• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The famine hadn’t yet become a major story. In some three months, the U.S. military would send troops, the American public millions of dollars in aid, and the broadcast networks their anchors. Hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved, but after that, things would get out of control. They often do. It started off being one thing, and ended up as something else. Peacekeepers became peacemakers. A humanitarian mission became a hunt for a Somali warlord. A Black Hawk went down. U.S. troops got killed. The whole thing turned to shit.

It started, though, with the starving. Thousands dying every day: mostly kids and old people, the ones without weapons or money, or families to fall back on. Roving bands of teens armed with guns and grenade launchers rode around in tricked-out “technicals,” pickups with machine guns mounted on the back.

I hitched a ride on a relief flight that the U.S. military had just begun operating out of Mombasa, Kenya. In Baidoa as many as a hundred people were dying a day. The United States was shipping in sacks of sorghum on lumbering C-130 Hercules transport planes. The bags of grain were stacked on wooden pallets, kept in place by mesh netting attached to the plane’s floor by cables. On my flight, a half-dozen young men with high-and-tight crew cuts lay sleeping on top of the sacks of grain.

“Who are those guys?” I asked the air force officer on board the flight.

“We call those guys the snake eaters,” he said, whispering as though he were divulging classified information. “They set up on the ground and monitor the security of the runway.”

A month earlier, stuck in Nairobi, waiting for my visa to clear, I’d gone to see a low-budget action movie, Snake Eater II, with Lorenzo Lamas. These guys looked far more businesslike than the muscle-bound star in that film. When we landed, the snake eaters were the first ones out the cargo door. They ran to the side of the airstrip and disappeared into the bushes.

The C-130 wasn’t on the ground more than twenty minutes when it shut its cargo door and took off, leaving behind a few sacks of sorghum, the icy smell of airplane fuel, and me.

On the other end of the runway, a handful of aid agencies had parked their pickup trucks. On top of one of the trucks, a young Somali sat straddling a heavy machine gun. In the back, gnarled men in soiled T-shirts stood around grinning, gnawing on small green twigs that I’d soon learn was khat, the favorite pastime of Somali men—besides arguing and shooting one another. Khat is like an amphetamine. Chew it all day, as many do in Somalia, and you’ll end up edgy, strung out—just the kind of qualities you want in a Somali gunman. Only a few flights of relief food were getting into the country, but dozens of planes packed with the bitter stimulant were able to land at airstrips every day throughout the starving nation.

That day I arrived a couple of Western aid workers waited for the food sacks to be loaded up. They all ignored me, and I was too shy to approach them. Journalists, I’d later learn, were considered a pain in the ass. They arrived at a story demanding transportation and food, not to mention information. Relief workers put up with them if they were from a major network, and had big audiences who’d make donations, but if you were just some kid with a home video camera, then nobody really wanted to make the effort.

When the bags of sorghum were loaded onto the trucks, everyone took off, leaving me standing on the side of the runway alone. There are times when the reality of what you’ve gotten yourself into hits you like a brick dropped from a tall building. Standing by the airstrip in Baidoa was one of those times. I was in way over my head, and had just realized it.

I had a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a camera, some blank videocassettes, and a backpack filled with cashews, the only food I’d had time to buy before boarding the flight. I had no idea what I was doing or what I should do next.