FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, and PANIC IN BLOGGER STREET

Y'all may or may not have noticed a serious glitch in the matrix yesterday - first I noticed was I couldn't log on to Blogger - the Google-based service that I use to do STORMBRINGER. Worse still, Wednesday's post about the last combat veteran of World War I was GONE - which disturbed me because Claude Choules and the generation he came to represent are worthy of much honor and respect. It's a rare moment you'll catch me waxing poetic, and I wondered if I'd ever be able to re-capture that haiku about the Ghost Fleet?


"The wind blows over a page in the open Book of History, and the final veteran of an ancient war passes . . .







A quiet drumbeat, a distant bugle call,

a final gun salute from the Ghost Fleet

to honor him."


When I thought about it a little later on, it occurred to me that I should have ended that haiku with the pronoun, third person plural not singular:


. . . to honor THEM."


. . . but that would be cheating and not in the spirit of haiku . . . a haiku must be like the downward sword thrust - executed once; a fleeting human thought, a moment of time, captured on paper verbatim - never edited.


WOW! I think I just wrote the world's first haiku about . . . HAIKU:


a fleeting human thought

a moment of time

captured on paper, verbatim

never edited.


Perhaps there's an English major out there who'd care to advise a lowly professional knuckle-dragging snakeater on whether it's allowable to alter that last, the Ghost Fleet number?


ANYHOW

It was time to hit the road, but before I did I checked the Twitter-verse and sure enough, Theo - my mentor in Blog-dom - was moaning about Blogger. So I added my two cents worth before climbing into the old Fahrfenugen TDI for another day of fighting Evil and keeping the world safe for Democracy.

I don't do any of the so-called 'social media' - Spacebook, My Face, FaceButt, WHATEVER - I say 'so-called' because I believe they are generally the antithesis of anything social; to the contrary they are destructive to our society, social intercourse and the art of conversation - however I do the Twitter thing because it's a useful communications tool; an abbreviated interface between the Internet, what's going on out there in the real world and the smartphone.





Twitter is a fascinating phenomenon; I posted about it during the Bangkok street battles. Twitter was instrumental during the recent uprising in Cairo, and now it seems the Taliban have infested Twitter to propagandize their cause - that's evil, of course, and I hope the people that own and operate the Twitter thingie get a handle on this - I don't normally do boycotts but this is beyond the pale; Twitter changes their act or I do.


AZIMUTH CHECK

Yesterday's break in blogdom was a refreshing refer and re-alignment of the aiming stakes. Beyond honoring those who serve, those who have served, and those who gave all; the original purpose of Blog STORMBRINGER has been to provide a little outlet for my creative juices. Somewhere along the line this thing has morphed into a life of its own, and creativity has suffered accordingly.

What's happening is the Blog is interfering with my time; family life, workout time (precious little of), the business of work itself, and more significantly my creative writing time. Bottom line is I'd rather do one or two well-written posts per week, and pick up where I left off posting on Theo's Last of the Few than cranking out half a dozen poorly drafted blurbs a week, just to make some kind of daily hit counter that quite honestly has paid less in two years than what I make in two days at my day job.

A couple of weeks back I floated the question of serializing a couple of novels I've crafted over the years, and I'm still keen on developing this.

Suggestions range from integrating my work into the blog and charging per chapter (which would be great if I could figure how to do it); self-publishing - which would be fine if my objective was simply to be published; or getting accepted onto one of the 'reader' devices - which is the way I want to go. Barnes and Noble have a reader thingie, and of course there's Kindle - either way would work for me.


ANECDOTE

I've gone on about the novel long enough - I guess it's time to share a little of what I write. My inspiration has always been the action/adventure novels of Scottish author Alistair MacLean, with perhaps a touch of Conrad thrown in for good measure.




Alistair MacLean wrote what became possibly the best war film of all time: 
Dirty Harry meets Agatha Christie.




Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; inspiration for Coppola's Apocalypse Now, before its 1902 publication, it was serialized in three parts.


In 2000 I spent the better part of a year mostly by myself in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. I lived alone in a large house of cement, stone and marble, on the edge of the great Sahara. That lonely outpost was where I started the novel I am about to present.

A year rolled by. I'd been in and out of West Africa a couple of times and as fate would have it I was in Washington DC on official business; good friends David & Danielle had me over to their place for dinner. Recently Danielle reminded me of something I said over the dinner table that evening: "Something big is coming . . . we see it coming, there's all kinds of activity on the intell sources . . . I don't know what's going down, but something big is going to happen . . ."

The date of that dinner party was September 10th, 2001, and the next morning I had an appointment at the Pentagon.




This was as close as I got to keeping my appointment that fateful September morning.


The point of my anecdote is this: the novel I crafted featured the world's most wanted terrorist ol' Mister Fish Food himself. Well 9/11 changed the whole premise of THAT work of fiction, and I spent a VERY busy next couple of years chasing ghosts all over Eastern Europe and North Africa, and writing fell by the wayside.

I may or may not have to change the premise of my story; I'd hate to intersect fiction on top of what is promising to be a terrific tale of action and adventure all by itself. Most likely I'll re-write it, craft it in my own terms, and drive on with it.

Here's the teaser:



Prologue


The map the continent of Africa resembles a skull; the fossilized skull of some primitive sub-human ancestor from deep within the dust and debris of Uldabi Gorge. If one starts at the straits of Gibraltar, where Africa comes closest to Europe, and traces a finger southerly, the western coastline of North Africa curves around to the base of the skull. On a human this is the medulla oblongata, where the spinal column joins into the most primordial part of the brain, the part of our being that governs instinct and involuntary muscle movement. On the map this is West Africa, an irregular, variegated coastline. Its solid green represents the low altitudes, dense vegetation, mosquito infested jungle, primordial scum.

Abidjan, Ivory Coast - Cote d’Ivoire - is a modern city on the edge of the West African coastline. Built on islands in an inland system of hyacinth-covered, crocodile- and hippo-infested lagoons and surrounded by emerald forest-covered hills, her modern skyline rises like a fantastic set from some science fiction epic.






The press had been harping about the “riots in the streets of Abidjan” for weeks, but the few clashes I saw out there didn’t come anywhere near what I would classify as a fully-fledged riot. More like spirited demonstrations, almost staged events for what is was worth.

There is no discernable beginning or end to the souk in Abidjan. There is no parking lot, no clearly marked entrance. The roadside stands simply increase in number as one approaches the area of the souk; merchants selling clothing, fruit, shoes, handbags, magazines, masks and African animals of carved wood or semi-precious stone, everything and anything imaginable.

Every hundred meters or so one encounters a woman standing by a large enamel or plastic basin perched on a barrel or a drum, full of antibiotics and other miscellaneous pharmaceuticals acquired from black market sources or the careful gleaning of westerner’s rubbish. Customers sift through the medications, lift up containers of pills in bubble packaging or plastic pill bottles with typed prescription labels to carefully inspect the mysterious drugs until they find something they feel will remedy whatever it is that ails them. Along a street that sells wooden artifacts one may find stall after stall selling hundreds of small statuettes featuring white men dressed as doctors, policemen, soldiers. Hopeful patients can place such statuary in their home, burn candles and offer liqueur, tobacco to the image. This is gri-gri; juu-juu or voodoo. If the pills don’t work, a gri-gri doll will.






The center of the souk is in a crumbling shell of concrete that goes up at least three stories; I never determined how far the complex goes in laterally. The roof in some places is made of the same steel-reinforced cement as the walls, mostly however the merchants stretch swathes of cloth between the walls to provide shade from the sun. The floor beneath one’s feet is sand, the interior is maze-like. A narrow set of stairs goes up the side of the building; merchants are tucked into every nook and cranny, poking out to offer their wares as one passes by.






It is hot and humid, airless within the depths of the souk. The senses are assaulted by a barrage of sights, sounds and smells. Bolts of vividly colored printed cloth, stalls featuring thousands and thousands of colored glass beads, more wooden statues and carved animals; hippos, crocodiles, warthogs, rhinos, gazelle, elephants, lions, zebras. Animals made of the printed cloth. Suitcases and shipping trunks. Hand tools, made in Taiwan. Korean mink blankets featuring Oriental geometric patterns or the old favorite, the white Siberian snow tiger, stacked to the ceiling in their vinyl packaging. West African music, the ancient ancestor of rock and the blues, blares it’s hypnotic rhythms out of cheap boom boxes and ancient transistor radios; the air reeks of spices, fruits, perfumes, the smell of dusty wood, and always, everywhere, the smell of thousands of sweating bodies.






A niche in the wall features shelf after shelf of ivory; tusks, statues, bracelets, bangles, necklaces, earrings, rings. More ivory lays beneath glass display cases. The owner is an ancient black in purple robes. He wears a fez, his eyes have a wisdom that is a thousand years old. He puts his hand on mine, draws me close. His dark skin looks almost blue against my arm. “Monsieur,” he says quietly, displays a mouthful of stained and rotting teeth. “Today is not a good day for you in the streets of Africa.”


© 2011 by Sean Linnane







Well, there it is. If you like my work, go over to the right there and click on email STORMBRINGER - and let me know if you'd be willing to click on it for a dollar a chapter.

Cheers - S.L.



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WAR IN THE LAND OF CHOCOLATE - PART 2

My story continues . . . Part 1 is HERE - S.L.


Africa is tribal. I saw this in the Ivory Coast – le Cote d’Ivoire – when I was there as a military advisor in 1999. I would tell the Ivorian officer where & when I needed his men, or where to go to next; he would turn around and give a command and half the platoon would tighten up and look alert like proper soldiers. The other half would look down at the ground and shuffle their feet, a lot of attitude and body language. I figured it out real fast; half the platoon was his tribe, Ashanti, the “shuck-and-jive” crowd was of the other tribe; Twee, or Ibo.

On 24 December 1999 what started as a pay mutiny by these same disaffected troops morphed into a coup d’etat, and by 2002 had become a full-blown civil war. At that time my unit was sent in to get 2700+ Americans and other nationalities out of the rebel-held north. What we saw last week - French and UN helicopters firing missiles into the President’s residence in Abidjan - was the culmination of events that kicked off in 1999.




French helicopter attack sortie toward the Presidential Residence in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, April 2011.


The current set of circumstances Cote d’Ivoire relate directly to national elections held in October of last year. Despite losing the election, Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down, never mind the fact that his term in office expired five years ago; he simply refused to leave.

His opponent, Alassane Ouattara, has the support of world leaders, but not of Ivory Coast's military. And so associated himself with the rebel faction, which slowly but surely made its way toward the capital in an almost symbolic combat that claimed less than 500 lives.


Road to War:

In the years leading up to the coup of ’99, the government of President Bédié had drifted toward a xenophobic policy described as “Ivoirité”: the exclusion of immigrant workers from Mali and Burkina Faso, some of whom had been in the country for generations. Ouattara’s father’s side of the family is from Burkina Faso – a fact that confounded Ouattara’s earlier political activities - and so much of the exploited underclass was able to identify with him and the rebel forces that emerged since the civil war of ’02. Another complication in this conflict is the cultural fault line between Muslims in the north, and the Christian majority of the economically prosperous south.

In North America it is difficult to fully appreciate these kind of issues, of course, and all this past month the thing in Libya has eclipsed the situation in West Africa. Oil is important, despite the fact that we could straight up buy the oil from the Libyans if we wanted to – or anyone else - any day of the week, or we can drill for it ourselves. But Cote d’Ivoire has something unique that can’t be found in deserts, arctic regions or at the bottom of the ocean.




Carrying cocoa beans in the port of San Pedro, Ivory Coast; much of the 
nation's economy depends on the exports. (Jane Hahn / New York Times)


Cote d’Ivoire produces almost 50% of the world’s supply of cocoa beans, and the beans have been piling up in the warehouses. There is coffee there as well, and rubber plantations. The rebels say they are fighting for their national identity, but their cause was financed by the power of the beans.


Autumn Return

In September of 2002 my outfit got the word we were going down to the Ivory Coast to evacuate Americans. Normally for this sort of thing the phone rings in the dead of night, you roll over, “Honey, I’m going to be out of town for a couple of weeks.” She says, “Whatever,” and you get a little break from each other’s company.

This time “the balloon went up” at ten in the morning. We immediately went into mission prep, dragged our kit bags, drew our weapons and blew out of there – phone calls to mama-san were out of the question; OPSEC. My wife and kids – ALL the wives and kids – didn’t know where we were for the better part of two weeks.

We flew into Yamousoukro and established ourselves in the airport firehouse – a cement lean-to at the drainage end of the runway. The place was infested with mosquitos. I have lived and worked in the tropics most of my life and I have never seen mosquitos that bad; at one point I looked down at my exposed forearm and it looked like I had black fur. I wiped the insects away and my skin was dripping red with blood.




American Special Forces at Yamassoukro Airport, Cote d'Ivoire, September 2002.


The American refugees assembled at the International Christian Academy in Bouaké. The rebels were having a firefight with the Loyalists; the French Foreign Legion were pulling security in their LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles) and their gun jeeps. The Loyalists would fall back through the Legion’s lines, the Legion would open up on the rebels, the rebels would fall back and the Loyalists would advance; rinse and repeat.

The people we evacuated were mostly missionaries who’d lived there for years. They left everything behind; they were allowed one bag each. We rolled up there in our “GunVees” (modified HumVees bristling with belt-fed weapons), pulled security while the Americans loaded up in school buses, then escorted them back to the airport at Yamoussoukro.





American refugees escorted by American Special Forces, Ivory Coast, September 2002.



(That's me you can see through the windshield of the bus.)


The scene at the airport was equally sad; I saw a Frenchman roll up in his Renault, hop out and say to an African standing nearby, “You want a car?” Then he simply handed over the keys.

At one point I was interviewed by an American intelligence officer. “You’ve been here before? You trained the rebels?”

“That’s right.” I told him about our activities in Akuedo, in 1999.

He asked me what kind of troops they were, their capabilities. I told him that if ever you come under fire from them, the safest place to be is right out in the middle of the road.

“HUH?”

“They can’t hit the broad side of a barn, from the inside.”

He opened up a laptop and showed me photographs of the rebels taken in Bouaké and Korhogo. “Do you recognize any of these guys?”

“Well, they all look the same, but yes I do. That guy’s name is Valere.”

“YOU KNOW HIS NAME?”

“We used to drink beer and play cards together.”




Valere


“What about this guy?”

“That’s Ironman.”

Like all military operations, there was a lot of “hurry-up-and-wait”. I spent an afternoon in an air-conditioned van with an older American gentleman and his wife. She had a strange accent I couldn’t quite put a finger one. To fight boredom I started impersonating the French officers – in French; the wife was going into hysterics, ringing out peals of laughter. Turned out she was Québécois, which explained a lot of things, and he was the “OGA” station chief, which explained even more.

Later, after we returned to Stuttgart, I learned from an Ivoirian I’d stayed in touch with that my buddy Valere was indeed with the rebel forces. It turned out he was killed in action - in Bouaké, the day of the evacuation.


Epilogue:

In February of 2003 I attended a briefing at Special Operations Command, Europe (SOCEUR), in Stuttgart. The officer opened the briefing with, “It’s coup season again down in Africa.” A small team was put on alert to go down to “CDI”, to perform reconnaissance tasks, prepare assembly areas for an evacuation, etcetera. We were told to pack our bags and be ready to launch; the specific guidance was: “Be within one hour of sobriety.”

While waiting for the balloon to go up, my journalist brother emailed me that he would be passing through Frankfurt, headed for an embed slot with the 3d Infantry Division for the then-anticipated invasion of Iraq - could we meet up?

At first I told him I couldn't make it – I was on a one hour string. Then it occurred to me that I was instrumental in my brother’s circumstances - in January I'd made a phone call that got him into the embed program – and if something terrible happened, I would never forgive myself, not seeing him when I had the chance. I had to go, so I called the officer over at SOCEUR. “Can you be back here within one hour?” Sure thing, I told him; normally it’s an hour and a half ride up there, but you can fly over those German autobahns. Never mind the fact there was about an inch of ice all over everything.

My brother and I linked up in the airport - he finagled his way through Customs to get out of the transit lounge. We had a good German breakfast of sausages and beer and joked about how it would be his last beer for a long time. Afterwards we strolled through the side of the airport which is like a giant shopping mall, and I pointed out the escalators to the S-bahn, the trains that go everywhere in Germany. It was still dark outside when my phone went off; all my brother heard was me saying, “Yes sir . . . uh-huh . . . yes sir . . . I’ll be there. I’m enroute.”

I looked up and my brother was grinning from ear to ear; he’d just seen me get THE PHONE CALL. We said our goodbyes and he went his way and I went mine. Two brothers, linking up in Europe, heading in two separate directions to two different wars, on two different continents. Much later my brother described the scene: “It was like being in London, 1942.”

My brother went to the Sandpile and took part in the Great and Glorious War on Terror; I parked my car in front of a gray, non-descript building in a military compound in Stuttgart, went inside and grabbed my kit bag, got on a C-130 and made my way back down to an obscure little war in Africa, in a country most people can’t even find on a map.


SEAN LINNANE SENDS









MMB HERE


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WAR IN THE LAND OF CHOCOLATE

Source: CIA World Factbook


Cote d’Ivoire was in the news cycle this past week, a six month West African power struggle culminating with French and UN attack helicopters firing rockets on the Presidential Residence in Abidjan, economic capital of Ivory Coast, a West African nation of 21 million. But the war goes back further than the past six months; I was there for the beginning & early stages of that war, back in the late nineties / early ought-oughts.

It actually began as a military pay mutiny, at Camp Akuedo on the outskirts of Abidjan. I know this because I helped train the soldiers who became known as the rebels.




One of the guys we trained in peacekeeping duties, seen here as a part of the rebel force in Bouaké, Cote d'Ivoire.


We were there as a part of a U.S. State Department program – the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) – teaching peacekeeping skills to company-sized elements from five battalions of the Ivorian military. At the beginning of the program we issued new uniforms, equipment, boots, everything – to the soldiers, many of whom had arrived from their remote bases in uniforms that were rags falling off their bodies, their web gear was held together in places by threads.

At the end of our four-month training program, the soldiers once again appeared in their rags. “What happened?” I asked one of the troops. “Where are your new uniforms, the ones we gave you?”

“The officers, they took them all back, put them in the warehouse.” Good old Third World corruption; we give them foreign aid, the guys in charge rip it off and use it to line their pockets. Your tax dollars at work.




This guy's nom de guerre was Ironman, because of his great physical strength. I still have the heavy steel bracelet he gave me in 1999.


One of the Ivoirians asked me for some money so he could take the train back to his base up north. He was a brother paratrooper, so I shelled out ten bucks – probably a month’s pay for him. This was telling, because later that night, it was the pay thing that kicked off the whole mess.

Third World Armies are paid peanuts. Actually, if they were literally paid in peanuts they’d probably be better off than the puny salaries they make. That’s where things like UN peacekeeping duty come in; UN pay is worth triple what they make, and this is crucial because their retirement scheme is practically non-existent.

Well, President Henri Konan Bedie was on TV that night, giving a big speech about how great things were going. The trouble was, things weren’t going all that great, and hadn’t been in the twelve years since the great Houphouët-Boigny – founding father of Ivory Coast – had died. The troops clustered in the dirt-floored canteen were yelling at the screen, ”Oh YEAH? Well if things are going so good – WHERE’s OUR UN PAY???”

What happened next - after they got enough beer in them - was they went down to the arms room, busted in and secured the firing pins for their rifles (that’s how much their own officers trusted them). Then they rocked on down to the Minister of Defense’s residence – about five miles down the road – and made known their grievances.

The security element at the Minister of Defense’s place returned fire, so the mutineers pulled back and went over to the President’s residence. There was no return fire this time, so the troops took the place down, and the whole country with it.

This was in December of 1999; the wealthiest, most stable nation in West Africa had just experienced its first coup d’etat.


TO BE CONTINUED . . .


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . S.L.


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FOREIGN LEGION IN COMBAT - COTE d-IVOIRE

I just found out what outfit from the Legion it was that was present with us on the battlefield in Ivory Coast, 2003.


2eme REGIMENT ETRANGER PARACHUTIST (2nd Regiment, Foreign Legion Paratroopers) FIRE FIGHT FOOTAGE, IVORY COAST, 2003:











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