2008 was a good year for journalism, and just plain old adrenaline-raising adventure stories from Africa's costliest conflict. National Geographic had a cover story called Who Killed the Virunga Gorillas, which we talked about here. Tim Butcher wrote Blood River describing his solo trip along the Congo River, about which we posted here and here. Now comes All Things Must Fight To Live, by Bryan Mealer, published by Bloomsbury USA, New York. Mealer has reported from locations across Africa including Nairobi, Somalia and Togo, and was the Associated Press staff correspondent in Kinshasa, Congo. His new book, subtitled Stories Of War And Deliverance In Congo, is an inside, up close look at Congo's grinding conflicts. It's riveting.
See the author's web site at bryanmealer.com. Bryan Mealer has kindly granted us permission to excerpt the Introduction to All Things Must Fight To Live on Common Sense and Whiskey. It follows below:
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All Things Must Fight To Live
INTRODUCTION
We went in first with soldiers, young and terrified Ugandan kids straight from the villages, whip-thin in their baggy fatigues and wound tight around their triggers, even high above the clouds. The Ugandan army flew Antonov-26s into Congo, scrapped by the Soviet bloc and born again for African war, steel Trojan horses loaded with gun-mounted jeeps, barrels of diesel, and crates of banana moonshine. You found a place on the floor and instantly started sweating, nestled between rifles and rocket launchers so close to your eyeballs you could study the paint chips on the grenades. There was little cabin pressure to soothe the landings, and going in fast, you felt like your eyes would pop out of your skull. The soldiers buried their faces in their hats to hide the tears. And all you could do was wince and give a thumbs-up and be thankful the engines were so loud that no one could hear you scream.
Later on it was UN Air, the almighty "move-con," skeek, white 727s that floated in like flying nuns. Inside you were greeted by cordial South African blondes who served Coca-Cola and gave quiet comfort to the malaria evac whose IV drip hung from the overhead compartment. You could read a book or fade out with your headphones or lose yourself in the six hundred shades of green below. Coming in was normal enough, but after returning from the field still plugged into the war, stepping into those planes was like being dunked in pure oxygen, or finding your way to the mother ship after crossing a hostile, unsheltered land.
There were eleventh-hour charter flights and Airbus red-eyes, six-seater Cessnas and the French-army Hercules, where female crew members doled out pizza and left you feeling ashamed by your own filth. There were speedboats across the Congo River, old German gunships that ferried you over Lake Tanganyika, and one guy I met rode all the way from Paris on a Honda four-stroke before the border guards rolled him clean.
There were journalists and aid workers, diplomats and diamond dealers, assorted opportunists and third-world peacekeepers deputized and deployed into hell. You could guess the new guys by the way their eyes never left the window; sitting next to them always made me nervous. There were many ways of going in, and everyone had his own reasons. But when we arrived, there was always the same war. Many came simply to test themselves against the brutal country, and I've learned there is nothing wrong with that. What mattered was what kind of prints you left behind in the red dirt. Five centuries of those bootprints now packed the soil and snaked into the trees, so many they bled into one enormous trail that hid below the camouflage and slowly choked the land.
But get down close and you can see.
One of those trails was mine.
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The Introduction of the book, All Things Must Fight To Live by Brian Mealer, published by Bloomsbury USA, New York. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
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