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It was September 1992, and I was walking along what I hoped was the road into Baidoa, nervously chewing the inside of my lip, a habit I’d picked up from my brother when we were both little. I’d been in Somalia for less than an hour and was already lost.

If I worked for a major news organization I’d have had a vehicle waiting to pick me up when I arrived. But I wasn’t working for anyone, and had been too intimidated to ask the relief workers at the airstrip for help before they drove off.

I’d noticed the outline of a pickup truck heading my way, trailing a large cloud of dust. As it got closer, I made out at least two Somali men in the back cradling AK-47s.

“Oh, good,” I said to myself. “Alone on a road, with gunmen.”

When the truck stopped and the dust had cleared, I saw a young Somali man walking toward me.

“Journalist, yes?” the young man repeated. He was wearing an oversize white T-shirt with I’M THE BOSS emblazoned on the front.

The boss was Saiid. A student in Mogadishu before his country imploded, he now made a living off starvation. He and his friends bought some guns, rented a truck, and offered one-stop shopping to visiting journalists: translation, transportation, protection. It was a package deal Mike Ovitz would have been proud to have put together. Around his neck, Saiid wore a pen from ITN, The British television network. He said he had just finished working for them. Technically, this gave him more journalism experience than me.

“Whatever you can pay would be fine,” Saiid kept insisting, which threw up all sorts of red flags, but he was adamant—and he had all the weapons—so I climbed into his truck, and off we went. On the windshield he’d taped a bumper sticker: I SOMALIA.

At first the town was a blur of brown—brown houses hidden behind high brown walls, mini forts barricaded from one another. On the main street were stores and cafés of corrugated tin, nearly all of them seemed shut down. People, some little more than skeletons, shuffled along or sat staring vacantly from behind soiled rags.

Gunmen careened around corners in pickup trucks, horns bleating, rarely slowing for the starving, who scurried out of their way. In one truck, a boy of perhaps thirteen sat atop sandbags with an olive green grenade launcher resting on his shoulder. In another truck I saw what appeared to be an improvised cannon.

There were no traffic lights, of course; the biggest guns got right of way. We had only two AK-47s, so we ended up braking a lot.

“Why don’t you carry a gun?” I asked Saiid, seated next to me in the truck’s cab.

“I don’t carry a gun because I’m an educator guy,” he explained. “Educator guys don’t need guns.”

Saiid’s philosophy of survival was simple. “I aim for myself,” he explained. “It’s not hard here. I’m living well.”

I didn’t really know where to begin, but I figured the hospital would be a logical start, so I asked Saiid to take me there. A sign out front warned those entering not to bring weapons inside, but no one seemed to pay much attention to this rule. In the courtyard, several Somali men squatted, cradling their guns, their long sarongs hiked up around their knees.

“Do you think it’s okay if I go in?” I asked Saiid.

“Of course,” he said, not understanding my reticence to barge into an operating room. “You are American.”

There were two rooms for surgery. Neither had running water or electricity, so operations were performed only in daylight, which came through an open window across from the operating tables. On the floor, a plastic bin overflowed with bloody gauze bandages and refuse. When I entered, I saw a young American medical assistant bent over a shirtless Somali man with multiple wounds on his legs and a bandaged arm.

The medical assistant’s name was Raymond. He was a twenty-eight-year-old volunteer with the International Medical Corps, an American group similar to Doctors Without Borders. Raymond was not a doctor, but in Somalia that didn’t matter. He was American,