapons. Khartoum also had a reputation as a den of Islamic terrorists. But they were discreet. Bin Laden was said to be in the area. But I never ran into him. And the vast majority of Sudanese have always been moderate Muslims. A month before I arrived in the country, there were controversial air strikes by the U.S. Air Force on Khartoum, a reprisal for the attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam attributed to Osama bin Laden. The raid was carried out on a Saturday night in the industrial district at the other end of the city, far from the expatriate quarter. The Western ngos in place had even learned the news through their hqs in Europe. The Americans claimed they had targeted secret factories manu-

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facturing weapons for terrorists. In fact, they destroyed a pharmaceutical plant. At acf, I found out that a un team consisting of Norwegians had restored the factory to working order three months earlier. Official reports had been submitted to the Western governments. Later, newspapers revealed that President Clinton had ordered the bombing to divert attention when he was threatened with impeachment by the legislators who accused him of perjury in the Lewinsky affair. When I arrived, mention of the strikes still raised the hackles of the local population. My blond hair and American look didn’t help either. Then, mercifully, came Ramadan, the month of fasting, the month of forgiveness. The Norwegians returned to repair the damage done by the Americans. The Norwegians claimed that not a single weapon had been manufactured there. The Khartoum government also invited diplomats, ngos and the Western media to see for themselves. That said, shady business was clearly going on behind the high walls of the huge palaces in the new city. Ghostly figures flitted in and out, influential and discreet. We never ran into them but we knew they were there. The mullahs didn’t deign to visit us or even speak to us. The population maintained a polite distance. Only once did someone admit an aversion to certain aspects of the West: he was a hero of the war for independence, he spoke English. He abhorred our degeneracy, the violence in American films. His remarks didn’t change my opinion that Muslim fundamentalists are an infinitely small minority in Sudan. Speaking of terrorists, photos of Illitch Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, were far from rare. Before his arrest, he was a frequent visitor to the German and the American clubs. They didn’t serve alcohol, of course, but there was a swimming pool, a luxury in that outdoor furnace. Many people had met him. Word had it that he spoke Arabic with the hint of a Spanish accent, recalling his Venezuelan roots.

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But bin Laden was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t invite me to share a chichi. I probably would have accepted just out of curiosity. There was a raging debate about slavery networks in Sudan. Some ngos focused on liberating these “poor souls.” But appearances can be deceiving. The struggle to end slavery in Sudan missed the point. The phenomenon has always existed in the country. It has practically become an ordinary part of the culture. The only reason the project was launched again was publicity. Some could see themselves emulating the abolitionists in the Americas. But Sudan was not America. Sudanese blacks were not flogged or put in stocks. In Sudan, the slave trade was carried on among clans in the south. The first mistake was the West’s Manichean view demonizing the northern Muslim. When the Nuer attacked the Dinka, they killed the men, kidnapped the women, stole the cows, and enslaved the children. The Dinka did the same thing to the Nuba. Every group participated in this wretched game. That has always been the case, and as long as interethnic conflicts persist, it will always be. In Sudan, the slaves were not in chains. Certainly, they toiled long hours for their masters, but conditions were no better in their own villages. They had simply changed bosses. In addition, the chief had certain responsibilities vis-à-vis his servants: how would it serve his interest if his slaves fell ill? He made the women his mistresses and turned robust men into a valuable work force. He had to look after them. This may offend Western sensibilities, but what’s even more revolting is the political capital gained from this struggle, an opportunity to demonize the Arabs in the north even more. What is really perverse is the B movie scenario in which a saviour from France, Switzerland or Canada wrenches the slaves from the clutches of the horrible slave owners. But to what end? To send them back to their villages where they’ll be captured again in the next attack? Or to bring them to a refugee camp where, at best, nothing will be done to change their living conditions, and

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where, at worst, inactivity will destroy their morale? What do we choose? To make matters worse, by buying back some slaves, are we not perpetuating slavery? The slave owner is no fool. When he spots a naive white soul, he’ll sell the “scraps”—the elderly, the toothless, the bedridden—at an exorbitant price. He’ll keep the good workers. The sight of the almighty dollar will inspire him to launch fresh raids. No, in the end, all this fuss about such a complex subject was totally ridiculous. The glory showered on ngos back home was unmerited. On the contrary, their actions had encouraged this shameful business. Once we acknowledge the cultural component in this awful commerce, the solution becomes apparent: education. No law will stop slavery. Many African countries have banned female circumcision, but it is still a common practice. Buying back slaves will not stamp out this evil; quite the contrary. True, as Bernard Kouchner says, the basis of humanitarianism is first indignation and then methodology. But sometimes, misplaced indignation can do more harm than judicious silence does. Worse, there is a kind of fleeting indignation that lasts a few weeks, a few months at most, when the media have turned on their cameras, when there isn’t a hotter, bloodier emergency elsewhere. All too soon, the façade of indignation is replaced by indifference or compromise. And why this fixation on Sudan? Uganda, Rwanda, Chad: there’s slavery in every African country. The networks vary in size, but they do exist. The Indian subcontinent that accounts for a quarter of the world’s population also resorts to it. Some Indians even continue this practice when they immigrate to the West. But humanitarianism is an exotic form of revolt; it’s easier to kick up a storm on the mountains of Kashmir or in the swamps of Bahr el-Ghazal than in the streets of Montreal, the boulevards of Paris or the highways of New York. Particularly since there’s less need to follow up. The proof? As of this writing, it’s been a long time since slavery in Sudan has been the subject of an article in Western media.

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I was only a logistics coordinator, but acf management asked me to take part in a meeting of mission chiefs in May 1999. The executive director invited me to a restaurant and told me that he could see me serving in some administrative capacity with the emergency services in Paris. After the meal, we went to his offices to revise the company’s organization chart. One function interested me: heading the emergency section for countries at risk or for acf teams in crisis. Other ngos, such as Oxfam or msf, have this kind of position. Someone in that post has a head start in anticipating crises. Between field missions, he would work with the desks in hiring qualified personnel and preparing them to handle all the details of life in the field. Just because you’ve motored around the French countryside or negotiated Quebec roads during the winter doesn’t mean you can handle a pzj75 in the Zairian bush during the rainy season. The coordinator could train emergency personnel to use the radio, to keep the books, etc. If the watsan knew the nutritionist’s job, if the logistician was good at bookkeeping, if the administrator knew what was happening on the medical side of things, not only would there be better understanding, but operations would be smoother and less stressful. In the present state of affairs, when a nutritionist gets sick, the food centre closes down for a few days until a replacement arrives. The executive director wasn’t convinced. But we parted on a civil note. During my week in Paris, I filled out my application form for enap and sent it to Canada. A letter arrived in July, confirming my admission to enap in September. I was on cloud nine. But at the same time, I had an anxiety attack. It had been exactly ten years and one month since I’d been in my country. I hardly knew a thing about Canada anymore. About its politics, about its society. I didn’t even know that the Montreal Canadiens had won the Stanley Cup in 1993: heresy for a child from the land of ice and snow. I’d lost touch.

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But I couldn’t, nor did I want to, miss my appointment with school. I asked Viviane to accompany me to Canada. Surely, a pediatric nurse of her caliber would easily find work. The two months before we left were undoubtedly the most difficult, because we had changed mission chiefs. The Spaniard was replaced. The new boss, a Frenchman in his fifties, was fairly knowledgeable about Africa. But this was his first visit to Sudan. He was married to a woman from Chad. But N’Djamena in Chad isn’t the same as Khartoum in Sudan. His wife soon found the time dragging: no bars, no cafés, no women’s groups to support, no television, no swimming pool. There was nothing in Khartoum. She was bored to tears. When the chief submitted his resignation two months after my departure, he blamed the team. It had done nothing, he maintained, to help his wife integrate. What could anybody say? We were past the age to gather around a fire in the evening like the boy scouts and declare undying love for each other. In Sudan, I came to the bitter realization that a new humanitarianism was emerging. I could never adjust to it. I’m the kind of guy who needs to get his hands dirty. I don’t make speeches, I act; I don’t hang around long enough to build a career, but I trust in the commitment of the people I’m helping and in my duty to let them take destiny into their own hands. I was becoming increasingly isolated. Theoreticians who never ventured into the field were the ones you heard in the media. They never set foot in Sudan, they didn’t even know Khartoum had more Christians than Muslims. The groups weren’t fighting over religious issues, as the pseudo-experts maintained in their air-conditioned offices, but over an unjust division of wealth. Mindlessly repeating Western caricatures, these experts won the support of religious pressure groups. One such example was the Norwegian Christian ngo who donated about forty transmitter radios to populations in the south. Everybody knew these tools would soon end up in spla hands. Some agencies were quite content to support the side fighting

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Muslims. They were misguided. In reality, the conflict pitted Sudanese against Sudanese. There were exhausted populations in the north and in the south. Mothers were heartbroken to see their sons dying for phony causes. Furthermore, the war was being waged to protect the interests of the people in the south. They opposed the building of a canal on the Nile, because they feared it would rob them of control over river traffic. In other words, it was a preventive war that went wrong. We should have denounced this fixation on religious issues. We should have shouted, “Stop the masquerade!” We should have made a clear distinction between humanitarian organizations and human rights advocates. So our actions would not be biased. Humanitarianism, the new humanitarianism, focuses on media coverage. There is also an attempt to justify everything politically. The result is an impasse. In their obsessive reliance on simplistic rhetoric to appeal to Western donors, humanitarian agencies tend to neglect the true needs of the victims. To selfrighteous Western Christians, it was obvious that the Northern Sudanese were monsters. Nuance has become a sin. I remember the cnrs researcher whom I knew in Khartoum. He had lived in the country for decades. He spoke nearly all the dialects. But when Radio France Internationale made a report about the situation in Sudan, it interviewed msf and acf representatives, not the researcher. How absurd! The sham that is humanitarianism is revealed in its tendency to talk rather than to act. Now we spend more time arguing than formulating realistic crisis management strategies. Devising and implementing a plan involves the possibility of failure. So rather than run the risk of having dead people on our hands, we issue strident communiqués: “msf declares that the situation in Southern Sudan is deteriorating and denounces the Northern Sudanese government for lodging the displaced people in camps

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with inadequate sanitary conditions.” Talk is cheap. Because all displaced people and refugees arrive under conditions of humanitarian distress. In Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America and elsewhere. Humanitarian organizations employ exaggerated rhetoric to mask insufficient action. What they really hope is that Khartoum’s merciless government will expel them. Then they win on two fronts. They can sit on their hands while the media make them, not the displaced populations, appear to be the victim of the ongoing tragedy. Am I being cynical? Hardly. That’s why I have unbounded admiration for the International Committee of the Red Cross (icrc), which on principle refuses to testify. At times, it is difficult to respect the principle, especially when we witness abominable crimes, such as genocide, but the Red Cross is active everywhere. The Red Cross really does humanitarian work. It takes care of human beings rather than churning out useless reports. What good is a report if it doesn’t help improve the living conditions of the victim? What good does it do to make accusations if we have to leave behind the displaced person or the refugee to die anyway? Why shout till we’re blue in the face or knock ourselves out writing reports that will be shelved in a few days when other news takes priority? Aid workers embittered by the misery they have encountered in the world are not interested in reports. This misery is what should concern us: the death, rage and distress of others always comes back to haunt us. Especially when the tragedies are partially due to our own actions, policies and erroneous vision of the planet. September 11 happens and we are surprised to learn there are people who hate us. Even then, we mourn the 3,000 deaths without a thought for the victims our government has left all over the world because of our evil and immoral politics. On the ground, I discovered that the inclination to resolve conflicts through war is not unique to poor countries. This insanity is not exclusive to Africans. People all over the world have engaged in war.

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Human beings have been making war for ten thousand years. Technology and modernity haven’t changed that. People were already fighting in Sudan thousands of years ago. Man has always fought wars. Last century, Europe underwent a series of major armed confrontations: the First and Second World Wars, the collapse of Yugoslavia. Not to forget the 50-year occupation of Germany by pro-Soviet forces. What’s going on in Ireland even today? And what about the Basques? And what about Quebec, where the biker war claimed some 160 lives in the 1990s? In the United States, kids pick up firearms and massacre their fellow students at school. The world is like that. In the Bible, Cain kills his brother Abel over land. Why would it end there? Because we’re good people? Sure if we forget the 40,000 people incarcerated in Canadian jails. Blacks in MontrealNorth without access to the rest of the city because they’re black. But let’s not talk about that! We’re smug, even though the only way Anglophones and Francophones in Canada communicate is by trading recriminations about past wrongs. Having been to the worst trouble spots in the world, I know now that war is a natural phenomenon, deep-rooted in every culture. Would that it were otherwise. That’s why I think the United Nations is still the closet thing to Utopia, a society without race, colour or religion. But we have to stop dreaming. By 1999, given everything I’d seen, I was no longer the starryeyed idealist. I’d seen too much shit. I didn’t whine, with my voice cracking, “Things aren’t going well in the world.” We know things are bad. All we have to do is turn on the tv. I no longer believe in an ngo’s duty to bear witness. It’s often just so much theatrical posturing creating the illusion that we’re uncovering facts when they’ve been known for ages. The media are omnipresent. They beat relief agencies to most of the recent conflict zones (Rwanda, Bosnia, etc.). In Iraq, the media already had access to the victims while humanitarian organizations were struggling to gain admission to the country. What can we add, what can we say when we arrive after them?

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But weapons engineering is a new factor. Once, the slingshot revolutionized weaponry. Then came swords, muskets. Then there was mustard gas. Today, before sending a single private into the field, we rain bombs on the enemy from B-52s. Or even worse, use bombs that release thousands of bomblets. Some of these bomblets don’t kill right away but lie in wait and go on killing civilians for years. It’s worse than slavery. Man’s nature is like that: bad. I could hardly wait to get back to Canada. I was nervous about going home since I didn’t know whether old biker friends had lied about me to the police. If they had, I would be the most wanted man in Canada. I asked my friend Mégot to have one of his lawyer friends find out. Three weeks later, the lawyer assured me that the police had nothing against me in their files. Still, I dreaded going back to Montreal. What if some of the guys hadn’t forgotten me?

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22 Palm Trees, Banana Trees . . .

There was no danger of school boring me to death. I’m not the kind to chomp at the bit, waiting for an assignment to the next hot spot. You can’t get them all. I landed in Canada three days before classes started at university. I dreaded going back to Montreal. What if the rcmp or even worse my former colleagues, the bikers, were there to greet me? So I hopped a flight to Philadelphia and then flew on to Toronto. When I handed my passport to the customs officer, my heart went into overdrive. Going through an Iraqi checkpoint had never been so harrowing. There was no way out. I thought I was a goner. This was Canada, it was their passport, their computer and it could cough up any information they wanted. Viviane held my hand to reassure me.

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When the customs officer looked up, I almost had a heart attack. “You do a lot of traveling . . .” “A little.” (That’s the best I could do.) “Welcome back to Canada.” I was stunned. I couldn’t help beaming. Outside, the sun was shining brighter. The next day, we took the train to Ottawa. That’s the way I wanted it. In my mind, going back to Quebec, going back “home” meant retracing my steps. I had left by train, I had to return by train. It was the early afternoon when we disembarked in Ottawa. On the other side of the Ottawa River stood Quebec. But I didn’t look yet; I wasn’t ready. We booked into a small hotel, took a shower, and then went for a stroll. We hiked all the way up to Parliament Hill. From there, I finally glanced over the river, beyond the bridges spanning it, at Quebec. My home. Viviane understood how I felt and left me to my thoughts. I waited until the next day before I crossed a bridge over the Ottawa River. I bought a local newspaper and pored over the “Apartments for Rent” section. We picked ten phone numbers and called eight landlords the same afternoon. By Sunday afternoon, we had a place. We didn’t have letters of reference, but we could shell out six months rent in advance. That evening, we slept in a place of our own, a little apartment with wooden walls that made me feel I was back in my country. But I didn’t feel entirely at home. I was in Quebec. But my home, my real home was Montreal. Architecturally, the school was a bit of a letdown. I was looking forward to something more grand. I’d seen the buildings of the Université du Québec at Hull. They would have been more than satisfactory. Instead, I happened to be walking along Rue Laval when I spotted a little sign on the floor above a bicycle shop: enap.

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Shit! But I was on a mission. A few stumbling blocks wouldn’t discourage me. Besides, there was some consolation: the town was green and pretty, the people couldn’t be nicer. And I was anxious to get back to school. In the afternoon, we bought some furniture at the mall. When the items were delivered on Friday, we felt we had arrived. Now we were really Canadian residents. Sitting in front of the tv with a glass of wine in my hand, I felt I was just an ordinary guy from Quebec sharing his life with a girl from France. I’d been back for days and the police still hadn’t pounded on the door. My pulse rate was nearly back to normal. Everything fascinated Viviane. She discovered poutine (a greasy specialty of Quebec—fries, cheese, gravy) and hotdogs, all dressed. There was no way she could survive on this fare, but I marveled at her enthusiasm. She was captivated. Imagine: squirrels scurrying right up to the doorstep, wildlife so close to the capital. People in the Ottawa valley are charming. Simple, accessible, easygoing. During my ten years of exile, I really missed Canadian roads. Two weeks after I got back, we rented a car and toured the region without any particular destination in mind, just breathing the air, giving our eyes a treat and bathing our ears in the magical silence of Quebec forests. In my missions around the world, people had regarded me as the typical Quebecker, but in Hull grocery stores, people remarked on my continental French accent. I was discovering a new world. When I had left Montreal ten years earlier, I wasn’t in any real sense a citizen. I was a biker strung out on dope, who moved around in an artificial world of coke-heads, dirty money, prostitution, crime and violence: another planet. Now, I was living in a little apartment in a small town, attending an institution where most of the students were federal government bureaucrats, and the others were primarily foreign diplomats taking advantage of their stay in Canada to

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land another master’s degree. Before becoming an aid worker, I would never have rubbed shoulders with these people. I wouldn’t have known what to say. They were squeaky clean. They drove to school in cars fitted with baby seats. In France or Africa, when I told people I came from Saint-Henri in Montreal, they thought I was quaint. In Hull, the bureaucrats who were my classmates were well aware of the milieu I was from. They realized I wasn’t exactly one of them: they were university graduates. They could guess from the way I talked what my childhood had been like. It took me two weeks to work up the courage to return to Montreal. The school asked me to find the report cards for my final years in school. I didn’t bring Viviane with me. I had to do this pilgrimage by myself. I took the bus. It was a Monday morning. I entered Montreal from the west, the way I had left town. The bus didn’t go directly to the terminal. The driver detoured through the centre of the city. I had goose pimples. Those streets had been my streets. I was speechless. I practically stuck my nose against the glass. I was overwhelmed. Dorchester Boulevard had been renamed René-Lévesque. Saint-Denis. Berri de Montigny. Ontario St.: my turf. It took me back ten years. I was terrified. Getting off the bus, I glanced around like a hare in a hunt, as if time had stopped the day I left and Le Gros and the gang were lurking behind the pole in the waiting room. I darted across the hall, jumped into the first taxi I could find and went straight to the School Commission to pick up my documents. I decided to walk back to the station. I took Sherbrooke St., then hung a left down to Hochelaga. Then on to Bercy St. and finally to 2363. I trembled. Would my mother come out and shout, “Supper’s ready!”? Would the children recognize me and invite me to play with them? No one. Wait! Maybe over there, in the cars passing by. Nothing. Ten years had gone by. Melancholy wouldn’t change anything. There, on the narrow sidewalk, while

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I turned sideways to make way for a radiant mother with a baby carriage, it dawned on me that I was a Montrealer through and through, and proud of it. I’d gone around the world many times, but this was my home. Residents of Paris or Prague living in museum cities would scoff at my affection for such an ugly town; but it’s the homeliness of Montreal that is its charm. Electric cables overhead, iron staircases attached to the façades of the houses: there lies its originality. At 2363 Bercy St., the door had been redone, but it was the same old balcony. Across the street, a big building had replaced the Académie Frontenac. I just kept walking, my hands stuck resolutely in my pockets. I could see myself wearing shorts, playing baseball in the street, stopping after every at-bat to let the cars go by. I remembered Pierre, Gaétan Pronovost, Roger Burel. I climbed back up to Sherbrooke St., but it was too crowded. The Alfred Dallaire funeral home still stood at the corner of Rouen and du Havre. That’s where I last saw my mother and father, lying in a coffin, with their eyes closed, as if they were asleep. Had they forgiven me for showing up stoned at their funeral? Were they proud of me now? I turned left and headed west along Ontario. I passed by the Fontana Pizzeria, where they made the best pizza in town. A few yards farther on I came to Macdonald Tobacco. How often had I gone there to bring my father his lunch? I backtracked toward the bus station. But, before arriving, I crossed so many streets—de Lorimier, Dorion, Papineau—biker territory. What should I do? Be brave? I hoofed it all the way to the bus terminal. I phoned Mégot, but he was out. Before I entered the station, I pinched myself to make sure I was still alive. Nobody had fired a shot. But I wasn’t out of the city yet. While waiting for the bus, I bought a newspaper and hid behind it, sitting as far out of sight as I could, and biting my nails. When the bus pulled up, I jumped the queue so I could board first. I returned to Montreal with Viviane, and this time I did get to see

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Mégot. It had been ten years. When I ran away, I’d left him up shit creek with my creditors and the bikers. His daughters, Milly and Nina, were there. When I’d worked at the Saint-Sulpice, Nina was just a baby. We hid her behind the bar so she could sleep while Mégot dealt dope to buy diapers. I watched Nina grow, take her first steps, unwrap her first Christmas gifts. She was my little pal. Not an evening went by when I didn’t give her a goodnight kiss. When I left, she was barely eight years old. She looked at me, her little eyes aghast. “Are you going to prison?” “No, I’m going on a long trip. I’ll be away for a while.” “I see! That’s okay then, I’ll wait for you.” She was a big girl now, almost an adult, with the body of a woman. Life hadn’t been easy. Like me, she’d ended up on the street when she was 14. She’d gone through a punk phase. She was barely managing to get herself together. Nina’s still my pal. Now she works for an ngo in India, opposing the use of genetically modified products. Milly was just a three-year-old tike when I left. By the time I came back, she was a Ricky Martin fan. And she dressed like a Spice Girl. In October 1999, it was announced that msf had been awarded the Nobel Prize. I received scores of congratulatory e-mails. But it gave me a funny feeling. On one hand, I was glad that the organization’s work—the heroic struggle of Luc Legrand, the fierce tenacity of Geneviève Begkoyian, the unflagging dedication of the nurses—had been recognized. But the humiliation of my departure had left a bitter taste. I was livid at the media coverage: images of employees at msf headquarters in Paris tossing flowers from the window and saluting the crowd. The press still didn’t get it: msf had won the Nobel Prize, and the best they could do was to show headquarters. How absurd! What a travesty! The Nobel Prize hadn’t been earned at 8 Saint-Sabin. It was earned over there in the field where the cameras were loath to go.

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Besides, I deserved a little credit for the Nobel; my 11 msf missions made a contribution. I inquired whether msf Canada was planning to celebrate. Michel Schull was the president of the chapter. I served as his host on my first Iraq mission. He invited me to join him in Montreal for the festivities. I didn’t go. For a lot of reasons; not all of them justified. Meanwhile, Viviane couldn’t find a job. Particularly shocking considering Quebec was lamenting the nursing shortage. She got fed up waiting and accepted a job in Burundi with acf as the medical coordinator for three or four months. I was glad she had found something fulfilling to do. Her irritability was getting on my nerves, and I had term papers to finish. Anyway we planned to get back together when I finished school. Around mid-December, acf sent me an e-mail. They wanted to know when I’d be available. An emergency team had just set up in the Pool region in Congo’s Brazzaville, six hours from the capital. You had to travel 100 miles along a hair-raising route to get there. There had been a war involving armed groups with strange monikers such as the Cobras, the Ninjas, the Cocoyes, the Mambas and the Zulus. As a result of the conflict, ex-president Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the father-in-law of Gabonese president Omar Bongo, returned to power. All that separated Congo Brazzaville and Congo Kinshasa was the River Zaire. In short, it had been a war with regional implications and, behind the scenes, oil interests. It was no accident that the biggest building in the Congo belonged to Elf of France. The fighting in the Congolese capital had forced the civilian population to take refuge in the bush. The people had stayed there a long time, surviving on leaves and roots. When SassouNguesso’s Cobras captured the city, their partisans seized the abandoned houses. Humanitarian organizations had just decided to establish missions. They were in the process of opening them up. The

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danger was still acute. acf set up in Boko, the capital of Pool, where there was an urgent need for a therapeutic centre. “Are you interested? I’m letting you know ahead of time, you’ll be working only with guys.” If it was too dangerous to risk sending women, it must be tough, I thought. I told him I’d be arriving on the first flight. I had three weeks to kill. My girlfriend was away. I had few friends in Hull, so why not welcome the coming of the year 2000 in a sunny clime with people who were just skin and bone, like the people I’d rubbed shoulders with over the past ten years? Let Westerners bite their nails, worrying about the millennium bug. Why not take advantage of a unique opportunity to finish the millennium among people who really need our help? I’m not saying the West should feel guilty. The West isn’t responsible for every tragedy on the planet. But we should be aware of the indecency of consuming tons of caviar and millions of bottles of champagne in a single evening, while elsewhere some have gone without a decent meal for ages. And it was happening in the year 2000, on the same planet, just a few hours away by plane. The idea of spending my vacation building a tfc (Therapeutic Feeding Centre) for displaced persons was particularly appealing. I felt happy. I handed in my last exam at eleven o’clock. A half hour later, I was on the bus heading to the airport in Montreal, in time for the eight o’clock flight. Seventy-two hours later I strolled into the afc offices in Brazzaville. It was still calm in the city. It was under tight military control. There were few people in the streets. Clearly, the town wasn’t in a festive mood. I fell back into the routine. Not many people on the team knew me, but I wasn’t concerned about that. The weather was good; it was warm. This was Africa in all its heartbreaking distress and festive exuberance.

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I spent two days in Brazza. The humanitarian workers make up a small community. I recognized three-quarters of the expats. On December 20 we got down to business and headed to the bush in two rickety pickup trucks, which we had smeared with dirt so they wouldn’t attract thieves. There were only guys on board. Boko, which had fallen into the hands of the regular army, was virtually empty. Its residents had just started to come out of the bush where they had been hiding. They were coming back mainly because the toubabs, the whites, were in town. The whites were the only ones they trusted. Abandoned for months, houses had been invaded by brambles, gardens had withered and vegetables were rotting. Looking at the first of the displaced people who returned, it was obvious they had been badly lacking in the necessities: they were thin, their teeth were coming loose . . . We set up the tfc in a school that could accommodate about 250 children and a few adults. I was on excellent terms with my collaborators, especially the Congolese Army major who administered the region. Surprisingly, he turned out to be an ex-sergeant who had been trained by the Israelis. He was one tough dude. But he was a man of his word. He swore he would protect us and we never had cause to complain. I witnessed heartrending scenes in the brush. I remember a man who was about 25 years of age but whose skin was so withered he looked forty. He was as thin as a rail. He came to the camp, pushing his father in a wheelbarrow. His father seemed even worse off than he was. Not only that but this man was carrying his daughter on his back. It had taken him three days to walk from his village to the camp. When he saw that his father and daughter were in good hands, he refused to stay at the tfc. He just asked for a little water, I gave him a big glass of milk and sat down beside him. “Where do you come from?” “It’s 30 miles from here.”

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Compared with the African jungle, the Canadian forest is a playground. “Why aren’t you staying so we can look after you?” “I can’t. My wife and son are waiting for me.” There was nothing more I could say. I got him some milk and then a little more. Then, I went to the store to get him some packages of biscuits. He didn’t eat a single one. He rolled them up in his loincloth and kept them for the ones who had stayed behind in the village. He got up. He took his wheelbarrow, and I watched as he headed into the forest. He came back four days later. Some biscuits, a few glasses of milk, and a banana had been enough to sustain him. That and a strong will, of course. This time his mother and his second daughter were in the wheelbarrow. He was carrying his son on his back. But it was too late for the boy. He had died en route. In the presence of this man, who set out again with his wheelbarrow, fighting to keep his family alive, I felt very small. I thought about my two daughters. Jacqueline, the child I’d had with Karen, and the daughter Sophie had given me. I didn’t know them, but strangely, it was the first time I really missed them. It would soon be Christmas in that village of fervent Catholics. But it didn’t make any difference to us: we worked on the 24th and the 25th, the day after that and every day. Before I left Canada, my fellow students at enap took it upon themselves to organize a special fundraiser for the children of the Congo. They collected about two hundred dollars. In Brazzaville, I had sent a nurse to the market to buy children’s clothes with the money. On the 25th, the village was all aflutter; a bishop was supposed to come and celebrate mass. Early in the morning, I went to the Feeding Centre with the children’s clothes. The mothers had tears in their eyes. Even patients sick in bed came alive. I was happy. For the first time in my career, the funds weren’t anonymous. Generosity had a face. I knew precisely who to report to about the children’s smiles.

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In the village church people sang Christmas carols with ever more powerful voices. Remember, the end of the world was supposed to take place on December 31. The West was worn out waiting for the catastrophic bug that would hit the computers. But at the tfc in Boko, computers were the least of our worries. During the day, we’d chilled bottles of pastis in the wells. We opened the first at 6:00 p.m., figuring that we’d open the next one at midnight on the dot. We were three expatriates alone in the African jungle. By 8:00 p.m., the first colleague conceded and went to bed. Thirty minutes later, the other followed. So at 9:00 p.m., on December 31, 1999, I was alone. I sat down on a plastic chair, outside on the lawn in Boko. My life was coming to a turning point and I recalled that when I was young, we always wondered what we would do in the year 2000. I played the film of my life backwards. Anecdotes, dates, faces. I stood up, opened the last bottle and went back to my deckchair. Engulfed by the stars, I got lost in reverie again. I thought about the day. About Viviane, about Burundi, about people I’d like to speak to, but couldn’t. I thought about my family back in Canada. Before leaving for the Congo, I had managed to find my brother and my sisters. My brother, Daniel, had just separated from his wife and taken up with another woman. He never got in touch with me again. I met my sister Huguette. She was the younger one, who had lived on the floor above my parent’s place. She was with a guy from the Ivory Coast. She had five children from five different fathers. No two of them were the same colour. The kids looked like a Benneton ad. She had always lived on welfare. The one time she went back to school she did so with the intention of working at the morgue and having a free apartment above her workplace. She’d hardly finished talking about her children when she told me that she couldn’t pay the rent and she asked me to lend her some money. It was the last time I heard from her.

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As far as she was concerned, our relationship was worth less than three hundred miserable dollars. It was a New Year’s Eve dripping with nostalgia. I thought about Andrée, about my parents. I curled up in my chair, cradling the half empty bottle in the hollow of my arm, a silly grin on my face, and I drifted off to sleep. But miracle of miracles, I awoke the next morning without a hangover. I went into the house and made some coffee. At 7:00 a.m., I was the first one to arrive at the tfc. I was greeted with an incredible scoop: the world had positively not changed. The night had brought me four new deaths. But Africa also has this extraordinary capacity to rebound. While we were wrapping up the corpses, women were singing in the New Year on the other side of the camp. I had built a soccer pitch for the children in phase 3 (remission) and I brought them a ball. They picked two teams and played a match with great skill. The mothers watched, proud of their little rascals, and the children who had arrived the previous day, were amazed to hear that the players had come to camp in as sorry a state as they had. It was only when I saw those little devils on the field and their cries of “Zidane” and “Ronaldo” that I felt I had the right to say “Happy New Year!” I refereed the match. When it was over, I gave the players sugar doughnuts, oranges and bananas. I served the mothers tea. Those magical moments were worth life itself. I left Boko at the end of the week. My flight was scheduled for the next day. Across the way, on the other side of Brazzaville, Kinshasha flirted with me. Kin-la-Belle, city of the uninterrupted fête. That’s where I went. I rented a room in a small hotel behind the Intercontinental. I took a shower. Then I entered the first bar I could find. Mama Claude. After that, I went to Mama MarieJeanne. It was nonstop. One hell of a party, an orgy of laughter and good spirit. The waitress’s name was Marie-Hélène. That’s all I remember.

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Round noon the next day, I crossed the river back to Brazza. Departure time for my Air Africa flight was 4:00 p.m. I hadn’t completely recovered from my wild night in Kinshasa. At the airport, I ran into a Canadian acquaintance. He was an aid worker, too. We chatted over a Primus, the national beer. Then we ordered another cold one. Many more were to follow. It degenerated into a merry bout of drinking. I made up for three weeks of abstinence in Boko. As often happens in that part of the world, boarding was delayed until 10 p.m. In Paris, I just had time to jump into a taxi and make a brief report to acf. On the plane for Canada, I continued my alcoholic binge. When I debarked in Montreal, I thought I was dreaming. I thought someone was playing a trick on me. When I left Brazza it was 30°C and when I landed in Montreal, the Canadian Weather Office can confirm it, in that month of January 2000, it was –34°C. I wondered where in the world I’d landed. Mégot greeted me at the airport with my coat over his arm. We walked to the exit. When the door opened, my knees buckled. I couldn’t breathe. I turned around and went right back inside. Behind me, I overheard a couple of Cameroonians on the same flight say, “It must be really cold if the white guy is afraid to go out!” The Cameroonians and I stood there for a few minutes eyeing the door as if it was a poisonous snake. Mégot and his daughter literally had to shove me out the door. I really wasn’t much of a Quebecker anymore. Bloody hell! The next day, I took the train to Hull. When I got home, there were seven messages on my answering machine. Not one from my brother or my sisters. Furious, I bought a new agenda and jotted down every address except theirs. It was my way of slamming the door shut. I found out about the Lester Pearson Peace Centre in the paper. During the winter break, I took a course there. All thirty

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of us in the room had something to do with international affairs in one form or another: through humanitarianism, diplomacy, the media or science. One of the students was a woman named Laurence. Gentle and smiling. Attentive and shy, she barely asked a question the entire week. I finally got a chance to speak to her on the last day of the course. She worked for a Belgian agency. Having just finished her bachelor’s degree, she was starting a master’s in international affairs. She said I could give her a call when I needed to exchange notes. In Hull, there were only two courses in my program. Hardly enough, I thought. I decided to take some courses given in Montreal. As luck would have it, both of the courses that I was interested in were given on Monday. For four months, I spent the beginning of the week in Montreal. I slept at Mégot’s place and traveled to Hull on Monday evening. With Viviane away, written French was hard slogging. I called Laurence to ask her to help me correct a text I’d written. I got a call from a program director at the Pearson Centre. He asked me to meet him in Montreal the following week. He was going to coordinate a new two-week program in Halifax and he needed a lecturer. The students would be high-ranking officers in African and East European armies. Entitled “New Peacekeeping Partnership,” the course would describe the key actors, media, aid workers and diplomats these soldiers would likely meet on peacekeeping missions. It would describe the role played by the various professional groups on the ground in order to facilitate the interaction among them. A great deal of money had been poured into this project. Thirty officers from many different countries and trade associations would take part. My job entailed accompanying ten of them, answering their questions and coordinating their stay in Cornwallis, the former Canadian Forces naval base, converted into a training centre. As there would be Canadian officers participating in the program, I would also have to facilitate the interaction between the “locals” and the “foreigners.”

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I recall a veteran Canadian officer. He had never been on a mission outside Canada. But that didn’t prevent him from criticizing aid workers. To credit him, they made a habit of asking soldiers to protect them, and to do their fieldwork for them. He had never taken part in a peacekeeping mission anywhere, not even for riot control. Then there was another Canadian, a sailor, who shouted peremptorily, “Marc, you should realize that the new peacekeeping partnership is impossible. Our mission as soldiers is to kill people!” “I’m sorry, Captain, but I absolutely disagree. Your mandate consists of defending your borders and ensuring the security of your compatriots. Killing the enemy is just incidental.” Most of the people there agreed with me. It was a difficult time. I almost cracked. Being the only humanitarian worker with a bunch of soldiers isn’t easy. Especially when some of them regard you as the enemy. I had a particularly exhausting time with career officers, who were more accustomed to giving instructions than receiving them. Every time a new trade association was introduced, I had to start the exercise in diplomacy all over again. When a documentary on the Goma massacres was shown, the horror came back to me and I realized that I still hadn’t gotten over it. Seeing the same scenes incessantly repeated was becoming hard to bear. The cameras endlessly focused on the same corpse-ridden square. The images didn’t convey the horror of the massacres; they didn’t give the odour. I’d had enough. I was worn out. Since I got back from Boko, I hadn’t gotten a week’s rest what with my courses and my stay at the Pearson Centre. But in the end, acquiring new knowledge, developing new friendships had been an enriching experience for everyone. I became a member of the faculty at the Pearson centre. A title that looked good on a cv. One of my professors at enap didn’t give me the grade I needed to

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qualify for a master’s program. He couldn’t comprehend the world of the aid worker as I described it in my term paper. I contested the evaluation. I received two letters of support from professors. My mark was revised and I earned my dess. The path to the master’s degree had opened up for me. In the ensuing months, luck dictated that none of my missions lasted long. First there was Ethiopia. A humanitarian catastrophe had been predicted because of the drought befalling the regions in the south. According to meteorologists, it would be a long time before it rained. The specter of the great famine of 1984 haunted us. Unless there was a miracle. And the miracle happened. I was one of the first to get off the plane in Addis-Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. As soon as I stepped on to the gangway, I felt a big drop of lukewarm water on my face. I looked up and the sky opened up on me. It started to rain nonstop. It rained as I left the airport. It rained when I reached the hotel and when I went to the restaurant in the evening. It rained for days. There was flooding in the Ogaden Valley. There was nowhere to land. But despite everything, it was good news because the vegetation would start growing again and the Somalis would be able to water their livestock. I waited in Addis Ababa for two weeks until the planes could land in Ogaden and Viviane could return. Then there was Xai-Xai, the capital of the province of Gaza in southern Mozambique. Torrential rains had ravaged the region. The fury of the storm caused the water pipes to burst. Malnutrition and cholera were a definite threat. The population was drinking dirty water from the rivers. I set to work rebuilding the water supply system while Viviane headed into the bush to assess the population’s nutritional needs. She returned with an astonishing bit of news: there’s no malnutrition. The farmers had enough to hold out until the next harvest. There was no reason for her to stay. But I had to stay. Disappointed and a bit furious

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with me, she boarded the only plane bound for Paris and then flew to the Philippines to coordinate an msf mission. When I left her at the airport, I felt almost relieved. Recently, things had become tense between us. When I saw the plane take off, I was already on the road, driving back to my worksite in Xai-Xai. My mission was a success. We were able to supply the town with 700,000 litres of water a day. The incidence of diarrhea and dehydration declined sharply. My forty employees were never without work because we had almost 15 miles of pipes to install underground a foot and a half deep, with pickaxes, on hilly paths, on slopes, through trees and fields. It was a daunting enterprise. Knowing the people’s passion for football, I founded the XaiXai football club. Each team had to have its hero. I sponsored the Patrice Lumumba team. I bought three practice balls and some uniforms with “acf Xai-Xai” written on them. We won the local championship. Then we won the provincial amateur title. The whole town was proud of us. When we played the final, ten busloads of fans accompanied us. That’s more support than Paris Saint-Germain receives at Guingamp. What could I say? I was happy. I didn’t think about Viviane anymore. A month later, I was standing outside my Xai-Xai office when I felt a tug on my sweater. I turned around and saw an angel with a radiant smile. Her name was Victoria. Twenty-six years old, an African beauty. “Bom dia, Senor Marco.” “Bom dia, mimina.” “Your name is Marco, isn’t it?” I’d be anyone you’d like me to be, I thought. “Sim.” “Oh, because I often see you ride by on your motorcycle and you never stop. But the next time you see me, stop and say hello and ask me if I’d like to go to the beach.” What more was there to say? There was nothing suggestive about the invitation. It was nice and simple. Two days later, I met her on the street and I took her with me.

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All good things come to an end. In November, I knew I would have to close our mission in Xai-Xai. I let an Englishman named Chris have my house. It was heartbreaking to leave Victoria. She kissed me gently on both cheeks: “Ciao, Marco!” Then she left without looking back. She walked along the sand, her steps stirring up a fine dust, as if she was flying. She climbed the dune and disappeared down the other side. I almost called out to her. I don’t know what stopped me.

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23 The Whole World’s My Home

I joined Viviane in Paris. She flew in from the Philippines three days after I arrived. When I picked her up at the airport, she was in an excellent mood. Her beauty enhanced by her tan and short hair. As far as she was concerned, things couldn’t be better. Our separation for a few months had reinvigorated her and she was looking forward to getting back together. At the hotel, I confessed my heart wasn’t in it anymore. When she was away, I felt fine but as soon as she came back, I couldn’t breathe. She was too clean and proper. She analyzed everything. In the four years we lived together, not once did she bawl me out. She didn’t know how to raise her voice. She was always eventempered. I had just spent four months with

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another girl who was full of life: she laughed when I was funny, cried when she watched a sad movie, yelled when I did something to hurt her. She was spontaneous, but never stupid. She realized she was born in a poor country and she would probably die in it. It didn’t prevent her from enjoying life and she didn’t have any illusions. She always said, “You’ll forget me. But it doesn’t matter, Marc. You won’t get me a visa. I won’t go to Canada. Let’s not think about it. Let’s just enjoy life!” Things got tense in that little hotel room in Paris. I packed my bags. Viviane started crying and I couldn’t leave. We agreed to give our relationship another chance. We went on a kind of honeymoon to Marrakech and Essaouira in Morocco. A beautiful vacation. But we sensed that it was a bit contrived. We even sent résumés to apply for a job we could do together. We hung around Morocco for another month and then acf called to offer us an assignment in Peshawar, Pakistan. A mass movement of Afghan refugees had gotten underway. People feared a catastrophe. It was the talk of all the newspapers. acf hired me to coordinate the mission. I was particularly delighted with the contract because I knew I couldn’t have a better colleague. Viviane is a real professional, conscientious and humane. As silly as it may sound, it’s that very perfection I resented. We reached Peshawar, a city in the middle of nowhere. It was stifling. It’s as if the town was walking through history backwards. Women’s rights declined daily as the madrassas, which had given birth to the Taliban, grew in influence. We were told there were 75,000 Afghan refugees. American journalists scrimmaged to gather testimony detailing the “immeasurable distress of these emaciated beings.” The un Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Kenzo Oshima of Japan donned his reporter’s hat and went to assess the situation personally. It had been a long time since this bureaucrat had set foot outside New York. And judging by his

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amazement at seeing the media circus, it must have been his first mission. Not to disappoint the media, he overstated the case and declared the situation a catastrophe. This had serious political and humanitarian ramifications. When Viviane and I arrived, we met the acf coordinator, who was pulling his hair out. He kept saying everyone was overwhelmed, that the situation was turning into an enormous crisis. “All right,” I said, “let’s check out the situation on the ground so we can make an action plan!” “Come again?” “That’s right, let’s see how it is in the field.” This guy was working on his fourth report of the “human catastrophe” without ever having set foot on the ground. He was content to rely on hearsay. “But you know, Marc, we need authorization to get into a camp!” “No big deal. Let’s go and get it.” We got authorization and the next day we set out for a refugee camp. There was a guide waiting for us at nine o’clock. We drove across a small village and at the exit, we came to an open space no bigger than a soccer pitch. The driver slowed down and informed us that this was the refugee camp. I was startled. “Is this a part of the camp?” “No sir, this is the camp.” I looked at Viviane and I could see she was thinking what I was thinking: Oops! “No problem, my friend. Tell me how it’s organized.” “The camp is divided in three: a big square and two squares on the sides.” I could see that. I didn’t even have to step back in order to take in the whole scene with a single glance. There was something I wasn’t getting. Where the hell were the 75,000 to 100,000 refugees? They couldn’t possibly be crowded into that square. I did a quick survey to determine the length of the camp. It

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was about 900 yards long. There was no way the refugee figures provided by unhcr and other humanitarian organizations could be right. According to our guide, unhcr generally determined the number of refugees based on the area they occupied. I had no objection to that. But I took another look, and I could swear there couldn’t be more than 20,000 people in the camp. There must have been some misunderstanding. So much for the human catastrophe announced by Kenzo Oshima. When the msf Holland team came to install the water system and heard about the error, we all had a good laugh. It reeked of one gigantic scam. I couldn’t really see what danger these Afghan refugees were fleeing, not at that particular time. Somebody was getting filthy rich and I was determined to find out who it was. I stuck around the neighbouring village as long as I could. I saw most of the so-called refugees leave the camp and head home. When I left, there weren’t more than 6,000 in the camp. We’d been hoodwinked like a bunch of raw rookies. Somebody had orchestrated this phony exodus to keep the relief aid rolling in. unhcr had decided to cut the aid because, it claimed, the people there no longer qualified as refugees. When I returned to Peshawar, I discovered that nearly 200,000 blankets had been distributed to the so-called refugees. That amounted to an average of 40 blankets per person. Under that many, they could have suffocated. I produced a report on the Peshawar scam. Then Vivian and I flew back to Paris. We saved acf needless expense. At acf, I expected applause. I got criticism instead for not inventing another mission to justify my stay. Money could readily be found for the region, I was told. I blew up. “I’m coming from one of the world’s poorest countries, Mozambique, for which you didn’t have a cent. And you’re telling me you’ve got bread to waste on a dictatorship that has the nuclear bomb . . .”

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I was livid. I remember another meeting in Peshawar. Viviane and I were at the English Club, one of six places where you could legally get a drop of alcohol. An American was sitting beside us. He had brown hair and a mustache. He was very discreet. He introduced himself and we spent the evening chatting. The next day, we saw him again at the same club. This time he was more talkative. He was really into the suds. He asked us what we were planning to do. I told him we were going to return to France because the Afghans had pulled off a gigantic con job to simulate a human catastrophe. “And what do you do?” “I work for the dea, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.” A bead of sweat trickled down my back. I was sure the police in Canada had reactivated my file and this guy had tracked me down. Maybe I’d fucked up a U.S. government plan by denouncing the Peshawar scam, so they might have decided to get rid of me by accusing me of taking drugs. But it was nothing of the sort. It was much simpler than that: the fellow was an ex-cop from New York who had seen his brother’s life ruined by drugs and he was determined to fight the dirty business. He’d thought he’d be deployed in Colombia. But the dea had sent him to Peshawar to help the local police dismantle the crime networks doing business with Afghanistan. He was disillusioned because the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan was nothing but a sieve. He knew all about what was happening on the other side. He’d even calculated to the dollar what it would cost to buy the entire Afghan poppy plantation and destroy it: about $300 million. One question sprang to mind: “So why don’t you do that?” Instead of wasting billions fighting dealers in the alleys of Brooklyn or Marseille. He didn’t need to tell me that politicians fatten up on money wasted on an unwinnable war on drugs that could have been won without a fight.

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Then the American poked his finger at a spot on the map north of Jalalabad. “He’s there,” he said. “Who?” “Bin Laden, idiot.” “You’re sure?” “Of course, every intelligence service in the world knows that.” I thought he was putting me on. I’d seen the impact of Bill Clinton’s strikes on Sudan, supposedly to get bin Laden. And this fellow from the dea was casually telling me he knew bin Laden’s zip code. Either he’s totally plastered or he’s pulling my leg, I thought. I was sure he was going to burst out laughing any minute. But just then, two guys from the World Food Program passed by and the American called them over. “Do you know where bin Laden is?” “Isn’t he near Jalalabad?” Everyone knew his address, down to the kids in the Peshawar market hawking T-shirts with a picture of Al Qaeda’s boss on them. I stared at the American wide-eyed. “Why not send him a little bomb delivered by an F-18 or a long-range missile?” “Marc, Marc, Marc. Politics isn’t that simple . . .” When I heard acf repeat over and over that there were thousands of dollars available for a masquerade in Pakistan, I thought about all those games that amounted to nothing but one big bluff. The whole region was just one big bluff. Friends and enemies. I couldn’t know it at the time but things were about to heat up with 9/11, immediately followed by a vicious war in Afghanistan. A war that claimed thousands of victims and that missed the only person in the country whose exact name and address we knew.

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Viviane and I were back to square one. It was starting to get to me. Since I’d left school the previous spring, not one of my missions had been completed, except in Mozambique. We got off at the hotel but we knew we couldn’t stay in Paris forever. Through the Internet, I landed a ten-month contract as a logistics coordinator for an American agency, the International Rescue Committee (irc). Destination: Bukavu in the Congo. One reason I took the job was to exorcise the trauma of Goma. I had never returned. But I realized that if I didn’t go back, I could never put the past behind me. I finally felt ready. Besides, I thought, I wouldn’t be there long. In four months, I’d have time to put my demons to rest and earn enough money to see me through, maybe even to go back to school. Viviane had already done Burundi. For her, returning to the region was out of the question. And I understood. It’s one of those places in the world that looks like paradise but harbours unimaginable horror. But we’d run out of options. She decided to work for msf again. She was offered a job in Sri Lanka. A six-month contract. Another separation. It turned out to be the last. She went her way; I went mine. No muss, no fuss, like a gently fading flame. My association with the irc didn’t last long. I couldn’t stick it out for four months. They managed to discourage me before that. All I got out of the mission was a chance to return to Goma. I went to see the volcano. Despite myself, I started to sweat. I could see the border, the road of death. I almost expected to see the bodies in their twisted poses or hear them laugh ironically: “Got you!” But it was a typical day in Africa. Market day, with the Congolese as noisy as ever. And I was alone with my memories. I went to take a look at my old football pitch. The car could barely make it along the rotten road up the little hill leading to the college. I parked and continued on foot. It felt as if a magnet

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was drawing me. It was a struggle to walk. Now and then I staggered. When I reached the main entrance, my eyes were immediately drawn to the pitch. And then, what rapture. There were children playing in the field where not long there had only been death. I couldn’t have imagined a better metaphor for redemption. A large crowd had turned out to watch a match between two local teams participating in an official tournament. Someone came up to me: “Marc?” I spun around. “Yeah.” “You don’t recognize me?” He was the first man I had hired when I arrived at the school in 1994. The two of us had created the mission team. Now he was a journalist for a local radio station and his father was the governor of Goma. He called people over. My cover was blown. But I was happy. I promised to see him again the next day. Then I drove back to the Caribou Hotel to get a night’s sleep. The next day, the guy came into the restaurant as I was eating breakfast. He gave me a conspiratorial smile and said, “Excuse me. Someone’s waiting for you outside.” Curious, I went outside. There were fifteen people standing in the hotel entrance. Former patients and staff. Four days later, sixty of them showed up to see me off. I met up with Pierrot, the carpenter, again. In 1994, I had gone through a remarkable experience with him. One evening, I had a gut feeling that something ugly was about to happen. It was just a feeling, but I told the driver to let me take the wheel. Entering Goma, we were stopped at a checkpoint. It was 6:00 p.m. and night was beginning to fall in the city. The lieutenant in charge of the detachment guarding the barrier was drunk. He ordered us to turn over the car. To show he meant business, he pulled out his Makarov, released the safety and drew a bead on my knee. My two hands clutched the steering wheel while

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Pierre, who normally would have been in the driver’s seat, huddled on the seat beside me. I tried reasoning with the soldier and even promised to deliver the car anywhere he chose. I pleaded with him not to blow a hole in my leg. Then fortune smiled. A unicef car suddenly pulled up behind us with its high beams on. A big woman from Zaire was sitting majestically inside. And then, I witnessed a scene that put the lie to all the Western nonsense that African women are powerless in their own countries. The lieutenant walked forward and stood at attention. He kept nodding as the lady reprimanded him. He wasn’t so high and mighty anymore. I took the opportunity to make my getaway. Two days later, I left Goma. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, I was still at the school in Hull. I’ll never forget seeing the people glued to their tvs, mesmerized by the images of the plane crashing into the second tower. My first impression was that they must be watching a movie. A film shoot. But no. This was real life. The people kept saying “Oh my God! Oh my God!” as the scene with the second kamikaze plane was repeated over and over. Bin Laden’s name leaped to mind. I thought of the last thing my dea friend had said: “Politics is really complicated, Marc.” A chill ran down my spine. Two weeks earlier, I had flown back from Kenya via Boston, the same airport from which Mohammed Atta and his deadly band of terrorists had taken off. And in April, before heading to Bukavu on assignment for the irc, I’d spent five days at the company’s New York headquarters. I did the things tourists do. I’d visited the World Trade Center. I would never have thought that someday it would be reduced to a pile of rubble. I panicked. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the cia might arrest me when they spotted too many coincidences. Then they’d check my passport and see the Sudanese, Pakistani and Afghan visas. They’d have

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a fine old time concocting all sorts of hare-brained scenarios. I could imagine them digging into my computer and finding e-mails that I’d written and that weren’t particularly proAmerican. Viviane and I had split up. She was back from her mission. We already sensed that there was no point trying to rekindle the flame. She called to ask if she should come and see me in Hull. I told her I thought it would be better if we broke it off before it got too hard. I found myself alone in Canada. So I called Laurence who was still working for the Belgians. She was happy to hear from me. “When you come to Montreal, why don’t we have a drink and talk?” “Yes, why not?” I took the train and went to see her in Montreal. I was running out of money. So I called acf. “Got anything interesting?” “Yes, right now. For a month. Assignment: closing a mission in Uganda.” acf loved me because I was the guy who took the shitty jobs, especially the ones that didn’t last long. I went to Uganda to end a mission that had been operating for eleven years on the Sudanese frontier. I handled everything: paid the salaries, stored the tools, etc. It was a rotten job. And once again it was brought home to me, as if I had forgotten, of just how nasty, unjust and cruel Africa can be. A week after I arrived, I noticed a gorgeous girl in a restaurant, sitting at the next table. When I struck up a conversation with her, she told me she was a midwife. She’d been interning in the village for a year. She had another six months left to earn her diploma. She had already applied to return to university. Her parents had bled themselves dry to pay for her studies. But they didn’t regret it. She was living proof that Africa can succeed.

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In the sad atmosphere that hung over the office, I couldn’t have had a better tonic than the young woman’s smile. I asked her if I’d be seeing her again. “I work at the hospital.” Two days later, I cooked up a reason for hanging around the hospital. I invited her to dinner. We met a few times. The relationship developed slowly. We were aware that our destinies were much too uncertain. We held hands; we kissed. But we didn’t have time to go any further. One evening, I took her back to her place and I left her with the promise that I would be seeing her again soon. When my assistant burst into my office the next day, I realized there must be something wrong. “The girl . . . somebody threw battery acid at her.” I rushed to the hospital. She was lying in bed, with burns on her chest and face. The attack had just occurred, her skin was still red, in striking contrast with the rest of her body. At first, her condition didn’t seem all that bad. Her eyes were swollen, but the acid hadn’t blinded her. She must have been suffering because the idiots in the hospital had smeared petroleum jelly over her. It’s the last thing to do when a liquid has burned someone. So her skin was continuing to burn. It was December 31. For the love of God, you don’t harm an angel on a day of celebration. I was distraught. The police were there. The family. A crisis. I was supposed to go to Kampala and I offered to bring her back a special cream. Three days later, I returned. I raced to the hospital. And it was awful. She was completely disfigured. The petroleum jelly had prevented the acid from evaporating. I couldn’t look at her. And that’s no way to act because the person realizes that it is even worse than she imagined. But Christ it was awful. I had a hard time looking her in the eye. I had kissed this girl. I had fantasized about her. She used to have the loveliest smile in the world. Why would anyone do that to her? I was afraid some acf employees had wanted to get even with me for closing the mission.

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But it had nothing to do with that. A woman had been arrested and had confessed that she’d committed the crime out of jealousy. Nothing all that unusual. The young girl had delivered the “acid woman’s” baby five months before. When the husband came to see his wife and child, he became infatuated with the midwife. He went to talk to her in the corridor and said, “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I’ve got money. I want to marry you.” The girl blew him off and threatened to tell his wife if he insisted. The guy wouldn’t listen. He kept pursuing her. She was forced to report him to the police. Out of spite, the man took out his frustration on his wife. He beat her. The way he saw it, he couldn’t have the midwife as long as his wife was alive. And instead of taking it out on her aggressor or reporting him to the police, the wife decided to take it out on a third party. She hid in a doorway waiting for the midwife. And when the midwife arrived, the woman threw acid into her face and then ran to tell her husband: “Your whore of a midwife, you said she was beautiful. Well, she isn’t anymore!” Then she ran off. The police found her in the bush, in rags and tatters, half out of her mind. My mission ended. I had a brief assignment without incident in Sri Lanka, and I returned to France. A few months later, when I went to have Jean-Christophe Rufin sign a passport renewal application form, we talked shop and he asked me what I was doing. “I’m leaving for Uvira in the Congo with acf. I must admit I’m dragging my feet a little. I don’t like the way the agency operates. There’s a big management problem.” He’d worked with acf in 1984 and 1985. So he knew the company. “Look, Marc, maybe you should take a step back and try something else.” “Right, but I don’t really know what to do. I’ve got only four or five months to kill before I go back to school. Job offers for such a short period don’t grow on trees.”

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“I might have something to suggest.” “What?” “How about working for me? If you’re interested, it could be fun.” “Tell me about it.” Jean-Christophe was no longer an msf vice-president. He’d become a writer. His books were bestsellers. He had won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious prize in French literature. “I’m working on my next book. But there are some important elements missing. The book needs more in-depth research.” Then he told me I’d be working on two themes. The first concerned Portugal; the second, the environment. He decided I’d start with the second. I’d visit relevant ngos, interview specialists and travel to countries where major events had occurred. I started to make inquiries in Paris and realized that the odyssey of modern environmental organizations had really begun with Greenpeace. I visited the offices of that agency in Paris and Amsterdam. I realized that for research purposes, I needed to go to Canada. One of the cities I absolutely had to visit was Vancouver. And me a Canadian. Talk about a coincidence! It had been twelve years since I’d set foot in Vancouver.

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24 It’s Been a Long Time . . .

In Vancouver I felt like the prodigal son. The first afternoon, I had a panic attack. I was walking through Stanley Park, terrified that I’d run into Karen rounding a grove. Karen and my daughter, who must have been eleven years old. It had been eight years since Karen and I had been in touch. Back at the hotel, I thought there was no way I’d get my research done if I didn’t act on the fear gripping my throat. So I called her. There were six people by her name in the phone book. When I dialed the third, a man answered. “May I speak to Karen?” “Karen doesn’t live here anymore. I’m her brother. Who’s speaking?” “An old friend. Marc Vachon. I’m at the

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hotel. . . . If you speak to her, please ask her to give me a call.” At 10 a.m. the next day, I was in my room when the phone rang. “Hi, it’s been a long time.” It’s the first thing she said in that calm, cool voice of hers. She spoke as if it had been yesterday. The next day, I went to meet her. Age had been good to her; she was just more mature; a real woman now. She didn’t slap me; she didn’t throw her arms around me either. She just gave me a peck on the cheek. And talked to me like an old friend. We shot the breeze for a while. Then the subject of Jacqueline came up. Very calmly, Karen told me about her. We were like two old friends bumping into each other outside a café in the early afternoon. And I was also curious about a mutual friend. “Say, Karen, remember my old pal, Laurent? I haven’t spoken to him since Iraq. It’s been 10 years.” She blushed and then I understood. When Laurent got back from Iraq, he went to see her, ostensibly to let her know how I was doing. He was the father of Karen’s second child. I was shocked but I wasn’t angry. After all, I was the one who’d decided to leave. But why had Laurent lied? Why had he pretended that when Karen had met a new guy she didn’t want to hear from me anymore? A couple of days later, Karen and I had dinner together. Then we met again. She didn’t hold a grudge. She’d always known I was a wild one. To live, I needed room, I couldn’t be fenced in. I was her eternal adventurer. Karen showed me photos of Jacqueline. “Our” Jacqueline. She was beautiful. Her complexion was smooth, healthy. It made me happy. Laurent had raised her like his own daughter; he hadn’t harmed her in any way or rejected her. She did theatre and took music lessons. There I was, in Vancouver, talking to my ex, the mother of my daughter. Life moves in cycles, I thought. For better or worse

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I was tying up loose ends. I was retracing my steps, with no regrets for the past, but with a brand new bag. I wasn’t the guy I used to be, even if I was walking along the same sidewalks. I wandered along the street where I’d slept when I couldn’t pay for a room. Twelve years later, I checked into a hundreddollar-a-night hotel that had served as décor in an American film. I visited city hall and the libraries—places I didn’t know existed when I worked construction. One morning, Karen called to say she was passing through Vancouver with her father before going back home to Richmond, B.C. “I’ll be in the station at 4:30 this afternoon. Come to the café and you’ll see your daughter.” I got there 15 minutes early so I’d be sure not to miss them. My hands shook so hard I was spilling my coffee. I couldn’t even read the newspaper. Karen strolled in with a tall, blond kid by her side. The child looked like me. In that packed hall, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was gorgeous. My daughter. She was absolutely beautiful. She made me feel alive. I was happy and a bit sad at the same time. I would have liked to go on a walk with her. I wished I had taken her to buy pretty dresses when she was a little girl. There, in the station, I didn’t speak to her, but just seeing her there was the loveliest moment of my life. I felt like running my fingers through her hair. Then the two of them left. Leaving me with my heart in turmoil, infinitely grateful to Karen. I finished my first inquiry and sent Jean-Christophe a document of about 1200 pages. He sent me the second part of the research I had to do. That would take me to the coast of Portugal. I was in Paris, happy, serene. I was thirty-eight years old. I didn’t have a steady girlfriend but I was taking a good bite out of life. My daughter was splendid.

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I was a supporter (and I still am) of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club, and the Stade Français Paris rugby club. I was a genuine Parisian. But I was starting to get bored. I wanted to get moving. I went into an Internet café to search help-wanted sites asking for aid workers. A German company by the name of Die Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe (juh) was looking for a logistician for Angola. I was more interested in the country than in the company. At this point, I missed Angola, Africa and Africans. I sent my cv. A week later, the bosses gave me a call. But they wanted to send me to the Congo, where they were having real trouble. They were waiting for me in Berlin to give me a rundown on the mission. The Congo was a rotten assignment. It involved closing another centre, laying off 33 employees and leaving a population in the lurch: the company’s health program had served 38,000 people. So I was pretty bitter. I left Africa not sure of what I’d do next. I no longer had my studio in Paris. What’s more, before my departure for the Congo, I decided to pay off all my debts to my ex-girlfriend, the school and my friends. But what a pleasant surprise! My bosses in Berlin were happy with the way I’d managed the Congo crisis. They gave me $150,000 to set up projects in Djibouti, in East Africa. I had always been intrigued by the Red Sea. On top of it all, they gave me two weeks vacation. Early in January 2002, I was off to Djibouti with a hefty salary. Djibouti is a pile of rocks lost in the desert, a former colony where 4,000 French soldiers occupy a strategic position overlooking Africa on one side and the Middle East on the other. The capital is an artificial city living off the French presence and the tourist industry. The rest of the country is just a big pile of rocks. To give you an idea what it’s like: The first episode of Planet of the Apes was filmed there.

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There’s nothing there, it’s as hot as an oven. It’s extremely poor. The $150,000 wouldn’t go amiss. I toured the sectors occupied by the other ngos so I wouldn’t be stepping on any toes, but found there were no ngos on site. So I consulted local associations and groups in the big cities to find out how to invest the money wisely. The objective was to identify projects with modest costs and significant spin-offs. After a month and a half, I had chosen 11. They were mainly related to public health: conducting vaccination campaigns, distributing mosquito nets, using videos to raise awareness in schools, rebuilding a hospital operating room, purchasing four tons of milk for a food centre, etc. They called for small investments that made people happy because the money was going to the right places. I also supported women’s ngos working for gender equality. My projects went smoothly in Djibouti, but on the international scene the picture wasn’t so rosy. The Americans had their canons trained on Iraq and were threatening to attack. The sound of boots on the ground was getting louder and louder. War seemed inevitable. In Djibouti, everywhere you went, you could see American soldiers. They had erected huge medical facilities to treat the thousands of likely casualties from the front line. But the French opposed the war in Iraq and the base was never used. Right until the end, I clung to the notion that it was all a hoax, that there would be no war. Things were being blown out of proportion, I reckoned. I’d been in Iraq ten years earlier. There was no way Saddam Hussein could resist an army, especially the mightiest military force on the planet. The ngos were already rushing into the region. They were convinced there’d be a massacre. Berlin asked me to go to neighbouring Iran to explore the possibility of Die Johanniter deploying relief aid in the event of a catastrophe or massive population displacement. I could check

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out Iran and then return to Djibouti to finish constructing a system conveying water to the Afars, who dwelled in the middle of magnificent mountains. It was quite an ambitious project, involving a few miles of pipelines, pumping stations, and valves. Enough to supply a small school, a clinic, a fountain in the centre of a village, a drinking trough for livestock . . . Johanniter had agreed to finance it. In Germany, people were in a frenzy about Iraq. All around the world, the television networks were covering one subject: Iraq. And yet, no one understood what was really at stake in this conflict. Iran was dragging its feet about granting us visas. I suggested we forget about it and try to enter Iraq through the southern gate. So we left for Jordan to study the terrain, assess the needs and intervention plans of the organizations already in the region. We remained on stand-by in Amman so we could enter Iraq as soon as possible. Experience had taught us that the most urgent requirements were emergency surgical kits and medicine. I called Christophe the Fireman. The two of us had teamed up in Kyrgyzstan. He’d just wrapped up a three-month contract with Oxfam in Jordan. He knew the region like the back of his hand. He joined me in Berlin to sign his contract and we left. Things accelerated when the war broke out. Everybody was caught off guard. In mid-April, with war raging, Die Johanniter sent me on a mission to deliver medicine in Iraq. So I picked up the package in Amman and headed to Baghdad. At the Jordan-Iraq border, the American soldiers took a cursory glance at our papers to verify our nationalities. It took all of five minutes. Then the marine wished us a good trip and waved us on our way. It’s a 300-mile trek through the desert from the frontier to the outskirts of Baghdad. Barren land. The road is a long black trail that winds across a vast expanse of golden sand. But the last 40 miles before you reach Baghdad are treacher-

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ous. One suburb, Al Hamidiyah, had earned its reputation as a haven for bandits. Now it was plunged into anarchy. Approaching this small town, you had to be wary of a trap in the form of a sleeping policeman placed in the middle of the road supposedly to discourage speeding. As you slowed down, bandits sprang from the ditches brandishing Kalashnikovs. If they were feeling generous, they left their victims stripped naked in the desert. As for women, I shudder to think of the treatment reserved for them. care had tasted the medicine three times in three days. lwf, another ngo, had stumbled into the trap. The Italians were victims, too. Many a journalist had fallen prey. What could you do alone faced with ten trigger-happy guys? Nothing. You gave them what they wanted hoping your face didn’t piss them off too much. Otherwise, you’d win a free ticket to hell. We were lucky enough to get over this stretch of road without incident. Of course, we had protected our car with big trucks in front, in back and on each side. We were like the stone in a piece of fruit. We headed to the Abu Ghraib prison, a few miles from the centre of Baghdad, to meet some local contacts and ngos already in place. It was about five in the afternoon and still daylight. We let out a sigh when we saw our colleagues. The prison was an immense building with no occupants. It had been the largest penitentiary in Iraq and certainly the most modern, easily accommodating 15,000 prisoners. Our contact, who worked for Première Urgence, knew Baghdad like the back of his hand. He looked after the trucks. We followed him to the city, because we had to crash in a hospital protected by the Americans. We knew we’d missed our exit when the signs indicated we were on the road to Basra. We decided to double back. Just then, we spotted a 500-man-strong American column, heading in the opposite direction. We were crawling along at 20

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miles an hour. It was starting to get dark. Adding to the devastation, smoke billowed up from the oil wells torched by Saddam’s men before he abdicated. The air was thick with smoke. The tension was palpable. And we were in the midst of executing a U-turn. A perfect scenario for a military snafu. My stomach was in a knot. I could imagine a mortar shell honing in on us. But nothing happened. We got through in one piece. We finally located our access road, our nostrils still smarting from the fumes of burning petrol. The cars hurtled ahead. Night was falling. It was Baghdad. War-torn Baghdad. When we reached the hospital, a pediatric centre, there was a marine standing out front. To protect it! I had the feeling the Americans were just looking for a place to park their tanks. They made us leave our truck outside the wall. Inside, in the event of an attack, it would have been in the way of their Abrams tanks. Considered the world’s best, these highly resilient armoured vehicles were protected against nbc attacks (nuclear, biological and chemical) and resistant to antitank missiles. A curious defence, in which the ones who are supposed to be protected were left in the open, exposed to attack, while the tank was safe and sound inside. The next morning, we got a cable from a Première Urgence team that had departed three days earlier for Basra in southeastern Iraq. They reported that the needs in the region were enormous. Our products would be of immense help. I rented some Iraqi trucks and let the Jordanians go back home. I was planning on delivering our stock to Basra via Al Qod and Nassiriyah. The destination: the pediatric hospital in Basra, which would then distribute the supplies to the small clinics. But I couldn’t leave Baghdad without bidding the city goodbye. It was like the opening scene in a Western: the guy is sitting quietly in his room; he hears a loud knock on the door; at first he’s startled but he gets up and opens the door. That’s what it was like in Baghdad. Bombs had rained down on the city. The people couldn’t fathom what was happening. Then, the strikes had

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stopped, Baghdadis wandered out on the street to find out what was going on. People were numb. The sight of Americans parading their tanks along the principal thoroughfares left them dumbfounded. What had happened to the state institutions? No more police, no more political parties. But also no more Saddam. People were particularly surprised by the speed at which events had unfolded. Twenty-four hours before the fall of Baghdad, the Iraqi information minister had promised a “night of the long knives” the Americans would forever regret. And then, nothing. And there was a dearth of information. The phones were out. There was no television, no radio. People still didn’t know yet who’d been killed at the front. Who would be coming back? Who was doing what, where and how? Big southern cities like Basra and Nassiriyah were showing no sign of life. The same was true in the north. People were just beginning to venture onto the roads. Little by little they learned that Mohammed was dead. Leïla, too. Hamad was in the hospital. Kamal managed to make it through. The post-Saddam moments of libations and looting gradually faded. People slowly woke up with a hell of a hangover. And bile rising in their throats. But they weren’t yet sure where to direct their anger. The daily hardships: no water, no electricity. One Americanfunded station, Radio Sawa, started broadcasting, with a bias no one could miss. Average Iraqis, no matter their opinion of Saddam Hussein, felt humiliated. Why hadn’t the Americans, with all their technology, assassinated Saddam and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, instead of subjecting the entire country to another war? The Americans could have eliminated the only danger. Controlled the apparatus of power. Far better to have shown the Iraqis that this wasn’t an occupation, that they were free to decide their future. There would have been no loss of face, and the people’s pride would have been spared. Baghdad wouldn’t have been

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humiliated. The city is a symbol. It’s what Paris is to the French or London to the English. The symbol was sullied, tarnished, scorned. Iraqis felt violated. They could hardly appreciate gestures of friendship that America may have been trying to offer them. Rape takes a long time to fade from the memory. Everybody knows that. When Iraqis looked at the occupier, there was no love in their eyes. It’s not over. There are the Kurds, a people without a country, mountain people who have suffered. After the war in 1991, the Kurds carved out a secure territory for themselves. But in the new Iraq, they stand to lose everything. They will lose their autonomy in the shotgun wedding that the Americans will impose on every religious and ethnic group to preserve (or so they claim) the integrity of Iraq. And if the Kurds get greedy, who will crush them this time? Will anyone be able to stop Turkey, which has its own Kurdish minority, from entering the fray to ensure the stability of its territory? And if Turkey jumps in, the whole of Europe will be affected. That’s what happens when people try to resolve conflicts and end up creating more conflicts. U.S.A., U.S.A.! Alas, once-proud Baghdad had lost its luster. It seemed poorer, more decrepit and more exhausted than it was when I first visited it in 1991. A few differences: in 1991, American strikes blew up the bridges and the infrastructure. That didn’t happen this time. Another distinction: the foreign presence. Now foreigners lived in every major hotel in the city. There was no doubt: Baghdad had been conquered. Relations with the Iraqis had changed. The Americans did nothing to appease the hatred that emerged. The reaction was entirely predictable. The Americans had hammered Baghdad with thousands of tons of bombs. And with shades of Vietnam, they mined the city, this time with cluster bombs instead of landmines. I ran into a number of American soldiers in Nassiriyah and

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Baghdad. I looked at the guys crouching behind sandbags and wondered how old they were. On average they were twenty-two or twenty-three. In other words, these were kids plying a deadly trade. Three-quarters of them had enlisted to escape godforsaken holes in the middle of nowhere in America. The recruits from the big cities came from the poorest districts. For them, the army meant a steady paycheque, a chance for a diploma, and an opportunity to play Rambo and stop being a loser, if only while the war lasted. In the streets of the Iraqi capital, there were frequent displays of arrogance. Once, an American Army jeep rudely cut us off. On the back of the vehicle were the words: “if you don’t like my driving, go fuck yourself.” What formula will the Americans propose to end the crisis? Machiavelli himself would approve. The Americans will let the towns destroy themselves. They’ll protect the oil wells in the vast desert. There, the wells are easy to guard; an intruder can be spotted from afar. The U.S. will claim, “We’ve liberated Iraq. When the Iraqi people are capable of managing their infrastructure, we’ll give them back their wells!” Then, the Americans will foment trouble so that the Iraqis will never be ready. The humanitarian situation is complex in Iraq. It’s not as straightforward as flooding in India. Nor is it the typical African situation with people dying from starvation or cholera. There will be a volcanic eruption of violence and destruction when Iraqis, numbed by decades of war, shake off their lethargy. When the effects of post-traumatic stress kick in. When orphans become brutal or absentee parents. When women who have been raped are driven to suicide. When the children of war play with real weapons. It’s a catastrophe waiting to happen: in a few years, a few months, even a few days. On a broader scale, this new war, this new human tragedy will soon affect Liberians, Congolese, Somalis, Sudanese and other victims of human distress, who will die of hunger because the food destined for them has been rerouted to Iraq for a crisis that could have been averted.

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One positive note, however. Iraq had know-how and experienced relief workers. The country wouldn’t need humanitarian assistance or ngos like msf. It would need materials and equipment, a health ministry, a supply structure, reconstituted data files, patients’ dossiers, etc. All the hospitals and health centres were called Saddam Hussein Centre. Every one of them had a name change. So, the stamps had to be changed for orders to be processed. Administrative responsibilities needed to be clarified. It was especially galling to return to Iraq only to find Westerners refusing to understand what was happening. There was no shortage of media, but they failed to get a handle on the conflict. I remember the reporter from Fox who was in a trench the Americans had just wrenched from the Iraqis. He was near the corpse of an Iraqi. With a look of disgust, he brandished a gas mask and said, “Why do they feel they need to wear these masks if it isn’t to protect themselves against their own weapons of mass destruction?” He seemed indignant. But if he had taken a look at his own soldiers, he would have realized they were also dressed like Robocops. But, of course, he was less disturbed by those robots. Anyway, now we know that wmds were a figment of the hawks’ imagination. The Americans tried to pick a quarrel with the Syrians for supplying the Iraqis with infrared glasses. Yet they’re part of every American soldier’s equipment. That said, some of the media were doing a good job. Whether it was politically motivated or driven by sincere humanitarianism, the European press had largely sided with antiwar demonstrators who had taken the streets of the major capitals by storm. The French press had also condemned the war because France had its own colonial past and knew all too well colonialism never succeeds. In Sarajevo, the war raged with a rare violence in 1993. I experienced the worst bombings in my life. But in Sarajevo, things were clear. The rules of the game were well established. The positions of the combatants were well charted. For a time, Sarajevo

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was the scene of anarchy caused by the plethora of Bosnian warlords and the proliferation of the black market. It was ugly. And that’s what could easily happen in Iraq. When the economy picks up again, opportunists will drool over the excellent business opportunities. As in Russia, they’ll be former apparatchiks who curried favour with Saddam. They’ll be the only ones with enough capital to provide the startup money. This will inevitably cause resentment. Neighbours will inform on each other. People will resort to divisions based on religion, clan and ethnicity. And that will be the start of the apocalypse. It’s not even comparable to Afghanistan under the Taliban. There, things were tough, too. The repression of women and liberties shocked our Western sensibilities. But the rules were clearly defined. Whether people liked the rules or not, they knew where they stood. We were free to stay and help the disadvantaged or abandon them on the pretext that women were forced to wear a burka. What is most troubling about Iraq is the absence of the structures of established order. There is the danger of the whole region collapsing. It’s the plethora of candidates for martyrdom. Now (in 2005), 48 percent of the Iraqis are under 18 years of age. This generation has also dreamed of jewels, big fortunes and a bright future. What will they do tomorrow when they meet Americans who have made orphans of many Iraqi children? How will they resist master terrorists’ promises of paradise in return for killing fat-cat Americans? They’ll throw stones like the Palestinians. But unlike Palestinians, Iraqis don’t lack for weapons. They have a panoply of arms at their disposal. They have dynamite for suicide bombers and rifles for future snipers. We thought they were out of their minds to attack soldiers with such ferocity. But soon bandits targeted civilians and aid workers for money, and we witness the tragedy of journalists and relief workers being taken hostage. It’s like in Chechnya. I don’t want to be taken hostage for thirteen months by a group that fears neither God nor man. And rather than seeing

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my country or organization pay a $100,000 ransom for my release, I’d prefer the money be spent in another part of the world on a project that could benefit a community. I don’t want to be a doomsayer. No doubt, some ngos will think that, despite everything, something can be accomplished. The Americans, for example, are fond of saying if you want to learn how to swim, you have to jump into the water. So to get things done in Iraq, all you have to do is go. They think they can teach the Iraqis to bathe in the pure water of democracy and the respect of human rights—humanitarian aid with the American occupation playing the tuba in the background. The 2005 elections were a testimony to Iraqis’ courage and determination. But whatever happens, they’re still under water. How long can they hold out? I don’t deny there’s a need for increased humanitarian aid in Iraq. It is as true for this country as it is for any other. Even in Montreal there are a thousand young people sleeping in the street, addicted to drugs and completely despondent. That’s not the issue. The fact is that Iraqis’ most urgent need is security and a return to the rule of law. Today, I no longer want to be in Iraq. It has nothing to do with physical fear. I haven’t known fear since I was a teenager. But I’m not suicidal. We’re not there to do a tv show. It may sound somewhat messianic, but we’re there to save lives. Including our own. I fear for my colleagues who are still there setting up wonderful hospitals, sanitation projects and general infrastructure. They’re pouring their heart and soul into the work. I hope I’m wrong and that in the end things will turn out well.

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25 A Dream

The war in Iraq, Junior’s war, left a bitter taste in my mouth. Make no mistake about it: I’m glad Saddam Hussein isn’t in power anymore. After all, I saw his dirty work. I know what he did to his people. It’s not what you see on tv. I saw it with my own eyes. But Saddam Hussein is just another dictator among dozens who are still ruling so many countries. It’s not his ouster that bothers me. It’s the price Iraqis and American soldiers have had to pay. How many people got quick burials in the Muslim tradition without anyone really noticing? And don’t forget the sanctions, a form of institutionalized civilian massacre accepted by the whole world because it came with un blessing. Why wasn’t the war prosecuted ten years earlier; why were American soldiers stopped from marching to Baghdad in 1991?

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Why did civilians have to endure 12 years of suffering? Terrorism has changed. It’s less idealistic, more desperate and more evil. Nothing can stop it. What’s worse than the sight of suicide bombers blowing themselves up and taking innocent victims with them to a noisy death? Yes, I’m bitter. But, despite my feelings of helplessness and bitterness, the flame of hope is still not out. When I get up in the morning, I still have the itch to start anew, to help again. In the field, I’m bursting with energy doing things I’ve done a thousand times before, building food camps, cholera camps. Because I know it’s essential. So I’ll go to Djibouti, then we’ll see. Maybe I’ll accept the offer to rebuild an orphanage in Rwanda. It’s tempting. After all, among orphans, we’re brothers. No, I’m not a teary-eyed humanitarian. I’ve seen death up close many times. For 12 years, it has been my companion. I know it. Death just missed me in Sarajevo, I carried it in my arms, I smelled it in the mass graves in Goma, I hated it when it carried off children in the cholera camps—there’s nothing worse—it disgusted me when it hounded the patients Luc Legrand was fighting to save. But I respect it. I know someday my luck will run out. I’m not suicidal, not pessimistic, and I can serenely face the inevitable. I just hope when death comes calling, it will be gentle and as late as possible. Fate willing. But I also know that luck has to be nourished. When I’m down or when I’ve got the blues, when I’m sitting alone in a park somewhere in Berlin and when I’m overcome by melancholy at seeing a couple embrace, I remember that I have at least one struggle to carry on against death. Nothing less. I have my own little life to lead. As far as I’m concerned my life is normal. I’m a pretty normal guy, considering the hand I’ve been dealt. If I go around with a valise in my hand, it’s because I’m called “Vachon with a V for valise,” as I used to say when I was a kid. I have no idea what my vagabond life holds in store for me. I’ve learned never to say never. I may end up a middle-class guy

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with pipe and slippers, leading a quiet life in the suburbs with my little family. I almost did it. That’s what I’d hoped to do with Lucrecia. Sure Mozambique wasn’t Canada or Switzerland, but now it’s peaceful. My construction business would have grown, even prospered. I might have had a house full of kids. Uncertainty has become a way of life for me. It’s exhausting, it’s scary, but I know how to overcome adversity. It’s heavy, sometimes it gets to you, but you get used to it. I see my life and my work as a long journey with its charms, its weariness, its discoveries, its encounters, its hotel rooms and stopovers. The journey has toughened me. The fear of the unknown has kept me alert. Like an old wolf. More wolf than fox. Instead of cunning, I have an instinct for survival. That’s how I pursue my path, alternating between solo projects and adventures in a pack. As I’ve grown older, I’ve been careful about the company I keep. I can watch time pass and contemplate the uncertainties that litter my path with a little more serenity. For now, at least, I’m hanging in there. I’m more mature now; I’ve settled my debts. I may be poor today, but I’m free, debt-free. They say a man without debt is rich. I don’t have any money, but I don’t owe any to anybody. My mother would say, “He did alright.” Today humanitarianism is in search of an identity, especially after the war in Iraq. In a perfect world, humanitarianism would not exist. People wouldn’t die of thirst or starvation. So humanitarian activity is in itself an admission of failure. I’m not saying there are no humanitarians. I still meet people who are truly committed. I’ve seen guys and gals set out, their hearts as big as a house. And they return year after year. Their enthusiasm tempered by experience. They’re less foolhardy, less ostentatious. Poised and determined, but humble. But some ngos, particularly the ones with prestigious prizes to their name, become media-dependent. They attract volunteers more interested in excitement and prestige than efficiency and discretion. They’re the companies we hear shooting their

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mouths off. It’s all very well to rail against human rights violations or the absence of democracy, but when there’s a need to vaccinate children, supply drinkable water, care for the wounded, you’d better step up. No matter what the host government is like. We’re aid workers. Not politicians. We serve human beings, not legal or political causes. If we can make a contribution to a cause, so be it, but not at the expense of our primary mission. Finally, if there has been one constant in my life’s journey, it has been a yearning to belong to a family. Psychologists would probably put this down, with some justification, to a reaction to being abandoned by my biological parents. This longing has persisted all through the days when I shuffled from one foster family to another. This longing has emerged in my relations with bikers, aid workers and friends. One day I would like to start a family, have a child, perhaps two. Make sure my daughter Jacqueline is doing all right. I hope one day she’ll want to meet me. I’d like her to visit me in Paris. That’s why I’ve settled my debts. So I’ll be presentable when I see her. Apart from her, my friends are my real family. Their love isn’t affected by the ravages of time. I can count on them. They’ll never betray me. They’re the best. They help me pursue my journey in an extended family: of humanitarian work, humanity and human beings. I’ve just reread this story. I’m thinking about the people who’ll soon be reading it. What about my first child, my first daughter, the one I never knew? Should I warn her about the book? Tell her not to worry about what I say? What should I tell her? I pour another glass of wine. And I wonder. Maybe I should give her mother a call. Why not? But no! Or should I? Something inside me tells me to settle that debt. But no. The wine is starting to go to my head. And I begin to dream. I see myself picking up the phone. I leave a message for Sophie; her name, not very common, is easy to find in the tele-

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phone book. But she doesn’t call back right away. Then three days later, the phone rings. “Hi, it’s Sophie.” “Sophie who?” “You know a lot of Sophies?” It’s just like yesterday. As if time has stopped. As if we are picking up a conversation where we left off. Dreams can be a pain in the ass: you don’t notice time go by. We meet. She hasn’t changed. Oh, maybe a little. A little more mature. But she’s much the same. It’s been 25 years since we last saw each other. We talk calmly. Like adults. Like the adults we’ve become. I tell her about the book. She smiles. She doesn’t hold a grudge. I’m glad. Good thing I called her. “You know, Marc, you’re a grandfather.” Sophie’s funny that way. She’s so spontaneous she just blurts things out. We laugh. We call my daughter. Yes, she’d like to see me. Get to know me at last. She’s done some research on the Internet. She found out what I’m doing. A relief worker, not a rat. Anyway, her mother has never bad-mouthed me. That’s the trouble with dreams; they leave things out. I meet her. She looks like me. She’s proud of that. She’s dreamed of the moment. She introduces her boyfriend to me. He’s a good guy. They’re poor, but doing fine. Humble but dignified. That’s what’s strange about dreams: your daughter’s beaus aren’t rich. My daughter has waited 24 years to get to know her dad. Not to settle scores or start life over: just so things will be normal. This kid’s like me; she doesn’t remake the past; she looks to the future. She’s fine. Then she says, “Come. I have something to show you!” She opens the bedroom door. And I hear breathing, the sound of two little beings breathing. And there they are, my granddaughters. The sleep of the innocent, carefree, trusting. I’m

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so happy I could cry. I’m a grandfather. That’s what’s so crazy about dreams: you learn how to cry again. Things are coming together. Karen calls me: “Get ready; you may be meeting Jacqueline soon.” Then there’s Marie-Claude. She doesn’t know it yet, but she does me a powerful amount of good. That’s what’s so crazy about dreams: everything happens at once. I call Jean-Christophe. He’s on the highway. He jams on the brakes, almost causes a huge pile-up. I tell him I’m a grandfather and I’m okay. I call François Bugingo. He’s just back from the U.S., shattered because Bush won a second term. I tell him I don’t give a damn because I’m a grandfather. Dreams are funny: people don’t believe you. Things are coming together. But I’ll be off again. Because I never stay in one place. But no one will get hurt this time. I’ll be back. That’s what’s so nice about dreams; sometimes they actually happen.

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